Learning in Melbourne

I have managed to time my visit to Melbourne to coincide with the last full week of the summer holidays which makes me all the more grateful to the three schools that let me through their doors. Just like Ryde a week before the start of term, they were a hive of activity as heads and bursars decided which projects to pull and which to double down on and academic staff started to trickle back to work and ask difficult questions like where has my computer gone and can I have the new set lists.

Melbourne is one of those cities that frequently wins the best place in the world to live awards and you don’t need to be here long to see why: easy access to long sandy beaches; a love of sport and the outdoors that is recognised in the many green parks and cycle paths, as well the iconic MCG and Olympic area (which was hosting the Open whilst I was there); two fabulous wine regions less than an hour away and a confident, modern city skyscape with great ethnic food and Aussie wine. 

It also has an enormous number of excellent private schools, many of which are fellow HMC members and feel in some ways more English than England. I was told that Kew, where I was staying, has the highest concentration of private schools anywhere in the world. Some of these schools are real venerable institutions dating back to the nineteenth century, many are world famous such as Scotch College and Geelong Grammar (where Prince Charles once studied.)

There is much about the schools that we would recognise – an appreciation of the importance of character education, a strong belief in sport, drama and music, robust house systems – and they are facing some challenges familiar to UK heads – affordability, balancing academic and pastoral demands, mental health and well-being. There are other areas, though, where Melbourne schools were clearly ahead of us. I also felt a strong sense of schools and teaching bodies willing and indeed eager to reflect on best practice and embrace research and technology. The most explicit example of this, and it is building on what I saw in Singapore, was the clear thinking in classroom and working areas design. Harkness tables to encourage discussion, strong open plan floors, a rejection (explicit in two of the three schools I visited) of teachers having dedicated classrooms, easy sight of what was going on in classrooms, varied break out areas in libraries. 

Melbourne, or more specifically Geelong Grammar at the other side of the bay, can also lay claim to being the place where ‘Positive Education’ was born. It was here that Martin Seligman, the US psychologist who first sought to translate Positive Psychology to an education setting, did his early research and work. It was instructive to look around and see evidence of ‘Pos Ed’ all around – most impressively in the well-being centre that combines sport, physical and mental health, counselling and a medical centre; the emphasis being on all elements contributing together to living well. Whether pupils (or staff) were going to the gym, for a swim, for a counselling session or some coaching, they all headed in the same direction. ‘Pos Ed’ has been around long enough to have its critics now too and it was interesting to hear from one school chaplain who felt it was really just a secular, and inferior, version of the teaching of the ancient Greeks and major world religions. It’s evident too that in some schools dedicated lessons don’t necessarily work and encourage rather than dispel cynicism. My own instinct is that Positive Education does have something to offer, especially in our secular age, but the emphasis on ‘living it’ and its significance to teachers and school leaders is more important that it being something to teach per se. Better it informs us, than we feel we need to teach others?

Geelong also gave the world Timbertop – an outdoor campus in the hills beyond the Yarra Valley. It’s a model that has been copied elsewhere, but not to the same extent, and it is fascinating. Essentially, all pupils in Year 9 (UK Year 10) spend a year in the outback. Whether boarders or day pupils they are away from their families, live in huts of 14, are denied access to social media and emails and have to chop their own wood to heat their huts (as well as do all the other duties such as washing up, tidying etc.) If that wood isn’t chopped they also learn how to take cold showers. It’s a DofE trek in extremis, and also involves running every day so that by the end of the year they can run 33km in one go. It’s tough, and it’s a programme the teachers also are expected to embrace (each hut has one teacher i/c and lessons carry on as normal each morning.) When I was there the new crop of pupils were being shown ten different snakes they might encounter when doing their wild camping and how to deal with them. The Head here was clear that plenty of education was taking place, but in particular pupils were learning ‘how to live together.’ He also noted that the break from social media was more difficult to manage than any of the physical hardships. Is it tough? Undoubtedly. And students were way from their comfort zones. But it is also popular – the Year 9 is the most subscribed in the School.

So, as I head south to Tasmania, Melbourne has given me plenty to think about. These schools have embraced some very modern ideas, but all are really re-working of timeless principles, and in a pretty traditional setting – no compromises on uniforms, chapel or compulsory sport here.