By Jill McLachlan
What if the transition from Preschool into Primary school was a seamless journey. What if hands-on exploration, engagement, time for questions and discovery didn’t stop when a child entered school. What if classrooms were thoughtful, intentional and felt like home? And what if children could keep learning everyday with others, free from competitions and certificates, free from bells and uniforms, and with oodles of time to give themselves to learning with joy! Such a place exists in Hornsby NSW.
‘What is Blue Gum?’ A simple but profound question that this new school, for students from Preschool through to Primary School, keep returning to, as they share the rich story of their educational programs with the community around them. They opened their doors in 2022, not simply to be, ‘just another school’ in the area. School Principal, Jill McLachlan, was determined to create a school for every child, that offered a new and hopeful option for families, “that bravely chose to reclaim school as a place of engagement, joy, commitment and connection. A place where every child is known and finds voice. A thinking place, not just a busy one!’.
And what makes it different? It’s a school that intentionally resists the trappings of traditional schooling that grew out of the industrial era. That’s when schools were first designed to train workers for factories – where the most important thing was uniformity, compliance, following instructions without question, and avoiding thinking outside the box! At Blue Gum, this factory model of schooling is nowhere to be seen! The school is built in a stunning and heritage-listed Arts & Craft Mansion, the spaces are warm and inviting, there’s not a uniform in sight and the students call their teachers by their first names. Ratios of teachers to students (1:12 in Primary; 1:8 in Preschool) are above the mandated state ratios and powerfully position Blue Gum to place significant and supportive relationships at the centre of their curriculum.
Also different from other schools around it, Blue Gum is determinably anti-competition. They don’t use stickers or certificate as motivators for behaviour. Instead, they focus on supporting their students to develop intrinsic motivation and a desire to live well for the sake of themselves and others! In a world where schools give preference to ‘certain types’ of learning (and certain types of learners) above others and position students in comparison to one another, the choice to design a school experience for students that is about learning with others, not competing against them, is a breath of fresh air! In this collaborative culture, the school describes the diversity and difference of its people as a gift to be nurtured, not a challenge to be avoided. Never has it been more important for the world, for its citizens to learn how to live alongside each other, sticking together, despite differences. At Blue Gum, this is their intent, to together find ways across the school to, “learn with and from each other and to stay in conversations even when they’re hard, to develop our skills at doing life well together, resisting the easier, but inevitably lonelier, road of living isolated from one another.”
Another distinction of Blue Gum – is the choice for their educational program to be meaningful and authentic, in both the Preschool and Primary School. Learning experiences are contextualised in real-life, students learn in and from the local community and ‘busy’ mindless tasks are avoided at all times. In Jill’s words,
“We don’t do pretend and boring - ever! Our school is a place of doing, a place of thinking and relating and important it is a place of joy! Our learning program is founded on authentic, meaningful and hands-on experiences that invite all our students to lean into to their learning, to think with others, and importantly to re-think and reflect, going deep with their questions and explorations of concepts.”
As such, at Blue Gum, working in small groups is their normal as they make time for dialogue, listening and the consideration of different ideas. Students are able to give time to their thinking, to playing with ideas and concepts and to revisiting, in order to take their ideas further. And their voices have genuine influence, in the way the program evolves, shaping the inquiries they take. They are taken seriously as thinkers, and in turn they take themselves seriously. Students have time to engage with commitment, in Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of flow, working with meaning, having influence, and shaping their own story every day!
In all this, because of their small size, it is not unusual to see a Blue Gum class out and about in the local community, visiting Hornsby Library or wandering through Lisgar Gardens. With no bells or interruptions in their days, there is time for these important encounters together - to have fun, to invest and to simply be! They embrace just enough gazing at the stars, with their feet still firmly on the ground!
Another distinction of Blue Gum is the way they resist power-over, manipulative forms of teaching, that can position students as ‘less than’, where compliance is valued above all else. In this way they have high expectations of their teachers, as well as of their students. As Jill shares,
“It would never be ok for a teacher at Blue Gum to shout at a student. As a team, we talk about, ‘calling our students up’ into who they can be, not calling them out in order to shame them into good behaviour. It seems crazy in this day and age that we would even need to make this distinction, but we do. There is way too much inappropriate strong arming of children by adults in schools, and it needs to stop.”
Often, as parents, we look for a school that we believe will offer our child the best opportunity to ‘do well’. Blue Gum, leaning into this question from parents, asks, “Do well at what?’ For them, this is what ‘doing well’ at school can look like:
“We want our students learn how to be more human together, to develop deep understandings of concepts, to learn to write in order to author texts, to fall in love with books, so they become life-long readers, to engage with mathematics, design, science, history and so much more, in order to better understand the world and to be able to contribute to it with intention, imagination and empathy! We want them to investigate, to discover and to invent, to navigate difficulties and learn from mistakes, to accept themselves as just a part of a bigger story and in doing so, recognise we need each other! And in that we want them to leave us confident in who they are, loving learning, humble and confident, knowing that they matter and they belong.”
Finally, Blue Gum believes in community – in the power of the group (not just the individual), and their practice is rooted in a strong belief in the social construction of knowledge – we learn in and through relationship! As such, their program is built on the understanding that powerful learning occurs with others, and that learning is shaped by inquiry, meaning and a commitment to thinking - and that that way of being at school is the right of every child (and adult). In this way, the school does, in this way, ask more of its students than a traditional school, not less! They expect children to lean in, make connections, to engage and to respect others. And they expect this of themselves.
Jill McLachlan is the Principal of Blue Gum Community School's Hornsby campus.