Primary curriculum Illustrations of practice

Peg's Creek Primary School

Summary

Peg's Creek Primary School is an independent public school, centrally located in the City of Karratha, 1600 km north-west of Perth. The school is a part of the Pilbara Education District and is one of five public primary schools and one Catholic primary school in the Karratha area. The Peg's Creek Primary School community is diverse as a result of local industry and the strong connection with Indigenous people. At the time of filming the school had 300 students with 27 per cent Indigenous enrolment, and 10 per cent English as a second language or dialect students, all which enhances cultural awareness within the school. The school continues to strive for improvement through specific curriculum targets that are supported by evidence-based teaching practices.

An essential resource for implementation is the school timetable, which was developed to provide shared planning time to enable discussion around the curriculum and assessment. A key element enabling the management of the Australian Curriculum is the subject specialist teacher leaders.The literacy leader supports new staff to the school, with planning using the Australian Curriculum and assisting with implementing the program. Coaches and staff collaborated to unpack NAPLAN results and student data gathered on entry to the school and work in teams in a coaching cycle.The numeracy leader meets with teachers, setting goals around addressing the Australian Curriculum. Staff use resources aligned to the Australian Curriculum for planning and programming.

Due to the schools remote location there is a transient staff consisting of graduates, interstate and overseas teachers. The school employs a music specialist and has allocated a literacy leader and numeracy leader. The school also has a history coach who provides professional learning both within the school and across the region.The deputy principal developed a tool to help unpack teachers’ understanding of the curriculum, and plan using the achievement standards and the content descriptors. There is a nine-week cycle for learning and staff meet every 2–3 weeks to monitor students’ progress. Building teacher capacity is a major priority in the school and it is supported with funding and teacher release time. Teachers are at different phases with developing their capacities – some are planning, integrating resources, and others are weaving the proficiency strands into the mathematics program. The staff are all members of a particular curriculum committee, holding different roles of responsibility. Educating parents with information sessions and newsletters has also been a focus for the school.

Peg’s Creek Primary School
Karratha WA 6714 Australia

School type

Government

School location

Remote

School size

250 - 400 students

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.