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Video transcript

My name is Georgina Davis.

I am the student agency and pastoral care leader at Craigmore High School, and I have the wonderful opportunity to work with students to improve their student voice.

Student agency is so beneficial to students for so many reasons.

Primarily at our site, I think it's around engagement.

If you get to pick your area of interest, you are more willing to engage with that unit of work or that program and therefore the outcomes are going to be way more authentic and better for our students.

Students are at the forefront of our design process because it's all around their learning.

Everything starts a blank canvas and it's where they choose to take it.

Fashion design allows me to just create whatever I want. At the moment I wanted to explore, like, jewelry.

So I’m honestly really proud of just the first go I've given, just being able to create something.

As a student agency leader, I get to work with a range of different students through student leadership groups.

I also get to work in curriculum areas, so with your math, science, etcetera, and get to work with them around co-designing learning for students.

At our site, we have an extremely diverse range of students, so equity is at the forefront of everything we do here.

Hence why I suppose student agency has led into that, because we need students to actually voice what's important to them and what makes their learning equitable.

Therefore they can engage in the learning themselves.

So CALM stands for Craigmore Alternative Learning and Mentorship program.

It works around the reference model of having a mentor, working with kids one on one, on their personal social wellbeing and their learning intentions.

The class sizes are small, making it easier for them to access the program with the least amount of anxiety.

I'm not going to lie, I was getting suspended all the time, getting into fights and stuff like that, and then they pulled me into CALM, it’s helped with, like, mental health.

There's always people here that have your back, lots of support, if you’re ever feeling down one day, there's always someone that you can talk to.

The main focus of the program is getting kids engaged, making them happy to be here at school.

We try and get kids interested in education again and the kids that have given up all hope, or they've left their dreams, we nurture them to get them back on track with what they want to do.

So for my Year 12 community project, Ashley said, “Do you want to design the garden?”

And then as soon as she said that my heart was down for it, I wanted to do it straight away, and then that's when I just ordered all the trees, bought garden beds, started building it.

Darcy is a fantastic student. He has put so much effort in, he's got raised garden beds, he's got lettuce, he's got broccoli, you name it. He is so invested in that garden.

Well, I never really thought I would like getting my hands dirty or gardening or anything, but ever since I've started doing this garden project, I've got into plants and, yeah, I love doing it.

After my students finish school I want many, many things for them.

But I'm hoping with the strong student agency focus we have at this site, they then have the goals, the stamina, the thriving, striving attitude to go and improve other aspects of their life and have the skills that they know how to do that because they have developed it through student agency programs at our site.

End of transcript.

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