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=Context=  media type="custom" key="4589330"Our school is the only State Secondary in our town catering for just under 1000 students from years 7 to 12, with the next nearest school being approximately 60 kilometres away. We are also quite isolated in relation to further education, meaning that students who might wish to pursue further study, in an area of interest that is not a skills shortage, will need to leave the town to pursue such pathways. The school also has a reasonably high Student Family Occupation index of .54, this does not include families in hardship through drought and resulting declining business incomes. This means that the school has become a one stop shop for school and Vocational and Educational Training (VET) opportunities to the point where we have some of the highest levels of VET enrolments in the state. This has happened to respond to issues of high levels of absenteeism and low rates of retention. While on the surface this seems to have had a positive impact on students, our data shows that absenteeism, rates of retention and VCE scores have continued to decline. This reflects our students morale about post school opportunities which have been quite low.

As a response to these issues the school set about creating a Managed Individual Pathways (MIPs) office and in 2007 started to build a small team of people, including myself to address the issue of student pathways and engagement, after a decade of very little careers or pathways assistance. In doing this the school has made a commitment to improvement through MIPs as a strategy in order to ‘raise student aspirations’. In trying to implement strategies to assist students we have to work with a staff of low morale and self belief due to ongoing leadership issues. These issues of confidence have heavily affected our staff’s ability to take risks in areas in which they are unfamiliar. As a result MIPs as a new thing in the school receives little support and even less understanding, as anything that increases staff work load or increases responsibility is not looked on favourably. It has been quite a battle just to try to work past the issue of maintaining the ‘status quo’.

We now have a committed and enthusiastic principal who has taken the reigns of the school and has a new leadership team and structure beneath him. He is keen to drive change through the school, but with the pressure from regional office this has been heavily focused around literacy and numeracy. Now that we are also adding E5 to the mix of this I am very conscious of adding to the work load / complexity of expectations that leadership has of staff.