Class Act

Maxine McKew

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780522866575
• eBook ISBN: 9780522866582
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Maxine McKew makes the case for a considered examination of the transformation that's now underway in some of Australia's most challenged schools. Through a series of conversations and case studies Class Act documents the precise strategies that are helping to change the culture of individual schools and to lift academic performance. Class Act invites reflection on one of our most pressing national dilemmas—how we replicate success across a fragmented educational system and reverse the decline in student performance.

PART I

Schools

1

OUR LADY OF MOUNT CARMEL

Beyond Fight or Flight

You don’t have to go to remote Australia, to regional towns or even to the outer suburbs to see evidence of the extreme social and racial segregation that is now a fixed feature of our schooling system. Schools that cater almost exclusively for students from troubled families and Indigenous communities, and for those with disabilities, are to be found right in the heart of our prosperous cities. Former top education bureaucrat Dr Ken Boston, who laboured long and honourably as one of the co-panellists of the Gonski review of schools funding, calls these schools ‘the emergency wards of Australian education’.¹ It’s a distinction that should shame us.

OLMC, a Catholic primary school with an enrolment of 127, is in Waterloo, a ten-minute taxi ride from the corporate towers of Sydney’s CBD. An attractive refurbished former convent, OLMC sits on a hill, and in the spring the blooming jacarandas, along with some mature Moreton Bay figs in the adjacent park, help give the site the feel of a cool and shady arcadia. But there are two very distinct worlds in Waterloo and in neighbouring Redfern, the site of Paul Keating’s historic 1992 speech acknowledging Indigenous dispossession by Europeans.

In the streets to the north and east of the school, Saturday auctioneers busily record million-dollar-plus prices for modestly made-over terraces or tiny off-the-plan apartments. But the young mortgage-stressed professionals who take up residence here will by-pass OLMC when it comes to the choice of schooling for their children. Most will live their lives without any contact with the many Indigenous families who inhabit the ageing housing-commission complexes that dominate the southern side of Waterloo.

It’s the children from ‘the flats’ who attend the little Catholic school on the hill. Many do so as a result of bursaries or scholarships, so that over the years OLMC has become known as ‘the Aboriginal school’, with 70 per cent of the students identifying as Indigenous. Five years ago, before John Farrell became principal, it was also known as one of the toughest schools around. Teachers were so demoralised and beaten down that it showed in how they dressed and how they spoke. Student behaviour was out of control; most children operated on the principle of ‘fight or flight’. But Farrell’s arrival signalled that things were going to be different. He brought to the school a strong sense of moral purpose, though he recalls an early encounter when he felt ‘completely powerless’ against the violence of one young female student. She threw him a bullseye challenge, saying, ‘What would you know? You’re just another blow-in’.

Many of OLMC’s students were like this—in possession of an honours-grade capacity to pick the emotional weak points in their teachers. No behavioural boundaries had been set for them, and there was no-one in their lives who cared enough to try.

Ending the Violence

It’s taken five years, but with the help of a no-nonsense deputy in Carol Carey, Farrell has turned OLMC into a very different place. When we walk around the playground at lunchtime and are greeted pleasantly by all and sundry, it feels like a happy school. Everyone looks purposeful. Dressed in smart uniforms, students are well turned out. Attendance is now exceptionally high. The results in National Assessment Programme for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) testing, though patchy, are more than respectable compared with similar schools. The transition to high school is a smoother process, particularly for the boys, somewhat less so for the girls.

This means that OLMC is now a functional institution, where learning is prized. But success? What will that look like?

Farrell smiles beneath a broad-brimmed hat, the better to protect a freckled Irish complexion, and says in answer to the question: ‘To have lots of fantastic applicants vying for my job when I leave’.

Motivated in part by his family—both his father and sister have a history of sustained involvement in Indigenous education—and inspired as well by the writings of educator Chris Sarra,² Farrell demonstrates deep care and respect for every child in the school. As he says, ‘These children deserve the best, and as a society we will go backwards if we just accept the ever-widening chasm in education’.

When Farrell took on the job as principal, his number-one priority was to put an end to the violence in the school, to make it clear that certain actions would trigger consequences: ‘We set some hard and fast rules. That learning time is sacred, and that if a child acts up and runs out of a class, then they will miss an important occasion, like a sports carnival. It was a big shift. Equally, we have a policy of never yelling or shouting at the children because that is what they get at home. What we try to do is help these children face their problems and not run away from them. Our attitude is, “We’re going to help you make the right decisions”. Sometimes that just means sitting for long periods with a child, and what we are doing is building up trust. They know we will stand by them. As a result, there is now an air of calm in classes and students like and respect that’.

