How a new approach to writing is lifting NAPLAN results at some Sydney schools

Rebecca Birch followed a non-traditional path into high school English teaching. Ten years into a career in marketing she decided to retrain, completed a bachelor of teaching and soon after landed a job at a private school in Sydney.

But not long into her first full-time role she started to notice gaps in students’ writing skills.

She took it upon herself to master how to teach the fundamentals of writing, from complex sentence construction to building deep grammatical knowledge. “I was frustrated, but also became energised to learn more after realising how little I learnt during my teaching degree,” she says.

That was more than a decade ago and, since then, Birch has worked at several private schools. She is now a year 7 English teacher and academic in residence at Queenwood girls’ sch