‘We have incredibly talented teachers’: Three schools crack coveted VCE 30 club

Most schools discourage too much chit-chat from students, especially when the business end of the VCE cycle is looming, but at Forest Hill College, they take a different approach.

The Burwood East school says its conversation-based approach to planning final exams has helped boost it for the first time into the exclusive “30 club” of schools achieving median study score of 30 or above at VCE.

The other two schools to crack the 30 club this year are Ballarat High School and its neighbour in the regional city, Damascus College.

Forest Hill College, a small state secondary school, credits a listening culture for helping to push its students’ VCE performance to new heights, with its median VCE study score rising to 31 from 29 in 2024.

A median study score of 30 is the state average and is the marker of an academically solid institution, based on more than 10 years of VCE data collected by The Age.

Forest Hill dux Jennifer Schutz scored an ATAR of 98.15, and 16 per cent of her classmates also achieved 90-plus scores.

Acting principal Nicky Buckingham said students had been encouraged to talk to teachers about their academic goals and were eager to see where they could improve, and that teachers were keen to listen.

“When we’re talking to students about their academic outcomes those conversations are having a bit more depth, and there’s more interest in those conversations with the students,” she said.

Students were also eager to see their data and work with their teachers to understand where they could improve.

Although Forest Hill was once considered a sporting school, more students now more focused on their academics, she said.

“We have ongoing conversations with our students so they know exactly where they are in their learning all the time,” Buckingham said.

“I think if you know where you are, and you know where you want to go with your learning, then it’s an easier shift in focus to our academic approach.”

The school was also recognised as a School That Excels this year.

Ballarat High School principal Stephan Fields said keeping teachers’ skills up-to-the-minute was the key to pushing students’ VCE performance to the next level.

The VCE teachers at the school met regularly and have “sacrosanct” time together to discuss assessment, moderation and feedback, and what was working and what was not, he said.

The school had been sitting on a median study score of 29 for the past few years, and having pushed through the 30 barrier, Ballarat High is eying off even more improvement.

“Our aspirations also lie in terms of pushing it even higher,” Fields said.

“We will be working with [students] closely to make sure that we can keep improving as a teaching staff and as a school.”

At Damascus College, a Catholic co-educational school just 10 kilometres down the road from Ballarat High, principal Steven Mifsud said the school celebrated students on vocational pathways as well as those with an academic focus, awarding duces to both streams.

It is an approach that begins long before years 11 and 12, Mifsud said.

“For the last three to five years, we’ve had a really strong focus on literacy from year 7 to 10, building up high expectations for our learners and being really clear about classroom practice,” he said.

That, and a really comprehensive coaching program for teachers with regular meetings, helped shift the school in the right direction.

“We have incredibly talented teachers who work with us and our young people,” he said.

In particular, the school was incredibly proud of its English average study score of 32, Mifsud said.

“It is about small, incremental engagement of our staff and our students, and I think we’ve done that really well by actually being really clear about who we are as a community.”

Damascus’ VCE dux, Kylan Jans, scored an of ATAR 99.5 and its vocational major dux was Meg Cahir. Eleven Damascus students received ATAR scores above 90, and 254 of the college’s students achieved study scores above 30.

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