Farrell and his team have also employed many of the approaches that academic and writer Dr Brian Caldwell outlines in The Self-Transforming School: a high level of professionalism informed by research; a steady supply of expert practitioners; professional development both on-site and with other schools; and the fostering of partnerships—in OLMC’s case, with two outstanding philanthropic arts organisations: the Australian Children’s Music Foundation and The Story Factory.³

Leading by Example

Central to the turnaround has been Farrell’s leadership and the clear-eyed assessment he made of the challenges he faced. He calls his approach one of ‘compassionate empowerment’. He is deeply sensitive to the plight and history of Indigenous Australians and thinks that university education faculties are failing student teachers by not properly training them in Indigenous studies. But, at the same time, he is dismissive of those educators who are prepared to excuse either failure or aberrant behaviour because of so-called concerns about ‘cultural sensitivity’.

After hearing too many children talk in a matter-of-fact way about the beatings, alcoholism, suicides, drug overdoses and incarcerations of their relatives, Farrell took aside the school’s Indigenous advisor and said, ‘I am going to have a good talk to the Year 5s and 6s about all this to say that this just isn’t normal. This isn’t the way things are supposed to be’.

In this way, Farrell has been attempting to reclaim for his students some fundamental rights and expectations—primarily the right to feel safe, and to receive regular nourishment and a proper level of parental care. That’s the goal. But each day throws up tough realities. Many of OLMC’s students are bringing themselves up, or parenting younger siblings, and that they get themselves to school at all is a major achievement. Farrell recently had to check on a young boy who he’d learnt had come across a young mum attempting to hang herself. The boy held the woman until a neighbour was called to cut her down. When Farrell and his deputy went to offer help and support, the young boy thought he was in strife for missing school.

‘That tells you a lot about the lives of these children and how desensitised they can be to some of the things going on around them’, says Farrell. ‘I did the statistics the other day and around 60 per cent of our students have a family member who is incarcerated. So our job here is to show them there is another way, and another kind of life they can aspire to. That means getting over their fears about the world beyond Waterloo. The horizons here are so small. Even a trip to nearby Queen’s Park for the cross-country trials can really stretch their confidence. I had a little fellow who was clinging to me and was reluctant to go over and register for the event by himself. He asked me to go with him and I said, “Of course Davo”. So you see how Waterloo-centric their lives are. It’s a trap in so many ways.’

Developing Language Skills

Having created an orderly school by establishing boundaries and setting enforceable rules, Farrell and his team then focused on the single biggest learning deficit—the limited oral language development of the students. And here the problem is stark. Most of the children have no conception of standard Australian English. They don’t hear it, and they don’t speak it. A typical modus operandi for a six-year-old in kinder class is to use gestures or single words in order to be understood. Vocabularies are exceptionally limited. In the most extreme cases, the facial muscles that help children form their words, the ability to use the tongue against the roof of the mouth to make a ‘t’ sound or to bring the lips together to produce a ‘p’, are underdeveloped. The kind of expressive conversation between parent and child whereby a series of questions and responses extends learning and helps a child make connections has been missing from their early development. Even with older children at the school, regular features of spoken English—the use of articles, pronouns and auxiliary verbs—are absent from their oral expression.

No wonder, then, that these children fear the world beyond Waterloo, or even the more demanding world of high school. Lacking the basic hardware of the language, the critical tool that enables self-expression, must be deeply intimidating. Further to that, if the attitude of teachers is that this is an area too sensitive to touch because it interferes with the norms of Aboriginal English, or if teachers have not developed the explicit practices that can help them explain how the English language works, then we risk locking out a generation of young people from the rich set of choices they have a right to expect in prosperous Australia.

University of Canberra academic Misty Adoniou (interviewed in Chapter 7) brings a lot of sense to this issue. Writing in October 2013 for the website The Conversation, Adoniou takes aim at those who think that a phonics-only approach will magically address our national underperformance in reading tests:

Australia’s scores in international literacy tests aren’t dropping because the students who sit those tests don’t know their sounds. They are performing poorly because they cannot comprehend what they are reading. They have poor vocabularies and cannot follow sentences that employ more complex language structures. They cannot read between the lines. Our low-achieving students … share one, very telling, common characteristic. They don’t speak ‘school English’ or Standard Australian English, at home. They may speak a language other than English, Aboriginal English, or a creole, or ‘bogan’ English … But it’s not school English; it isn’t how the teacher speaks and it certainly isn’t what international tests or NAPLAN reward.⁴

Adoniou goes on to make the point that it is the school’s job to teach standard English so that everyone can participate in the learning that is meant to take place at school, but she notes that many teachers struggle to help the underperformers because of their own limited training in the fundamentals of linguistics—phonetics, semantics, morphology and syntax.

