Primary of the earth: Whorouly PS

This article by Suzanne Taylor originally appeared in the Term 1, 2017 edition of AEU News, the member magazine of the Australian Education Union Victoria.

The evening before I met Fran Waterman, principal at Whorouly Primary School, she had been part of a community dinner at the school, which saw her students cook dinner for their parents using ingredients grown as part of their Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Program. “The students cooked while I stood back, watched and cleaned dishes!” she says.

But this was no throw-another-snag-on-the-barbie affair; this was an elaborate 12-dish feast. “They made Middle Eastern lamb cigars, three different dips, home-made pitta bread, cauliflower risotto, fresh fettuccini with eggplant sauce, a Moroccan salad, a focaccia ... And dessert was home-made lemon curd with a strawberry sorbet.”

To Fran, school culture “should reflect the local community”. Situated on the Ovens River between Wangaratta and Myrtleford, Whorouly is home to a bounty of primary producers growing kiwi fruit, persimmons, cherries, grapes; and it also boasts one of the country’s largest capsicum farms.

“If we’re a farming community, we should be a farming school … and we should have food appreciation and develop that in our kids,” Fran says.

The school building is flanked by an orchard (you can smell the apple blossom on the breeze) and an olive grove. Chooks cluck away happily and herbs erupt out of vertical gardens made out of palettes constructed by Year 9 students from the local high school.

With just 30 students, Whorouly is one of the smallest primary schools in the state – but that’s exactly how Fran likes it. Before she came here, she was acting principal at Thoona Primary School up the road – which had just four students when she started!

“When a kid opens the toilet door while you’re in there and says, ‘Fran! Can you come to the sandpit and check out my sandcastle?’, you go, ‘Yeah, no worries!’ because it’s like you’re the second mother to those four kids.”

Fran describes her own primary school education as “idyllic”. Both her parents were teachers and as one of four kids, she grew up in a two-bedroom cottage adjacent to a school in the Grampians, where her dad was head teacher. On her first day of prep, she just toddled next door and was taught by her father for her entire primary education.

“My primary school made a huge impression on me; it was such a unique, flexible, local community-based education,” she recalls. “We had between 11 and 16 students in the whole school, in one room, who were like extended family. They were my closest friends and confidantes.”

It left such a lasting impact, in fact, that despite initially studying to be a journalist, Fran ended up following in her parents’ footsteps, studying to be a teacher and running a small school in the bush.

She’s a young principal, and attributes her professional development to some wonderful mentors, great leadership training, and exposure to opportunities that she couldn’t have gained in larger urban schools.

“Even though you have a smaller number of staff [in rural schools], you’ve still got to create the same volume and breadth of experiences for the children, so there’s the opportunity to offer leadership because you don’t always have that linear leadership model that tends to exist in the bigger schools.

“I think in rural areas, the people that stand out are those that do more. Aspiration is valued.”

Now, Fran is working hard to replicate the “strong sense of connection and community” that she experienced at her own primary school.

“You’ve got the flexibility to really do innovative things. You also have more time in smaller schools to get to know the kids and their families, and be responsive to what they need.”

That knowledge can make a world of difference.

Fran recalls one little girl who wasn’t going to school and whose parents were similarly “disengaged” from education. So Fran set up a little after-school sports activity group for the whole community. She invited kids from all around, regardless of whether or not they attended the school, and made it clear that everyone was welcome.

“You just create events to try to integrate the kids but also their families and the broader community, by knowing who they are and what would work, what they’re interested in,” she recalls. It was a subtle approach, but it helped coax that little girl to come to school.

“I’m a big believer in generating excitement about school and that’s much easier to do when you can work with the known interests of the students. If you can find things that kids connect to, that’ll flow on to academic studies, and that excitement will be infectious.”

When explorers Hume and Hovell passed through the area in 1824 on their way from Appin in New South Wales to Port Phillip in Victoria, Hovell described it in his journal: “As pretty a spot, and as valuable, as any I have seen since leaving home.”

But as tranquil and picturesque a setting as it is, running the school is not without its challenges. While Fran says that pressure from the Department of Education is “not explicit”, there is nonetheless an understanding that enrolments are critical to the future of a school. Small, rural schools feel that pressure more than anywhere else. What Fran didn’t expect upon taking up the position at Whorouly was that the future of her school could be jeopardised simply by a change in government policy on the operation of a bus service!

