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Form of workSchool Profile
Meadows Primary School is proudly multicultural, having 18 language backgrounds other than English with 71% of students recognized as English as Additional Language (EAL). Meadows Primary school has a number of families with refugee status (6%) and/or new arrivals to Australia. It is often the case that children from these families enter Meadows Primary School with little to no English. These students may have had limited exposure to formalised schooling and may have experienced traumatic events in their lives.
We have a significant percentage of transient students who enter and leave our school at various times throughout each term. This is usually due to government housing, VISA status, domestic or family violence and legal issues.
Meadows Primary School engages in the School Wide Positive Behaviour Support (SWPBS) framework and Berry Street Education Model (BSEM) to support trauma informed practice. We believe positive behaviours can, and should be taught. All staff are trained in the BSEM, with the strategies embedded across the school. This is our philosophy that underpins the teaching and learning programs and the learning environment. These strategies support students and teachers in their teaching and learning. Our values of Respect, Responsibility and Resilience align to SWPBS and BSEM and reinforces how the school community operates and interacts with one another.
Teachers follow scaffolded instructional models that support phonemic awareness and synthetic phonics for Reading, Teaching and Learning Cycle for writing and vocabulary development and the Four Proficiencies for Mathematics. All of which is underpinned by explicit teaching and use of HITS. Research into the Science of Learning has led us to implement changes to whole school practice that support students in their learning.
The school has a strong focus on Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) where teams drive their own cycles of inquiry, based on student needs. PLCs are fully embedded across all teaching teams, with teachers engaged in high level discussions with each other and school leaders about student achievement, growth and next steps of learning. Teachers have high levels of agency in the way they design curriculum and assess student learning, with teams having their own decision making capacity. There is a strong emphasis on distributed leadership within all teams, focussing on leading from the `middle¿, rather than as a hierarchical, `top down¿ approach.
Collaboration is key and we use PLCs as a means to effectively improve school culture and increase student achievement. It is the way teachers collaborate with each other, with their students and the level of inquiry they enter into, which will determine how successful we have been at creating a strong learning culture.
Our school vision states that¿.'We are an inclusive and safe learning community that empowers students to achieve their potential and live our values. We are responsible, respectful and resilient'.
The main driver to achieve our vision, is the development and commitment to continuously improve our school culture. We do this through an agreed set of values and norms which we call the `Meadows Cultural Compass¿. Our Cultural Compass was developed with staff as a means to create agency within the school and for teachers to have significant input into the way they work. We do this by developing collective efficacy and academic emphasis through whole school inquiry.
The school runs a community hub, (part funded by Community Hubs Australia) to provide programs that support our families. These include Adult Conversational English, Reading and Writing programs cooking and gardening classes (run through our community garden program with qualified horticulturalist), Playgroup, Adult Health, Child Minding, Arabic Women¿s Voice and Art Therapy.
