Reading focus delivers results

IT starts the moment the four-year-old students walk through the door.

IT starts the moment the four-year-old students walk through the door.

At Tintern Girls Grammar, in Melbourne's outer eastern suburbs, they have a targeted literacy and numeracy program that begins on day one with the pre-prep students.

And that is what the school believes is the key to its successful NAPLAN results, which put Tintern as the second-highest-performing primary school in the country for reading.

The independent school is the highest ranking non-selective school for Year 3 and Year 5 results in the nation and also scored well on numeracy results for the same year levels, coming in at 45.

The school, which has senior and junior campuses, has about 180 primary students who start in a pre-prep program at age four and go through to Year 6.

Fees are between $12,000 and $16,000 a year.

Junior school head Anna Riddell said the school had targeted literacy and numeracy programs as soon as students started in pre-prep and this was one of the reasons behind the NAPLAN results. "We are a relatively small junior school but I don't think that is necessarily why we have done so well," she said. "It's more to do with the consistency of the literacy and numeracy programs from one year level to another."

Ms Riddell said the teaching was "explicit" in the sense that the school conducted stand-alone classes on reading, spelling and comprehension. She said the school started with the Letterland program, which is used to teach children in the lower classes the alphabet. The method assigns a character for the sound of a letter and she said this was highly successful.

Ms Riddell said the school had used this program, as well as the Spalding program for spelling, for more than a decade.

The former headmistress of a private girls school in London, Ms Riddell said the school was not surprised by the NAPLAN tests for reading and literacy.

"We have had strong results in the past and so it just confirms that," she said. "But . . . we are always reviewing and looking at our practices."

Ms Riddell said the school was particularly happy with the results because it did not have selective entry. "I think that's very important that we have an open-entry policy to all students," she said.