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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 3 Hansard (26 May) . . Page.. 576 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

The ACT literacy strategy is designed to provide a focus on literacy development for all of our students - girls and boys, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and students with special learning needs.

A significant development which underpins the implementation of the strategy is the establishment of a literacy team. This new team draws together into a coordinated unit all staff members with the responsibility for diverse aspects of literacy. This team has already commenced work. We are wasting no time in reaching our literacy goals. For the first time, we have a team approach to the delivery of English as a second language, ESL; learning assistance; reading recovery; language understanding across curriculum, LUAC - a high school program; and first steps. The highly skilled members of this team will be working in schools to enable them to deliver against the goals of the strategy. In particular, the literacy team will support schools in the development and implementation of another key plank of the strategy - school literacy plans. School literacy plans are at the core of the strategy to improve literacy; they are an explicit statement that literacy is valued and enable schools to focus their attention and resources on the acquisition of fundamental literacy skills by their students. The recommendation to develop these school literacy plans is yet another of the eight initiatives in the Government's literacy strategy. Other literacy initiatives in the strategy include:

providing professional development for primary and high schools which enables schools to share the excellent literacy programs already operating in many of our government schools

working in partnership with parents to develop information for parents about supporting their children in their literacy development

the primary school assessment program which monitors, across the system, all year 3 and 5 students in government schools. As part of this program, parents receive individual student reports which clearly indicate how and what their child is achieving in literacy.

Mr Speaker, this assessment program is more comprehensive than that in any other State or Territory. The ACT program assesses and reports on all strands of literacy - reading, writing, speaking, listening and viewing. The breadth of our assessment program places us in an enviable position to report on the nationally agreed benchmarks in Years 3 and 5 because we have the capacity to collect this data without further work in schools. Another literacy initiative is:

the Government has also given approval for the ACT to develop a literacy and numeracy assessment program for year 7 and 9 students in high schools.

This literacy and numeracy assessment will be applied to a number of learning areas. This is because we recognise that applying literacy and numeracy skills in other subject areas like science and technology is critical to students' success as they move towards further study or work. There will be a trial of items in June this year. From this trial a final selection of test items will be constructed for implementation in 1999.

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