Chifley College Dunheved ‘exceeding’ expectations in lifting Indigenous students

Indigenous students at a western Sydney high school have achieved a fourfold increase in top-level reading scores after staff fostered stronger connections with families.

Chifley College Dunheved's principal Therese Azzopardi with students, from left, Paige Stacy, Levi Sainsbury, Mark Williams and Tehya Da Costa. Picture: Jane Dempster

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Sydney principal Therese Azzopardi puts the huge improvement in reading scores among her school’s large Indigenous population in part down to a “growing sense of shared responsibility for learning between our students and their families”.

The percentage of Year 9 Indigenous students from Chifley College Dunheved in North St Marys in the “strong” or “exceeding” bands for reading in NAPLAN rose from 11 per cent in 2023 to 44 per cent in 2024. Writing results at the school, which has 28 per cent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, increased from 30.7 to 37.3 per cent.

Ms Azzopardi said the school community was looking forward to the release of the 2025 NAPLAN results to see the growth continue. She said it took a “sustained, focus on reading” through personalised goal-setting programs in collaboration with parents, one-on-one reading lessons, explicit teaching efforts, and initiatives to “catch people reading” at school and reward them.

Chifley College Dunheved also has the “Personalised Learning Pathways” for its Indigenous students – a document for Indigenous students, their families and mentors to help them actively engage in education goal-setting and planning. But, Ms Azzopardi said, it became “closely linked to consistent school attendance and also a strong sense of belonging”.

“That for us is the key. If we don’t have our students here at the school, then we can’t work with our students,” she said.

This year’s NAPLAN tests showed an encouraging increase in the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teenagers performing at the top level in writing and numeracy at high school.

In Year 9 writing, 6.6 per cent of Indigenous students achieved “exceeding” compared with 4.3 per cent in 2023, while in Year 9 numeracy, the top group increased from 0.9 per cent to 1.5 per cent.

But across all year groups in reading and numeracy, about one in three Indigenous students are at the “needs additional support” level, while fewer than one in 10 non-Indigenous students fall into that group.

Ms Azzopardi, who has been at the college for 25 years, said it had seen a “real shift in how our Aboriginal students engage with their learning”.

“A lot of that comes down to the wellbeing programs that we run, but also, you know, the ability to make sure that our students feel safe,” she said. “We’re no different to any other school in the community. It’s staff commitment, it’s the belief that we can make those changes, and it’s having all staff along for the ride. And it’s also then the belief in our students, but it’s also very important to bring our families along with that as well.”