Springside West is quite a new school.

It opened in 2018 with a student cohort of 175 and has

experienced a period of rapid growth. We now have 1500 students, so in our school here, being a
new school, we are very well represented with young and early career teachers. So graduate
teachers and teachers within their first five years of teaching which brings a lot of energy and
enthusiasm to the school, to the programs that we run and the initiatives that we are putting in place
to support student learning. And it provides us with a capacity to support our colleague’s growth in
areas of inclusion and disability support as they develop into their careers.

At Springside West we have PLCs, our Professional Learning Communities and within those
Professional Learning Communities there are PLTs, or Professional Learning Teams, which are small
groups of teachers that work on projects to improve practice and improve student outcomes across
the school. Within the PLTs teachers have to work collaboratively together to really focus on
differentiation for the students.

I am the teacher of the Year 9 2D Art class. It's an elective subject that runs for one semester. At the
moment we have a Select Entry Learning Program that runs at our school, and a lot of these students
have particular focuses with Individual Education Plans implemented.

Something I ensure to do in my classroom for my students is differentiation. The good thing about
differentiation is you can make it relevant to that particular student in what they actually require. So,
for example, with a student, I might go to them directly and they may already have a modified task.
But even just running through that with them or writing down key words that they may need to focus
on in order for them to ensure that they are completing the task as required. I find being able to
teach at the front of the classroom and maybe referring to a TV a good way to start off, but then
going up individually to students and providing them with resources, with scaffolded steps of what
needs to take place.

Our staff participate in a range of curriculum days across the year. Throughout each curriculum day
there is always a focus on differentiation in some capacity, looking both at how do we extend
students that require extending. Some of our students with diagnosed disability here require
extending and are quite advanced in areas. So how do we support those? What adjustments can we
put in place in our classrooms as teachers to support those students to achieve their learning? And
then for our students, where learning might be a real challenge, how do we put reasonable
adjustments in place to support them and scaffold them towards learning growth for themselves.

As a teacher we’re constantly having professional conversations, particularly education support staff
or teachers, and with these conversations we can talk about challenges, wins or successes that we
have with particular students in our classrooms and work together to create new ideas or what we
can implement in each other's classes to best support our students.

As for formal training, sometimes our school offers certain professional development sessions, they
may take place as set meetings, or often our Learning Specialist Officer will run particular
professional development sessions, and they may relate directly to Autism Spectrum Disorder or
particular learning needs that are relevant in a lot of our classes at our school.

We measure our effectiveness of our approach to supporting students with a disability through a
range of measures. So, we look at data, we look at things like attendance data, incident data, learning
data for students to ensure that our students are learning and to investigate whether there might be
some other barriers that might be coming into play if the learning is slowing down, or learning is not
improving.
We also have an attitude to school survey which ask some specific questions to our broader school
student cohort around inclusiveness, around differentiation and around specific supports that they
see in the classroom.

Student voice is core to the work that we are doing. It's critically important that our students are
present, that they have an opportunity to be part of the conversation and as they get older and as
we support them towards self-advocacy through that process as well to start to lead the
conversation around what is happening for them, what their needs are, and where they're wanting
to go.

We have a Student Voice Coordinator who works with focus groups of students around issues of
student concern and takes areas of innovation and development that the school is looking at putting
into place to those groups for student input and to his student voice actively. And this plays a role in
our inclusion improvement planning.

At our school we are provided with different resources and information for students that have a
disability. For example, we may be giving a psychological assessment or Individual Education Plans
are developed. So according to these documents, we're able to break through particular things that
will help them and will support them in the classroom. So, for example, we may look at creating
resources that have visual cues and very short prompts for them to follow with instruction, or we
may create an actual modified task for them to complete in the classroom.

Families and support services play an integral role in the wrap-around approach that we have here to
supporting students with a disability within our school. Through our student support group process,
we review individual students IEPs or Individual Education Plans frequently. We sit down with
students, their families, and talk through their learning. Look at their learning data, discuss and
celebrate where learning growth has been accomplished and review and plan for areas where
learning growth might not have been achieved in a way that we had expected.

We frequently meet with families and with allied health professionals and external stakeholders to
get all the core people around the table with us as a school and the student to collaboratively plan
for the needs of that individual student. What adjustments are needed to put in place to ensure that
they're learning successful at school and any other emerging needs or concerns as they arise.

We have an understanding that we all have a collective responsibility for the learning of all of our
students, including our students with a disability. It's not that any of our students with a disability are
the responsibility of one person or one group within the school. It's a collective responsibility across
the board for all teachers in all of their classes, and this contributes to a culture of inclusion at
Springside West Secondary College.