From the Deputy Principal - David Hodges

It has been a significant past week of professional learning for our staff at St Andrew's School.

It is our responsibility to establish the necessary structures, programs, and evidence-informed teaching practices to ensure success for all our learners. While everyone progresses through the same stages on their path to proficient reading, research indicates that individuals may do so with varying levels of ease. At St Andrew's School, we remain dedicated to ensuring reading and writing success for each and every one of our students.

Last week, we were thrilled to have Jocelyn Seamer join us at St Andrew's to collaborate with our junior primary staff. Jocelyn, an education consultant with prior experience in teaching and leadership roles in primary schools, now supports schools across Australia in developing structured literacy practices, sequential phonics delivery, and evidence-informed instruction.

Jocelyn's book, published by Routledge, a world-leading provider of educational professional learning resources, features a foreword written by Professor Pamela Snow, an esteemed researcher and expert in the Science of Reading from the Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) lab at La Trobe University. Jocelyn serves as a keynote speaker at numerous educational events and will be presenting for the Department for Education, Literacy Guarantee Unit at an upcoming state conference. She has also been honoured with the Bruce Wicking award for her exceptional service to children with learning difficulties, as recognised by Learning Difficulties Australia.

During her visit on Thursday and Friday, Jocelyn demonstrated phonics lessons in classes and engaged with the junior primary Professional Learning Teams to support their literacy planning and instruction. Jocelyn assisted us in analysing our School data to explore targeted teaching approaches, aiming to meet the diverse needs of all our learners. At our curriculum meeting on Thursday, Jocelyn shared the extensive global research conducted on the Science of Reading, and its implications for literacy development from ELC to Year 6, with the entire staff.

This inspiring professional development opportunity greatly benefitted our junior primary team and will lead to further investigations into literacy improvement throughout the School. We look forward to Jocelyn returning to work with our staff in Term 4.