Student success is the real prize for Redcliffe State High School team

The team at Redcliffe State High School is showing others around the world why it’s a High Reliability School. We find out what that means and why it’s making a difference.

Redcliffe State High School principal Shona McKinlay with Deputy Principal Years 9/10 Maria Williamson. The school is a High Reliability School. Picture: Dominika Lis

HARD work and a shared vision have made Redcliffe State High School a world leader when it comes to helping students achieve success in their chosen pathways.

It’s the first secondary school in the world to achieve certification in four of five performance levels, as part of the High Reliability School framework.

Principal Shona McKinlay and Deputy Principal Years 9/10 Maria Williamson say it’s more than just certification, with tangible student outcomes the real prize.

“We have evidence that our students are getting great (academic and NAPLAN) results,” Shona says.

She says the framework identifies five ways to ensure students learn the content and skills they need for success in senior schooling, careers, and beyond.

Teachers have been given more time to collaborate, and time has been allocated on Friday afternoons to work with students struggling to grasp concepts.

The children   work with proficiency scales, which offer a different way to gauge their success. Students also set their own targets at the beginning of each semester and they review them.

“They can see what they need to improve. There’s no mystery in what they have to know and do to get a certain result,” Shona says.

The school earned its certification in March 2019 and has hosted about 20 schools, keen to see first-hand how students and teachers are working together.

“We’ve just told them what we’ve done. We don’t try to tell them what to do. We just share that information. It’s up to them what they take out of it,” Shona says.

Maria says they have also stressed that it’s taken four years to achieve these results and some things they’ve tried haven’t worked.

“Schools need to think out of the box,” she says.

The hard work is not over, with three priorities now in sharp focus – vocabulary, student wellbeing and encouraging students to take responsibility for their own learning and behaviour, and competency-based work where students are able to work at their own pace.

“I think the way students learn has changed and in the future they’ll need to be more independent learners,” Maria says. “We want every student to leave here being a citizen that will contribute to the community.”

Shona agrees: “We have a responsibility to not let kids just get through school and not learn. We think we can do better”.

HIGH RELIABILITY SCHOOL

● Based on 40 years of research, defining five levels of performance a school must master

● These include professional learning communities, teaching framework, teacher evaluation and development, sound curriculum, vocabulary instruction, instruction in critical thinking and reasoning skills, formative assessment and standards-based grading