A key responsibility of the NSW public education system is to ensure that all students in all public schools have equal access to quality teaching. This is especially important for students whose chances of success at school are jeopardized by family poverty, low levels of parental education, family mobility, and recent migration.

The Classmates project aims to prepare beginning teachers to work effectively in schools where many of the students come from backgrounds such as these. Classmates will operate in Priority Action Schools (PAS) schools and other schools that might not be so classified but share many of the same characteristics. An evaluation study of the Priority Action Schools program indicated the importance of professional development related to productive pedagogies and to explicit and systematic teaching. PAS schools that focused on these pedagogical strategies showed the greatest gains in student outcomes in literacy and numeracy (Groundwater-Smith & Kemmis, 2004). For the Classmates project this is an important finding: it indicates that the problems that make it so difficult for students in PAS schools to succeed academically can be countered if their teachers are appropriately prepared.

PAS schools are typically hard-to-staff. They are schools that receive disproportionate numbers of beginning teachers and experience high rates of teacher turnover. High turnover results, in part, from the operation of the transfer points system. However, recent research indicates that beginning and early career teachers will only remain in hard-to-staff schools if their initial preparation is better matched to the complexities of the contexts they enter, if they have sufficient knowledge and skills to help all students learn, and if expert teachers are available to serve as leaders and mentors (Glennie, Coble & Allen, 2004). A specific recommendation made in this US-based research study was that teacher education providers should improve beginning teacher preparation by providing well-supervised field experiences which demonstrates how effective teaching practices can be carried out in hard-to-staff schools. These experiences should be situated in such schools, not in University classrooms.

The NSW Public Education Council (PEC) Report (2005) identified 85 schools in NSW that received a disproportionate number of the beginning teachers who were appointed in 2004. Over half (47 out of 85) of these schools were in Western and South Western Sydney. In these schools, beginning teachers typically comprise between 10 and 20 percent of the teaching staff. Since this pattern is repeated year after year, the schools of Sydney's West and Southwest often have only a small minority of teachers who have more than five years of experience and very few who have remained in the same school consistently over a longer period of time. The Report notes that three percent of the schools of NSW are responsible for inducting about 30 percent of beginning teachers. Thus, the high schools of the West and South West play a key role in ‘making or breaking' beginning teachers.

A central feature of the Classmates project is the designation of schools that are hard to staff and that tend to receive large numbers of beginning teachers might as professional practice schools. This proposal is entirely consistent with the recommendations of the PEC Report. It is worth noting that the PEC report makes the following recommendations which are also consistent with the goals of Classmates.

• professional practice schools should become centres for nurturing new teachers, giving them the time and attention they need to develop their skills;
• professional practice schools should build on the successful strategies of the Teacher Mentor Program and would apply some of the successful features of the PAS program;
• professional practice schools should develop strong and focused partnerships with Universities or other outside experts.

Classmates will involve pre-service teachers (the UWS students) and supervising teachers in a process of systematic reflection on professional practice. Participation in this process will be voluntary and will be come under UWS ethics approval. Its goal will be to make the tacit processes that experienced teachers use on a daily basis more explicit. In the hurly-burly of life in classrooms and playgrounds much is done on the spur of the moment and much of this intuitive action is not codified. This is especially true in hard-to-staff schools, and as a result, beginning teachers have little access to the knowledge they need in order to become effective. Classmates proposes that the expertise developed through partnership between professional practice schools and the University will be published and made available more broadly to other schools within the public system.