Craigieburn principal Colin Burke shares vision for new school
As construction nears completion on Craigieburn’s newest secondary college, inaugural principal Colin Burke has shared his vision for the school. Find out how he plans drive aspiration and create opportunities for students.
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Craigieburn’s newest school principal has declared his vision is to drive aspiration and create opportunities.
Elevation Secondary College – about 2km west of Craigieburn Central – is one of 10 new schools across Victoria set to open for term one next year.
Classrooms and specialist buildings at the Elevation Blvd site are about 90 per cent finished, with the administration building about 50 per cent completed.
The college’s first principal Colin Burke said he had been amazed at the interest the school had gathered in the community.
But he said the student’s first day would be “like Christmas” with construction likely to run until January, meaning even staff won’t get a look inside until they start lessons.
Mr Burke said he had recently appointed an assistant principal and a business manager and was beginning to hire teachers.
“Once you’ve got students, which we’ve got, and teachers, it starts to become a little bit more real,” the 39-year-old said.
“We had a meet the principal event at the Craigieburn Global Learning Centre last month and we had more than 400 people turn up, which is just amazing – that really displayed to me the need for the school within the community.
“The absolute vast majority of our enrolments for next year live really close to the school.”
He said they would have about 140 Year 7 students, which was seven classes worth, 12 teachers and five or six support staff starting at the school next year.
Mr Burke – who was also among the first cohort of students at Mill Park Secondary College in the early 1990s – said he was excited for the new challenge.
He said he would take a very traditional academic approach to student learning to help foster aspiration and create opportunities.
“Traditional academic subjects – maths, English, science – we’ll be looking at hiring specialist teachers that have depth of content knowledge within individual subject areas,” Mr Burke said.
“We’ve already established a few partnerships with universities and corporate organisations to make sure that students from Year 7 are getting opportunities that maybe they wouldn’t get in another school.
“The opportunity to be mentored by someone who works for a major corporation or to get onto a university campus a couple of times a year to see what it’s like at the tertiary level.
“That’s what we’re about – matching the really high aspirations of the community and providing as many high quality educational opportunities for students as we can.”
The Bundoora father-of-one, who is married to a primary school teacher, has been a campus principal at Mill Park Secondary College for the past five years.
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He said they had chosen Chinese as the school’s language and would try to be as much of a community school as they could.
Yuroke state Labor MP Ros Spence said Mr Burke was “passionate about ensuring young people (got) a great education and a good start in life”.
“You can really see this new school coming to life – I encourage local residents to take a drive up to Elevation Blvd and check out the progress,” she said.