By Lucy Carroll and Nigel Gladstone
When year 7 students start at Glenwood High their timetable includes three lessons each fortnight dedicated to foundational literacy and numeracy skills.
The classes were slotted into the school day several years ago by principal Sonja Anderson after she noticed students were struggling with core reading and writing skills, including complex sentence construction, comprehension and grammar.
This year’s senior students at Glenwood High. The north-west school achieved an average HSC score of 85.6 for English advanced last year.Credit: Louise Kennerley
It is among a raft of initiatives that Anderson says has reinforced an academic focus at the north-west Sydney school – and contributed to a steady climb in HSC scores.
“We also brought back our former head English teacher Lesley Sargeant as an instructional leader to build literacy skills across subjects and teach our new graduate teachers,” Anderson says.
Sargeant retired a decade ago but returned to the school in a master teacher role while also holding intensive writing sessions with senior students. “It is about having someone with that expertise in English and grammar to really grow our teachers’ capacity and confidence.”
Glenwood High is one of multiple schools with improved HSC average scores, according to a new Herald analysis of final exam results from 2019 to 2023. The school’s average for English advanced leapt five marks to 85.6 last year, ranking it in the top 20 public schools for that subject.
The analysis, from data published in more than 300 NSW public schools’ annual reports, reveals those achieving strong results across their entire student cohort, not just on band 6 results. Many private schools do not report averages and are excluded from the analysis.
For HSC English advanced, the top-performing school on an average score measure was academic powerhouse North Sydney Boys with 90, followed by comprehensive school Killarney Heights High in second with an average of 89.6.
North Sydney Boys also notched up the highest average for maths advanced with 93.6. Balgowlah Boys was the strongest performing non-selective school for that subject, scoring an average of 89.6, followed by St Ives High and Dulwich High School of Visual Arts and Design.
Last year’s senior school Balgowlah Boys students after 2023 HSC results were released. The school achieved an HSC average score of 89.6 in English advanced.Credit: Nick Moir
At Glenwood High, Anderson says there has been an overall shift in the top three band results since 2020, with last year marking a bigger shift from band 3 to band 4 and 5 results.
“They’re starting with fewer skills all the way through … we are looking to fill the gaps so students can master the syllabuses to be able to meet the demands of the HSC.”
From year 7, students concentrate on comprehension, practising inferences, sentence construction and punctuation. “Kids need explicit focus on reading for meaning as they miss things on the page. We move to extended essay responses once we’ve dealt with all the nitty-gritty.”
English teacher Rani Levett, who works alongside Sargeant as an instructional leader, says the school is rolling out a writing project for students achieving band 4s to help refine essay structure and paragraph composition. The school also runs maths, English and science help sessions during lunch, and a homework club.
Among selective schools North Sydney Boys achieved the top average scores last year in chemistry and physics, while the most popular selective school among parents and students, Baulkham Hills, had the highest averages in economics, modern history and biology. Gosford High was the strongest performer in visual arts.
Comprehensive schools such as Cammeraygal High and Epping Boys recorded similar averages in economics to multiple selective schools.
Balgowlah Boys principal Paul Sheather has previously said a more explicit approach to teaching literacy and writing has contributed to lifting results in maths at all levels.
“There can be a deficit starting from year 7 – boys don’t read or write as much as girls,” he told the Herald last year.
“One area we struggled in was general maths because of the literacy needed to understand the questions. We have done a lot of work on literacy and writing.”
At Canley Vale High, literacy is included in the year 7 to 9 timetable as a stand-alone subject for two periods a week.
The school was among the top 20 comprehensives on average scores in HSC English advanced, drama, economics and maths extension 2.
Canley Vale High is ranked in the top 20 comprehensive schools on an average mark analysis for multiple subjects.Credit: Nikki Short
When disadvantage is factored into HSC results, Canley Vale has long been among the state’s highest-achieving schools, while its NAPLAN results are well above average when compared with students from a similar background.
Check out Campus, our higher education hub, including an interactive course search tool
More from Campus:
- Feeling overwhelmed by uni applications? Here’s what year 12 students need to know
- Where Australia’s universities rank among the world’s best
- Here are five things I learnt from studying in Paris for six months
- Where to start when you don’t know what career you want
Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.