This school’s ‘KISS and catch up’ approach became its secret to success

You might call it the “KISS and catch up” approach to lifting students’ literacy and numeracy. Keep It Simple, Stupid – and the kids will catch up.

While other schools were spending their share of $1.2 billion in state government pandemic funding to employ external tutors for students, Forest Hill College kept it in-house and used its own teaching staff as tutors.

“There was an existing relationship between staff and students, so it made sense,” said acting principal Nicky Buckingham.

“And then returning after the pandemic was a natural opportunity to reset and refocus.”

The model proved so successful that Forest Hill College, in Burwood East, has adopted it permanently.

It’s an approach that has helped the school become The Age’s 2025 Schools that Excel winner for eastern Melbourne, based on improvements in its VCE results over the past decade.

The annual series celebrates schools that achieve outstanding advancement in their VCE results.

Once considered a sporting school, Forest Hill College has seen its median VCE study score rise from 25 in 2015 to a 10-year high of 29 last year.

Much of that improvement is due to the small state secondary school of just 469 students developing its own data-driven system that tracks year 7 to 10 students’ performance in literacy and numeracy almost in real time.

Mapped out on a collection of colour-coded printouts displayed on a wall in the staffroom, the data can be difficult to decipher for the untrained eye. But to each of the school’s 42 teachers, one glance and everything makes sense.

Students’ names are listed beside a grid. Some squares are green, others beige, representing a gap in a student’s knowledge. When the gap is addressed, a green sticker is placed over the beige square.

“People get a bit nervous talking about student data and sharing students’ data because of not wanting to make kids feel bad,” Buckingham said. “But we flip that narrative and say it’s not about what they can’t do, it’s about what we need to teach.”

Having the performance data displayed on the wall of the staffroom also prompts conversations between teachers in addition to the weekly staff meetings, where Buckingham says the information is clinically assessed.

Members of the school’s leadership team regularly sit down with students individually to talk through their data. Students can nominate areas they want to focus on and work with their teachers to achieve that.

Year 12 student Emily Youssef began her secondary schooling in 2020 and benefited from the tutoring provided by her teachers.

“The help that I received when I needed it was really great,” she said. “I’ve always felt like I can go to a teacher, which is really nice.”

Class sizes are also small, with an average of 15 students per VCE class and a maximum of 25 in other secondary years.

For aspiring law/commerce student Zac Rosso, the smaller class sizes have fostered a sense of collegiality.

“We’re all really friendly with each other … everybody’s super-close, and you can ask anybody for help,” the year 11 student said.

The school, 18 kilometres from Melbourne’s CBD, also began phasing in a new uniform this year for year 7s. Hoodies and polo shirts have been replaced with jackets and V-neck jumpers, and male and female students wear a shirt and tie. By 2027, all students will be wearing the new uniform.

“We want to remind students that we’re at work now, and we need to be doing work,” Buckingham said.

The $1.2 billion statewide Tutor Learning Initiative began in 2021 and is due to finish at the end of this year.

More than 1500 government schools and 600 low-fee non-government schools have participated in the program each year since 2021.

However, according to a 2024 assessment of the program by the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office, many schools did not see an improvement in student learning, with fewer than a third of schools using effective practices and many failing to implement the program correctly.

That has not been the experience at Forest Hill College. For Buckingham, the program sparked one of the best initiatives the school has ever undertaken.

“What we now hear is students in classes saying ‘hang on a minute, this is one of the areas I want to focus on’,” Buckingham said.

“So individual student data has made the difference. It’s no longer just the teacher leading students, it’s much more collaborative.”

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