Our Lady of Lourdes is a Gifted Education Lead School in the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle. We have targeted the identification and extension of gifted students in our School Improvement Plan and will be working in collaboration with St Aloysius Chisholm and St Bede’s Chisholm.
Part of the focus of this new approach is to provide a framework to ensure that our schools provide learning opportunities to meet the needs of all students, enabling them to reach their full potential. A key component of this framework is the Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT). CogAT is a group-administered K–12 assessment intended to estimate students’ learned reasoning and problem solving abilities through verbal, quantitative and nonverbal test items. The CogAT is used with other school data to assess student’s learning and to provide guidance around instruction decisions and strategies.
Our Lady of Lourdes has a Gifted Education Mentor (GEM) and a Gifted Education Committee to assist teachers with collating and analysing data, identifying the strengths and needs of students and providing appropriate strategies to meet their needs. We work closely with our cluster schools St Bede’s Catholic College, Chisholm and St Aloysius Primary School, Chisholm to collaborate and network to best cater for the gifted students across our cluster.
Gifted Education is an exciting new chapter for the lives of many students in our schools and we look forward to working with all the schools in the diocese during this exciting new era of learning.