Driving Ochre’s mission to advance equity in Australian education, is the provision of high-quality curriculum resources, through our online library, to maximise teacher expertise so that they can provide all students with the educational opportunities they want and deserve. Since our launch in 2021, we have had a comprehensive focus across all of our work on setting and ensuring established quality standards to lead to high-quality outputs. This includes across our curricula, our instructional resources and our curriculum-aligned professional learning.
Ochre lessons and resources have been designed to support teachers to effectively implement evidence-based practices as described in AERO’s Teaching for how students learn: A model of learning and teaching. We work with our project partners to ensure that our quality standards are embedded throughout our work, including with subject-matter experts on specific projects.
The majority of teachers using our resources rate the quality of Ochre’s curriculum sequencing and teacher resources as high or very high. We have a strong commitment to continuous improvement, which ensures that we seek and respond to feedback from teachers about the quality of our materials, and any areas in which we could improve.
As part of this commitment, we designed the internal Quality Review pilot as a formative process which would provide additional feedback to us to support the ongoing improvement of Ochre’s curriculum and instructional materials.
The review process was designed drawing on effective practice internationally, and built off Ochre’s existing Quality Framework. Like all that we do, it sought to put practicing teachers at the centre of the work, recognising their deep professional expertise, judgement and experience.
We are today releasing the summary report from our first Pilot Internal Quality Review in primary English. The Review aimed to:
The review was led by a dedicated review team, which included both Seven Teacher Expert Panel members and Six Advisory Panel members provided input and support to Teacher Expert Panellists.
Teacher Expert Panellists independently rated Ochre materials strongly against the review framework. Six key constructive take-aways also emerged, including around supporting teachers with adaptation, inclusion of assessments, further support for EAL/D students and students with learning difficulties, and embedding diversity. The Ochre team has reviewed this feedback closely, and has committed to making improvements to our existing and future materials based on the suggestions.
We now plan to apply this process to the review of other Ochre materials, and are currently in the process of an Interval Quality Review of our Secondary Mathematics Curriculum, which should be complete by Term 3 2025. We are excited about the opportunity to embed this process into our curriculum development going forward, continuing to put practicing teachers at the centre of our work.
Read the Summary Report here.