Program: Special assistance schools balancing student wellbeing with learning

Laurise Dickson
With the growing issue of school refusal, parents are looking for alternatives to mainstream schooling.

Rowan Cox
We know that having that sort of engagement with the students is what is most likely to lead to their success. They're turning up for the relationship, they're turning up for the safety factor. They're here because they want to learn in this environment.

Laurise Dickson
I'm Laurise Dickson and today on NewcastleCast, how one school in the Hunter region is giving kids the chance to love learning on their own terms.

Laurise Dickson
High school can be tough. You're trying to figure out who you are, make friends, all while juggling homework and exams. For Emily Large from Cessnock, it became so overwhelming she stopped going.

Emily Large
When I was in mainstream I had under 6% attendance. I was going through depression and anxiety and they just wanted me at school and they didn't care about what I was going through. They just wanted my attendance back up.

Laurise Dickson
It was in 2018, when she was in year 8, that Emily's therapist suggested she checked out a different kind of school called Alesco, who had a different approach.

Rowan Cox
It is a place where we believe that in order to be most successful, a student's learning and their wellbeing has to be in balance. And that wellbeing extends beyond their learning wellbeing. It goes to their social, cultural, psychological, financial, physical wellbeing as well.

Laurise Dickson
Rowan Cox is the principal of Alesco Secondary College.

Rowan Cox
Most people just want their kid to survive high school. You know, the thought of sending a student off and going, I hope they survive high school is a really scary thought. They are going to succeed sufficiently in their education to be able to move on to whatever pathway comes next. And they will do so a happy and healthy child.

Laurise Dickson
It was a similar story for 17-year-old Samuel Winter.

Samuel Winter
Well, I was really struggling at my previous high school and my mental health got really bad. I faced some learning difficulties, but I did struggle with some of the work or keeping up or being able to keep my attention with the work and also struggled with bullying and harassment.

Laurise Dickson
And just like Emily, it was Samuel's counsellor who first told them about Alesco. So they decided to make the switch.

Samuel Winter
It is a lot better for me because I feel much more comfortable. I get what I need.

Laurise Dickson
Trying to get kids to want to come to school and learn isn't a new problem. It's been a challenge that Rowan has been trying to solve for the last 20 years.

Rowan Cox
We were working with cohorts of young people who were identified as at risk of leaving school early. And we found that when we took groups of young people outside of the mainstream environment, removed many of the barriers that they naturally felt like they wanted to rebel against or that they found too inflexible, and engaged them really personally in their learning journey, that they had this great outcome of success.

Laurise Dickson
But Rowan found that once these kids went back to their mainstream schools, they faced the same challenges as before.

Rowan Cox
So then they were bouncing back to us saying, can I do the course again? Which we couldn't do because the funding wouldn't allow it. So then we started to try and consider ways that we could engage young people in meaningful learning in this environment over a longer period of time. We approached the state government and the state government said there's no full-time funding available for young people outside of schooling. And then somebody said to me, really the only way you're going to be able to keep them five days a week, 35 hours a week, is to become a registered school. And so that's what we did.

Laurise Dickson
And so, Alesco Secondary College was born. Attached to Atwia Community College, Alesco is an accredited, independent, non-government secondary school for years 9 to 12, with an option to stay on for an extra year. Alesco is a Latin word meaning growth and maturity, or I am growing. And since opening its first campus in Newcastle in 2002 with just 35 students, that's exactly what it has been doing.

Rowan Cox
Once we opened at Raymond Terrace, we were full within weeks, which really speaks to the fact that when you place a solution in the community, then it's much more effective for that community.

Laurise Dickson
But it was a bigger issue than they first thought.

Rowan Cox
I think when we started Alesco, we were trying to answer a really local problem, but I think we hadn't realised that what we had tapped into is it's a local problem in most locations. So they expanded. Where there's an area of need and where there's the possibility of connecting and engaging with that community, that's where Alesco would consider popping up next.

Laurise Dickson
Now with over 630 students, Alesco has six campuses in the Hunter region and one in Foster on the mid-north coast. They're just one of a number of special assistance schools, also known as SAS schools in New South Wales, which offer flexible and tailored education for students whose needs aren't met at a mainstream school.

Rowan Cox
We know that in the right environments, students thrive. And in actual fact, you know, their whole lives can be changed by having the engagement and connection from a good learning environment like Alesco. So I think that places like Alesco and other special assistance schools and other flexible learning models really are starting to become that school of choice.

Laurise Dickson
According to Independent Schools Australia, there were 97 specialist assistance schools in 2023, compared to 45 schools in 2014. Growth in enrolments rose 364% over this nine-year period, which is just over 12,000 students, compared to 24% growth in mainstream independent schools.

Nigel Howard
So we've seen a tripling of the number of students that are enrolled in specialised assistance schools over the last 10 years. Probably double the number of schools that there were. Most of the new specialised assistance schools are less than a decade old. So they've been formed within the last seven to five years. And so there's a huge demand and there's a demand that's an unmet demand.

