TEACHER PROGRAM COMPLIANCE CHECKLIST

Ensuring your teacher program is compliant should an audit happen can be easy! But how do you ensure you have all the documentation required by law in your teacher program? How do you ensure it easily accessible and organised? And how do you do it without spending your precious planning hours putting it all together? The Teacher Program Compliance Checklist can help you do all this!

Teaching requires a healthy blend of content knowledge, instructional strategies and classroom management tactics. It also requires some experimentation, luck and a good sprinkling of pixie dust!!! You also need to be prepared for the fact that that lesson or assessment that you’ve poured hours into prepping and planning and looks AH-MAZING on paper… could, in fact, turn out to be a big failure!

There is allocated time to plan and program at school. However, often that time is used to contact parents, conduct a conference, catch up on emails, or grade papers. Everything BUT “planning”.

PREPARATION AND PLANNING MATTER

When it comes to your teacher program, preparation and planning do matter. Don’t view it as a waste of time. Instead, view it as an investment in yourself, your colleagues and your students.

Teacher Programs are a record of planned learning experiences. A teacher’s program should:

• reflect the needs, interests and abilities of students;
• be based on syllabus outcomes and include a variety of teaching, learning and assessment activities, strategies and resources to address the learning needs of all students;
• be a working document – it is a flexible and dynamic document that changes in response to student learning needs, school context, teacher evaluation and feedback;
• include adjustments for students with special education needs;
• reflect school policy, values and initiatives; and
• be a record of how syllabus requirements are met.

True planning and preparation often occur outside of school hours. Many teachers arrive early, stay late, and spend part of their weekends working to ensure that they are adequately prepared. They explore options, tinker with changes, and research fresh ideas in hopes that they can create the optimal learning environment.

And this is why teaching and learning programs take so long to prepare. Add to this the fact you also need to include records of individual student learning plans, health care plans, assessment data, school policy and procedure documents to meet compliance – OH MY! You could spend HOURS of your own time collecting and writing all the necessary information. However, using the Teacher Program Compliance Checklist will not only ensure that you have everything you need to meet compliance, but it will also save you time each and every year!

MEET COMPLIANCE WITH YOUR PROGRAM

Programming is an important process in the teaching, learning and assessment cycle. It enables teachers to plan for the delivery of syllabus content and improve student learning outcomes. It is also a legal requirement, as teacher programs form part of the registration and accreditation requirements under the Education Act 1990. You can find a list of what happens during a school audit on the NESA website (and I’m sure the equivalent on other state and territory education websites). The following points will provide you with the ‘CliffsNotes’ so you can get on with your most important task – teaching!

THE REGISTRATION AND COMPLIANCE PROCESS:

• NESA has both random and cyclical selection processes.
• 18 government, 4 independent and 4 systemic non-government schools will be selected randomly each year.
• Schools will receive NO LESS then 4 days notice.
• School’s will be informed as to whether they will need to address STRAND A or STRAND B.
  • STRAND A: NESA Annual Priorities.
    • Schools will need to provide evidence for 2 of the 4 policy requirements from Part One.
    • PART ONE: Child Protection, Discipline of Students, Student Welfare and Communication.
    • PART TWO: Curriculum requirements for a particular Subject for a particular Stage(K-10).
      • this includes scope and sequences, teaching programs, assessment plans and student work samples.
      • OR Curriculum Requirement for the Higher School Certificate (Stage 6)
  • STRAND B: Quality of Student Learning.
    • • A particular focus area and subject will be determined each year (e.g. 2019 – curriculum – English).
      • REQUIREMENT ONE: Curriculum for K-10
        • Evidence of consistency in scope and sequences, teaching programs, assessment plans and student work samples.
        • Evidence of student engagement and progress. Teaching strategies to meet the needs of all learners, and evidence of assessment guiding teaching.
      • REQUIREMENT TWO: Curriculum for Stage 6
      • REQUIREMENT THREE: Evidence of the quality of Student Learning in years 7-10.

For more information regarding Registration and Compliance, head to the NESA website.

BE PREPARED AND ORGANISED

It is important to ensure your teacher program meets compliance. You Principal or Head Teacher could inform you that you will need to submit your Teacher Program for an audit occurring in 4 days time. Yikes!!! The Teacher Program Compliance Checklist will ensure that you have everything you need to be compliant and audit-ready! It will provide you with a one-page guide to everything you need to include, and how to organise it.

Check out my YouTube video to see how to put everything together.

Sign up below to download your FREE Teacher Program Compliance Checklist and get your teacher program in order today!!!!

WANT MORE PLANNING AND PROGRAMMING INFORMATION?

There is a lot to learn when it comes to writing a high-quality teaching and learning program. Check out this post on using my program proforma templates. You can also read about my experience with differentiation here, and how I plan engaging and relevant assessment tasks here. Click the image below to download the checklist.

NATIONAL PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS FOR TEACHERS.

Professional Knowledge:

Professional Practice: