Narrabeen Sports High School

Location: Narrabeen, NSW

Narrabeen Sports High School is a comprehensive, inclusive and innovative, co-educational school with a selective sports program, population of 800 students, located 40 minutes from the Sydney CBD on the northern beaches of Sydney. The school has a strong sporting, arts and academic tradition, with a focus on individual student needs through strong wellbeing programs and a broad co-curricular program. The school is focused on quality teaching and learning, positive education and future focused skills, aiming to develop well informed, critical and creative thinkers with high resilience. The school community is committed to a strong learning culture with respect for others and aspiration to success in all endeavours.

How has your school used its Gonski funding?

Our school employs two primary trained teachers to deliver the Stage 4 syllabus to a group of 40 Year 7 and Year 8 students across English, Mathematics, Science, Geography, History, Music and Languages. In other subjects, classes are a mixture of students from across Year 7 for Visual Arts, Technological and Applied Science, Physical Development/Health/Physical Education and Sport classes. This "streamline" class ensures minimal disruption to learning and maximum learning time throughout the school day. The school has focused the financial resources made available through NSW's commitment to the Gonski reform, to enable this learning environment for students based on evidence outlined in the educational research literature.

How has Gonski made a positive difference for students?

Students in these classes receive targeted learning support and benefit from a continual link in key literacy and numeracy skills across the curriculum. Students also benefit from cross-curricular/subject projects which allow deep rather than surface learning of concepts and skills. Students were chosen specifically for these classes by the Learning and Support Team, Executive and teaching staff from our school and primary schools using Year 6 results, learning profiles and teacher observations.

What could your school do with Gonski funding in the future?

Narrabeen Sports High School hopes to 'upscale' this program should the evaluative data demonstrate the value of this pilot program. Initial data related to student work models, attendance, engagement and feedback from students, parents and teachers is extremely positive.

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