Post-primary catch-up sees secondary school soar

Principal Digby Mercer believes he has a ‘moral obligation’ to ensure his students leave school with essential skills.

Principal Digby Mercer with Ry Dawson, 12, and Mebrahtom Gebreselassie, 13, at Como Secondary College in Perth. Picture: Colin Murty

Como Secondary College principal Digby Mercer believes he has a “moral obligation” to ensure his students leave school with the basic knowledge and skills needed to secure a job or go on to further study.

He also believes secondary schools are not doing enough to achieve this, which has been confirmed by the latest PISA results.

“My general view on PISA is it’s a valuable tool,” Mr Mercer said.

“We do need to know what’s going on so we can take action.”

The Perth school received its own wake-up call a few years ago when it began screening incoming Year 7 students to ascertain their levels of achievement and found that as many as 15 per cent were so far behind they lacked the basic literacy and numeracy skills needed to access the secondary curriculum.

To address this, Mr Mercer hired two specialist teachers to run intensive learning programs to help get students’ reading and maths up to speed.

Students are typically removed from their usual class for the lessons, in which they participate until their skills are lifted to the point they can learn alongside their peers.

“We’ve had some great success,” Mr Mercer said, referring to the school’s improved NAPLAN scores in recent times.

“What we find is that we can make a lot of progress with these kids in a small amount of time.

“I just couldn’t sit comfortably knowing that we had kids leaving school without being able to read, without at least having a crack at it. It’s a moral obligation.”

He said while there were lots of “outstanding things” being done in Australian schools, there were ­aspects holding the system back.

Teacher training needed to be improved, while schools were being asked to do too much within the curriculum, he said.

“We need to look at what we’re teaching teachers, and whether we are equipping them with skills and strategies they need to be effective,” Mr Mercer said.

“And the curriculum could be more explicit. It consists of fairly general statements and I think teachers need more guidance on what are the critical areas that we need to be teaching kids.”