By Mikayla van Loon
Croydon Community School has been named as one of the most improved secondary schools in NAPLAN results this year, a testament to its alternative education practices.
Assistant principal Kaye Bahn said it was a wonderful acknowledgement that many of the students needed who had previously been disengaged from learning or who had never completed NAPLAN before.
“Arguably, some of our kids have never done NAPLAN before because their previous schools exclude them because they won’t do well traditionally on a NAPLAN assessment because they’re literacy and numeracy is low,” she said.
“So it’s a credit to us that we can even get the kids to undertake the tests and our data sets are much broader than NAPLAN but it was lovely to see that acknowledgement of alternative education across the board.”
As a Big Picture Learning school, Ms Bahn said the building of trust between students and their families while allowing them to learn to trust education is as much the focus as the academic side of things.
“We just encourage our young people to participate. We find that when students are learning about what they’re interested in and what they love, then they want to learn, to read more and write more.
“It’s the same with the numeracy that may be implicit or explicit in their learning and because they’re engaged in what they’re learning, it’s not given to them, it’s driven by them, the skills improve exponentially with the love of learning.”
For the last 10 years Ms Bahn said the number of students who have participated in the NAPLAN has remained consistent, with the school encouraging all Year 7 and 9 students to partake in the test.
“We don’t teach NAPLAN, I know a lot of schools will buy the NAPLAN handbooks. We don’t do that, it’s all about students having that belief in themselves as learners.
“So we present the NAPLAN to them as an opportunity to try it and see how they go, that they’re not competing against anyone else. It’s purely about where they’re at as individual students and to give it their best shot.”
