Two years ago, at a state primary school in regional Victoria, the parents of a six-year-old girl named Nelani were told their daughter was no longer welcome.

After a series of violent incidents in which Nelani struck out at classmates and teachers, the school had made a decision: she could no longer attend classes.

Struggling with a combination of mental illness and drug addiction, her parents struggled to process what they were being told.



“It’s like we were there but we weren’t there,” Katherine, Nelani’s mother, tells the Guardian. “We were just, vacant, because we didn’t understand really where they were coming from. All we heard was that our daughter was getting thrown out of the school. It was just like, ‘Wow, she’s six years old, this is so unfair.’”

That meeting could have been a life sentence for Nelani – the beginning of a cycle of conflict and distrust with an education system unable or unwilling to address the barely hidden trauma at the heart of her behaviour.

“It set this precedent of what school was going to be like,” says her father, David.

“She didn’t want to go back to school after that. It completely destroyed any trust she had. For us too, actually. There was a perception that if we got it from one school we’ll get it wherever we go.”

Except they didn’t. Two years later, Nelani, now eight, is spoken about in glowing terms by the teachers, doctors and social workers who poured hundreds of hours of resources into helping bring her and her family back from what they call their “fog”.

Nelani’s new school, Wilmot Road primary, is on the south side of Shepparton, a town of about 63,000 people, two hours north of Melbourne. Statistically among the most disadvantaged schools in Victoria, it is set in a neighbourhood dominated by 1970s-era public housing properties inhabited by disadvantaged families and, increasingly, a booming refugee population.

The Guardian spent a week inside Wilmot and its secondary neighbour, McGuire College, talking to teachers, parents and students to get a close look at the challenges facing Australia’s unequal public school system. A question emerged: how much does it cost to give a disadvantaged child the tools to benefit from an education? And do Australia’s schools have those resources?

“It can feel like fighting a boxing match with both arms tied behind your back, at times,” one teacher told the Guardian.

But despite the built-in inequities, there are victories, such as the case of Nelani.

How far has she come? Katherine illustrates this with two gift-wrapped parcels.

Beneath a coffee table in their weatherboard home , the presents have been bought and carefully wrapped for two of Nelani’s classmates whose birthday parties she is due to attend.

“Little miss social butterfly,” Katherine calls her. “Once upon a time she didn’t know what a friend was.”



Nelani is bubbly and precocious. One recent afternoon she climbed on her older brother Michael’s shoulders in their front yard as Katherine and Dave tried to explain the change in her in those two years, and the impact Wilmot Road has had on her life.

“Wilmot saved us,” Katherine explains. “Not just Nelani, but our whole family. Without that school I honestly don’t know what would have happened to us.”

Troubling social stratification

Remember the Gonski report? In 2011 the businessman David Gonski released a report on Australia’s education system, which proposed a revolutionary overhaul of the way schools were funded.

Sector-blind and needs-based, Gonski’s proposal – adopted by the then Gillard government in title, if not deed, was for funding to be allocated on the basis of a per-student benchmark, which included loadings based on disadvantage.

The plan was supposed to help address inequity in the system so that, in Gonski’s words, “differences in educational outcomes are not the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possessions”.

But, it hasn’t. Thanks in part to the continuation of several special funding deals with individual states and sectors – which the education minister, Simon Birmingham, is seeking to unwind against fierce resistance from the Catholic education system and, lately, the Labor party – most of the problems that Gonski identified six years ago are the same or worse.

Student outcomes measured against benchmarks such as Naplan have flatlined, Australia’s position in international education rankings has gone backwards and, most damningly, researchers such as Chris Bonner from the Centre for Policy Development continually point to a troubling social stratification within and between school sectors.

It’s a problem Shepparton knows all too well. The Guardian sat in on a staff meeting of high school maths teachers resigned to a lack of working calculators. A week earlier, the prestigious Trinity Grammar School in Melbourne had recruited a former federal court judge to lead an investigation into the sacking of a deputy headmaster who gave a student a haircut.

Shepparton is a city of contrasts. Drive in any direction outside town and you’ll soon hit the orchards and farms that account for about 25% of Victoria’s agricultural production.

But the town has long battled entrenched disadvantage, highlighted by high youth unemployment, welfare dependency and one of Victoria’s worst high school completion rates. Teachers at Wilmot and McGuire told the Guardian it was common for students to enter school several years behind developmentally.

Dr Peter Eastaugh, a respected paediatrician who has practised in the town for 40 years, says Shepparton is “a tale of two cities”.



“We have a massive growth and development in one part of Shepparton and then there are pockets of significant disadvantage in other parts,” he says. “And it’s very easy for the man in his Mercedes to drive past the drunk in the gutter without the two ever meeting.”

On the north side of Shepparton, new suburbs made up of McMansions with Toyota Klugers in the driveway sit uncomfortably alongside streets of public housing properties, where children ride Razor scooters and blast Migos and Tupac out of their mobile phones.

Zabidullah Haidari, 12, the Wilmot Road school captain, with his father, Mohammad, and his brother Haudiullan, 14. Photograph: Michael McGowan/The Guardian

For the past five years, Eastaugh, the former head of paediatrics at Goulburn Valley Health, has been at the centre of a program trying to break the cycle of disadvantage in Shepparton by going directly into schools such as Wilmot.

