National Literacy and Numeracy Week, from 29 August to 4 September 2016, is an opportunity to emphasise the importance of literacy and numeracy skills and to highlight the progress being made to help all Tasmanians improve these key skills.
National Literacy and Numeracy Week represents a collaborative approach by all Australian governments and school communities to highlight how essential it is to develop good literacy and numeracy skills for everyday life.
We are making progress in building skills in this essential area, as evidenced by Tasmania’s 2016 NAPLAN results showing students have further narrowed the gap to the national average with results improving on 2015 to be closer to the Australian mean scores in 15 of the 20 assessments.
The greatest increases of more than 10 points for Tasmania’s average scores were in Year 7 and Year 9 Writing and Year 7 Numeracy which suggests our strategies, including 25 specialist literacy and numeracy teachers working with students in Years 6-9, are helping students achieve significant improvements.
Continuing to lift education standards, including improving literacy and numeracy, is one of the Tasmanian Government’s key priorities and we are continuing to make significant new investments to help us achieve this.
In addition to providing specialist literacy and numeracy teachers, we have introduced Learning in Families Together (LIFT) and announced a new $10.7 million Literacy and Numeracy Support initiative in the 2016-17 Budget.
We are also looking at how we can continue to improve our teaching practice with the Peter Underwood Centre for Educational Attainment to undertake a review of literacy teacher training and practices to ensure we can provide current evidence-based professional learning support to our teachers.
We have also committed to helping Tasmania’s adults receive the support they need to improve their literacy and numeracy releasing a new ten-year vision for 26TEN – 26TEN Tasmania: Tasmania’s Strategy for Adult Literacy and Numeracy.
Improving literacy and numeracy skills can help change lives, and I encourage the Tasmanian community to join our schools in celebrating National Literacy and Numeracy Week.
More Media Releases from Jeremy Rockliff
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