Schools get write stuff

QUEENSLAND schools are paying up to $100,000 a year for a world-first program to upskill teachers on basic English as students fall further behind in educational benchmarks including NAPLAN.

More than 65 private and state schools, including the Far North’s Trinity Anglican School, have bought into the Writer’s Toolbox program, whose founder, Ian Hunter, claims proper writing instruction stops in primary school – and boys are harder hit than girls.

“For three generations, we have not taught teachers how to teach writing, so when students ask ‘how can I get a higher mark?’ the teacher cannot explain how,” said Dr Hunter, a New Zealand-based former university lecturer.

“The result is students are falling well behind in writing tasks, as shown in NAPLAN, and their confidence is at an alltime low. If you ask a class of 30 students to put their hand up if they feel competent in writing, 16 hands will go up, and 15 of them will be girls.”

Dr Hunter, who introduced his program in Australia in 2018, said it was “too convenient to beat up all the English teachers” because writing was across the curriculum and a “shared responsibility”. A core component of

Writer’s Toolbox, which uses artificial intelligence to measure students’ performance, is coaches who conduct workshops for teachers on traditional composition, sentence styles and paragraph structures.

“We have 50 staff working with over 400 schools across Australasia, and all we do is writing, everything from teaching training and diagnostic testing to whole school turnaround projects,” Dr Hunter said.

Leading the Australian rollout is educator Julie Quinn, who for 14 years was dean of studies at Brisbane’s St Joseph’s College Gregory Terrace.

Mrs Quinn, who previously also taught in state schools, said Australia had the most writing-intensive curriculum in the world.

“A Year 12 humanities student will write about 22,000 words and a maths student 18,000-20,000, with subjects like PE and biology also having heavy writing components,” she said.

She said schools had “really amazing uplifts” using Writer’s Toolbox, with some NAPLAN results for writing soaring by 40 per cent.

She said while very large schools had invested about $100,000 in teacher development, the average spend was $36,000, with entry level access from $1000.