Teachers from all over the State and beyond are attending the school, participating in a packed program of events.

The school is part of the Australian Government Summer Schools for Teachers program, which is running summer schools across the country, covering a range of subjects including literacy and numeracy, English, science and Australian history.

The teachers went through a rigorous application process in order to attend the schools.

There were more than 3000 applications to attend the summer schools, which had to be whittled down to 1000.

Demand was particularly high for the literacy and numeracy summer school.

The successful participants were selected through an assessment process which involved application review panels in each state.

The mathematics summer school includes two presentations each day by top ranking speakers from the UK, New Zealand and Australia, covering a range of topics, from the latest developments in neuroscience to discussions on assessment methods.

Professor John Geake, from Oxford University in the UK, spoke on Monday.

“It is actually about how the brain does and does not do mathematics,” Prof Geake said.

He said there had been tremendous developments in the understanding of the brain in the last 10 years, but understanding is still limited.

“There is now a whole international movement on the subject of educational neuroscience, but there are certainly some limitations,” he said.

“Progress on understanding how the brain functions hasn’t proceeded as quickly as people anticipated 15 years ago.

“The brain has turned out to be a lot more complex than people thought.

“What I provided in my speech was a summary of where we are up to in that understanding, in terms of what we know and what limitations there are.”

Prof Geake said the teachers have the ability to get a lot out of his address.