Celebrating 90 years

A 90th birthday

The Launch Assembly 1926 – 2016  – Monday 21 March 2016  11:30am

Featuring past/present students and staff, school council presidents, representatives from neighbourhood schools, and Darebin Council and DET.

Open Day Exhibition - beginning Wednesday 27 April 2016

Featuring school photos and memorabilia plus David Wadelton’s photos of Northcote through the Decades

Back To Soiree - Friday 09 September 2016

This will be an early afternoon/evening gathering featuring opportunities to review photos and memorabilia and catch-up with students and staff form your time at the school.

Seeking photos and memorabilia and linking with past students and staff – please contact Kate Challis  9488 2332 

Which 3 staff (above) look familiar?

Yes... some teachers arrived 34 years ago! In the photo above its Mr Price (upper right), Mr N.Murphy (upper left) and Ms Corkery (middle row, sixth from the right). Only Mr Price and Ms Corkery have worked at NHS continuously however.

The photo also shows former Principal Mr Bob Nelson (centre front row), former Principal (and then Assistant Principal) Mr Gary Israel to his right, former Assistant Principal Ms Rani Reid (front row, left) and many other long serving staff members.

Where have we come from?

In the early 1920s there were just five Melbourne metropolitan high schools providing less than 2,000 places combined. Local Member of Parliament and future Premier John Cain Senior led the agitation for a local high school in Northcote and Lt Colonel J. Sidney Kitson became the first headmaster of the new school, with 71 boys and 61 girls enrolled in the first year.

After two years of coeducation, the Education Department required all NHS girls to leave and attend the newly established Preston Girls High School. No choice was given to stay! Educational thinking at the time was that single sex schooling was preferable, although there was no educational research to support this thinking - it seems to have reflected the cultural bias of the time. For the next 60 years, Northcote High School operated as a boys only school.  The curriculum offerings and facilities expanded as the school reached a maximum of about 700 boys in the early 1980s. During this time NHS’s reputation blossomed as a provider of international education, as the school to beat in interschool sports and as a school with a strong academic tradition.

By the 1980s staff were aware of overwhelming international research that advocated coeduation as the preferred  context in which to educate children. At the same time, several families insisted their daughters attend the school with their brothers to access the wider range of senior level subjects. The school found itself in the absurd situation of playing interschool senior boy's soccer, but with girls in its (boy's) team. In 1988 the school made an easy decision to again offer places to girls. There are now 800 girls in the school, constituting almost 48% of the student population. In 2016, girls outnumber boys in Years 7 and 12. A dramatic change in less than 30 years.