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Threat to WAM voice.

Cost of living.

Threat to Atar music

Common assessment tasks undermine our unique ability to cater to student needs and interests in their individual school contexts, thwarting student motivation and sense of purpose.

Rubrics that are backwards-mapped from ATAR are completely unrealistic for the vast majority of students who are not going to do ATAR music - for example, nearly half of the marks for repertoire are awarded to style and expression, in Year 9 and 10. If they are actually used truthfully, they will be harmful and spirit-crushing to students and their teachers.

If there are too many assessments, lesson content/practice is irrelevant and they increasingly feel they can’t succeed, why would students continue with IMSS as their school journey intensifies?

There is a feeling of disparity in rolling this out to our range of school contexts - we can try to adapt, but it’s really difficult to achieve in the low-socio schools.

RE Term 1 RTP 1st assessment upload, there is a range of schools who have organised RTP or not, and a mix of staff have or haven’t assessed/uploaded first task data.

This also hasn’t been helped by the Union Directives with no meetings in Term 1.

I think these are easy things we can get back, and may help boost staff morale and the human existence in our organisation, rather than the numbers and data behind it all... which are important, but would be nothing without the human contribution our staff make.

This is already forcing staff to either remove 'stylistic interpretation' altogether, or simply rely on professional judgement to accommodate a student at that point in time along their learning journey.

Advice from staff who have previously or do currently teach classroom Music in schools is that schools DO stream... why can't we? Or at least be given the allowance to be flexible and apply relevant marking keys to students based on their pathways or course enrolment in a school?

(ie/ General, GATE, Specialist, etc)

Consideration would need to be given for review of the RTP assessment outline.

As the blanket of conformity possibly gets tighter as we align other aspects, there is a concern this will restrict learning opportunities which are unique to our different instrument sections. There are many ways to do things and we hope these will be heard and considered, genuinely, rather than a prefabricated model which will ultimately be implemented, regardless of input from others.

What is "best practice"? Music In Our Lives is only one study... there are plenty of other models which have achieved greater success!

Rossmoyne SHS has been identified as the "model of choice" in terms of instrumental instruction. (Note: Not a GATE Music school, nor represent the majority of the schools we teach in).

Instrumental teachers at RSHS has voiced the recent DATA is leaning too far towards aural-only strategies, which is causing levels of notation reading to suffer... now to ask staff, "How can you mitigate this?".

The fundamental operational model of IMSS has long been - we provide small-group instrumental lessons for students to develop the skills required to participate in large ensembles. MOST ensembles (if not all at some point) will require students to read/sing from notation.

While the weighting of the IWSTLP gives 50% to Reading/Singing from Notation (Repertoire), the problem is this is only 1 of the 4 aspects. The implied goal is that we will spend equal amounts of time across all 4 aspects of the Pedagogical Framework, which then potentially reduces engaging with notation to 25% of lesson time overall, as more often than not, the other 3 aspects are aural based.

If the desired "lesson design" is heading this way, then this will have detrimental ramifications on the reading skills of our students, lowering the standards of ensembles in schools across the board.

Well actually, this is a very simple, surface-like take, and unfortunately only touches on one aspect of the strategy.

As stated in the DoE Wellbeing Model (p6) Staff wellbeing is also affected by "workplace culture and environments"... "culture and leadership; supportive systems; and safe environments - particularly psychological safety in workplaces" - which unfortunately, some would say we don't have, particularly in our office, given how conversations are generally steered and accepted as the way we interact and operate in meetings, etc.

We must delve deeper in this space, especially considering the huge amount of change our organisation has gone through over the past 2 years, and continues to do so... we need to do better to support our staff. There has been talk of potentially creating a Wellbeing Team... considering the Wellbeing Strategy only came out last year, now is the time for this important work to begin!