Two Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Sydney were among 15 of the nation's award-winning schools in the 2007 National Literacy and Numeracy Week Excellence Awards for Schools.

Holy Family Primary, Menai is Sydney's first ever Catholic systemic school, and the only school in NSW to win $10,000 in the Numeracy excellence category, while Christian Brothers High School, Lewisham was one of only four non-government schools across Australia to win the $10,000 Excellence Award for student literacy improvement.

Among the other 41 schools highly commended, Berne Education Centre, Lewisham won the $5,000 award.

The annual awards recognise schools for their exceptional and innovative work to improve students' literacy and/or numeracy outcomes.

Holy Family Primary school Principal Cathy Forrester said the award was recognition of a series of effective strategies that teachers had designed to engage students in numeracy learning since 2003.

"These include the appointment of a full-time numeracy coordinator to assist teachers to plan and monitor student progress and provide in-class support; the establishment of a Numeracy Project Team; ongoing professional development for teachers; a complete review of teaching programs from Kindergarten to Year 6; and an increase in extensive resources," she said.

"Various parent information evenings, explicit Mathematics teaching in a daily one-hour numeracy block, and the implementation of Years 3 and 5 Intervention programs to target areas of need, have also significantly improved results," Mrs Forrester added.

"Our focus has been on ensuring sustainability. Teachers are now more skilled and confident, students are achieving highly and enjoying the challenge of their learning experiences, and parents are better informed and more skilled in supporting their children's numeracy development."
Christian Brothers High School, Lewisham won their award for their 2005 'Lewisham's Paragraph Power' - a program designed for boys in Years 5 to 8 that helps them develop better writing of descriptive paragraphs.

Consisting of activity booklets, intranet sites and assessment tasks that involves visual stimulus, ICT, student mastery and cumulative review and humour, the program is based on photos of school identities, sporting heroes or cartoon characters. 

Results indicate that the program is highly successful and currently an online version of it is being created in collaboration with the Macquarie ICT Innovations Centre allowing further development of this exciting project.

At the awards ceremony in the Great Hall of Parliament House in Canberra, the Minister for Education, Science and Training, the Hon Julie Bishop, commended the 15 exceptional schools or making a major contribution to Australian education and achieving significantly improved outcomes.
For the list of 15 winning schools and 41 highly commended schools go to: www.literacyandnumeracy.gov.au