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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-09-26 Daily Xml
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O'SULLIVAN BEACH PRIMARY SCHOOL

Ms THOMPSON (Reynell) (15:30): It is my great privilege this afternoon to rise to talk about yet another of the excellent schools in my area. This afternoon, I would like to talk about O'Sullivan Beach Primary School. It is a fairly small school, but it is rapidly growing. I need to indicate to the Minister for Education that enrolments at O'Sullivan Beach are growing so rapidly that I will be writing to her soon asking for some new classrooms please. This increase in enrolments has come about because of the educational achievements of the school. I find that, when a school is doing particularly well, people vote with their feet and they suddenly arrive at that school from all over the place.

O'Sullivan Beach currently has children coming from far and wide, but particularly it is servicing the local neighbourhood of O'Sullivan Beach. There is a high proportion of Aboriginal students in this school (about 19 per cent), which is unusual for a city school, and there is quite a low proportion of students from different language backgrounds (only about 6 per cent), but there a high number of children who have experienced trauma and who are identified as having special learning needs.

In fact, when the recruitment process for the current principal, Sally Menadue, commenced, I was engaged in a discussion with the governing council about what they were looking for in a principal, and one of the important things they wanted was somebody who recognised the importance of having skills in teaching children who have experienced trauma because, unfortunately, many of the children have been through situations of violence in their home. But they also wanted somebody who was going to recognise that just because children had had this trauma, had parents with long periods of unemployment or illness, it did not mean that the children could not learn.

In Sally Menadue they got somebody who clearly believed that children could learn. When she started, the NAPLAN tests were not doing very well at all. She sought a way to improve the situation and decided that Jolly Phonics was a program that would help them. I came across the Jolly Phonics program in Scotland, and one of the important things about that is that part of the program seeks to engage the parents actively in their children's learning. Jolly Phonics teaches the 42, I think it is, different sounds of the English language rather than looking at letter by letter.

It recognises that some children learn best when they do things, so an action is associated with each sound. So, children who have struggled with dyslexia and other reading difficulties have had other pathways opened to them to learn. The result of this is that, in two years, the average of the minimal increase above the standard for NAPLAN is six months, and there are many children in the school who are now 24 months in advance of their reading age.

This is clearly a demonstration that children whose background might not have been rich in books, etc., can learn and do learn when there is confidence displayed in them. Sally also recognised that the school community was talking about things that they used to do as a community. They used to have school concerts and they used to have school fetes so that the whole community could come together. Well, there is now a school concert, and this year there will be the first school fete in many years, and the whole purpose of that is to bring the community together to identify as people who help each other.

Another important decision of Sally's was to engage all the teachers in deciding that every child in the school was the responsibility of every teacher—the year 2 teacher did not just look after the year 2 students and the year 6 teacher look after the year 6 students: every teacher had to consider the wellbeing of every child. It had to be a seamless process from one class to the other. Children could not be confused with different learning styles and teaching styles all the way through; they had to have one learning methodology that would enable all children to learn. As I have said, the results have been outstanding in a short time, as was recently demonstrated on a Today Tonight segment.

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