The Creation, Sustaining and Revitalisation of the ACT Secondary College Model

Courtesy Bill Donovan

Mal Lee

This historical analysis examines the creation, sustaining and the challenges facing the revitalisation of the Australian Capital Territory’s government secondary colleges and its unique, college based Year 12 assessment system.

It is a read for all interested in sustaining school change, and those wanting to revitalise the ACT’s government colleges.

It examines why this core system wide school organisational change could have been made, and why the model could have been sustained forty plus years, when globally virtually all the other school innovation of the 1960s and 1970s has long disappeared.

It asks why the ACT secondary college model has been so successfully normalised as part of growing up in Canberra, why it has been universally accepted by the electorate and why decades after its inception the model still has the strength to be built upon, and readied for the decades ahead.

The analysis provides the ACT education community – the students, teachers, parents, the tens of thousands of graduates, the college leadership, the administrators, Government and the tertiary educators – an insight into the model’s educational vision, its guiding principles, key attributes and culture, and a base from which to discuss the attuning needed for the contemporary world.

The analysis moreover provides educators and researchers globally an important insight into the largely unexplored art of sustaining, and revitalising core system wide organisational change.

The ACT college model remains globally one of the few core school organisational changes that has survived the change of head, the change of government and forty plus years on seemingly has as strong a learning culture as when the colleges first opened in 1976.

What is it that has enabled the ACT change to continue to grow, and now tackle significant revitalisation when near all the other major innovations made in Australia in the mid 1960s and 1970s – and indeed in later decades – have long disappeared?

Published under Creative Commons the analysis can be freely downloaded at –http://douglasandbrown.com/publications/–