Welcome to a quick walkthrough video on how to use the HSC minimum standard resource. In this video, you will learn about the requirements of the HSC minimum standard, how to access the resource site and how to navigate the key features of the resource to assist you in supporting students to achieve the HSC minimum standard in reading, writing and numeracy. Students in NSW need to achieve a Level 3 or 4 in reading, writing and numeracy online tests to meet the HSC minimum standard and receive their Higher School Certificate. 

The NSW Department of Education have developed some resources to further assist schools in supporting students to meet the HSC minimum standard. These resources are now available on the Department’s HSC minimum standard webpage. 

They contain lessons and activities to support students’ literacy and numeracy development. The teaching and learning resources are designed to assist teachers to target specific areas of need across the domains of reading, writing and numeracy. 

We will now explore the HSC minimum standard resource in more detail, including how to access and navigate through the resource site. 

The HSC minimum standard resource can be used by staff supporting students in Years 10, 11 and 12 to meet the standard in the three domains of reading, writing and numeracy. Teachers can also use these resources in a support setting to target specific skills with a smaller group of students, particularly those that may have had multiple attempts at the online tests and have yet to meet the minimum standard in one or more domains. These resources may also be used by teachers in various key learning areas to support student’s literacy and numeracy development within their subject area. 

While the resources are classroom ready, teachers should differentiate and adapt them to meet the needs of their students and their subject area. 

The HSC minimum standard resource contains: 

• Lessons and activities to support targeted teaching of specific skills in reading, writing and numeracy 

• Links to the National Literacy and Numeracy Learning progressions as well as the ACSF. 

• Additional EAL/D resources to support EAL/D learners achieving the HSC minimum standard, and 

• Illustrations of Practice – in the form of videos to demonstrate examples of best practice detailing how teachers can select, adapt and use lesson activities to meet the varying literacy and numeracy needs of students. 

Now we will briefly look at how to use PLAN2 to support teachers with their student’s literacy and numeracy development. 

The HSC minimum standard resource also includes a link to PLAN2 to help teachers monitor their students’ development in literacy and numeracy. An Areas of focus template has been created for each skill across the domains of reading, writing and numeracy to support targeted teaching of each skill. These links can be found on each skill page and the templates can be found on the Areas of focus template library tab. Each skill page also takes you to information and support on how to use PLAN2 to record observations aligned to the progressions. 

In the Areas of focus template library, you will find a list of HSC minimum standard templates for each skill, created by the Department of Education. Here, you can adapt the templates to support your students in achieving the HSC minimum standard as well as developing their literacy and numeracy skills in your KLA.  For example, if you were to carry out some explicit teaching on percentages for selected students in your class, simply go to the drop down menu under Created by and select DoE, then click on the tab that says ‘Use template’ and then follow the prompts to select the students, stage and the syllabus outcomes for your KLA. For support with using PLAN2, go to the Home drop down menu and select ‘Using this resource with PLAN2’ for a walkthrough video. You will now watch a demonstration of how to access the HSC minimum standard resource. 

To access the HSC minimum standard resource, go to Teaching and learning, Curriculum and scroll down to the link for the L&N homepage. Once you’re in the literacy and numeracy site, click on the HSC minimum standard link displayed ‘In this section’. This will bring you to the department’s HSC minimum standard webpage.  Here you can see various resources to support schools with the HSC minimum standard. For now, click on Teacher resources. When you click on the teacher resources page, you will see a link to the HSC minimum standard teacher resource. Clicking on this link will take you to the resource homepage. You may like to bookmark this page for easier access next time.  

On this page you will see some information about the resource, quick links to other sections of the resource, and a key to help you navigate the pages. The different icons represent the different types of activities you can access. Scrolling down will take you to the teaching and learning activities for the three domains of writing, numeracy and reading. Within each domain, you will find focus areas. These focus areas have been developed to reflect the broad criteria as seen in the online tests. Below each focus area you will see the relevant skills by which teaching and learning activities have been designed to support students achieve Level 3 in the online tests. Clicking on any of these will take you directly to the activities for that skill. In writing, you will also notice additional text resources. These can only be accessed via this link. The text pack as you can see contains an example of informative, persuasive and imaginative text that can be used to support the other writing activities in the resource. You can also access these activities via the navigation bar at the top right-hand corner of the page. The drop-down menu lists all the skills for quick access. Clicking on any of these skills, will take you to the activities for that skill.   

Each skill page tells you what focus area it belongs to, in this case the skill is percentages, and it falls under number. Each skill page contains the definition of the skill, teaching and learning activities, relevance to the test marking, which outlines the performance indicators to achieve a Level 3 in that skill, connections to the Level 3 descriptors of the Australian Core Skills Framework as well as connections to the Progressions.  Links to the progressions are useful to support teachers in identifying where students are at in their learning and what they need to learn next. These progression indicators have been developed into Areas of focus templates in PLAN2 to support teaching and monitoring of skill development.   You can go to Using this resource with PLAN2 to view an instructional video on how to create an Area of focus using the department’s HSC minimum standard templates. Under the teaching and learning activities, each activity has a separate tile that can be downloaded and ready to use. Alternatively, you can download all the activities into a zip file by clicking on the ‘Download all’ link.   

Clicking on an individual activity will open up the activity as a PDF.  Each activity contains learning intentions, materials required to complete the activity and a lesson sequence which is a set of detailed instructions for the teacher to carry out the lesson activities.    

There are also classroom ready student-centred activities, marked with the icon highlighted. These can be used to determine student understanding after the teaching activities or to reinforce learning. 

Enhanced teaching and learning activities for the domains of writing and numeracy have been created to support teachers of EAL/D learners. In numeracy, the literacy in numeracy section has a range of parallel activities for teachers to support students to unpack word problems. Open text structure in writing, the enhanced activities appear under the general teaching and learning activities, indicated by the EAL/D icon.  

Clicking on any of these links will take you to the Illustrations of practice page.  Illustrations of practice videos contain examples of best practice, detailing how teachers can select, adapt and use the lesson activities to meet the literacy and numeracy needs of students in various key learning areas.  

While these resources are classroom ready, we encourage teachers to adjust and adapt the resources to meet the literacy and numeracy needs of their students in any KLA. Finally, there is a feedback link available at the bottom of the homepage, should you wish to provide feedback on the resources.    

In summary:  

The HSC minimum standard resource can be used to support literacy and numeracy development in preparation for the HSC minimum standard.  

The resource can be found in the Literacy and Numeracy page, under HSC minimum standard and then in Teacher resources. 

Staff using the resource should differentiate and adjust the activities to meet the needs of their subject and students. 

For the most up to date information on the HSC minimum standard, visit the NESA website. 

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