During Term 1 State Council, and at your coming PPC meeting (or the next), we are asking members to be involved in a workshop focussed on the use of school funding, particularly flexible funding within schools, and the impact on student learning outcomes. This has become even more important given comments by the Minister relating to changes in the LSLD strategy in the media recently. The workshop will

• Identify what’s working
• Identify what’s consistently not working
• Promote sharing amongst members to further improve learning outcomes across our public education system
• Inform planning for NSWPPA professional learning programs
• Identify people which can lead the delivery of NSWPPA professional learning programs
• Provide the Association with data for use in discussions with the DoE
• Provide the Association with data to assure the general public of the value of the additional funding allocated to schools since the introduction of needs based funding
• Provide data for further research into effective teaching and learning programs

In order to promote the benefits to our students and collegial sharing bringing about further improvements to our work, and to underline to all the value of this funding, the NSWPPA has created a tool for capturing how we are using the funds. The tool is known as The PI Tool. It is accessed by logging on to the PPA website and found in Quicklinks on the dashboard (landing page after log in).

In preparation for the workshop you will asked to collate information for three to five initiatives in your school (more if possible) according to certain fields of information. You are asked to have this information brought together in a Word file, perhaps with the assistance of school executive member(s), grouped by the initiative. We are really hoping everyone will do this, as the data that will be captured is extremely important for our work. Please complete the pre-workshop tasks as explained in the email, come along to your PPC meeting and input your program details. Further information about the workshop and data capture is available from Vice-President Rob Walker.