- Posted on 1 May 2025
- 4-minute read
School context
The Entrance Public School is a government primary school located on the Central Coast of New South Wales. The school sits in the suburb of The Entrance, where Tuggerah Lakes connects to the ocean, best known for its beachside holiday and tourism spots as well as natural beauty. The Entrance Public School serves communities in nearby suburbs such as Long Jetty, Blue Bay, Toowoon Bay as well as The Entrance township itself.
The school includes a support unit for students with disability, as well as a public pre-school that supports students from the local area to access early learning services provided by the NSW Department of Education.
The Entrance Public School is on Darkinjung country and 26% of students identify as Aboriginal. The school’s community is part of a local government area with one of the fastest growing proportion of people identifying as Aboriginal.
While some students are on traditional homelands and are in contact with country, other students have family members who were part of the Stolen Generations and thus have experienced some sense of disconnection from culture and country.
Challenge
While these stunning costal spots are associated by many as wonderful places for a seasonal family holiday, the resident community at The Entrance has significant concentrations of social-educational and economic disadvantage. The school’s student enrolment has 82% of students from below the Australian average for socio-educational advantage, with 58% of students representing the bottom quartile.
With diminishing local options for employment outside of seasonal tourism, the community experiences a high rate of transience. This makes making educational continuity a challenge.
The school’s immediate enrolment area includes neighbourhoods in the lowest decile of socio-economic advantage for Australia. There is significant concentration of students accessing social and government supports, as well as high numbers of single-parent households.
Actions taken
Building a culture of high expectations
Many coastal communities such as these are at potential risk of low educational expectations or family aspirations. Recognising this as a challenge for the school and its approach to teaching, The Entrance Public School has embedded a sustained focus on academic growth, wellbeing and social and cultural competency through multiple recent school plans.
The school set an objective in its 2018 School Plan to implement staff professional learning on promoting a culture of high expectations, tapping into the NSW Centre for Educational Statistics and Evaluation’s What Works Best publication.
The school identified ways to improve the consistency of expectations in teaching and learning as well as wellbeing and behavioural practices. In the 2022 school plan, the school’s leadership reinforced this focus by strengthening its community statement of expectations and aspirations. The school’s plan set improvement measures to increase the proportion of students achieving learning growth in literacy and numeracy.
A comprehensive and consistent focus on strengthening explicit teaching practices
Over the course of three school plans, The Entrance Public School has worked to build and strengthen a whole-school approach to explicit teaching.
Starting with professional learning sessions on parts of explicit teaching strategies for literacy and numeracy, as well as general curriculum points, the school has built this up through revised teaching programs and units to embed these practices in scopes and sequences, teaching units, and individual lesson resources. This has been supported through the school’s executive team, as well as a dedicated Instructional Leader model, and actively promoted through stronger leadership capability for pedagogical leadership, data analysis, coaching and mentoring.
In 2024, The Entrance Public School worked with Department teams to test and provide feedback on emerging professional practice resources in development for all NSW public schools, sharing their own journey and experience in the process.
Facilitating collaboration within and across schools to share and learn effective teaching practices
The Entrance Public School is part of the Tuggerah Lakes Principal Network, which includes 20 public schools in the Central Coast region. Working alongside the network’s Director, Educational Leadership, The Entrance PS has helped to build and foster a collaborative culture focused on sharing teaching practice and seeking to learn from others.
This culture of collaboration extends beyond the school and is shown through the active participation in the explicit teaching professional learning community within the Tuggerah Lakes Principal Network. This network approach has included The Entrance PS initially working with neighbouring schools identified as being further ahead in their uptake of explicit teaching, and it included facilitating observations and collaboration activities to learn from neighbouring colleagues on how to strengthen their practices.
In 2025, The Entrance PS staff worked with nearby schools to host a network Explicit Teaching Conference, welcoming teachers and leaders from public schools across New South Wales. This conference showcased the ways the school had made explicit teaching a critical part of their approach to supporting all students, including disadvantaged learners, while also sharing the consistent multi-year approach to strategic school improvement.
Outcomes
The Entrance Public School has been recognised as one of the most consistently-improving public schools in the NSW, for teaching and leadership practices, as well as student outcomes.
The Entrance Public School’s 2024 school excellence assessment showed a changed picture from previous years. In 2017, most elements of the NSW School Excellence Framework were identified as Delivering or Working Towards. By 2024, the school had shifted practice in all elements to Sustaining and Growing or higher, with some reaching Excelling for the first time.
This improved standard of practice is reflected in stronger student outcomes and an upwards trajectory of school performance.
From a low point over a decade ago, the school now consistently achieves mean scaled scores for Year 5 Reading and Numeracy above the statistically-similar school group. This is on the back of a sustained growth in value-add data for Years 3 to 5 of close to 20 points from 2014 to 2021, as well as significant growth in the proportion of students attaining in the top bands of the previous NAPLAN reporting scale.
The school has also improved its student attendance rates, with an increased feeling of student success in the classroom leading to a stronger positive attendance culture on the back of the effective use of explicit teaching.