How the plan for CBC St Kilda and Presentation union may work
How does a Catholic all boys school cope with a sudden influx of female students? That’s the conundrum faced by CBC St Kilda after opening enrolments to female students from the soon-to-close Presentation College Windsor. Here’s how the proposed “parallel education” model will work.
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Catholic boys’ school Christian Brothers College St Kilda has officially opened enrolments for girls for 2021.
The single sex school emerged as a suitor for girls left without a school when Presentation College Windsor closes at the end of 2020.
Families applying for entrance for girls will have the $200 application fee waived for 2021 entry.
Edmund Rice Education Australia, which oversees the network of 50 Catholic schools around Australia, is working on the inclusion of girls at the 140-year-old CBC in St Kilda.
Parents are due to be briefed next week before EREA makes an official announcement about how the new school will look.
Both EREA and CBC St Kilda said they would not comment until families were briefed.
However, several parents of boys at the school said they believed there was “very positive reaction” to plans to integrate over the next few years.
One option the school is looking at is parallel education model where girls and boys will be taught separately at the same school.
The model, employed by schools such as Haileybury College and marketed as the “best of both worlds” sees genders split during core subjects with students sharing classes for electives and during VCE.
Presentation College will not close until the end of 2020 but it is unclear as to how many students will stay at the school next year. Many families attended the last open day of the year at Melbourne Girls’ College and, depending on where they live, may be eligible for entry.
Presentation’s sister school Star of the Sea also has offered spots for girls.
CBC has been consulting with families and ran a parent forum before the last school holidays.
But it is conscious, although the two schools have collaborated over manyyears, that it has marketed the school on the merits of boys’ only education and many families deliberately chose a boy’s only schooling.
In an expansive newsletter to parents in September, outgoing principal Gerald Bain-King acknowledged the complex issues.
“As principal of this school, I am very conscious that this decision may be difficult for some CBC families, given they have enrolled their sons in a single sex school which has strongly promoted the virtues of a boys’ education model for young men,” he said.
“For this reason, and after some deliberation, we have formed the view that it would not make sense for us to offer a traditional form of coeducation that adopts a neutral position regarding the influence of gender in relation to learning.
“Instead, we are considering a school model that is often termed a ‘parallel streaming’ approach. This usually entails separate learning in the junior school at least, where the boys and girls would have different classes for most or all of their subjects.”
CBC St Kilda is currently has an enrolment of approximately 550 students. It has a Year 9 campus in Balaclava.
CBC marketing is offering a “comprehensive and contemporary educational program for girls and boys for 2021 and beyond”.
Mr Bain-King said the approach had a number of variations and consultation with the community would shape the direction.
“As I have said during many presentations to parents; in adolescence, boys and girls develop at quite different rates and in different ways,” he said in the newsletter.
“Young men usually mature more slowly, this can be a two-year variation.
“As well as this, a boy’s capacity to contextualise information, and/or transfer information from one context to another, appears more slowly for boys; as does their capacity to think ahead, or if you like, predictively.
“In fact, this last capability is not anywhere near as developed as it is in young women through most of adolescence. For this reason, traditional coeducation can have an impact on the confidence of some boys because they develop a sense that they are ‘not as smart’ or suited to studies as are the girls and this can have flow on consequences in relation to engagement.“
Mr Bain-King said that boys often benefited by being taught in more structured, explicit ways.
“On top of this, young men can be more energetic and often need to have higher levels of active learning. By using a parallel model, we would be able to continue to utilise these approaches for boys in ‘their’ stream, while at the same time, developing strategies that work with the strengths of girls and mitigate areas where they have challenges,” he said.
“In the case of girls, a number of these may include a reluctance to take risks or speak outside of group norms. Some girls can be too passive and really need to be engaged and drawn-out by their teacher.
“Many girls respect authority to the point where they are reluctant to challenge ideas presented to them. And unfortunately, too many girls focus on pathways that are relational rather than conceptual or technical areas, such as the math, technology and science pathways.”
He said while things had improved, he believed many young women felt uncomfortable standing out.
“As CBC continues to think through these important distinctions and approaches, and so we can remain faithful to our mission to be transformational educators, we have to exercise care and diligence to make sure that everything is developed thoroughly and effectively,” he said.
Mr Bain-King described a range of governance issues that needed to be resolved between each school.
He said there were complex regulatory frameworks to be met.
Although the decision to close came as a shock, Presentation College Windsor is understood some time ago to have spoken to Kilvingon, which has gone co-ed in recent years, as it assessed its situation.
The closure surprised many with the school having a $1.7 million planning permit approved by the Stonnington City Council less than a year ago.
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Taxpayers tipped in $1 million for the redevelopment of the Dandenong Rd campus as part of a stage three round of State Government funding to support the non-government sector.
As recently as early June the school’s Lantern newsletter was calling on the school community to support the building works.
The school employed Y2K Architecture for the refurbishment of the Nagle Building.
Award-winning Y2K, based in Malvern, has designed major works for government and independent schools such as Assumption College and Melba College.
PARALLEL EDUCATION EXPLAINED
Haileybury was an early adopter of the parallel education model almost 20 years ago.
This approach recognises the unique and changing social, emotional and educational needs of boys and girls.
Boys and girls are separated into single-sex classrooms through significant developmental stages of their school life.
The ‘separated coeducation’ structure is designed to try to better tailor their learning with their personal maturity level.
While learning is in separate classes the boys and girls share the same campus, which allows them to socialise and enjoy co-curricular activities together.