POSITION STATEMENT

Over the past five years, Kaleen Primary School has been refining the systems and processes of effective curriculum delivery. The school has developed a stronger emphasis on the Australian Curriculum Achievement Standards as a foundation for what students are expected to understand and do because of the curriculum content taught. In 2019, all staff participated in ongoing professional learning with the Directorate's Curriculum team to explore the Australian Curriculum and how this links to differentiated teaching practices. These professional learning sessions enhanced teachers' differentiation practices and assisted them to better support students with disability.

Over the course of the year, teachers worked collaboratively to unpack the Achievement Standards to create a Curriculum Plan for English and Maths. These documents support the alignment of overall curriculum delivery, term overviews and unit plans and assessment practices. The executive team worked with each teaching team to ensure curriculum documents incorporated both general capabilities and cross curriculum priorities and that they were vertically aligned to build on previous years of learning. Refining these documents will be a continued area of focus in order to enhance our existing processes and reflect changes in the updated Australian Curriculum.

In 2020, Kaleen Primary School (and all other ACT schools) experienced a rapid shift to remote learning. We appointed two temporary Digital Strategy Executive teachers to support the leadership team and staff to successfully make this transition. Staff collaborated to design and build the Kaleen Home Learning Hub to house a whole school curriculum that was accessible to students and parents. The school received ongoing feedback about the system from a variety of stakeholders (teachers, parents and students) and used this to strengthen our curriculum plans and delivery. 

We designed a curriculum to support all families to engage based on their individual circumstances and mapped the level of independence or support required for each lesson. We also incorporated Higher Order Thinking skills and created a branding system (coloured dots) to support differentiation and highlight tasks that were open ended. This structured yet flexible approach enabled the school to better respond to the individual needs of families and ensure a smooth transition both into and back from remote learning.

SUPPORTING EVIDENCE

NEXT STEPS & FUTURE DIRECTION

Kaleen Primary School will continue to develop and update our whole-school plan for curriculum delivery, based on the latest version of the Australian Curriculum. This plan will make explicit what (and when) teachers teach and what students should learn. There will be horizontal and vertical alignment to ensure continuity and progression of learning to build on the work from previous years, however, the flexibility to tailor the content to meet individual needs. The curriculum will be locally relevant and connected to students' world and provide them with opportunities to develop cross-curricular skills and attributes, including teamwork, critical thinking, problem solving, and the evaluation of information and evidence. The school's curriculum design intentions and actions will be shared with parents and the wider community.