Overview

Francis Greenway High School is in the Hunter Central Coast area of New South Wales, situated between the beautiful Newcastle coast and the Hunter Valley. The Newcastle/Hunter area is predominately a mining and industrial community, with a combination of middle-class and low socio-economic families. The Aboriginal nation of the area where the school is situated is Wonaruah, being bounded closely by the nations of the Awabakal and Worimi people.

Francis Greenway High School has an enrolment of approximately 800 students, with twelve per cent being identified as Aboriginal. The learning community of the school is known as the Gateway Learning Community (GLC) and is a diverse group of schools working closely in partnership across many areas. The high school offers students quality academic, sporting and cultural programs and opportunities within a supportive local context. Respect, Responsibility, Commitment and Co-operation reflect the ethos of collaboratively determined values and beliefs, which underpin the strategic direction and daily organisation of the school and serve to shape students with a strong sense of community as global citizens. Identifiable strengths of the school include an experienced staff undertaking innovative programs and a concerted effort to build community partnerships and community perceptions of the school.

Overall identified needs for our Aboriginal students:

• literacy improvements: skills, metalanguage and confidence required to improve reading and writing
• motivating students to engage in writing and overcoming their perceived lack of interest and willingness to give up easily.

Ideas for change

In 2012, Francis Greenway High School received targeted funding for the Write it Right! Teach Successful Writing: Empower Aboriginal Learners project, which provided schools with professional learning and support to assist teachers in strengthening literacy provisions for Aboriginal students. Participating schools were challenged to develop teaching and learning programs that focus on teaching writing across the curriculum in Stages 2, 3 and 4. This initiative was initially funded by the Commonwealth to strengthen implementation of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Action Plan (ATSIEAP) 2010-14; however, the funding was for one year only. After the amazing successes achieved, the school has gone on to self-fund this program because of the value of the Write it Right! Plan.

Our aim was to develop:

• a School and Community Partnership Agreement
• Personalised Learning Plans for every Aboriginal student
• local attendance strategies
• whole-school literacy and numeracy strategies
• a Local Activity Plan;

and to deliver:

• professional learning for teachers and Aboriginal education workers to support the delivery of Standard Australian English literacy and numeracy strategies
• professional learning for school leaders.

At Francis Greenway High School, our Write it Right! project was developed with the purpose of addressing the KLA demands of writing for all students, focusing on explicit teaching strategies and high-interest, motivating cultural activities to engage students in writing.

What does it look like?

The Write it Right! approach at Francis Greenway High School was created and developed by the key leadership team members, Janene McIntosh, Deputy Principal (Rel.) and Danielle Walsh, Head Teacher English (Rel.) who consulted with the community and key partners in Aboriginal Education to ensure the program would meet the needs of our students and our community. We wanted to make a difference with our students and to improve all teachers’ skills, as they have the capacity to improve student writing across the school. We have provided extensive training to the teachers of our school within the area of writing, as a result of the Write it Right! initiative, and the program has continued to grow since 2012.

Write it Right! is unique in that we incorporate writing and academic skills with regular cultural awareness and immersion at the Worimi Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Murrook, led and facilitated by Jonathan Lilley. These cultural activities and experiences become the stimulus for the intensive text-type-based writing workshops delivered fortnightly in a group withdrawal context back at school. This means that the students are in their Write it Right! group every week, working within a cultural setting for a full day every fortnight and sharing these experiences back at school during intensive writing workshops.

The program is evaluated annually. From preliminary data analysis, students who had previously failed to attempt class-based writing tasks are now submitting and attempting these tasks, with strong retention rates to Year 12 from the first cohort in 2012. Assessment of NAPLAN results shows growth for many students across all areas of Literacy and in the third year of the program, Aboriginal students’ literacy results at the NAPLAN assessment increased dramatically. This invaluable program will continue to be maintained within our school for the foreseeable future and it demonstrates the philosophy of our school to be STRONG and SMART!

Written by Janene McIntosh and Danielle Walsh from Francis Greenway High School. Published in 2016.