SUPPORT & INTERVENTION

At St Mary's we believe that every child can learn to high levels but we also recognise that there are factors that impact on a child's academic development. When our data or professional judgement indicates that a student is not making the expected gains we ensure that we provide targeted intervention to support that student. This is process known as Response to Intervention (RtI).

One of the roles of our Learning Community Leaders is to provide additional, small group support to those students who require a 'boost' to reach the standard in a particular area of the curriculum. In addition, when students require more targeted interventions, we use a range of evidence-based structure programs to support these students at their point of need. Our highly skilled Learning Diversity Leader works with each Learning Community and our Learning Support Officers to identify the needs of a particular student and then apply an appropriate program to provide effective support to that child.

At St Mary's we believe in early intervention. This means that in the first semester of each year, we provide additional levels of support to our Junior Learning Community. This enables our Junior Learning Community teachers to identify and target those children who need additional support to develop appropriate early literacy and numeracy skills before they fall behind the standard of their peers.

Examples of the programs include:

SELL - Literacy support program for small groups of Grade 2 to 6 students

Mini-Lit/MacqLit - targeted small group literacy intervention programs for Junior & Middle-Senior Learning Community students 

Quick Smart - a Numeracy Support Program

Speech Intervention - targeted intervention frameworks for student whose articulation difficulties is impacting on their academic development

Partnership between home and school is a critical focus of our practice. For children who require additional levels of support, our teachers will work with parents and caregivers to develop a Personalised Learning Plan, with targeted goals to meet the needs of a particular student. These are developed at specific termly parent-teacher meetings called Program Support Group meetings. In this way, we ensure that our practice has been developed collaborative between parents and teachers. 

‘learning for all, fairness for all, compassion for all’