Principals and leadership teams have a pivotal role in driving literacy and numeracy improvement in schools.

Guides for reading, writing and numeracy have been developed to support conversations about literacy and numeracy improvement in the context of school strategic planning.

They support us to ensure that every student, teacher, leader and school improves every year.

The guides support the director, educational leadership, principals, school leadership teams and teachers to have informed conversations about evidence based literacy and numeracy instruction in all key learning areas across the school context. The guides can assist us with an analysis of current practices, help to inform planning for school improvement in reading, writing and numeracy. Suggest ways to build capacity and understanding of effective literacy and numeracy with explicit classroom practices and professional learning resources.

There are two guides for reading Effective Reading Kindergarten to Year 2 and Improving reading comprehension Years 3 to 10. From 2024, there are also two Writing guides, one focusing on Kindergarten to Year 2 and one for Years 3 to 10. And there are also two guides for Numeracy a K to 2 Numeracy guide and a Numeracy guide for Years 3 to 8.

All of the guides support conversations about evidence-based practice.

The guides provide an outline of the responsibilities of the principals and leadership teams in driving, reading and numeracy improvement throughout the school.

All of the guides are foundational for success in everyday life.

Reading is a complex cognitive process. It requires our brains to make new connections and requires explicit teaching in order for our brains to make those new connections.

All teachers need a thorough understanding of how the complex cognitive process of reading develops and how the many components work together. As students read increasingly complex texts skilfully, strategically and critically.

Writing is one of the most difficult and demanding tasks we engage in, and learning to write effectively is even more challenging. Students must be explicitly taught the knowledge and skills they require to become skillful writers.

Numeracy is also complex and multifaceted. Numeracy is considered the confident application of mathematical skills, understanding and dispositions across areas of learning and within our daily lives. While the evidence base for understanding and teaching numeracy is largely shared with mathematics. Some researchers have attempted to define numeracy and describe its components.

To support and build capacity and understanding. The guides are organised into the components of numeracy, reading and writing.

The components of reading you will see in the reading guide are phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.

The writing guide is organised in a similar way to the reading guide with information about the components of writing, including transcription skills, grammar and punctuation, text structure, language features and vocabulary for writing.

Looking closer at the numeracy guides, we see that these resources highlight evidence-based practices to inform teaching and learning in the components of number and place value patterns and algebra, additive thinking. Multiplicative thinking and proportional thinking.

Each component in all of the guides is defined with links to New South Wales syllabus documents and the literacy and numeracy learning progressions, as well as an outline of what this learning looks like in the classroom.

Advice is offered on where to find further support, including professional learning, podcasts, resources and assessments. The reading, writing and numeracy guides are available on the literacy and numeracy website and on the Universal Resources Hub.