 We use NAPLAN data at our school level in a number of ways. A very important way that we use it is by developing individual student profiles for teachers to use as a way of getting to know their students. Those individual profiles then contribute to class profiles, so a teacher can have a very good understanding of each of the needs of the students, whether they require extension or they might require some extra assistance in their class. Those profiles include the literacy data and they also include the numeracy data. Every student has a profile that is on our online learning management system, so it's accessible to all teachers. We also make sure that the teachers have a hard copy and they also have a photo associated with them, so the teachers really know the faces in front of them that require that extra help, whether it is extension or whether it is some sort of assistance. We use NAPLAN data at a whole school level to plan very specific professional learning that addresses the needs of all the students that we have in our classrooms. We analyse the data and we ensure that the teachers are equipped with strategies that they can use in every lesson to deliver the content that they are required for their own courses. For example, our students were underachieving in writing, so we implemented a very explicit targeted program where teachers were taught how to effectively teach writing. This has had excellent results with now all students achieving or collectively achieving double the state average in writing and that has occurred over the last four years. It's an implemented program that is sustained and all teachers at the school have a very good understanding of how to teach writing and also the writing is in the context of their subject, so they feel that it is a worthwhile investment in their course and in the students. We're a fully comprehensive school and we can't rely on a small part of the cohort at the top end who are going to help us through with outstanding results which we can then share with the community and say look aren't we good because we've got high flying students. Our success academically relies on learning growth and our success therefore must rely on because we're comprehensive on the success of every student. So we've developed a system of target setting within the school. We engage parents, the homeroom teacher, the student in the co-construction of targets in February for every subject, for every student, for every year level. One of the things that we use that's a key bit of part amongst the suite of data for target setting is the NAPLAN data. Particularly when the boys are coming into year seven, when we don't have school-based data, the NAPLAN data looms large as a really important piece of information for parents and for homeroom teachers to set targets. We use NAPLAN data to really help us with our target setting process, the idea that we have a large amount of data available in terms of school-based data, whether it be from primary school that's carried through or in-house secondary school data. So we like to use that data to inform the student, to inform the homeroom teacher, to inform the parents about the story, about where the student is at so then we can co-construct goals and targets to determine where we want them to be. And as a result then we can put plans in place to support those students with their parents and the teachers to move forward to be the best they can possibly be but also to obviously improve. We think it's really important that teachers know their students well and they know them very early on in the year. So the situation arises where we don't want teachers to be getting to know their students over that whole calendar year. We would like teachers to know their students on a very intimate academic level within a couple of weeks so that they can target their teaching towards supporting those students. We use the target setting process very early on in the year. So by the end of week three or week four, at the beginning of every year, that homeroom teacher knows that student. He knows they know their family background. They know their strengths and weaknesses academically. They know some of the areas inside their life or some of the things in their life that might be distractions or obstacles to their success. So by having a target setting process in place that is informed by NAPLAN data, that is informed by school data that's been collected from previous years, we know that student incredibly well, very early on in the year. Our school has a number of strategic priorities in place. Whole school plans used for the benefit of our students. So the idea is through our NAPLAN results we've examined in the past. We've identified, for example, the need to focus on writing across the school and as a result we've been able to create and implement a number of writing workshops to support students at all ends of the spectrum both at the bottom top and in the middle. We are able to extract students from class on occasions to give them individualised help if need be, but also at the other end of the spectrum too, those boys that are doing exceptionally well that need to be challenged. NAPLAN's created a source of information that's allowed us to make decisions on who we focus on so that we can support the best of our ability. We use NAPLAN data at a school level to firstly understand where we are in the context of other schools. We, in a smaller school, use trend data quite a lot to give us more validity about our performance over several years. We also use the growth data to see whether we've actually value added to students' learning outcomes. So NAPLAN data is also used for more administrative areas in the communicating to the community and also developing long-range plans. We use it in the context of our school management plans to set targets and those targets have to be linked to our learning programs. We also use NAPLAN data to report and evaluate to the community about how we have achieved those learning outcomes for students. We use NAPLAN data to ensure that the