Principal's Report

There’s been a fair bit of chatter in the last couple of months, in the media and in education circles, about the academic success of students living in a metropolitan context compared to regional Victorian students.  Every bench marked data set that the government currently collects (and there are a lot of them) suggests that the gap between regional Victorian students and their Melbourne counterparts is widening on an annual basis.  Indeed, a working party was established by the Minster for Education’s office to visit regional stakeholder groups across Victoria to better understand the issues that we may be facing beyond Werribee, Eltham and Frankston.  We were fortunate to have this working party visit Warrnambool as part of their listening tour of the state.

I’m not yet privy to the overall findings and recommendations stemming from this working party - I’ll be interested to hear about any of the additional supports that might be made available to regional schools.  But I’m convinced that young people growing up in a context of paddocks, agriculture and open skies are no less capable than those that deal with traffic, endless visual advertising and compromised horizons on a daily basis.  Further, I’d argue that those in our care in regional Victoria receive no less of an education than those in Melbourne.  But, data doesn’t lie – the harsh reality is that all regions, from Geelong to Bendigo to Ballarat to Shepperton to Bairnsdale to Horsham to Warrnambool are struggling with academic results that do not mirror the majority of the population centred around Port Phillip Bay.  So, what’s going on?  And should we be concerned?  Indeed, am I doing my children a learning disservice by making the decision to live in this wonderful part of our state and choosing to send them to Warrnambool College?  My short answer is an emphatic no – what we have here is exactly the sort of learning environment that I want my children to grow up in.

One of the issues that we will continue to grapple with in determining success (or otherwise) in education is the narrow measures that we consistently use.  Traditionally, and contemporarily, these measures are generally easy to quantify and express as a number.  That’s why NAPLAN is expressed as a score in the hundreds (and will be arriving shortly for 2019 results!).  VCE subjects are scored out of 50.  An ATAR is a number somewhere between 0 and 99.95.  And so, it’s easy to rank individuals, schools, cultural groups, genders, classes, regions and even states against each other.

But how do you measure the joy expressed by the audiences at the Lighthouse Theatre last week as our talented students danced and sang their way through the Hairspray musical?  As I sat in the audience myself on Saturday night I was captivated by this incredible production and couldn’t quite fathom that every student on stage was from our school community.

How do you measure the confidence and care with which our presentation ball couples moved across the dance floor a few weeks ago?  By the number of smiles and the delight on the faces of friends and relatives as they saw their special someone whizz by?

How do you measure the commitment of our student leaders today who once again arranged and coordinated an extremely successful House day (Childers on this occasion) to raise funds for Daffodil Day?  The number of sausages sold?  The fact that we’ve now raised over $100,000 for house charities since the house system was introduced?

And how do you measure the impact that work placements and VCAL community projects have on the long term career prospects of those that have chosen an applied learning pathway?  I’m not entirely sure as there are many measures we could chose to focus on, but I do know that our collective focus on this in regional Victoria doesn’t hit the performance targets the Department uses to measure schools on.

How we measure ourselves and our relative successes is inherently a personal thing, but it’s a conversation that we need to continue to have within our education system and concentrated population in city centres.  Ultimately, I want to measure our success on the basis of whether we are living out our vision – that ‘Every Warrnambool Student Thrives’.  And I’ve seen countless examples of this in our school community over the past few weeks.

Kind Regards,

Dave Clift

Principal