Education is one of the most crucial investments we can make in our future. But it’s a huge challenge to get the funding to boost our schools and colleges.
Luckily, there are many charities that fight for educational equality. Educate Girls, for example, runs door-to-door surveys to identify out-of-school girls and enroll them in local schools.
Academic Support
Academic support is a broad category of educational strategies intended to help students succeed in their studies. It can include tutoring sessions, supplemental courses, summer learning experiences, and student-teacher advisors. It may also include alternative ways of grouping or instructing students, and faculty training and workshops. Academic support may be provided to individual students, groups of students such as specific racial or cultural populations, or the entire student body.
Students have multiple demands on their time and energy, including work, family, and social life. In addition, they often encounter personal challenges such as poverty, balancing school and home responsibilities, or academic struggles in their courses.
Many of these concerns can be addressed through academic advising, a key support service offered by Pace. However, this principal academic resource can go underutilized by some students, who consider advising to be an optional service that they might only use when they are registering for classes or have a crisis.
Individualised Learning Support
A key component of individualised learning support is to create relevance. This involves connecting the learning with a child’s interests, strengths and goals. It’s also important to make sure that students understand the value of the work they do in school.
Often, students are disengaged because they believe that what is being taught has little or no connection to the real world. Individualised learning supports can help to create this link, ensuring that students are more engaged and less likely to drop out.
Teachers or school teams will consult with a student, their parents/guardians/carers and other professionals to identify the student’s aspirations, goals, strengths and needs. They will then develop personalised adjustments to support the student in participating at the same level as their peers. They will monitor and review the effectiveness of these adjustments regularly. They will ensure that all records are maintained in accordance with school, sector and/or jurisdiction policy and practice requirements.
Observation & Recording
Observation and recording are the foundations of many forms of learning support. They allow practitioners to document a child’s progress and identify areas for further development. They are also used to promote consistency in practices across the service.
Using photographs and video recordings of a child is another way to capture observation evidence. Teachers can replay key moments in a child’s day and observe their interactions with others, play patterns and developmental milestones. They can also listen to children’s conversations to monitor language development.
To ensure that observations are meaningful and useful, they need to be documented in a timely manner. This means that a report should be completed as soon as possible, while the information is still fresh and the recall is at its optimum. Avoiding slang and psychological jargon maximises clarity when reporting on a child’s behaviour. For example, a note about “a ubiquitous olfactororial assault” is more meaningful than a vague statement such as “poor smell”. This is a great way to record the specifics of a child’s experience.
General Office Tasks
As an education support officer, you may assist teachers in the classroom or work with individual students as required. This can involve providing academic support to students with their learning, or helping children who struggle with social and emotional behaviours.
General office tasks may include proofreading, recording meetings and operating various office equipment like photocopiers and scanners, fax machines and voice mail systems. You may also perform administrative functions such as entering data into computer databases and spreadsheets, managing information files and preparing responses to inquiries.
The duties of an education support officer can be varied, but it’s a great career choice for people with strong customer service skills and a willingness to learn new things. The job is generally full-time, though many employees choose to do it on a part-time basis for flexibility and work-life balance. Those who excel in this career often have an interest in the Building, Persuading and Organizing Holland Code areas.