staff, the teaching staff, understand what it is that is occurring in those tests and then how that information can be used to better improve our learning programs. Some of those areas of explicit teaching that we see that we have a need to develop may come through in, for example, a writing writing program where we are using the language and the understandings of the criteria from NAPLAN to look at our scope and sequences of learning in writing and then to modify them to try and improve those outcomes. It is a reference. It is not something which we use to direct all our teaching and learning but is a very good reference to go back to to validate our own school assessments and other external data that we get. I am one of the key ways in which we use NAPLAN data at the school level is the feedback it gives us on our value-adding. Our agenda as a school is to be a value-added value-adding school. That's what our defined purpose or moral purpose if you wish. So when we get those relative gain reports the thing we want to see is that each child no matter where they have started has made at least the relevant amount of growth. Now over the years we have seen our school grow to achieve fantastic relative gains and fantastic value-adding and the moral lifting aspect of that is just tremendous. For example, when we went through our mathematics analysis a number of years ago we found we were very strong in the number components but we had probably been neglecting areas such as space and geometry. So this allowed us to recalibrate our teaching programs and the results have been there for everyone to see. And again it gives you that sense of we have a goal. Here's how we work towards the goal and let's celebrate it when we achieve the goal. Another area of strength for our school has been how we've lifted the bar for our high achieving students and the smiles on staff's faces when they see those writing scores stretching to the very top of the charts. That's just been a tremendous journey. We used the feedback from the NAPLAN item analysis reports to guide what we wanted to do in our professional learning which was really to build our kids as writers and authors, help them to engage audience and actually bring out the richer writing behaviors. At the school level we have a team of staff, the executive staff in particular those that are to do with teaching and learning. We sit down with our principal and we go through and we do quite an analysis of the data that we get. We then look at where our strengths and our weaknesses are and we work out how we're going in particular with our strengths. Are they in relation to the programs that we're using in where we've had a weakness in the past? Can we now tell that we've been able to fill that gap? It also helps us where those areas of weakness are for us to then look at ways in which we can improve those students. We're after improved outcomes for our students and so now we're able to target our teaching in our program level to make sure that any of those gaps that we have that we're filling that we're looking at those and that we're really targeting that area for an area of improvement. The NAPLAN data is analysed in terms of trend data for the school as well as the band percentages that students fell into. Our aim is to make our school meet the national average and comparable to our community of schools. We then look at the percentages that fall in each band and our aim there is to move the bottom bands across so that we get an upward shift. In order to do this we sit down as an executive team and discuss where the strengths or weaknesses fall within our teaching and learning programs for each KLA and then we work towards implementing those skills into our teaching and learning programs. For example if we have a numeracy weakness we would look at implementing those into our everyday teaching and finding where it best fits for each faculty and then we discuss so an example would be the history teacher might decide to teach timelines and it may best fit within their first program so that's where it will be introduced and then an English teacher might say remember when you did timelines in history we're now going to use that in our English lesson today based on this novel that we're studying so they're connecting the skills and reinforcing the skills. At school level we're using the NAPLAN data in I think some of the traditional ways that schools have used it in a top down way so looking at making decisions about staffing about programming and curriculum but also advising our executive about priorities and direction for the school. Well we use NAPLAN data in various ways one of the ways is we release teachers during what we call a leading learning session which is a half day where teachers sit with their grade partners and two executive members and we examine the data. Now we look at some of the patterns and trends within the data for the school how are our students performing in the top two bands how are they performing in the bottom two bands and then we also look at boys versus girls. The other way that we look at the data is we look at some of the students results and also map these to the ESL scales because as a school all of our teachers are required to map the students to the ESL scales in talking and listening reading and also writing. So for example if one of the questions was about comparative language and that was the ESL scale outcome we would look at how the percentage of children performed and then perhaps make recommendations for our programs. NAPLAN data is very thoroughly analyzed at St Mary's in North Sydney. The Catholic Education Office of Sydney funds training days for our executive staff and members of staff within the NAPLAN team to go and to totally fully understand the NAPLAN data and how to use that data within our schools. It's then brought back to staff meetings where we then analyze the data further and look into trends and into different ways positive and negatives that have come out of the results and how we can then further improve student learning.