School context
Hunter River High School is a public secondary school located in the town of Heatherbrae, just off the Pacific Highway north of Newcastle and 175km north of Sydney. The school serves the nearby communities of Raymond Terrace, Salt Ash and Tanilba Bay, taking in areas around the Royal Australian Air Force base at Williamtown. The local community has a mix of coastal and rural areas but is also not too far from major mineral, logistical and industrial hubs in the Newcastle-Hunter Valley area. Hunter River High School is in Worimi country, and 26% of its students identify as Aboriginal. With over 800 student enrolments, a large proportion of students are from families identified with lower levels of socio-educational advantage. Over 60% of students are identified as coming from families in the lowest socio-educational advantage quartile in Australia, with only 3% in the top quartile of advantage. While most students were born in Australia and speak English at home, there is still significant diversity with over 20 national backgrounds and 25 language groups in the school community.
Challenge
Hunter River High School is located in an area that traditionally relied on a much larger industrial base for its limited local employment opportunities. The school has a strong record in pairing students with traineeships and pathways into local employment. While the school’s agriculture programs remain popular, the changing profile of opportunities in the Newcastle and Hunter area created a new challenge for the school’s leadership. In addition to bringing new vocational education programs inside the school gate, there was a clear need to help lift the learning and outcome expectations to ensure students are prepared for a shifting education and employment landscape in the local area.
Actions taken
Educational leadership from the classroom to the whole school
The school has maintained a consistent focus on educational leadership across multiple consecutive school plans. This consistency of focus is credited with supporting the continued improvement in practices and programs, leading to better and stronger student outcomes. Hunter River High School set an objective in 2018 to shift the paradigm to ‘high challenge, high expectations, high support’ across the school, with an increased focus on explicit teaching practices in all classrooms. This focus was sustained in 2024, building on previous successful implementation to then work towards a culture of collective efficacy where instructional excellence is prioritised. The school has made effective use of additional equity-based funding to create different models of instructional leadership positions to support quality assessment practices, collaborative data models, and student case management.
Implementing evidence-based teaching practices
Hunter River High School has actively used the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation’s What Works Best suite of resources as an explicit part of its school excellence plan. In recent years, the school has focused first on explicit teaching, then feedback, formative assessment and quality assessment practices. The school’s leadership team has made the effective use of data a priority, grounding it in the individual monitoring and support of each student’s learning journey. Each faculty area is empowered through distributive leadership to take responsibility for the effective implementation of the curriculum through strong scope-and-sequence planning and lesson resource generation.
A supportive environment for senior secondary students
With a diverse range of secondary students and related pathways, Hunter River High School is dedicated to ensuring that students have a pathway suited to their aspirations, abilities and commitment. In recent years, the school has prioritised the implementation of senior secondary study initiatives, including dedicated spaces and additional teaching and learning support for Years 11 and 12. The school has intentionally supported a broad range of curriculum options, including traditional HSC subjects for university pathways, bringing vocational education and training subjects inside the school gate and facilitating school-based traineeships and apprenticeships. The school’s subject selection, student mentoring and career support services have helped to connect students with learning that suits their future aspirations.
Outcomes
In 2023, Hunter River HS was identified as among the most improved secondary schools in NSW for its HSC results. The school demonstrated a 28-percentage-point growth in the proportion of students achieving Top 3 band HSC results, along with improvements in student growth and attainment across the whole cohort. The school received a Secretary’s Commendation Letter and Secretary’s Award in recognition of its consistent dedication to school improvement and the strength of its student outcomes. This is also seen in the improvement in HSC course averages to above that of similar schools and even above the state average for KLAs such as Mathematics. The school has also improved its level of value-added results, shifting into the Excelling category in 2023. Additionally, Hunter River High School showed strong growth in student attendance rates to 2023, exceeding the average change attendance rates as schools across the state returned to normal after the COVID-19 pandemic.