Dr Mark Dowley, chair of Mastery Schools Victoria, says whether children experience learning difficulties, anxiety, school refusal or other challenges that prevent them from thriving at school, the approach relies on clear processes and structures that work to hook at-risk kids back into learning.
Getting a taste of academic success is highly motivating for students who may not have believed they were capable, Dowley suggests.
“Our attendance rates are fantastic, the students’ literacy and numeracy results improve dramatically once they start coming.
“And the biggest difference is just kids’ wellbeing; they enjoy coming to school again and the impact that has on families and [the students] is just really powerful.”
Content mastery at the core
Classes are run with rigour and high expectations, Dowley shares, with a keen focus on skill and content mastery every step of the way.
“It’s very science of learning-based,” he says of teachers’ instructional approach.
”And there’s a big focus on making sure students have really deeply understood the content before they move on.
“So, it’s lots of explicit instruction. It’s all highly scaffolded, making sure they have skills … the assessment practices are really authentic.”
What really sets a Mastery School classroom apart, however, is the targeted intervention and learning support offered to each student.
“In a mainstream school, you might have a student in a Year 8 English class, but their literacy level might be at Year 4.
“So with our structures, we can cater to that,” Dowley says.
Years 4-6 learn in multi-age core classes and study a common curriculum, with a number of teaching assistants on hand to further help students access the content and work through any problems.
“That level of differentiation of classroom instruction really helps target the individual needs of the students with different interventions.
“And because they’re small schools, and we’ve got the teachers and teaching assistants, we can teach students at the level that they are at far easier than at a standard school,” Dowley says.
Achievement builds motivation
The model works on the premise that achievement precedes motivation, and not the other way around, the educator suggests.
“We think that’s one of the reasons students love coming to us, because they succeed – learning is quite a powerful tool for motivation.
“And so if a student has been disengaged from school for a period of time, to finally be in a classroom where there are high standards and there are high expectations, and they’re told that, ‘yes, you can learn and you can do this’, for them to succeed, it’s really powerful both for their academic development, but also their resilience and their self-esteem and their ability to solve problems out in the real world as well.
“The knowledge that they get (at Mastery Schools) forms a basis of, hopefully, a lifelong understanding that they can succeed and they can learn.”
Estimates are that up to 30 per cent of school-aged children – or 1.2 million – across Australia may be facing medical or mental conditions serious enough to affect their attendance and education, with 14 per cent experiencing one or more mental disorders.
Parent groups have warned that cases of school refusal – or ‘school can’t’ as some say it should be called – are escalating dramatically.
A look at behaviour
While many of the students that come to Mastery Schools have had behavioural problems in the past, Dowley says this generally shifts once they can start to access the curriculum and feel a sense of progress with their learning.
“We’ve got really strict policies on bullying, any aggressive behaviour, and that is just to maintain the safety and standards of the school…
“It’s a sweeping generalisation, [but] sometimes a lot of that behaviour is frustration for not being able to access the curriculum.
“And if they’re in a school where they can [do that] and they can learn, it’s amazing how those behavioural challenges decrease pretty dramatically,” the educator notes.
Dowley has just overseen the opening of Victoria’s first Mastery School, with seven other campuses currently operating across Australia.
“It’s really exciting,” Dowley says of the new offering.
“We had to go through the process of being registered as a school in Victoria – it’s a long process, and it should be a long process because we can’t have just anyone opening up a school to look after kids.”
Since opening it’s doors for the first time early this year, Dowley reports enrolments for the Bundoora school have doubled.
“It’s already growing very quickly with students and families – they’re happy to trust us with … helping them learn.”
Mainstream challenges
The educator is keen to emphasise that mainstream schools are “doing the best they can” in their circumstances.
“I think it’s just it’s really hard with some of the structures that are in place and the resources that are available to meet the changing demands of what’s happening in Australian society.
“More students are disengaged, lots of students with learning difficulties and need allowances or adjustments. It’s really hard to do that in a lot of mainstream schools, and so we’re fortunate to create a school that can teach really explicitly and focus on the mastery [of] learning.
“We still follow the Australian curriculum, but we can structure our day and our time a little bit more flexibly, and that’s what this group of students really need.”
Although the Mastery Schools’ model is responding to a swelling demand across the sector, Dowley admits one of the big challenges is finding sites to open new schools.
“If we get this right, we’ll keep students engaged in education who might have dropped out. We’ll keep teachers in the profession, because students who are finding mainstream education challenging, hopefully, might move to Mastery Schools…
“Teachers at Mastery Schools are happy working with students and keep students engaged in school – and that’s got to be a good thing for families and society at large, I reckon.”
