Go back to our strategy for public education in South Australia

Video transcript

Learner agency is very important because every student learns differently.

They need to be actively involved.

If they're invested, they're going to want to do the work.

They're going to want to do it on time, and they're going to want to feel that proud achievement at the end.

It all comes down to relationship.

For a long time, our mantra was personalized approach we have high standards that we hold the students accountable to, and then we do very personalized course counselling for them through a year 10 and 11, choosing their subjects.

So, we try to really fit in with them around what their career path is going to be, what their interests are.

If this is your passion and you know, are you going into veterinary or any other pathway, you can use a structure from integrated learning and you can go into other careers and just seeing what my future might look like and what career path might look like, I think that's helped me a lot.

So, we're running courses currently around nutrition history, literacy, medicine.

We've got another student who's studying to be a veterinarian, so, we've got a course around that as well.

The medicine course came about because we had a number of students who indicated that they were quite keen on going on into medicine, but they didn't know a lot about it.

So, we decided to try and develop a course where they could actually prep for the UCAT, find out more about becoming a doctor, find out if it was really something they wanted to do.

Having opportunities to go to different universities to know, like, your environment and which one you want to go to.

Doing something that I'm interested in allows me to be excited about every other subject I'm learning.

So like biology and chemistry, it makes me more engaged to want to learn about it because I know that I'll be applying it in my future.

With Community Connections is designed for students who weren't going to achieve their SACE or at risk of not achieving their SACE, and it's a little bit of a safety measure.

They start off in food and hospitality, then they convert to community connections.

They're still in that classroom, they're still cooking, they're still learning.

They’re just assessed a little bit differently.

So, it's been a real positive for a lot of our students who were either disengaged from school, had some health concerns or just weren't quite able to access the curriculum.

It meant they could come about it in a different way and still feel that achievement of getting their Year 12.

Sometimes just the traditional subject offerings just don't engage with them and we find when they actually give them an opportunity to research and engage with what they're interested in, we get much higher involvement from the students.

Seeing them grow from year 7 to 12, particularly when you're at graduation at end of the year, when you see those year 12, they come up on stage that, perhaps, when they were in year 8 or 9, you weren't sure if they were going to make it, and then you see the young people they become, that's what I love, and then seeing him a number of years later come back and thank you for what you've done that makes it all worthwhile.

End of transcript.

Go back to our strategy for public education in South Australia