Ochre Education’s Submission to the Inquiry into Literacy and Numeracy in ACT Public Schools

Ochre Education has made a submission into the Inquiry into Literacy and Numeracy in ACT Public Schools.

Our submission highlights the significant usage of Ochre resources in ACT public schools (with registered users across 65% of public schools), as well as independent schools and ACT Catholic schools through our foundational partnership with Catholic Education Canberra and Goulburn (CECG).

It recommends evidence-based practices that should drive ACT’s support to schools to

advance excellence and with a particular focus on equity. These are already embedded in Ochre lessons and resources:

• as described in the Australian Education Research Organisation’s (AERO) Tried and Tested evidence guides for schools, and in line with AERO’s Teaching for how students learn: A model of learning and teaching;
• the specific literacy and numeracy teaching strategies outlined in the new ‘core content’ for Initial Teacher Education programs that were identified by the Teacher Education Expert Panel.

It recommends two strategies to support high quality implementation of these practices, which the ACT Education Directorate should consider as a priority:

• Recommendation 1: provide evidence-based centralised teaching resources to ACT public schools as a key effective, sustainable and locally contextualised support to help every student to obtain literacy and numeracy capabilities. Opportunity for resources to also support effective systematic provision of additional support for students who have fallen behind in their learning. Opportunity to develop resources in a way that promotes professional collaboration within and across schools;

• Recommendation 2: accompany these resources with high-quality curriculum-aligned implementation support at the school level for all ACT public schools. This must embed consistent system-wide key features: content expertise; high-quality professional learning design; robust evaluation mechanisms;

It sets out how the ACT government should move with speed and urgency to implement these recommendations, and suggested next steps.

The full submission can be read here.