What a difference a day makes!

Having left behind the grey autumn skies of Essex, we landed in Melbourne some 24 hours later to be greeted by blue skies and genuine warmth of welcome from everyone we met. Not only had the weather changed, so had the educational climate! Gone was the rigorous testing regime of the National Curriculum and in its place was a more relaxed approach to teaching and learning that was nonetheless very much geared to developing pupils' socialisation and thinking skills.

Our particular study visit consisted of a cross-phase group of fourteen teachers from our South Essex Networked Learning Community. Our group gelled almost instantly and, from the outset, all of us agreed we were very privileged to be able to take part in such a fantastic opportunity for professional development.

By visiting a number of schools we were able to gain an excellent insight into education in the State of Victoria and its impact on pupils from the ages of 5 to 18.

Classrooms tended to have fairly traditional seating arrangements dominated in the majority by an old fashioned blackboard.

However, class size tended to be lower than we would expect in the UK, in both primary and secondary schools. Most of the schools try to keep the pupil numbers down to around 23 to 24 per class. We all thought this helped contribute to the atmosphere of equanimity.

The fact that there is no formal assessment or reporting of these levels, in many ways, 'frees up' the learning experience with the result that students have a chance to be more creative in their studies without the pressure of 'exams' or the pressure for teachers of having to get through the 'need to know' content. On the other side of the coin, however, is the fact that the pace of teaching and learning is not generally as great as you would find in UK schools.

What struck us most of all was the ease and maturity pupils had in joining in conversations with us and the fact that there was little or no evidence of name calling or bullying.

The visit was an enormous success. Most importantly it gave us all time to reflect on our own practice. Our own National Curriculum, the emphasis on tests and accountability has definitely led to a raising of the standards of teaching and pupil performance. However, we could not help but feel that the pupils we met in Australia had better social skills, were more independent with their learning and did not require much support as pupils in our own schools. We were also very impressed by the way Victoria has managed to establish an acceptable, balanced curriculum for students post 14 with pathways to 18 that can include a mix of both the academic and the vocational.

As one of our group recorded, "The fact that the visit involved members of our Networked Learning Community rather than just our school was particularly useful because I felt, from talking to various members of the group, that I found out a lot not just about the schools in our Networked Learning Community. Another stated, "First and foremost this is the most eye opening Professional Development that I have experienced! On the other side of the world is a country that looks like us, sounds like us but is in so many ways different from our day-to-day experience in the classroom. I have already begun to feed back what I have learnt to my colleagues in school and have begun to pilot ideas in my classroom."

There were many innovative ideas being implemented in Australian schools. As an ICT classroom teacher, I naturally paid particular attention to the effective use if ICT.

A simple, but effective tool was in fact the layout of the classrooms. All observed using the U-Shape computer suite , which allowed the teacher to observe each pupil's work throughout the duration of the lesson.

The library was perceived and used as an additional tool to support E-learning. Indeed, library teachers took a proactive educational role, not only providing technical expert support, but also teaching pupils how to effectively search for material,either using ICT-based or non-ICT based sources. The library booking system was networked and allowed books and other resources to be booked using the Intranet. Online newspaper articles were available and links were regularly checked. New search engines were introduced to improve the efficiency or researching using the Intranet, Vivisimo.com and Filamentality.com, which categorised possible search results.

In fact, the Intranet system at two schools were developed and maintained mainly by librarians. All librarians were trained as teachers and were tasked to encourage pupils to develop thinking skills. This is particularly useful for research projects, so to discourage pupils simply copying and pasting huge chunks of data from an Intranet site, without any learning-taking place. Instead pupils were encouraged to constantly ask questions about their work. Teachers routinely asked pupils to include a bibliography and built this into the assessment criteria, to reduce plagiarism.

In sum, the study tour has opened many possibilities as to where I could use ICT more effectively in my teaching. The next step is to implement changes and examine new possibilities for the future.