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Numeracy

Foundational skills

The 3 foundational skills of Digital Literacy, Literacy and Numeracy describe observable skills and are fundamental to learning across the curriculum. Their development is crucial for students to build an understanding of the key knowledge and skills across all the learning areas and capabilities. They are utilised across the entire curriculum and are critical to enabling learning for all students during their school years and beyond.

The foundational skills are not described as curriculums themselves. Literacy and Numeracy are presented as progressions, and the skills in Digital Literacy are presented as a continuum. The foundational skills are provided as reference points for schools to use for curriculum planning and in their teaching practice. Future releases of the website will include resources to help teachers and school leaders use the foundational skills when planning teaching and learning for whole classrooms and for individual students.

Numeracy

Numeracy comprises knowledge and skills developed through learning in the discipline of mathematics, in conjunction with behaviours and dispositions that students judiciously draw on to use mathematics effectively in a wide range of academic and social situations. It involves recognising and understanding the role of mathematics in the world and having the dispositions and capacities to use mathematical knowledge and skills purposefully. Number, measurement and geometry, and statistics and probability are common aspects of most people's mathematical experience in everyday personal, study and work situations. Equally important are the essential roles that algebra, functions and relations, logic, mathematical structure and working mathematically play in people's understanding of the natural and human worlds, and the interaction between them.

Numeracy is fundamental to a student's ability to learn at school and to engage productively in society. In the Victorian Curriculum F–10, students become numerate as they develop the knowledge and skills to use mathematics confidently across learning areas at school and in their lives more broadly.

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