In the last couple of weeks, a major focus of my work and the other consultants has been the Language and Literacy Levels. For example, I met with my manager, Karyl Martin, and Bronwyn Custance who is the writer of the document to clarify the relationship between it and ACARA's EALD Teacher Resource.

Essentially we feel the ACARA document informs:

• teachers about what each broad cohort of EALD students is likely to be able to do across the literacy macro-skills
• teachers and leaders about general teaching strategies for each cohort
• school decisions about prioritising EALD support and which students should be assigned a Language and Literacy Level.

Meanwhile, the Language and Literacy Levels will be used to:

• inform each student's EALD support category to allocate EALD funding to schools
• inform teachers of the language needed to access and demonstrate knowledge of Australian Curriculum
• provide a fine grain assessment of student writing (and oral language)
• monitor and track any student's progress especially in writing.

The two documents are not in competition with each other. Indeed the introduction to the Levels will include a reference to the ACARA document and its usefulness. To further this work, Bronwyn and I will meet next week to align specific Levels to the descriptions of the four stages of EALD progression from R-10.

During the last few days, some of the consultants have started developing a set of moderated evidence to support teachers in assigning accurate and consistent Levels from 2013. This is just one aspect of the implementation planning happening in Term 4. Catholic Education have also been part of some of our implementation planning meetings and as a result there will be sharing of resources across the two systems.

In my last post, I mentioned a garmmar PD session I was going to run at the start of the school holidays. It went very well. Most participants rated the training as excellent. This is one of the reasons why I am offering it again. It will be in two parts from 4-6 pm Wednesday 31st October and 4-6 pm Wednesday 7th November. Both sessions will be held at Flinders Park. Emial me for a flier ross.hamilton@sa.gov.au