“Since 2013, the minimum requirements to maintain a school bus route have increased. Now, in order for a bus service to run, you need to have a minimum of seven eligible students, as judged by a DET set of criteria, using it. If you don’t, then they might pull it.

“If I can’t provide a bus service and the other schools do, then I imagine that families with working parents might not be able to sustain their enrolment here at Whorouly,” she says.

Determined to protect the service, Fran set about introducing herself to families in the area and ensuring that the children eligible for the service were accessing it. So far, the bus is running and enrolments are on the up from three years ago when she started.

Then there’s the concern shared by many small rural schools as to how best to prepare Grade 6 students for the shock of moving to a much larger, more impersonal high school. To tackle this one, Fran decided to partner up with the local Everton Primary School – the other smallest school in the cluster – and one day a week, the Whorouly kids are bussed down the road for an interschool exchange.

“We wanted the partnership to help expose our students to different teachers and programs, but also to socialise and develop some extra relationships outside of their own small schools, to help set them up for Year 7.”

There were other benefits to teaming up – like the fact that neither Whorouly nor Everton had the numbers for competitive team sports, so the two schools pooled their resources to purchase the ‘Bluearth’ program, a holistic approach to PE. It uses non-traditional games that encourage kids to move and be active, creative and imaginative through physical play, along with yoga, breathing and mindfulness activities. It’s not something Fran could have afforded as a stand-alone school.

The collaboration also extends to teaming up on STEM classes, sharing the specialised skills of teachers across both schools, including a literacy specialist from Whorouly who is now transforming the lives of students across two schools, not one.

When I ask Fran what has been the most significant change in her school over the past few years, she answers immediately with a huge smile: “Equity funding.”

Whorouly, she tells me, has been identified as experiencing a significant level of disadvantage. This is related to low levels of education amongst parents, as well as to the levels of disability and learning difficulties faced by a relatively high proportion of students.

“Students as young as five are coming in with violence, with severely threatening physical and verbal language. We’ve had staff attacked, we’ve had threats. We’re also seeing students arriving with low levels of parent engagement in school. Some are coming in with no alphabet recognition and low levels of literacy at ages five and six.”

The needs-based Gonski funding has meant that this year the school has expanded to three teachers. There’s a fluid three classroom structure, with an average of 10 kids per teacher. “We’ve been able provide those differentiated programs that are super well-received by our kids. There’s been so much great feedback from the community: that a school with 30 kids has three teachers– it’s just unbelievable to them that we can offer that.”

Gonski funding is also covering a literacy intervention specialist two afternoons a week, along with an integration aide who works with students with disabilities, and with several students who have been exposed to trauma and grief at a young age.

“Having an additional person in the room as an educator – but also as a carer and an extra reassurance – has been really valuable to those children, particularly as they start their education. And it’s reduced the workloads on teachers as well.”

In a move that is likely to be the envy of many teachers, Fran also allocated some of the equity funding to staff PD to cover time for planning.

“I arranged for CRTs to come in and run the school for a week, and I pulled out all of my teaching staff and we spent that time planning and plotting the Victorian curriculum implementation for 2017. My teachers already do a lot, they’re already very giving, so I didn’t want to tack on extra meetings and do an hour here or there.”

Curriculum planning is “core business,” she says, “and not something to add as extra meetings at the end of the day. My approach to my staff was – let’s find a way to utilise our financial resources and value your time and energy to do this together, and do it well.”

Fran teaches five days a week, and prides herself on not taking work home. That means she is often at school before 7am, putting in the administrative work, before her teaching day starts at 9. “I didn’t want to sit in an office, I wanted to be in the classroom!” she smiles.

Smaller schools like Whorouly, as with small communities anywhere, have the advantage of showing up where the vulnerability and strengths lie in individual students, as well as quickly revealing the impact that the right kinds of intervention can have on children’s lives, and the ripple effect that has on all those around them.

“I find teaching in a smaller community so satisfying,” Fran reflects, “because you can get to know the kids and where they come from, and you see on a much deeper level, the way they’re developing and growing, and the role you have in that.

“It makes you really understand the difference you can make as an educator