Inside Findon Technical College, where students are taught the skills they need to thrive in the workplace

Findon Technical College is a school like no other. Its 328 students are preparing for life in the workforce – and we spent a day learning alongside them.

I am back at school and holding a baby. This isn’t just any school, though. Findon Technical College feels more like a workplace.

Students clock in when they arrive in the morning and clock out at the end of the day, there are no school bells to tell them when class ends and there is not a maths or physics textbook in sight.

The teenagers enrolled at the college tell me they’re learning how to act in their future workplaces and they are all the more engaged in their schooling for it.

To experience it first-hand, I regress to my teenage years and spend a day in the lives of the students on the campus.

Findon Tech is the first of five planned technical colleges to be built in the state, designed to address critical skills shortages in multiple industries, at a cost of about $209m total.

Findon Technical College early childhood educational care student Poppy Vojnovic shows Advertiser journalist Shashi Baltutis how to keep a baby happy. Picture: Brett Hartwig

The school, operating since the start of 2024, has three distinct streams of learning – advanced manufacturing and engineering, health and social support and early childhood and education. It has 128 full-time and 200 part time students.

“We’re still a school for students but we’re really a workplace,” technical college lead Luke Northcote tells me.

“You don’t come and have English in the morning and then maths and then drama and then science, humanities, you come and you’re an engineer.”

The teens absorb traditional school subject knowledge, to South Australian Certificate of Education standard, through projects related to their chosen pathway.

Students also meet with mentors regularly, who guide them on how to act and present themselves when they begin their placements through the school and when they enter the workforce after they graduate.

Poppy Vojnovic says students at Findon Tech are given professional mentoring, not just lessons. Picture: Brett Hartwig

Early childhood education and care year 12 student, Poppy Vojnovic, says her mentor has helped her with “writing emails professionally”.

Others are advised on the value of promptness, work readiness and being presentable.

“With people skills, we have conversations like we’re colleagues, as if we’re in the workplace,” Poppy, 17, says.

She is already working and earning money through a partnership between Goodstart Early Learning and Findon Tech.

Her classroom is modelled after a preschool with colourful displays and tables and chairs at child height.

The teen admits at her previous, conventional school she would routinely show up to campus hours late.

But at Findon Tech, she has a near flawless attendance record.

“I’d arrive late, like really late, like hours late from the start time but now I’m here on time every day,” Poppy says.

“I couldn’t see the end goal of all these subjects and all of these assignments.”

Student outcomes present a compelling case for the technical college model.

By the end of 2024, more than 70 per cent of full time year 11 students had an apprenticeship or traineeship before they started their final year at Findon Tech.

About a third of those students were taking advantage of a fast-track through university in which they started their first year of their degree in year 12.

Year 11 student Riley Humphrys Picture: Brett Hartwig

The advanced manufacturing workshop is like a worksite, with students on the tools and music blasting through a speaker as they work.

Here, sparks were flying as the students were busy welding metal pipes and buckets, parts of a digger for a sandpit, the plans for which they had proudly shown me moments earlier through an industry standard computer-aided design (CAD) program.

They’re supervised by staff with combined decades of experience in manufacturing, including one instructor who lost his job when the Holden factory in Elizabeth closed less than a decade ago.

“You learn how to treat them as a workmate rather than just a teacher,” student Riley Humphrys, 16, says.

The year 11 recently completed a three-day work placement with the school’s industry partner, defence company BAE Systems Australia, and has a metal fabrication apprenticeship with Australia’s submarine builder ASC.

“I feel like being apart of the tech college guarantees the career I want as long as I push myself,” he says.

Parneet Kaur is instructed by industry program trainer Rebecca Thring to lift journalist Shashi Baltutis using an aged care hoist. Picture: Brett Hartwig

In the allied health and social support area of the college, I’m treated to a demonstration of how a student is taught to use a machine to lift an elderly resident off a bed and into a wheelchair.

I play the part of the elderly resident.

With great patience, industry program trainer Rebecca Thring assists year 10 student Parneet Kaur to strap me in and lift me up, asking me if I’m comfortable along the way.

“I love how it’s very hands on and I don’t have to do subjects I’m not interested in,” 15-year-old Parneet says.