Glendyne desperate for funding to keep one-on-one support

CARINITY Education - Glendyne desperately needs more funding to ensure it can continue to offer specialised one-on-one support to disengaged students.

CARINITY Education - Glendyne desperately needs more funding to ensure it can continue to offer specialised one-on-one support to disengaged students in the Hervey Bay area.

Carinity's executive manager - educational services Michael Harding said Glendyne provided a unique service for students who often had nowhere else to go and that funding to maintain education services at the school had become "critical".

"While Carinity Education - Glendyne is grateful for the assistance of the Federal and State Governments, more funding is needed to ensure that the divisions within our educational landscape do not continue to increase," he said.

Mr Harding said provisional federal funding figures for Queensland's independent schools in 2014 showed that schools that catered for some of the most disadvantaged students had received the lowest funding increases following the partial implementation of the Gonski model.

"Simply, young people with complex and often intense social, emotional and educational needs require funding for specialist help now," he said. 

"At Carinity we know that with this, we can make differences in the future of many children, often intervening in a journey towards long-term welfare dependency. 

"In short, money spent now will pay enormous dividends into the future."

Mr Harding said Glendyne, in Nikenbah, provided a second chance for young people who struggled in mainstream schooling by providing a practical education with individual learning support in a flexible learning environment.

He said the school's mentoring program allowed staff to build positive relationships with students in an informal 'family-like' environment offering both an out-of-school-hours recreational sport program and a holiday program, along with excursions and camps.

However, Mr Harding said, there had been a growing shortfall in funding to provide this type of specialised intervention and school costs continue to increase by about 4-5% a year.

He said as it was, Glendyne relied on significant fundraising efforts to make up the shortfall each year.

"Many graduates from our schools go on to make wonderful contributions within their communities, families and in the wider world of education and work - contributions that could not have been imagined during the lowest moments of their young lives," Mr Harding said.

That's why increased funding is so critical to ensure these young people still have somewhere to go."

Glendyne also delivers accredited training courses in hospitality, engineering, furniture making, IT and work education as part of the senior curriculum.

Principal Dale Hansen said businesses within the Hervey Bay community were supportive of their Vocational Education and Training courses but it cost money to ensure students remained on track during their work placements.

"Carinity Education - Glendyne carries out a lot of additional work to ensure that students thrive in their work placements, such as calling into the employer and students to touch base and discuss issues, and put plans in place for improvement," he said.

"We are one of the schools who stay in regular contact with employers but education funding doesn't pay for this additional work.

"Several employers have indicated that they will only use our students for work experience placements because we train them properly so that they're job ready and understand industry requirements.

"A number of our students have gained traineeships or casual employment after the completion of work experience in a variety of industry sectors, as they're learning practical skills which really transfer into jobs.

"But we need more funding to keep this high standard up."