AN innovative approach to teaching that’s shown outstanding results in re-engaging at-risk youth with schoolwork has earned a Port School teacher a national award and helped swell middle school classes at the Hamilton Hill campus.
Port School on Carrington Street caters for kids who fall through the cracks in the education system; often coming from trauma and disfunctional home lives, they struggle to fit into mainstream schools and either get expelled or simply don’t turn up.
Back in 2016 principal Barry Finch was given a particularly tough cohort who’d been referred from the juvenile justice system and needed a fresh approach.
Instead of chaining them to a desk, he had the idea of converting a bus into a classroom and after being picked up each day the students would do some school work in a park before being rewarded with an activity they’d find stimulating and engaging.
Mr Finch handed the bus program over to teacher Matt Hopkins to run.
“These were kids that couldn’t stay on course, and had not been to school for years,” Mr Hopkins said.
“The approach developed real and trustworthy relationships and provided education to the boys at their level.”
It was something of a lightbulb moment, and buoyed by the program’s success, Mr Hopkins pitched a separate program for at-risk and disengaged girls and boys in years 8 and 9 a couple of years later.
“What really engaged disengaged kids was not taking them to fancy places, but to give them education at their level, and then they started to get pride in their work.”
A primary school teacher before moving to Port School, Mr Hopkins adapted its teaching style to suit the high schoolers.
“We would come at it at their level, without making it babyish.”
Mr Finch said they also worked heavily with parents to ensure the students were committed, and as a result the school’s attendance rates are now over 80 per cent.
• Port School also picked up a state award from Resilience Australia for its Emergency Services Cadets program, which skills up youngsters from vulnerable communities to deal with emergency situations by putting them in contact with organisations like the police air wing.
Literacy
“We’ve had an amazing outcome in their numeracy and literacy,” Mr Finch said.
Mr Hopkins said they used a range of “high impact instruction” techniques which are recognised internationally as best practice for teaching.
“It’s the science of learning; how we use information,” Mr Hopkins said.
“In our classes kids have to be thinking and responding to the teacher 40 times.”
He says as a result, kids who’d stagnated in literacy and numeracy at a young age were advancing by a year.
Mr Finch says the program comes with high expectations about learning, behaviour and outcomes, and while Port is technically a CARE school, he prefers the term “special assistance school”.
“CARE schools can be accused of being too focused on social outcomes and not academic performance, and that’s not so,” he says about Port’s expectations of its students.
“Care schools can also be accused of not having enough rules and boundaries, and that is not so.”
As a result of the program’s success, next year the school will have its biggest cohort of year 8 and 9 students so far, while Mr Hopkins will get to hang his National Excellence in Teaching Award in one of Port’s new middle school classrooms, which he helped to design so it would suit the school’s teaching model.
Mr Hopkins said he wasn’t sure “how to take” winning a national award, but said a big factor had been Mr Finch’s willingness to try new ideas.
by STEVE GRANT