Laurise Dickson
Nigel Howard is a research associate at Flinders University, who's been looking at school refusal and retention rates, and says despite these alternative schools, the number of kids leaving school early is still growing. A recent Four Corners report found in 2023, 38% of all students in years one to 10 were absent for more than 20 days a year, which is considered as chronically absent. But why?

Nigel Howard
What our research over the last five years has shown is basically what they're saying is, somehow or another I don't fit in. And that's across a range of things. Sometimes they don't fit in in terms of the curriculum. Some students are saying they don't fit in socially, that the restrictions of school and the way that school is organised doesn't suit them as you know, growing up 17 and 18 year olds. And for others, they just don't fit in personally. There is a well known expansion of mental health issues among young people. And so some people, young people are just finding that the school isn't able to adapt or or accommodate the needs that they have. And so it's that idea of, you know, I don't fit in. And so I've got to find somewhere else.

Laurise Dickson
Somewhere with more support. When Emily started at Alesco's Cessnock campus in year nine, it was a big deal for her. But one person in particular helped get her through the school gates. Tell me about Sarah and what role she played in your high school life here at Alesco.

Emily Large
Well, she was like my, I don't know, like my first friend, but she was more like, I hung out with her a lot when I first started.

Laurise Dickson
Sarah is one of the wellbeing officers at Alesco, who supports students alongside their day to day learning. For Emily, this guidance changed the way she saw school.

Emily Large
They're always there if you need to talk and they're like really, Sarah was like really friendly and easy to talk to and funny. They're there to help you no matter what.

Laurise Dickson
And that's not the only way SAS schools set their students up for success. Students like Sam benefit from smaller classes and a flexible attendance plan to help them socialise and learn in their own way.

Samuel Winter
Our schooling and flexibility takes away the stress on students with assessment tasks and work because we always do it in class and the teachers are very good at being able to work with us and we're all given our own time with the teachers. It's a mix of being able to ask for help and also independence because in some ways, depending on what work we're doing, we're able to work on it by ourselves, completely independent. It doesn't feel overwhelming and it feels more of like your own little community or your own little family within that subject. And it's pretty easy to make friends or get to know people when it's only just you, a teacher and maybe 14 other students.

Laurise Dickson
They don't even have to wear uniforms.

Samuel Winter
I'm always comfortable to be who I am and I get to dress as myself and it does really help with the environment because it makes me feel more relaxed and makes me feel as if I have my own individuality.

Laurise Dickson
Alesco is all about tailoring education to each student. They offer a compressed HSC schedule over two years, with a year 13 option for students where they can do extra studies, vocational training or just take a year to transition into the wider world. For these kids, success isn't just a 99.95 ATAR. For some of them, it's just showing up every day and feeling like they belong as part of their school community. So it's no surprise their school motto is some of all parts. And for Principal Rowan Cox, this means her students' wellbeing is just as important as their education.

Rowan Cox
And so on one day, it might be the focus is really on your learning today because you're in a good space and you know everything's going well. But we can also see that when they hit speed bumps and potholes, that maybe their wellbeing needs are what we need to take care of a little bit more today.

Laurise Dickson
Even though Alesco has been around for more than 20 years, alternative learning is still pretty new. Nigel Howard says there's still a disconnect between this flexible approach being recognised alongside mainstream accreditation.

Nigel Howard
At what point do we say to these young people that the community recognises the learning you've done, which is what basically the HSC is about, is how do we get that recognised in a different way and how do we do it? Because otherwise what we're doing is just finding another place for these young people to feel good and safe for a short amount of time, but then not being able to translate that into work and community life when they leave. How do we help the accrediting authorities and the schools meet somewhere in the middle? For the accrediting authorities to see that the model of learning and teaching that happens in these schools is very different from the industrial model that happens in a mainstream school. And also for that, talking to the SAS schools about how they connect their learning and how they make it more than just responding to the individual need of that student at that time, but actually make it forward-looking and aspirational. And so that's the main challenge. And what needs to underpin that is research. And what needs to underpin that is an actual understanding of how many students are there, what they're doing and what their outcomes are. And we're kind of working blind in that because we don't have that research at the moment.

Laurise Dickson
Those special assistance schools and their structures are ever-evolving. One outcome we do know for sure is recent SAS graduate Emily Lodge.

Emily Large
My attendance got to like 99 by the end. By the end of when you graduated? Yeah. So I went there with like under 6% and I graduated with 99.

Laurise Dickson
She's now studying to be a library assistant at TAFE. What do you think would have happened if you never went to Alesco? Like would do you reckon you'd be studying now at TAFE?

Emily Large
Nothing.

Laurise Dickson
You can see how much coming here meant to you.

Emily Large 
Yeah. Got my life back now thanks to Alesco and the teachers there and Sarah. My sisters like are very grateful for Alesco because they're always like they got their sister back is what they said. But yeah, and my mum was, she loves Alesco because like she got her daughter back.

Laurise Dickson
And she was even awarded a pretty special honour.

Emily Large 
I was student of the year for 2022 when I graduated. Felt really good. Like I realised like it matters what I'm doing and stuff. Like what I do with my life matters and it affects a whole heap of people.

Laurise Dickson
NewcastleCast is produced on Awabakal Country. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. I'm Laurise Dickson. Thanks for listening.