Innovation and tailored curriculums help to tackle entrenched disadvantage and trauma among students. Part two of our special report on education in the Victorian town • Sign up to receive the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning

When Ebony Nelson moved out of home as a 16-year-old to escape family violence, school was her “saviour”. A “safe space”, she calls it, where the pressures of an itinerant housing situation and the legacies of childhood trauma seemed to ease for at least a few hours every day.

“Still, though, I was always stressed at school,” she says. “I was worried about falling behind. I guess I acted up a few times. I don’t think my school knew how to deal with it to be honest. I was just lost and they didn’t know what to do with me.”

Nelson, now 23, had moved from her home near the small town of Mooroopna in regional Victoria to neighbouring Shepparton, where high youth unemployment and welfare dependency has a symbiotic relationship with one of the state’s worst high school completion rates.

She moved from place to place, staying with friends. Money was scarce, and all of a sudden that short trip to school – half an hour on the bus – became another in a growing list of pressures.

“I had to pay for the bus back and forth to school and, it was only a couple of dollars but I couldn’t really afford it, she says. “And because I didn’t have a lot of support I got really scared of homework and things like that.”



So, at 17, she dropped out. A few months later she fell pregnant. Her mental health deteriorated and she was diagnosed with postnatal depression.

“Things got out of hand for a little while,” she says.

Located on the Goulburn River in Victoria’s most productive agricultural region, Shepparton has long grappled with a school system beset by inequality. Driven in part by pockets of social housing on the north and south end of town, the area’s high schools have become deeply stratified.



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That divide has had challenging consequences for three of the town’s four public schools – since 2008 enrolments have fallen and the proportion of students from low socio-economic and non-English speaking backgrounds has risen.

In 2014 the town’s state MP, the independent Suzanna Sheed, spoke in parliament of a pattern of “entrenched” disadvantage emerging in the three schools, as middle-class and Anglo Australian parents pulled up stumps.

Sheed said disadvantage was being centralised in certain schools, leading to some of the lowest high school completion rates in Victoria.

Stories such as Ebony’s go to the heart of a problem that Shepparton – and towns and cities across Australia – have struggled with. How do mainstream schools stop at-risk teenagers from disengaging and dropping out?

Teresa Deshon, the assistant principal at the independent Berry Street school in Shepparton, says it would take an overhaul of the entire education system for state schools to be able to help the most vulnerable children properly.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ebony Nelson, now 23, says her mainstream school in Shepparton was unable to properly support her through complicated problems in her home life. Photograph: Michael McGowan/The Guardian

Berry Street caters for children who have suffered significant trauma and no longer fit the mainstream education model. Its students usually have a history of some combination of physical abuse, sexual abuse, malnourishment, abandonment, drug and alcohol abuse, and crime.

The school develops individual learning plans for students, has one teacher for every six students and places a huge emphasis on building trust and relationships with the students.



But enrolments are necessarily kept low – this year the school has 32 students – and the goal is always to get students back into mainstream schools if possible.

“We find a lot of the students who come through here, when we ask them what would make it easier for them to go back to school, they say ‘work that I will actually understand’,” Deshon says.

“With big classes, 25 to 30, one teacher who has their training but not necessarily trauma-informed training, they’re doing the best they can, but that system model isn’t really going to work for these sorts of students.

“Resources and funding in mainstream schools is not there and perhaps the training is not there for teachers to deliver lesson plans at so many different levels.”



But at McGuire College, a state school in the heart of one of Shepparton’s most disadvantaged suburbs, teachers and principals are trying to change the way they teach at-risk teenagers.

It’s a school of low-slung brick buildings and halls scattered with rose petals from a blossoming garden at the front gate. The school has been a victim of the stratification that Sheed warned of in 2014.



In 2008 the school had 658 enrolments. But by 2015, as the school underwent what principal Brad Moyle describes as a period of “instability and decline” it had fallen to 448.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anna Sloane, assistant principal at McGuire College with Brad Moyle, principal. Photograph: Michael McGowan/The Guardian

As enrolments fell, the demographic makeup of the school’s cohort began to skew radically more disadvantaged and multicultural. By 2017, 67% of the school’s population came from the bottom socio-economic quartile and 50% from a language background other than English, a 17% increase in less than a decade.

Compare that to Notre Dame College, a Catholic school a few kilometres away. Its enrolments have increased from 1,402 in 2008 to 1,673 in 2016. Only 26% of its students come from the bottom socio-economic quartile, and 11% have a language background other than English.

“It’s certainly fair to say it has been a problem,” Moyle says.

“We have students from a really diverse range of backgrounds and some from very challenging backgrounds. We know that the best place for those children to be is at school, so finding ways to keep the kids who might be at risk of disengaging here is one of our biggest challenges.”

It might sound silly, but honestly I think if we can save one kid’s life it will be worth it Teacher Sam Owen

This year the school introduced what it calls the alternate pathways program in a bid to keep students it identifies as being at risk in school. Using money from the Victorian government’s equity funding program, the school began taking students it could see were struggling with mainstream classes and placing them in a smaller, less conventional classroom setting.

The students learn a different curriculum, with a heavier focus on engagement, and are given an individual learning plan. When the Guardian sat in on one of the alternate pathways classes, the students were making stop-motion animation films on iPads. Earlier, they had used graph paper to design their ideal home using a limited number of resources.

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Teacher Sam Owen is one of the program coordinators. He said the goal was to find ways to make the mainstream education system bend to stop students dropping out.

“The issue is, if you put these kids in a science or maths class they’re going to misbehave or just sit there and not do anything, and usually that’s because they don’t want to put themselves in a position to fail,” Owen says.



“It’s about giving them a chance to engage with learning.”

The program also focuses on building trust and relationships with the students, something Owen says did not always happen easily.

“Every kid in there has experienced some sort of emotional or physical trauma in their lives,” he says. “Because of that their development has been stunted [and] they’re not where they should be in terms of learning, but it also means they have individual issues outside of school. Sometimes it’s about being someone that they can look to and trust.”

The program has limitations, of course – only about a dozen students are currently enrolled – and it is too early to say whether it will be successful in improving dropout rates.

“It might sound silly, but honestly I think if we can save one kid’s life it will be worth it,” Owen says.

Ebony Nelson has begun training at a local TAFE, and hopes to eventually become a counsellor. How does she explain life in Shepparton? “There isn’t a word,” she says.

“Childhood trauma is embedded in every home. Whether you’re rich or you’re poor. I’m a textbook childhood trauma victim, but I guess I’ve learned to process it and deal with it.”