Check out the department's learning from home resources.

Video - Secretary's update 27 March 2020

Duration - 2:17

Transcript

Mark Scott

Hi, it's Mark Scott and I'm here with Mark Harris, who's the principal at Auburn North Public School. I know there's no Easter Show this year, but it feels a bit like the showbag pavilion here in the library at Auburn North. There are great bags of learning materials that have been prepared for the students so they can do their learning from home. Mark, tell us about the process of getting all this material together.

Mark Harris

Sure. Thanks Mark. Well, we know our community particularly well at Auburn North as all school staff do, and we know that a number of our parents don't have access to the internet at home and we want continuity of learning for all of our students. So we decided as, as a team to make sure that the students were able to have hard copies of the learning that was going home. Therefore, each grade got together, developed sets of work for two weeks, one week, another week. They've placed that in one of our blue schoolbags also with some stationary. And what happens is the parents come up over three day period this week to collect the goodies and they take them home to their children, so the children continue their learning.

Mark Scott

And you've still got some students here but, but somewhere between 10 to 15% of students.

Mark Harris

Today, it's about 10% and they are going to be learning in class what the boys and girls will be learning at home with the resources that are going home with them.

Mark Scott

So same learning materials, prepared and used at home and at school?

Mark Harris

What we're thinking of doing Mark, is over the next two weeks, grade teams are going to collaboratively develop the next set of two weeks work and if this process works well and we are assessing it, the parents will come up in week one of next term to collect the new set of work. At that time they hand in the work that's been completed by the children and the teachers from home or at school can mark that work and get it back to the children in two weeks time if we continue that process.

Mark Scott

So extraordinary effort here. Enormous work taking place in schools across the state. I saw the effort here replicated at a number of different schools I visited this week. Thanks to our teachers, thanks to our support staff. Thanks for the parents who are being partners in learning in a way they never had been before. Thanks for this great collective effort across all our schools in NSW.