Educating young people is not a onesizefitsall endeavour
i’m the principal of australia’s only
high school with a registered nightclub
and i don’t believe for one minute that
any of my teachers when i was at school
thought i’d be the principal of any
school
in fact judging by the report card
comments they thought i’d end up in a
different industry altogether
but here i am the principal of
australia’s only high school with a
registered nightclub
a nightclub that our students operate
they do everything
including booking aria award-winning
artists and international touring acts
that’s real world education and i almost
didn’t make it through school
in my final year of school my dad
tragically passed away
and i dropped out you could say i ran
away to join the circus
my boss from work experience had offered
me a job in his lab developing prints
and negatives and i took that job
and i really enjoyed it but after eight
months he let me go
and i was at a loose end not knowing
what to do my eldest brother sat me down
and talked to me about going back to
school and said i should finish my final
year
now i know that not every kid in that
situation has that kind of support and
i’m lucky that i did but i followed his
advice
went back to school and while i was
there met an incredible mentor
my pe teacher not only was he a great
bloke but he had the best job in the
world
played sport all day and had 10 weeks of
holiday every year
how good is that so i was on my pathway
to becoming a teacher
i went to university for three years to
study the theory of how to become a
teacher
and putting that theory into practice
proves a lot more difficult than what i
could imagine
one of my first teaching gigs was an all
boys year 10 pe class
and boy did they make life tough for
this rookie but when i decided to
recruit some of them into my rugby
league team
and built meaningful relationships with
them they slowly came on board and
things became easier
i then continued to hone my skills as a
teacher across the following 16 years
in regional and tough cities and i loved
my time teaching in the classroom
but i started to get jaded and the gloss
had worn off because i’d seen so many
students
either drop out of school or been shown
the door and told to leave
kids like me good kids kids who were
struggling with something was far
greater than what they could grasp
and handle at the same time at school so
they dropped out
or they acted out and got asked to leave
i often hear a lot of people say that
school days are the best days of your
life
well if that’s true why do the stats
paint a different story
one in four kids who enter school in
australia fail to graduate year twelve
forty percent of students are disengaged
on any given day in any school across
the nation
it’s clear that we have a problem add to
these the mental health statistics for
our youth
where one in seven will experience a
mental health problem
one in ten will self-harm and 113 will
seriously consider
suicide and you can see that we have a
much larger problem
i found it unacceptable that so many
students were disconnecting from school
so i decided to do something about it in
1996 a group of mates and i
started a drop-in centre that quickly
morphed into a full-time youth centre
we developed job programs a live music
venue
a radio station a recording studio and
even our own record label
and these kids kids who couldn’t or
wouldn’t go to school
we found it difficult to get them to
leave the facility at the end of the day
because they’re so engaged in what
they’re doing after six years of running
these programs i got to thinking
we should be able to do more for these
kids we could legitimize their learning
and that’s where the idea of music
industry college came from
a school that’s dedicated to students
who want to pursue a music career
a school where graduation rates are
above 90
where bullying is almost non-existent
and where mental health problems ease
and disappear over time
and mark’s improved but that’s not
really our focus
and when we started mic we decided to
strip back everything that was
unnecessary
for example we have no uniform no
homework
we allow students to leave campus when
they need to go out for lunch
we even threw away the rule book we just
don’t have any but we replace them with
four pillars
trust respect community and
participation
now just so you know that these aren’t
just words on a page that we pay lip
service to
i want to give you an example of how
these play out in everyday life
let’s start with trust at mic we expect
that every member of our community is
trustworthy it’s just simply
non-negotiable
this allows us to give the students full
access to all facilities
all the equipment allows us to let them
leave the campus to go and get lunch
not be at school if they don’t have a
class and yeah
you’re right some of these kids will do
the wrong thing
and even some of the staff will and
we’ll have an issue with trust
what we do then is we seek with that
individual and we work through ways that
we can restore that trust relationship
between them and the school community
because we want every member of our
school community to be a fully
functional member of that community
and trust is a key tenant of that this
philosophy and style applies to each of
the other three pillars
in a similar manner we deliberately kept
the size of the school small
we started with a cohort of 27 students
and we quickly grew to our current cap
of a 90.
this is based on dunbar’s number robin
dunbar was a british anthropologist
and through his study he found that the
human brain can really only cope
with around 150 meaningful relationships
so given our 90 students our 10 or so
staff
their friends and family outside of
school they’re at that capacity
and in order to have a really good
educational experience the research
tells us it’s based on relationships
we also provide flexibility at music
industry college
because no two students are the same and
the music industry can be an
unpredictable beast
a student might be required to go on
tour or play a festival during school
time
one example of that is olivia mccarthy
also known as joy
when she was in her final term of year
12 getting her exams and her assessments
done so she graduated high school
she was called away to sydney to record
a cover of kylie minogue’s can’t get you
out of my head
for our national broadcaster’s leica
version
the song was so successful when it was
released that kylie minogue herself
tweeted olivia while she was in a maths
class and as you can imagine her music
career gained momentum
overnight so there’s this tension
between the industry requirements
and requirements to complete school and
her parents were very stressed about
this issue
so we sat down with her parents and
olivia and we discussed a way that we
could manage it so that she could still
do her school
and travel to and from sydney to pursue
a music career
well she graduated high school was
offered a position at a university in a
paramedic course
but she also went on to have a
successful music career
she’s toured europe with demi lovato and
reduced a number of
chart-topping singles we progressively
released responsibility to our students
as well across their two years of year
11 and year 12.
one good example of that is when our
students run our annual festival
students allocated roles that they have
to fulfill prior to
and during the festival caleb one of our
year 12 students
was given the role of head of security
he had a budget
he had to book security and he had to
provide them with a roster
and on the day he had to take them
through an induction process
well about halfway through the event
caleb was wandering through the venue
just checking to see everything was
going well and he found two heavily
intoxicated patrons
who shouldn’t have been in the venue he
took them outside safely
and after he’d done that he went
searching for the security guard whose
job it was to keep them out of the venue
in the first place
when he found the guard he was
fraternising with two young female
members of the public
caleb gave him a piece of his mind set
him straight
put him back on his post and the rest of
the event ran smoothly
since graduation caleb has gained
employment in the construction industry
as a workplace health and safety officer
a job where you have to have difficult
conversations on an almost daily basis
caleb’s often told me that the skills he
learnt through that festival
have stood him in good stead with the
work he does from day to day
we focus on skills not scores
and through that process magically the
scores
improve and also it takes the pressure
off students
come exam time and assessment times
there is an appetite for data at the
moment in the education system within
australia
and mic has the data to back it up
through improvement in students grades
but that’s not our main focus during
post-graduation
interviews some of our students have
disclosed to us that they were suffering
from severe mental health issues
and even suicidal thoughts prior to
enrolling in mic
one female student unsuccessfully
attempted to take her life three times
during year nine and year ten prior to
coming to nyc
upon graduation she’s healthy she’s
happy
she’s full-time employed as a
photographer and pursuing her music
goals
as she goes along another example is a
young man who was suffering from such
debilitating bouts of anxiety and
depression
that he couldn’t go to school at all in
fact he found it even difficult to get
out of bed
when he came to mic what he found was a
supportive and nurturing group of peers
and teachers
he was able to express himself musically
and as an individual
he’s now a university graduate he’s
worked for our national broadcaster
and now he is manager of one of
queensland’s busiest retail
outlets not all of our students will go
on to have a sustainable music industry
career
but some of them will and many more are
pursuing that goal
ari award winner thelma plum recorded a
song called father said while she was at
music industry college
after graduation she uploaded that song
to triple j on earth
a national music competition they chose
her
to be their unearthed representative at
the national indigenous music awards
since then film has gone on to have
multiple chart successes with her debut
album better in black
another example is marco gikas marco
worked intensively with his music
teacher tom egert
over his last year at mic to produce
music
he released his first single running
while he was still at school
and it quickly amassed more than one
million streams on platforms across the
world
he gathered the interest of many people
in the industry and has signed a record
deal
with one of australia’s major record
labels thomas also joined the same
company full-time
and although we’re sad to see tom go we
believe that the school is there to
improve
the industry capacity of both students
and staff
see education is not just a
one-size-fits-all endeavor
and it’s not something where success
should be measured by a cold score
that compares one human child with every
other human child
ignoring their skills their experiences
their knowledge their passions and their
pursuits
the music industry college experience
demonstrates that there is a purpose
and positive impact of allowing students
to pursue the things that they love
and that they’re passionate about to
develop their own individual learning
pathway
supported by teachers as guides and
facilitators
and while we’ve chosen musical as a
vehicle there’s no reason this model
can’t be applied to dance or drama
computer gaming or coding in fact we’re
currently developing
an innovation and entrepreneurial campus
education shouldn’t come down to one
single school an education system should
be about providing students
with knowledge and skills that allows
them to lead a meaningful life
filled with passion and purpose and that
is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor
you