Through the Neighbourhood Schools Program, he runs health clinics for children identified as being at risk in five of Shepparton’s primary schools. Since starting the program, he has worked with 360 children between the ages of six and 12, who he has diagnosed with foetal alcohol syndrome disorder, learning, behavioural or speech disorders, and, in a small number of cases, addiction.

But Eastaugh tells the Guardian he quickly recognised that an “overwhelming” number of the children he saw – 25% – suffered from some sort of environmental trauma, a product of the drug addiction, domestic violence and poverty he says is “endemic” in some parts of Shepparton.

Environmental trauma comes up a lot in Shepparton. And it’s not just a result of family violence or poverty. Since the 1990s, the town has been a beacon for migrants seeking work picking fruit in orchards alongside European backpackers.

It’s not enough to sit a kid down in a class and say ‘learn this’ when [they] may not have had breakfast that morning Paul Greenwood, community relationships coordinator

It’s a diversity that Shepparton’s residents take pride in. Half a dozen people pointed out to the Guardian that in 2015, when a proposed mosque in Bendigo led to a series of ugly anti-Islam demonstrations, Shepparton was quietly building its fourth.

But the influx of migrants has meant particular challenges for schools. In 2017 70% of Wilmot’s enrolments came from a non-English speaking background. About 40% of the school’s enrolments come from Afghan families. They are exclusively Hazara, an ethnic minority persecuted by the Taliban.

It means that while the school’s administrators struggle to build trust with parents who might have had little or no exposure to a formal education setting, classroom teachers deal with students coming from a trauma background that few of them can comprehend.

“A lot of our families have [a] very low education because they’ve always been pushed back from education,” says Zahra Khademi, Wilmot’s Afghani family liaison officer.



“Because of the background, these people are not tending to go to complain or find out what’s going on. If they think their children are not OK or are in trouble at school they’re going to just keep them back at home.”

So Wilmot decided to do something about it. Using some of the $3.2m in extra money that the Victorian state government has pumped into the school in the past three years as part of an equity funding program, it has sought to turn itself into more than just a school.



In doing so it has become a case study for what can happen when a school has the funding it requires.

Wilmot now employs speech and play therapists, as well as family liaison officers for the school’s Arabic and Afghan students. It also runs a scholarship program, linking students with members of Shepparton’s professional community.

Paul Greenwood, the school’s community relationships coordinator, says the goal was to turn Wilmot into something closer to a community hub.

“It’s just not enough to sit a kid down in a class and say ‘learn this’ when those same kids may not have had breakfast that morning, when they’re dealing with things at home that make that impossible,” he says.

“One thing I’ve learnt in my time here is that these kids are just as smart, just as capable, as kids at private schools, but they need support.”

Schools as community hubs

The idea of schools becoming community hubs is not new, and there are programs in most states that seek to make schools the centre of their communities.

It’s not without its challenges though. Since 2012, New South Wales has been running the Connected Communities program, which has pumped $60m into 15 of the state’s most disadvantaged schools with the goal of turning them into “service hubs”.

Laura West, a play therapist at Wilmot Road primary. Photograph: Michael McGowan/The Guardian

The program has had some success, improving attendance rates and student behaviour at some schools. There is also evidence of increased parent engagement. But an interim report released in 2016 found that some of the issues faced by disadvantaged communities were “beyond the abilities of schools to address alone”.

It also found that schools involved in the program had not improved academic performance. Jennifer Buckingham, an education researcher from the Centre for Independent Studies, says schools have only a certain number of hours a day, and their core business still needs to be educating.

“It comes down to, schools have a job, which is to educate students, and for every intervention outside of the classroom that’s less time that they have teaching children to read and write,” she says.

But at Wilmot, there is a sense that the school has to do something. Laura West, the school’s play therapist, says bringing therapy services into the schoolremoves one barrier for children to get access to the help they need.



“Parents have to bring their kid to school anyway, so the kid comes to their paediatric appointment,” she says. “They don’t have to drag them to or from therapy, and they don’t have to pay for it because I pull them out of class for 45 minutes and give them their session.



“So the attendance in therapy is far higher than in any other environment because they’re already in school.”

And, at least in some cases, they are seeing success. The school’s latest Naplan results place it substantially above other schools with a similar advantage profile in writing, spelling, grammar and numeracy. But perhaps more importantly, staff at the school believe they are helping address some of the issues at the heart of the area’s disadvantage.

When Katherine first brought Nelani to Wilmot, her family was in a prolonged state of personal crisis. Katherine was struggling with severe mental illness and caught in the grips of an ice and cannabis addiction. A 2012 house fire in which the family lost all their possessions had left them traumatised.

But Greenwood says the school and other service providers, including the Rumbalara Aboriginal Cooperative, “wrapped Nelani and her family up”.

“When we first came to the school, she was breaking down in tears, not even wanting to come in,” Katherine says. “Now, she’s a normal, happy little girl.”

From his office in Shepparton, Eastaugh, the paediatrician, estimates that “hundreds of hours” and countless resources had been invested into helping the family get on its feet.

“But look at that little girl,” he says. “How can that not be worth it?”