Rebuilding Public Education – From The Ground Up

Regardless of our politics, there’s one thing everyone agrees on: the need to give every child the best education we can.

You can’t choose your parents, but everyone deserves the same start in life. How do we achieve this basic promise of Australian equality?

A much fairer funding split between public and private schools is essential. But, let’s face it, best not to hold our breath.

The current approaches to school improvement more centralised targets, more testing, more ranking, more culture wars - clearly aren’t working. So what will?

The answer lies in a school-by-school effort to make education more contemporary, creative and innovative. It will make education more interesting, relevant and engaging for students right across the socioeconomic spectrum. How do I know this will work? Because some great public schools are already doing it.

In 2006, Albert Park College had lost the confidence of local families. Built to house 1000 students, its enrolment had fallen to around 150, with only 15 year 7 students set to start in the following year. Some 94 per cent of locals had chosen to send their children to other public and private schools. The only chance it had was to close and reopen with new buildings and a more positive approach.

The college reopened in 2011, with a brand new, well-designed campus. Now, a dozen years later, academic results are strong, enrolment pressure is high, and we have become the school of choice for our community.

How we have achieved this is full of lessons for education systems across Australia. Five things stand out.

First, we reconnected with our community. Before the college reopened, we held multiple forums, well attended by local families, to ask them what exactly they wanted for their kids’ education.

They said they wanted a school that got their children into the university and TAFE courses of their choice. Interestingly, they also said they didn’t want the school to be just another exam factory, but a truly creative place.

The second thing we did, therefore, was build high academic expectations and creativity into everything we do. Dumbing down the curriculum to boost test scores disengages academically strong and weak students alike, preventing everyone’s talents being discovered.

Our college therefore puts a big emphasis on the creative arts, with major programs in music, dance, drama, sculpture and more. To give you a sense of how far we take this, every time we put on a play, musical or dance production, the students and teachers write, compose and choreograph it themselves. The effect on the school is electrifying.

The third thing is to be unashamedly innovative. Too much of what happens in schools belongs to the last century. No matter what we do, we always insist on doing it differently and with as much flair as possible.

We don’t have a school bell, we display both student and professional artworks everywhere, our teachers don’t sit in front of the class but move around and teach in teams, we have lots of artists in residence, and our campuses don’t look like schools.

For example, to cope with local enrolment demand we built a New York style art studio that takes up an entire floor of a nearby office block. Everyone who visits it tells us it’s the most amazing learning space they have ever seen. Even the top private schools can’t match this audacious innovation.

The fourth thing is to make our education future-oriented and exciting. There’s lots of fear of technology use in schools at present - we don’t share that fear.

Our students will graduate into a world where IT, biotech, creativity, working in teams, gender equality and environmental sustainability will be demanded by their employers, friends and partners - so we insist they become savvy in these new ways of working and thinking.

We encourage them to take responsibility for the planet - and don’t hold them back from speaking out. Our student leaders have addressed climate rallies and shared platforms with Greta Thunberg.

To achieve all this, there’s a fifth thing we have done: treat our teachers as the true professionals they are.

Commentators often blame teachers for everything wrong with our society. They don’t trust them - which is why schools are burdened with endless measurement and compliance paperwork.

We know this is nonsense, so we have organised our school to bring out the best in our teachers. We invest heavily in their professional growth, we give them the top technology, we surround them with appropriate support staff so they can concentrate on teaching, and we bring them together in teams to create our very own (best practice) school curriculum.

In such ways we have made our college the local school of choice, attracting parents back to public education, and ensuring every local child, regardless of family circumstance, gets the best secondary education money doesn’t need to buy.

Top down approaches to improving schools are not working. We need a new direction for public policy that focuses on improving schools at the local level. It works - Albert Park College and other great public schools prove it.

Let the new revolution begin.

Steve Cook is the foundation principal of Albert Park College. His new book, From the Ground Up: How a community with a vision and a principal with a purpose created a thriving state school, is published by Black Inc. See the book here https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/ground