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Just over a year ago, teachers at Holy Family Primary School in Granville decided to go all in on reading. For 30 minutes every day, a staff member would sit in front of four children of similar ability reading at a semicircular table.
“We call them our jelly bean tables, so we have the teacher positioned with four or five children around them,” assistant principal Louise Kingsley says.
A Herald analysis of NAPLAN data has identified 160 out of more than 2000 primary schools at the top of the state for student progress. It tracked gains from year 3 to year 5 last year over two years.
Holy Family at Granville had big gains in reading, spelling and grammar. The school calls its intensive approach All In for Reading – or simply AIR. A team of teachers moves from classroom to classroom, each working with a group of similarly able children.
“The premise is that we’re all in for reading. That’s our goal at the moment,” says Owen Wallis, the school’s instructional coach.
His coaching role was created as part of Catholic Schools Parramatta Diocese’s Effective Learning and Teaching Model for its 80 schools in 2024.
The job, he says, is to look carefully at data to see what is working in the classroom. He has his own hierarchy of items – such as a checklist with teachers.
“First and foremost, are we teaching the curriculum? Yes. Look at the syllabus. Are we teaching what we’re meant to be teaching? And it’s all about student engagement – because if they’re not engaging in that lesson, then they’re not paying attention, they’re not learning.”
For reading, recognising the sounds that letters make and forming words is the focus in early primary school, while the later years focus more on sophisticated books by authors such as Roald Dahl and teaching vocabulary explicitly.
“The wider that vocabulary is, the more they’ll actually understand those words when they’re reading them in the text,” Wallis says.
Some of the primary schools with the biggest gains on average across the five NAPLAN domains of reading, writing, spelling, grammar and numeracy include Central Coast Steiner School, Bethany Catholic in Glenmore Park and Rydalmere East Public School.
The top schools for numeracy progress include St Paul of the Cross Catholic in Dulwich Hill, Arrahman College, Holy Spirit in St Clair, Merrylands East Public School and Woodenbong Central School.
Over the past 20 years, learning fads have included putting a laptop in front of every child, inquiry-based learning, the gamification of learning and individualised learning.
Across high progress schools that the Herald spoke to, there was a focus on explicit teaching. Teachers often mention having specific learning goals at the start of each lesson and success criteria to measure themselves against at the lesson’s end. This provides a sign of whether pupils learnt what they were supposed to.
That’s also the practice at The Armidale School, in the state’s Northern Tablelands, which had some of the top scores for student progress across reading, spelling, grammar and numeracy. Concepts in maths are explicitly linked to real-world phenomena in other subjects.
“It makes it very tangible for the kids … they know, going in, ‘OK, if I can do these three things, I know that I’ve actually achieved well’,” junior school head Scott Chittenden said.
It also has a selective approach to technology.
“Flashy, exciting apps and games can be really engaging. But are they the best way to go about meeting the needs of our kids? That’s debatable,” Chittenden said.
Bankstown Public also had some of the biggest progress results. Principal Kim Collas knows that before learning, before good NAPLAN results, everything hinges on attendance. Children’s attendance is tracked, and improvement is recognised with praise.
At school, lunchtime is populated with things that might entice less academic students to come to class. There’s a lunchtime crochet club and activities such as dance, gardening, sport and chess. “Because when they’re at school, they’re learning,” Collas says.
Its biggest gains were in numeracy. Maths lessons start with a learning intention, and focus is placed on learning times tables through timed recall activities.
“We definitely do teach multiplication explicitly … but we’re not sitting chanting ‘one times one is one, one times two is two’ because we would lose our kids – that’s not engaging.
“We would turn it into a speed test, so everybody’s got their response tables in front of them, and we’re going to get, ‘Let’s see how many you can do in five minutes’.”
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