Primary curriculum Illustrations of practice

St Mary's School, Greenborough

Summary

St Mary's is a Catholic primary school in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. At the time of filming there were 540 students, 39 teaching staff (including part-time teachers) and 15 non-teaching staff. A comprehensive, rich, values-based curriculum is offered in a supportive caring environment at the school. St Mary’s School community believe that all students should be actively engaged in their learning. The leadership team has focused on all staff being well-versed in the Australian Curriculum to assist with the development of consistent teaching practice within the school.

About this illustration

In order to implement the Australian Curriculum, St Mary’s took a ‘two pronged’ approach. The school changed the leadership structure by creating curriculum leader positions, rather than administration roles. The curriculum leaders’ role was to create consistent, whole-school teaching practice across all learning areas. The second strategy was to start with the Australian Curriculum and backwards map from the achievement standards to the content already being delivered in the school. To support the new approach in the school, professional learning teams focussed on becoming familiar with the content of the Australian Curriculum while making connections to existing curriculum. Provision was made to allow teams to meet weekly during school time and a planning day was provided at the end of each Term for collegial planning, analysis of data and moderation of student work.

For each year Level, Focus books were restructured to align them with the Australian Curriculum and for the incorporation of learning intentions, success criteria and teaching strategies with the aim to build consistent teacher practice across the school.

School context

St Mary's works to provide a curriculum that is inquiry-focused, personalised and that stimulates innovative thinking. The school has a range of programs taught by specialist teachers in Italian, physical education, library, and the arts. The principal’s vision and emphasis was for all students at St Mary’s to be actively engaged in their learning and that teachers should be well-versed in curriculum and pedagogy.

The implementation of the Australian Curriculum afforded the school with the opportunity to reflect on their practice and pedagogy to begin delivering the new curriculum.

School details

St Mary’s School, Greensborough
Greensborough VIC 3088 Australia

School type

Non-government

School sector

Primary

School location

Metropolitan

School size

400 - 600 students

Supporting documents

Evidence in action powerpoint

Foundation English overview

Scope and sequence

Specialist timetable

Year 6 weekly literacy timetable

Copyright

These illustrations of personalised learning are not licensed under the creative commons license used for other material on the Australian Curriculum website. Instead, you may view, download, display, reproduce, and distribute these materials in unaltered form only for your personal, non-commercial educational purposes or for the non-commercial educational purposes of your organisation, provided that you retain this copyright notice. This means you cannot edit, modify or adapt any of these materials and you cannot sub-license any of these materials to others. Apart from any uses permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), and those explicitly granted above, all other rights are reserved by ACARA.