Dorothy’s Yellow Brick Road to Success – The Story of Holroyd High School
By Maxine McKew
The next time you hear someone being dismissive of our public school system you might want to tell them the story of Dorothy Hoddinott and the amazing re-engineering she has achieved as Principal at Holroyd High School in Sydney’s west.
There is nothing flash about this school. On the day of our visit the rain is bucketing down and the 1960s structure is well and truly showing the strain. The guttering is overloaded so vast waterfalls are gushing forth and the flooding of ground floor classes and offices is probably not far off.
Dorothy is unperturbed. She knows that her school, like many others needs a massive capital investment (remember the BER was directed at primary schools) but her priorities are clear.
“With any extra funding that comes my way, I invest in people, not in stuff.”
That approach has paid off in spades. Holroyd punches above its weight and sends an average of 45% of graduating students to universities. Many more make successful transitions into training or work. This from a school where a large percentage of students start high school with little or no English. Holroyd’s value added results for ESL students are above the state average.
It’s a small school, about 500 students and a lot of them are from families where their parents have limited or no literacy in their own language. African, Arabic, and Afghani students are among the more recent arrivals.
These young people are coping with multiple burdens. They have to navigate the deepening social divide and suspicion of new arrivals that now seems an entrenched feature of Australian life, and they are doing this, not just for themselves, but for their families.
For someone from a land-locked country in Africa or Central Asia, Sydney is akin to a foreign galaxy and students at Holroyd are in many cases helping to carry their parents and wider families into the 21st century.
It’s why a big effort is placed on “experiential excursions” – small day trips organised by teachers to help expose students to the wider world of city life and its complexities.
For new arrivals, it can be something as simple as how to ride on an escalator, how to fill out forms at Medicare, how to use public transport.
“In a school such as this, teachers can’t afford to ignore the cultural context,” says Dorothy. She goes on to recount a lovely story about a bright young female student from Afghanistan. Dorothy took her on a trip to Watson’s Bay – home of our great novelist Christina Stead who knew a thing or two about families and culture – and all was going well until the young girl hit Dorothy with a question she never expected.
“How do these boats stay in the water?”
The twenty footers and the luxury cruisers weren’t part of this girl’s life experience but that question kicked off an extended tutorial that ranged over everything from water displacement, the design of hulls, modern shipping routes, and eventually took in the journeys of the great explorers of the 18th century, and eventually got around to the international law of the sea and the obligation of mariners to help those in distress.
Not a bad lesson and with no electronic whiteboard in sight.
We all start to learn this way. As youngsters we are curious. We drive our parents nuts by constantly asking “why?”
The best teachers understand this. They encourage the curiosity of their students, they fire them up about possibilities and a sense of wonder, and it’s precisely this that Dorothy Hoddinott is embedding as best practice at Holroyd.
“We put students at the centre of everything. We consciously evaluate everything we do. Above all I want teachers here to think positively and expect the best. I certainly do. I’m constantly saying to students – you are intelligent, you have a gift. I expect you to finish your HSC. I expect you to go to university.”
Dorothy looks you straight in the eye as she says all this and I wouldn’t want to be the teacher with the bad attitude who confronted this veteran of the public school system.
And confront she did.
In 1995, Dorothy Hoddinott took on the stewardship of a school that she says had a “negative culture and was balkanised”.
The school was known locally as “Import High” a label helpfully reinforced by a group of teachers who referred to newly arrived migrant or refugee youngsters as ‘imports’ and actively excluded them from any of the schools specialist classes. Those unfortunate enough to be tagged in this way were not allowed near the Art room. Discrimination was overt and the right of all students to a comprehensive education was a notion that was simply trashed.
That’s just the way things were at Holroyd High until Dorothy Hoddinott walked in the door and started her very own education revolution.
She put new structures in place, executed some significant HR change, tore up the school rule book (full of ‘thou shall nots’) insisted on transparency and evaluation, and set about writing a new code of behaviour around the concept of respect.
Sitting in her modest office today, Dorothy can recount all of this with equanimity but she must have had steel in her spine to do this. Executing radical change can be a lonely unpopular business.
Dorothy sees it differently.
“Schools in areas of significant disadvantage need leaders who have the intellectual capacity to look deeply at the culture of a school, and to work hard on the issues that will bring about change.”
Biting the bullet on the hard decisions, and doing it early in her tenure as a new Principal, has yielded big benefits. Staff morale has turned around, absenteeism is low, and there is now a stability at the school that was absent before.
Along with improved and measurable achievement for students, Dorothy also points to the non numerical indicators. “We have seen a decline in littering, in petty vandalism, in graffiti, and we now have a very low suspension rate. This is a respectful place. Above all teachers and students have learnt how to negotiate.”
And yes, the Art Room is now open to all comers.
The formula that Dorothy has followed at Holroyd is not that different from what we see at other schools where highly motivated change agents are achieving a stunning turnaround in schools with a high proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The key levers for achieving change revolve around clarity and understanding of an organisational plan for the whole school community, close monitoring of student data, teacher evaluation, staff buy-in on the key goals and a genuine collaborative approach to learning from each other.
Oh yes, extra dollars do help. Courtesy of the final round of the National Partnership funding, Holroyd now has a HAT (Highly Accomplished Teacher) who works in an intensive way with classroom teachers to help with pedagogy and innovative learning approaches. Rebecca Mahon has taken on this role at Holroyd and is one of the reasons that the HATs are a major NSW success story. Pity no-one talks about them.
The idea of pedagogical experts mentoring and promoting the talents of others is an oldie but a goodie. Again, no whiteboard needed.
So is this a story of one gutsy woman defying the system?
In part, yes.
But there is nothing magical about what has happened at Holroyd. It’s taken a lot of time, a lot of smarts, a fair bit of heartburn and it’s probably even taken a few years off Dorothy.
There are still huge challenges at this school and for those of us who have had a more privileged schooling, it is utterly shaming to see the decrepit infrastructure that passes for classrooms and recreational spaces in some of our poorest public schools.
But Dorothy and her teachers have got the important things right at Holroyd.
They understand the power of ideas.
They dream big dreams.
And most critical of all, they know that you have to take the time to listen to young people and answer them honestly when they ask “how do boats stay on water?”
As Dorothy walks us out the gate, creature of habit that she is, she stoops to pick up a stray piece of playground rubbish and leaves us with a sobering message.
“With all the emphasis now on continuous improvement, we are still seeing too much rhetoric and not enough action. Too much blah. Unfortunately the system is just not set up to replicate best practice.”
She’s dead right. But it’s worth another shot.
Click on the links below to jump to the story