Hi my name's Doug Thomas, I'm the principal here at Claremont College, which is a K-6 co-educational primary school.

It's an Anglican independent school in the eastern suburbs of Sydney.

As we collect data here at Claremont, one of the first things that we try to see is that the data is not year by year. And I suppose the history of a lot of this work is that the class teacher starts with a new student, and in a sense the onus was always on that teacher trying to make sense of the child. But now what we do is collect the data across all school years and the team works together, so that the new classroom teacher at the beginning of the year is working with data and an understanding that the team brings to that new year, to the child. 

Previous to going on the journey, classroom teachers would perhaps refer the student to myself as a school psychologist, or the learning support teacher, ask for an assessment, and then for us to make up the plan. So now instead of that happening - we still do the assessment - we provide recommendations but we're more in the classrooms now working with the teachers.

The teachers are the people who have the ownership. That way they have a view of the whole child across specialty area and different areas of learning needs.

Now we have teams of people that meet regularly with parents where everybody has a chance to input, and it's the responsibility of
the class teacher to make sure that the IP has been followed, and to record any results or changes. And then at the next meeting where all stakeholders are invited, everyone then has the chance to talk about what progress has been made, what things need to continue, what might need to change.

And it's been a really great thing to be a part of, especially when you have these children your class, you can talk to the parent about the small things that previously you might not have had much opportunity to talk to them about, because you weren't aware of it.

We took the opportunity for professional learning with the staff, to look at ways in which they could start to document adjustments.

And part of that process, the staff realise that actually they were doing so many adjustments anyway, just as the natural part of their
classroom practice.

But we just had to work with the teachers on actually beginning to document those adjustments.

And the best place to document those adjustments were in the class program. I basically helped teachers and the learning support to look at those children that had special needs and needed adjustments. We then passed it back on back onto the teachers what adjustments they thought and what categories they thought those children fit under.

So then we brought it back and we collected the information and we put it and work out what type of documentation we had. So it could have been from professional reports, it could be the documentation from the IP as such, health plans. If they've got extra teachers TLA support, or there were other adjustments. So we just put it all there in front of us so we could see.

After our first collection, we had quite a large amount of children. And then through the system, what we've put in place, we now can see and work with teachers in saying how much adjustment does this child need. And things do change - they don't always have to stay on - the level of adjustment changes with their children's needs and the way they've grown. - There's a lot of support given with Anna, with the clerical and the Admin side of it.

So she'll organise the meeting time for making sure that there's a free date on the calendar for me and also for the parents. Then we liaise with my my other co-teacher, and we work out the needs of the child, we go through the assessment. We have Anna also helping with collating data. With what are the needs of the child.

We look at the previous IP that had been done up from the teacher the year before and we have a hand over time with them.

So it's good being able to talk about the needs of the students. How the current IP had gone in meeting those needs and also what things we can plan as goals for that student for the upcoming semester. And as a teacher it frees myself up from the clerical side of
things, to actually being able to focus more on strategies that we can put into place to meet the needs of the student in the class.

I think parents in our school community have been really impressed by the way hat we approach this. For example I can give you a kindergarten student this year who obviously is just embarking on the process, and the parents have been absolutely blown away by just how all of these little mice in the school come out and are all involved in their son's learning - it's not just the teacher. So they get to see the role of other staff members that they previously didn't see.

And so perhaps previously didn't value as much either.

And it also gives them the opportunity to be an active team player as well. You know once we've decided on level of adjustment and on the adjustments themselves, we then sent all that documentation home to the parent for them to review and add to that, if they have any additional concerns or anything that's working at home that we hadn't thought of, so we can incorporate that too.

The nationally consistent collection of data has helped us here at Claremont to use our data to direct our teaching and learning.

It helps us to look at the data and then say ok, we know what the data is saying, what is the teaching looking like, and is there a match between that data and what the teachers are doing in their classrooms. I can say it's been fabulous to see here at Claremont how there is a great match between  what the data is telling us and what the
teaching is actually doing.

The collection of data has had huge benefits for our students and I believe ultimately it comes back to the way teachers teach, understanding how children learn, we're not wasting time guessing what we need to put in place for students. We've been quite strategic about the level of support that they require and certainly as we collect data, as we measure it, as we track it, we can see what the point of need is for a child and we can respond from that.

So as a school we're just really supporting our teachers to do their job  well, to talk professionally and then the children have great lessons, they learn. 

And you know it's tough for them so we're not spending half a year guessing and trying to work out what does this child need, we're in there - doing it.