Heywood and District Secondary College was just 24 kilometres up the road, and it had fewer than 150 students. Maybe it would be less confronting; friendlier to a girl without friends. Three years later, Tahlia is in Year 10. Tahlia Heinrich sits on a rendered garden fence built by the Hands on Learning students. Credit:Tony Wright She cracks a broad smile and declares: “I get out of bed early, I’m motivated, I’m on the bus. “I’m going to finish Year 12. Do you want to know what I’m going to do after that?”

It turns out that Heywood secondary college’s relatively small size wasn’t the major reason for Tahlia Heinrich’s transformation. Soon after she arrived three years ago, the school decided to try out a program for disengaged students at risk of dropping out. Called Hands on Learning, it is administered by the aid organisation Save the Children. “It saved me,” Tahlia says. Hands on Learning has been operating to great acclaim in Victorian schools for almost 20 years, and has now spread to 90 campuses, including a few in Queensland and NSW. Save the Children wants to take it to 300 schools across the nation. But that would require about $10 million.

To the great frustration of teachers, parents and Save the Children, who have evidence from Deloitte Access Economics showing that the benefit of Hands on Learning’s work in keeping students at school between just 1999 and 2012 was $1.6 billion, no funding has been forthcoming from the Federal Government. Tahlia with Hands on Learning artisan teacher Gregg Housden. Credit:Tony Wright Save the Children relies on philanthropists to provide around $5000 a year for each school, and the state government funds two “artisan” teachers to run the program at each school. At Heywood, the Hands on Learning kids do some of their own fundraising. They built a wedding arch for a local couple’s marriage ceremony, they’ve made and sold bird boxes and shopping bags, they’ve helped cater for community events and they’ve held a movie day. Tahlia tells you straight out that she would have been lost without Hands on Learning.

“It’s flipped my life upside down,” she says. Her mother agrees. “We didn’t know what Hands on Learning was at the start,” says Amy. “And even after Tahlia was taken into it, she struggled to get to school. It was heartbreaking. “But then she started to appear more comfortable with herself. And now, there is absolutely nothing I could do to keep her at home on a HoL [Hands on Learning] day.” The program is both simple and revolutionary. At Heywood secondary, like the other schools that have embraced the system, a small group of “at risk” students is excused from traditional classes for one day a week.

On that day, Tahlia and the eight or nine others in the HoL group become a little family. They cook meals for themselves using ingredients they have grown in the school’s own gardens and orchard. Sometimes local home cooks drop by to offer direction. The HoL students undertake tasks like building fences and caring for gardens and animals (the school has a strong agriculture program). They operate as a team. They aim for fun, but they’re not horsing around: they keep an eye on each other, checking moods. “None of us puts down the others,” says Tahlia. “We all have our issues.” The students, almost imperceptibly, are learning personal and social responsibility.

They are assisted by “artisan” teachers, who typically have long experience in the practical world but don’t necessarily have formal teaching qualifications. One of the artisans at Heywood is Gregg Housden. He worked for 20 years with the Grain Elevators Board (now GrainCorp) in construction, maintenance and management, and later ran a citrus farm north of Mildura. When drought, soaring prices for water and a 50 per cent cut in his irrigation allocation crippled his farm, he taught himself to bake sourdough bread and established a bakery to survive. Gregg lends plenty of “can-do” knowledge from his years of work, including teaching the kids to bake bread. But he says the mental strain of trying to keep a citrus property going for five years, with failure always looming, gives him another useful edge.

“I think the strain of those years helps me understand where some of these kids are coming from,” he says. Elly Colley, a teacher of 30 years who has led about 25 students through Hands on Learning over the past three years, says the point of the program was to allow students to build a sense of personal confidence through achievement. Tahlia with teachers Shara Rose (centre) and head of the Hands on Learning program at Heywood Secondary College, Elly Colley (left). Credit:Tony Wright “It’s about giving these young people a chance to understand they can take responsibility,” she says. “It allows them to do this without being worried about making mistakes. It’s about having the time as a teacher to sit down and have a conversation. “It’s about giving them a place where they can feel they belong.

“I’d been saying for years and years that if only the system could give me these kids, I’d give them a chance. But without Save the Children, we couldn’t have done any of this.” Tahlia, accompanied by another artisan teacher, Shara Rose, who runs a mentoring program at the school called Standing Tall, takes me into the schoolyard to inspect one of her early projects: a garden wall she and the other HoL students built and rendered with their own hands. “I wasn’t too keen on the idea when we started, to be honest,” says Tahlia. “It was hard work. But we all had a ball. And yeah, this wall is part of me.” Loading Nearby is a firepit, sometimes used for Indigenous cooking and ceremony. The Budj Bim landscape of stones and the world’s most ancient aquaculture system is not far from Heywood, and the school runs classes in Aboriginal culture and language. The HoL kids have been out with Indigenous rangers, planting trees in the stone country.

Tahlia says the confidence she has gained in HoL has helped her in traditional classes too, where, against all her old fears, she is passing her subjects. The biggest lift, however, has come as she works towards that plan of hers after Year 12. She has been accepted part-time into a college called Rural Industries Skill Training (RIST) in Hamilton, 60 kilometres north of Heywood, which certifies students in farm work. By working one day a week at a farm, Tahlia has earned RIST certificates in the use of chainsaws, tractors and all-terrain vehicles, in cattle handling, shearing, crutching, food handling and first aid. “If I didn’t have the confidence I’ve learned in HoL, I would never have been able to walk in to the RIST program, where I’m normally the youngest person,” she says.

Which takes her to the big plan. “When I’m finished with Year 12, I’m going to run a farm for disabled people,” Tahlia says. “I know how animals can help people with problems. “My family has a little hobby farm with pigs, chickens, geese, ducks and dogs, and I have a horse. If I’ve had a bad day, I’ll go out and hose out the animals’ pens with my music blaring, and I’ll feel better.” Hands on Learning student Tahlia Heinrich in one of the gardens at Heywood and District Secondary College. Credit:Tony Wright It may seem a long step to establishing a farm for people with disabilities, but it’s no pipe dream. Amy tells me the family has already purchased a larger property so Tahlia can work on her vision.