Future Victoria: Middle school revamp plan to cut dropouts and lift grades
Secondary schools would get a shake-up to help students get through their difficult teenage years, amid fears many are buckling under pressure.
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Middle school students would revert to having just a few teachers in a bid to lift grades and curb dropouts.
The return to primary school-style teaching would have a core group of teachers — or even just one — charged with helping pupils navigate their troublesome teenage years.
It comes amid concern Victorian pupils are falling behind their international counterparts in the crucial years before VCE.
Jim Watterston, head of the University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education, said students in the middle years of secondary school should have no more than four core teachers, rather than one for every subject.
He said students were particularly vulnerable in years 7-9, and some slipped through the cracks as teachers focused on specialised disciplines and dealt with huge marking loads.
“Sometimes secondary teachers can assume another teacher is looking out for the student’s wellbeing … they think it is someone else’s job,” he said.
“But you can’t have quality teaching without quality care.”
Victorian year 9 students missed more public school days than any other grade in 2017 and, earlier this year, had significantly lower NAPLAN participation rates than younger years.
The results showed a drop in year 9 writing scores compared with 2011 and stagnation in reading, grammar and punctuation, spelling and numeracy over the past decade.
It has forced the state government to consider overhauling the annual test as well as linking the results to future job applications.
An advisory committee from government, Catholic and independent schools will also tackle secondary school engagement, particularly for year 9 students.
“Year 9 students have long been considered the hardest cohort to engage in education,” Education Minister James Merlino said.
But Dr Watterston warned it was too simplistic to class struggling year 9 students as “disengaged teens” and said there was a danger in “trying to fix students, rather than the way we run secondary schools”.
“The problem is much deeper than that … the issue is the quality of instruction in year 9,” he said.
“To be successful going forward, we can’t afford to waste time. To focus on the whole person, as well as the social and academic, is imperative in today’s society.”
Newhaven College, an independent school on Phillip Island, has a year 9 learning centre where five core homeroom teachers oversee just over 100 students.
They overseee pupils’ wellbeing and teach most subjects. Specialist teachers are brought in to cover some subjects.
Teacher Steve Scott said the initiative created a “far quicker and far stronger” connection that students could rely on during a time when some struggled at school.
“It is extremely important,” he said.
“It is probably the most important aspect because they feel as though they have someone — a trusted adult — they can go to with any problems.
“It also gives them a real opportunity to feel a sense of ownership in their own classroom.”
The college separates its year 9 students from the rest of the school and runs a series of programs designed to build resilience.
The teenagers crawl through a muddy commando course, compete in community games, head to Melbourne for a city placement and are sent on a week-long camp to Wollangarra in East Gippsland.
They also split the boys and girls for gender-specific seminars on “making men” and “rising women”.
As part of the boys’ course, they are unexpectedly dropped in the bush for 4-5 hours with no phone or friends.
“They are just cold, uncomfortable, bored and have to put up with it,” Mr Scott said.
“We wait until the sun is going down and then their dads collect them to debrief and discuss what strength of character it takes to sit out in the bush with nothing to do.”
A string of private schools also have separate campuses with specific programs for year 9 students, while exclusive colleges Geelong Grammar School and Lauriston offer alpine schools where students board.
Thousands of Victorian students go to the public Alpine School, with campuses at Dinner Plain, Snowy River and Gnurad-Gundidj, where the year nines focus on personal development and resilience.
But University of Melbourne learning intervention lecturer Dr Lisa McKay-Brown called for year nine-specific programs to be rolled out across public schools.
“There are some public schools that do have year nine programs but they are few and far between compared with what private and independent students can access,” she said.
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Dr McKay-Brown predicted schools of the future would become community hubs, where at-risk students could access wellbeing officers, speech pathologists and other allied health services.
“I see that a school that will be more of a community hub with the health resources so that kids don’t have to leave,” she said.
“That will take a big shift in the health and education systems in order to resource it sufficiently.
“Schools are getting really good at tapping in community groups and resources.”