Nick Lovering: Changing culture to welcome Katherine kids to school

He bought shirts for the students and he listened hard. How Nick Lovering turned a troubled school around.

Nick Lovering is the principal of Katherine High School. Picture: Aaron Francis

When Nick Lovering was asked to find a new principal for the Katherine High School, the Northern Territory school administrator drew up a job description for this troubled school.

That’s when he realised he would be a good fit and volunteered to run the school for five weeks as a stop gap measure.

Almost two years on Mr Lovering has changed the school’s culture so much he has pulled his teenage children out of their Tasmanian boarding school and put them back into the high school. Indeed three of his children are enrolled, with his nine-year-old also slated to go there. That’s because Mr Lovering, who has spent 17 years teaching in the territory, is not going anywhere.

His passion for the school, where almost 70 per cent of the 580 students are Indigenous, was obvious as he spoke at the Outlook Conference lunch on Thursday.

“I’m prepared for my own kids to be there,” says Mr Lovering. “I suppose it was a message to the community. I have always believed in public education, and that education should be free. I think kids like mine and families like mine that are advantaged and privileged, we have a role to play in public schools.”

Katherine High is the only government high school in the town. Some 31 First Nations languages are spoken by its students.

“We cover an area that’s larger than the state of Victoria geographically, we have two boarding facilities so that young people can travel into Katherine and stay there to complete their school,” he says.

“When I arrived, things weren’t good. We’d lost 16 staff out of our total staffing of 46. (Now) we have a flourishing school. We have staff who are staying and in fact we have teachers from all over Australia wanting to work with us. We have a school that is focused on the possibilities, not problems.”

It hasn’t been about money or expensive learning programs but about behaviours and belief, he says.

“Strong leadership – that’s not being authoritarian, it’s authority of leadership,” he says. “But also courage to know what we needed, and what we didn’t need.

“Some of the behaviours of our students were not acceptable. That was partly their fault but probably the majority of the fault was due to adults in the school who allowed it to happen through a lack of leadership. So we asked our staff to raise their expectations of the young people.

Mr Lovering spent more than $5000 buying shirts with the school’s grevillea emblem and insisted everyone wear them: a simple action that helped build school cohesion, he says.