By Ingrid Schmoutziguer, Communications Advisor
Angus Dalrymple-Smith, I&S and History teacher, coordinates the foundational skills programme at our school, making sure the subsidy is spent sustainably.
The Dutch Ministry of Education divides foundational skills in:
- Literary,
- Numeracy,
- Citizenship and
- Digital literacy.
The past couple of years the focus at ISU has been on literacy and numeracy skills. In the coming years we will work on a more structured approach to digital literacy. Citizenship is already very well covered in the International Baccalaureate curriculum taught at our school.
‘Both literacy and numeracy skills are under pressure from social media & AI’, says Dalrymple-Smith. ‘Children read less and instead of really thinking about a numeracy problem, they try to just quickly solve it on their computer.’
60+ home languages
As a school you are quite flexible in how you spent the subsidy, as long as you provide proof of the effects of the programmes you put in place. This is more complex in an international school, according to Dalrymple-smith. ‘Local schools have clear literacy standards and standardised testing, whereas in our school we have 60+ home languages and students coming from different educational backgrounds’, he says. That is why we decided to work with external multilingualism specialist Dr Eowyn Crisfield to help us come up with ways to support all students in their language development. Together we clearly defined the language we use and created uniformity in the way we use this language to better support all students to access content.
Clear and aligned language goals
Dalrymple-smith: ‘We are at the stage in the process that we now feel every lesson of every unit in our school, from KG-DP2, needs to have a language goal and these goals need to align. Teachers need to ask themselves what language skills do students need for the summative assessment at the end of this unit and work backwards from this.’
This process is supported by the language coordinators, but also by the ATL (Approaches to Learning) skills, such as time management, communication and research skills students need.
Numeracy skils
On top of literacy skills, we started work on numeracy skills in September 2024. Again, we asked numeracy specialist Dr Jo Skelton to do an audit of our students’ numeracy skills. ‘What she found is that students outside of specific mathematics lessons, couldn’t apply those skills in any other context’, relays Dalrymple-smith. ‘They did not stop to think about the problem and which skills to apply to solve it, instead they just quickly tried to solve it.’
Numeracy skills are really important in real life contexts, like trying to decide whether something you find online is ‘fake news’ or understanding a discount in the supermarket.
Together with the mathematics department, the numeracy team are developing a toolkit for students and teachers. This will define what ‘basic skills’ are, provide clear examples and a uniform way to teach them to students.
'Choose your own adventure'
The team also invented a project entitled ‘Choose your own adventure’, where every subject area will find 4 topics in their curriculum where numeracy skills are needed but not currently developed. ‘We will collaborate with the mathematics team to provide training to teachers (if necessary) and develop material which builds on what the students have already learnt in Maths’, says Dalrymple-Smith. ‘For example, in I&S grade 10 we are working on material for a unit on Economics and Climate change that will use bivariate statistical analysis that the students learnt in Mathematics.’
Digital literacy
From next year, we will start with developing our digital literacy curriculum. ‘This will take time’, says Dalrymple-Smith. ‘First we need to develop a clear vision of what we believe digital literacy is, then we can start putting a programme together.’