Wimmera Cluster working Together
Building Bridges for Students
Balmoral, Goroke and Edenhope Foundation to Year 12 College staff came together on Monday the 12th of July for a combined professional development day, focused on improving student outcomes within the West Wimmera. The basic idea was to look at ways to improve the use of our school resources and turn that into improved outcomes for our students.
There was a lot of excitement as staff mingled and were able to share knowledge of programs they run at their schools. The basis for that excitement was the fact that in small rural schools you may be the only person in your area of expertise. Being a teacher, education support staff member, administrator or wellbeing officer, now having others around to learn from and collaborate with, is really empowering.
Phil Brown and Matt Copping from Country Education Partnerships (CEP) helped facilitate the day, which started off with former Goroke student, Phoebe Allen, speaking with the combined staff about her experience of growing up in a rural community and attending Goroke P12 College. Phoebe now works in a large computer software company out of Ballarat looking after a large portfolio including staffing and other HR related activities. Having Phoebe talk was a great way to kick off the day with a focus of what can be achieved from a country educational setting.
As the day progressed it was evident that there was a lot of passion within the room that was focused on ways of improving curriculum delivery. Also, how we can better engage students within the classroom, build social skills and simply give students more ‘life experiences’ by pooling our resources. An example of this could be that the three schools could hire an expert teacher in curriculum areas such as wood, automotive, LOTE or music and share the cost between the three schools. Due to smaller numbers in our schools, currently we can only advertise for a part-time teaching load; by joining forces and timetabling teachers on full-time loads between the schools, we are more likely to attract staff and inevitably, offer a broader range of subjects on-site, face to face with our students.
Other areas discussed on the day: staff collaborating in ‘like’ fields in terms of planning, sharing resources and curriculum knowledge, avoiding working in silos (solo). This potentially has a lot of positive spin-offs for the learning environments within our communities.
While lots of positives came out of the day, we are still in the ideas phase. How do we take things forward from here? We can definitely look at ways to attract staff to the area between the schools. We have a Year 11 & 12 Formal already organised amongst the three schools (postponed due to the recent lockdown). Joint school camps for particular year levels are also on the agenda. This is a great way to lock-in experiences for the students through the different levels. Snow trips, Canberra trips, Melbourne Metro experiences, joint Year 7 activities camp (to help with senior school transition), Year 11/12 trips looking at universities and building study skills. This one may be a dream, but walking the Kokoda Trail (has been done by one of our schools in the Duke of Edinburgh program). Doesn’t hurt to dream!
We left the day with lots of positive connections in place and staff are keen to follow through on their ideas. Moving forward, the plan is to catch up again early in Term 4, however, there is already plenty of interaction and ideas being shared between the schools since the initial catch up. We all want the same thing: to improve opportunities and outcomes for our rural students and build their social skills and life experiences along the way.
* Country Education Partnerships (CEP), are a not-for-profit organisation, working to support the provision of high quality education within rural and remote communities across Australia.
Trevor McClure
For further details please see a fantastic article in the Country Education Partnerships Bush Voices which explains the collaborative approach the three schools are creating in order to improve the opportunities and outcomes available to our students. https://cep.org.au/wimmera-cluster-explores-creative-local-solutions/
The collaborative work of the Wimmera cluster has also featured in The Age, click here to read the article
Rural Youth Ambassadors Camp
The Rural Youth Ambassadors Camp in Halls Gap was about what us as students, could do for our schools. We both had such a great experience being the two youngest students there, we still got to share our views on being in a small school. We were taken out of our comfort zones straight away and mixed in with the other kids sharing our ideas about what makes our school good and what isn't so spectacular about them. Everyone there had very similar issues to do with things like Mental Health, Career Opportunities, Excursions and a lot more!
We came to the conclusion of three topics that we wanted to come up with an idea for that could come into effect in the next six months. We split off into the three groups of our favourite topic and we had to create an idea that could target it. Two out of the three groups had a very similar idea to target the mental health stigma and help students into the future. Sadly, we finished on that though. As we were wrapping up day one the news of lockdown cancelled our plans for day two! We met so many amazing people in our time there and everyone was super friendly too! The continuation of our idea and other meetups hopefully will be put on in the future.
We say thanks to Matt, Joe and Phil for having us and giving us such an amazing experience! Also thanks to Mr McClure for taking us up to Halls Gap (and the cheeky Maccas trip too!!), We really appreciate the opportunity to change our school for the better! We look forward to working on this project for the long run!
Emma & Mollie