By Nicole Precel
Drinking in the peace on the banks of East Gippsland’s Mitchell River, you’d have no idea what once was “Australia’s worst school” is mere minutes away.
That’s because six years after Bairnsdale Secondary College’s low point was aired on national television, the school is now seen as an entirely different place, almost doubling the number of year 12 students accepted into university and apprenticeships since.
Speaking with host Samantha Selinger-Morris on The Morning Edition podcast, Age education reporter Nicole Precel tells how two determined principals dramatically turned around the culture of a school where educators were traumatised, pushed down the stairs, and where poor academic results and plummeting mental health, had become the norm.
To listen, click the player below, or read on for an edited extract.
Selinger-Morris: [In 2019], it’s fair to say that this community and this school, it had a really sort of low public point because it was described on national television as “Australia’s worst school”. So, can you tell us what led to this naming and by what metric was this deemed “Australia’s worst school”?
Precel: That was quite a low point for the school. There were a few things that led to that A Current Affair piece [that] went to air ... there were quite a few teachers who had been assaulted, some who had said that they unfortunately had post-traumatic stress disorder from some of the things that happened at the school while they were teaching.
So, there was a teacher who said that they were shoulder-charged and pushed and ended up with a disability because of that. And I think there’s probably more that we don’t know about, but they obviously had huge impacts on teachers who felt unsafe. The school chaplain said that a number of teachers said they were suicidal from some of the interactions that they had at the school. So on that level, the staffing level was a real challenge. On top of that, there were quite a few behavioural issues. It was no secret that the school wasn’t performing very well in their ATAR or NAPLAN results. So kind of a perfect storm, really.
Selinger-Morris: And then there’s a dramatic turn, though, in the life of this school and I guess the community because the school turned a corner, and it has become a radically different place, at least according to one teacher. What actually sparked this turnaround?
Precel: It was a few things ... there was a change in leadership. Obviously at the school they had an interim principal in there for a year after that, Trudie Nagle came in, and she became the principal until only recently when [former Education Department senior education improvement leader] Tony Roberts took over.
But Trudie really saw that there was a need for some significant change ... So one of the things can happen is that when there are big issues, cultural issues … what can happen is schools close shop, and they don’t let people come in. They don’t want people to kind of know what their dirty laundry is. And sometimes that can create distrust.
I understand why it’s the case in some … sometimes it’s important to do that. But, you know, especially in a regional community where everyone’s talking anyway … So Trudie actually set up a few community forums, and she invited the school community to come and talk about the issues so that they could look at ways to change it. They brought in a different way for teachers to engage with students. It was … really trying to engage them in a different kind of level rather than being more punitive. It was developing a respect between teachers and students, and some of the students that I spoke to at the school said that had actually had a huge, huge impact on them. There was one student who was so lovely. He was in the leadership team in year 12, and he said that he had had a whole host of issues during his schooling life, and he decided now that he wants to become a teacher because one of the teachers at the school made such an impact on him that he wanted to be one of those teachers. He wanted to be one of the positive teachers that he experienced.
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