Three NSW public schools with an ‘X factor’ that drives student success are to share their practices with similar schools to help guide improvement.
Minister for Education and Early Childhood Learning, Sarah Mitchell said the schools would join the Department of Education’s Ambassador Schools Program, “a league of the best schools in NSW”.
“The Program, which is unique in Australia, uses the School Success Model to identify schools achieving academic performance above and beyond similar schools,” Ms Mitchell said.
“Our three new Ambassador Schools – Huntingdon Public School, Macarthur Girls High School and Bonnyrigg Heights Public School – all bring teaching approaches that have cut through in terms of lifting results for their students,” she said.
“As part of our School Success Model, the Ambassador Schools will help lift school performance by scaling best practice to similar schools to support ongoing improvement.”
Ms Mitchell said there were now six Ambassador Schools in the early phases of a pilot program that would gather and share evidence of the high-impact practices they utilised.
The Minister said that, when compared to similar schools, the Ambassador Schools all demonstrated stronger outcomes on a range of targets, such as literacy, numeracy and HSC performance.
“These three schools come from very different parts of the State, a remote bush school, a south-western Sydney school and a large Sydney girl’s high school, but what they all have in common is the excellent results their students are achieving – we want to capture and share this success,” she said.
Ms Mitchell said planning was also underway for a research program that would partner universities with Ambassador Schools to identify what made the schools successful and translate that information to be shared with other schools.
