A Department of Education tutoring initiative to support school students following COVID-19 lockdowns has enjoyed benefits beyond its original aim of improving student learning according to a new evaluation from the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation (CESE).
Welcoming the results, the Minister for Education and Early Learning, Sarah Mitchell said CESE’s COVID Intensive Learning Support Program Phase 2 evaluation report 2021 examined the Program’s impact on student learning and engagement from teachers’ perspective, the quality of the Program-specific teaching and learning resources, as well as some of the challenges encountered by schools.
“We are seeing students’ confidence and classroom engagement improve thanks to the support they’re receiving, along with providing hundreds of pre-service teachers invaluable hands-on experience,” Ms Mitchell said.
“The evaluation revealed student confidence and engagement improved by 80 per cent, and students’ motivation and attitude towards school had improved by 77 per cent and 69 per cent respectively,” she said.
“A wider evaluation of the Program, including academic outcomes of students involved, will be completed by the end of Term 1 2023.”
In its Report, CESE said the COVID Intensive Learning Support Program had been well received by schools, with survey data showing strong agreement amongst school staff that it had a positive impact on students’ learning progress.
However, the Centre said NSW schools faced significant challenges implementing the Program during the learning from home periods of 2021.
“At this stage it is not possible to demonstrate an improvement in student assessment performance at a system level for students who participated in the Program,” CESE said.
“This is due to considerable challenges to both the implementation of the Program in the transition to learning from home, and the collection of data using existing reporting platforms.”
It said the Department’s Program team had made changes to the reporting guidelines for schools, which was expected to make analysis of student outcome data clearer for the next phase of evaluation.
“In addition, resources have been acquired to undertake qualitative work to investigate the wider impact of the Program on specific student cohorts and school contexts,” the Centre said.
CESE’s 54-page Report can be accessed at this PS News link.