Typically teachers come from middle-class families with homes that were simply an extension of school. Mum and dad spoke like their teachers, read the same books as their teachers, and had similar life experiences and expectations … They have a good grip on Standard Australian English which comes naturally to them. But they don’t know how it works, and they usually cannot make their intuitive knowledge explicit to those who don’t have it.⁵

OLMC’s teachers are working hard to crack the code on this one. There’s a relentless focus on reading and exposure to rich language. Under Farrell’s guidance, Carol Carey leads a team of teachers who are constantly working to extend the verbal range of students, many of whom struggle to pick up on their own mistakes when they read aloud.

As Carey says, ‘Many don’t hear plurals, pronouns, tenses. So they are saying to me, “You read it, Miss”, and they can then hear what’s wrong with a sentence’.

A composite Year 5 and 6 writing class run by Carey has students working at very different levels. Her daily battle is to get students to be coherent in putting down their thoughts and to stay on task. As she moves between groups tackling an exercise on their laptops, Carey explains her approach: ‘So many of them are convoluted in their writing. My approach is to get them to stay in the same tense. To have a subject and a verb in a sentence. To be clear. New idea, new paragraph. All those basics. Are they capable? Of course they are, and with some we’ve seen huge development since the start of the year. But when you are dealing with these children you have to recognise that English is for them a second language, and that’s a huge deficit we have to make up’.

After five years of solid work, OLMC is now seeing the impact of its approach. NAPLAN results show that student competency in Years 3 and 5 is above that of statistically similar schools. In one tested area, that of persuasive writing, the data for Year 5 students shows they are substantially above the average benchmark.

There’s pride in these results, but it’s a cautious pride. As John Farrell says, ‘The trend data shows we have fewer children in the bottom bands and a big clump in the middle, with huge potential to go further. We need to be consistent about what we are doing and to be very specific with students about their achievements. A general set of platitudes is no good. You have to say to a child, “I love the way you are stopping at the full stops when you read aloud because that makes sense”. They need acknowledgement for what they have achieved but they also need the next challenge within a zone that will extend them without it being so difficult they will stop trying’.

Working with Partners

An added boost to literacy has come from an important partnership developed between OLMC and The Story Factory, a philanthropic venture launched in 2011 by Fairfax-trained journalists Tim Dick and Cath Keenan. Operating from a ‘Martian cave’ shopfront in Redfern, an army of over 800 volunteers, many of them writers, publishers and journalists, come together each week to offer one-on-one tutorials to children to assist them in writing their own stories. The finished effort is illustrated, bound and presented back to participants as a completed work.

The program was piloted at OLMC in 2011 with six students. Cath Keenan laughs when she recalls the first class: ‘There were eight of us, more volunteers than students’. Keenan credits the school for being ‘willing to give us a go and to see what would happen’. She will never forget the absolute silence, after some chaotic episodes along the way, when students got their first look at the individually designed booklets that contained their first creative storytelling efforts: ‘It was something these children could never have imagined. One little boy who had been very disruptive actually ended up producing a story that had a beginning, a middle and an end. He just kept looking at it. He had done it’.

The key is to get children to the point where they feel confident about writing, getting ideas onto the page. The sustained attention of professionals who write for a living is at the centre of what The Story Factory offers, and for many children that attention is a powerful motivator. That, along with a safe, fun environment and a pre-digital approach—no distracting computers, only pen and paper—is making a big difference to the ambitions of the venture’s young clients.

Keenan says, ‘The kids love the freedom to write creatively as so much of the writing they do at school is procedural. That and the interaction with the tutors, with people who write for a living, means that we are opening up a lot of avenues. And we can see the effect it is having. One young boy, when he first came here, told me he was the second-dumbest boy in his class. But having produced his own story, and in book form, he doesn’t think that anymore’.

The Story Factory is part of a growing network of philanthropic enterprises that are supporting strategies to help lift achievement in Australian education, particularly with students living in disadvantaged circumstances. There is evidence that these contributions are making a difference. The Gonski review, which considered the multiple requirements for improving equity in our schools, recognised this. As well, Dr Brian Caldwell has said that ‘they should be added to the repertoire of strategies that help build the capacity of schools to become self-transforming’.⁶

Another partnership that has taken root at OLMC is with the Australian Children’s Music Foundation (ACMF). The brainchild of professional musician Don Spencer, ACMF sends trained musicians into detention centres and refugee sites, and to disadvantaged schools. In the case of OLMC, a five-year partnership with musician Rachel Scott has developed the school’s musical repertoire—singing classes for very young children, drumming sessions for older students and, at the end of each year, professionally staged concerts. The effect at the school has been dramatic. Under Scott’s command and energetic direction, students look forward to the vigour and fun of her classes. Many have developed a sense of pride and collegiality around the ensemble work, and, with younger children, the exposure to the rhymes and rhythms of so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note from David Gonski AC
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Schools
• Part II: Thought Leaders
• Conclusion: Choices to Make, Time to Act
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Glossary
• Index