Inclusive Education in the Junior Years

A key touchstone of Edmund Rice Education - Inclusion - is woven within each of the College’s classrooms and faculties. Inclusive Education is when all students, regardless of any support needs they might have, receive high quality instruction, intervention and adjustments that enable them to succeed academically. At Rostrevor College, each student is considered on an individual basis to ensure all students can access school life and flourish.

The Inclusive Education Program at Rostrevor College caters primarily for students with learning difficulties and students with additional support needs. We provide a holistic approach to supporting the students where there is a clear collaborative partnership between the class teacher, Inclusive Education team, allied health professionals and parents and carers. This collective responsibility is documented in our Personalised Plan for Learning and a key feature of this documentation is student voice and family consultation. Students continue to be supported to express their views, make decisions and set goals on their personalised learning journey. Self-advocacy is valued and developed, with students continuously participating in decisions that affect their education at Rostrevor College.

Personalised Plans for Learning

Support strategies for our learners are documented in Personalised Plans for Learning. As part of the process of supporting a student with an identified or additional learning need, a Personalised Plan for Learning (PPL) is created, based on criteria recommended by the Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability (NCCD).

A PPL details the recommended strategies of support that can be put in place for a student. Such strategies may be via:

adjustments to their curriculum and/or assessments;
an awareness of specific social and/or emotional needs;
consideration of a student’s optimal learning environment; and
tailored instruction to suit the individual.

Learn More: NCCD Parent Information

Response to Intervention Model

At Rostrevor, we employ a three-tier Response to Intervention model to efficiently differentiate instruction for all students using specific, research-based interventions. Student progress is monitored through regular cumulative reviews built into each program.

Tier 1: Whole class, high-quality, scientifically based instruction
All students receive high-quality, scientifically based instruction. All students are screened periodically to identify struggling learners who need additional support.

Tier 2: Small group, targeted interventions
Students not making adequate progress in the regular classroom in Tier 1 are provided with increasingly intensive instruction matched to their needs based on levels of performance and rates of progress.

Tier 3: Individual, intensive interventions
At this level, students receive individualised, intensive interventions that target the students’ skill deficits.

Literacy Intervention

PreLit

PreLit is a tier 2 intervention delivered to our Early Years students (Reception and Year 1) providing them with a sound foundation skill for reading. It is a systematic based program that incorporates different types of phonological awareness activities, oral blending and segmentation activities complementing the play-based approach to the early years.

MiniLit

MiniLit is a tier 2 intervention delivered to our Year 1 and 2 students who require intensive support to develop decoding skills. The students are explicitly taught the relationships between the sounds and letters and how these are used by skilled readers. Students are provided with further opportunities to practise their reading skills using a variety of connected activities and resources.

MacqLit

MacqLit is a tier 2 intervention delivered to our Year 3, 4 and 5 students who require intensive support to develop word recognition skills. The students are explicitly and systematically taught the skills of reading - phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. In addition, students are taught strategies for decoding multisyllable words and given the opportunity to generalise the learnt component skills through connected text reading.

Nessy Reading & Spelling Support

Nessy is a Tier 2 internet-based program that helps teach students who require additional support in reading and spelling. Nessy contains over one hundred independent learning lessons spread over ten engaging islands. The lessons emphasise phonemic awareness, phonics, blending, irregular words, fluency, spelling, vocabulary and comprehension. Students begin by taking a Nessy Challenge to establish their baseline reading and spelling ability and then a personalised program is designed with reading and spelling targets. These targets are constantly reviewed and new targets are set.

Intensive Multisensory Literacy Support

Highly trained educators deliver intensive multisensory (visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic) literacy support to pairs or individual students who require extensive support to decode words across any age. The lessons are highly explicit and delivered in a systematic way paced to the learning of each student. Intensive Multisensory Literacy Support lessons include drill, repetition and reteaching of phonology, sound-symbol association, syllable instruction, morphology, syntax, and semantics to commit this knowledge into a student’s long term memory.

Multisensory Maths support

Multisensory Maths (MSM) support focuses on the student understanding and applying real maths concepts using auditory, visual and kinaesthetic modes. The emphasis is conceptual understanding as opposed to rote learning. MSM is a mastery program: it aims for mastery and is paced at each student’s own rate of learning and understanding and is aligned with the Australian Curriculum for mathematics. Students are assessed to determine their current level of mastery prior to beginning intervention.

Social and Emotional Support

School counsellors are available for students across the College. They provide one-on-one counselling for students, in-class support and facilitate group sessions.

Counsellors also work with teachers to facilitate social and emotional skills and programs in the classroom. Programs include social skills, self-regulation, emotional control and mindfulness.

Allied Health Professionals

Rostrevor supports Allied Health Professionals and works in conjunction with these providers to support our boys.

If you wish to have a provider offer services to your child during school time, please contact the Inclusive Education Coordinator to register your interest. The provider will require a Catholic Education clearance as well as meeting our onboarding requirements. It will remain the responsibility of the parent/caregiver to cancel appointments and inform providers when a student is absent. Annually, a consent to share will need to be signed enabling the flow of information from the allied health professional to the teaching and Inclusive Education team and vice versa.