[Gentle music]
[On-screen text: Inclusion Outreach Coaching. Coordinating supports to embed inclusive practices at Marong Primary School. The Education State / Victoria State Government / Department of Education]
Lindsey White: Our students weren’t performing very well with literacy, particularly the writing. The curriculum that we were using at the time wasn't really supporting all students.
[On-screen text: Inclusion Outreach Coaching aims to improve the capabilities, practice and confidence of the education workforce to build inclusive practices and, in doing so, improve student outcomes.]
Lindsey White: The Inclusion Outreach Coaching involves being connected with a coach. And it's a real deep, rich conversation about what your needs are at your school.
Michael Ring: So we're not really there to tell people what to do or what they should be doing. We're there to gain insight from the expertise that's already within the school.
Lindsey White: We were able to, over time, drill down to a particular area of our school that we wanted to improve on, and that was literacy.
Michael Ring: Really good results coming from the Tutor Learning Initiative, the utilisation of the SSS team, the utilisation of the Disability Coordinator. And that's what the data was telling us that those initiatives were having success within the school, and we were looking to see how we could take that work into all of the classrooms at that Tier 1 level. So all students had access to that same teaching and learning.
Lindsey White: We worked out a bit of a workforce plan about how to utilise those strengths but also some external services to create the change.
Michael Ring: As our partnership agreement was coming to an end, we were looking at how we could extend and support that school going further and Diverse Learner Education Improvement Leader Kerry Carman was an expert in the field that they were looking at as well.
Lindsey White: So she had a lot of knowledge to also bring building the capacity of our staff in particular around diverse learners and the science of learning.
Melissa Patching: We're now using a lot of different strategies, programs, tools, building capacity in our own teachers to support our students.
Lindsey White: I think the beauty of Inclusion Outreach Coaching was that he was there to sort of identify the plan, make sure everybody was aware of what they needed to do, and then let us all sort of thrive and move on and create that change, which is what's happened here at Marong Primary School.
[On-screen text: The Education State / Victoria State Government / Department of Education / Victoria State Government – Authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne]
Updated