When a new crop of year 7s starts at her school, Kambala’s head of English, Greta Beaumont-Kennedy, gives a speech to clear up any misconceptions about the subject.
“I speak to them about the importance of realising that we all do better when we all do better, and that your peers here in this classroom are not your competitors, they’re not your rivals, they’re your comrades,” she says.
Kambala head of English Greta Beaumont-Kennedy with HSC students Evangeline Chu, Sasha Van Onselen, Ansalee Desai, Gabriella Gamerov, Jessica Allen-Waters, Stephanie Harvey-Fros and Sophie Regan.Credit: Louise Kennerley
This year, English students at the eastern suburbs private girls’ school outperformed everyone else in the Higher School Certificate: 75 per cent of its entries in English advanced and extension received a mark of 90 per cent or above.
While Beaumont-Kennedy talks about the importance of the Kambala sisterhood, she says students must also discover what they’re individually passionate about.
“My expectations are that they find something that they love and something that makes them curious,” she said.
During the HSC year, English staff hold targeted small group feedback sessions, and in the holidays there are workshops and practice exam schedules, all of which are very well attended by students.
“And you don’t see that at a lot of schools,” Beaumont-Kennedy said.
Outgoing year 12 student Evangeline Chu, who lost her sight at age 16, said the study of English subjects at Kambala had allowed her to thrive even in difficult circumstances. Her classmate Gabriella Gamerov said classes were often combined and taught in a lecture style, so students could benefit from multiple teachers’ perspectives.
“The teachers’ ability to make literature from centuries ago feel relevant, whether through lively debates, niche insights or connecting texts to the broader world, instilled not just academic skills but also a sense of intellectual curiosity and confidence,” she said.
In the Blue Mountains, St Columba’s Catholic College in Springwood topped every other Catholic school in HSC league tables for English. The percentage of students achieving above 90 per cent in advanced and extension English has shot up to 46 per cent. This year, St Columba’s student Grace Costigan topped the state in English extension 2.
St Columba’s Catholic College English teachers Sarah McCauley, Tracy Mulhall and Jaden Ellis.
Principal Phillip Scollard has made changes across the board in the past two years, such as removing free study periods at the school so students spend more time in class.
Head of English Sarah McCauley said she and her staff pored over previous years’ results and identified areas of comparative weakness, such as their study of Romantic poet John Keats.
“In those early years of teaching Keats, we probably focused on things that perhaps we didn’t need to,” she said.
“We still want them to love the poetry, but we also had to get them to the place where they were focused on the things that they needed to, in order to write those really sophisticated responses.”
They backward mapped the skills required to score top marks. That meant building vocabulary and enhancing the clarity of students’ sentences. In class, students would submit work and their peers would evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of individual responses to ensure the writing was not simply just verbose.
“You have this problem with a lot of advanced classes; there’s a difference between being complex and convoluted and sometimes, they were confusing the two,” McCauley said.
You can do as much practice in class as you like, but assistant English head teacher Jaden Ellis said a genuine enthusiasm for the subject, which started with the teacher, was also fundamental.
“They saw our love and passion for it, and that was infectious, and they felt empowered to want to do well. We made them explicitly speak to what it was that they wanted to achieve. So setting goals, being honest and open about wanting to achieve at a high level and finding the joy in the lesson,” Ellis said.
The top-ranked comprehensive public school was Killarney Heights High, followed by Willoughby Girls and Balgowlah Boys.
Selective school Normanhurst Boys lifted its ranking in English this year. Its head of English Dean Stevenson said there had been a refreshed focus on students’ personal responses to the texts they had studied, which had made the subject more engaging.
“The big discriminator, or what has changed, is the ability of the boys to express their personal insight,” he said.
Interest had surged at the school and there has been a 300 per cent increase in students taking extension English.
“There might be a false narrative that boys aren’t good at English, and then there’s also a false narrative that selective school kids are good at math and science, and that’s it. So a lot of this year has been trying to redefine that narrative to instead [say], ‘boys can be good at English as well’,” Stevenson said.