Here’s a Punch quiz.
What do Foxtel’s Kim Williams, RMIT Vice Chancellor Margaret Gardiner and Victorian Opera supremo Richard Gill all have in common?
Yes, yes, they are all bright sparks and high achievers but it wasn’t until I became the Member for Bennelong and started to develop strong links with all my local schools in the north west of Sydney that I realised that this talented trio were all graduates of Marsden High School.
Last Saturday night Marsden celebrated 50 years of comprehensive public education and brought together students from across the decades.
You could spot the 59ers and 69ers in a flash. They were the ones peering very very closely at name tags. (Well, come on, who wants to give away their age and wear glasses at a school reunion?) They were also the ones with the best stories.
Kim Williams was happy to acknowledge his very first girlfriend (who was also in the audience) to a hall that was noisy and high on its own excitement.
Await the Foxtel Biography version of this one.
Richard Gill, later the school’s music master, had everyone in stitches as he reminded his peers of the deputy principal whose microphone technique consisted of repetitive blowing and tapping and ‘test test – can you hear me, can you hear me’ to the point where this took up the entire assembly time.
It was a great trip down the time tunnel to a time when secondary education was about to explode and when ambitious families of modest means could see that education was the pathway to social mobility.
First though, you had to actually locate a school. Gough Whitlam always reminds an audience that when he entered the Federal Parliament as the Member for Werriwa in 1952 there was not a single high school in his electorate. It wasn’t much different in the north west of Sydney.
Epping Boys, Cheltenham Girls and Marsden High were all built in a rush in the 1950s and when they opened, students were participants in a new six year high school curriculum known as the Wyndham scheme.
Looking back on his Marsden years at the reunion, Kim Williams identified one teacher after another – “Mr Neil in History who has influenced my thinking ever since” and of course “Richard Gill and Maureen Fryer, close lifelong friends.”
It was Gill and Fryer who could see the musical talent in the working class teenager from West Ryde.
With good marks in the HSC, Kim Williams took the only route then available to bright kids from modest backgrounds – a Commonwealth Scholarship to Sydney University where he secured a Bachelor of Arts in Music. A stellar career in music and media has followed.
The point is this. In the 1950s and 1960s this was the exception. In completing Year 12 and going on to university, Williams was part of a tiny elite. In those days less than 15% stayed at school to complete their HSC. While he might recall with affection some aspects of his schooling, he’s scathing about the tolerance of the times for the drop-out rate after the completion of the School Certificate or Year 10.
As Williams sees it, Marsden High’s motto, “We Learn to Serve” had nothing to do with encouraging community activism but everything to do with “knowing your place.”
To this day it riles him when he talks about it. “Most of the boys were herded towards metal work and the girls to home economics.”
Fast forward from the class of 69 to the class of 09 and Marsden High has certainly changed. It’s highly competitive and Principal Greg Wann is proud as punch when he tells visitors that there are students from 46 different language groups at his school.
Marsden High now has a new motto – “Learning for Life.”
I remember my first visit in 2007 where I met a Year 12 student who struck me as mature beyond his years. His story came as a huge shock.
Along with his siblings he’d spent years in a refugee camp in Pakistan and had witnessed the sort of things that rob you of your childhood forever.
But this young man was one of Marsden’s stars. A top student, a community leader and a fiercely proud Australian citizen. He’s now well into his university studies in international law.
He’s proof positive that postcode is not destiny.
But in 2009, it is still a shock that we have a high school retention rate that has plateaued at around 75% nationally.
The Rudd Labor Government, like the Whitlam and Hawke governments before it, is committed to boosting the retention rate.
The Party’s recently renewed National Platform sets the goal of raising Year 12 equivalent retention rates to 90 per cent by 2020.
This week Families Minister Jenny Macklin put some stick into this commitment.
From January next year, payments of Family Tax Benefit A will be conditional on children aged from 16 to 20 completing or working towards completing their final year of secondary schooling (or an equivalent level of study or training.)
This is a big change and a timely one. The quality and breadth of our schooling tells us so much about who we are and what we treasure.
When Marsden High celebrates its centenary in 2059, the names and the faces will look different. And that will be because of the great expansion that took place at the start of the 21st century.
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