Mal Lee and Helen Strauch reflect on building ACT's school system

The territory was going to run its own schools separately from NSW and a group of eight Canberra educators were brought together, tasked with creating an entirely new education system from scratch.

Fifty years on, Mal Lee and Helen Strauch said they were proud to be part of creating a secondary school system that has proven itself through the pandemic years.

"I was incredibly young," Mr Lee said.

"I was 29, responsible for the secondary curriculum and making these decisions about this radical change to move away from syllabus to school-based curriculum development."

He said the members of the Interim ACT Schools Authority were under significant time pressure to create the policy, prepare secondary teachers to write their own curriculum and to design the college programs.

"Canberra was growing at a rate of knots and we knew that we had to have the secondary colleges operational for the start of 1976 because physically we couldn't fit in the students. So we had that deadline," he said.

Mrs Strauch was teaching history and economics at Narrabundah High School when she was invited to join the authority.

She said it was a lean operation without any clerical support but with a heavy supply of optimism and enthusiasm.

"The challenge we faced was to get the system up and going in a very short span of time, but also to prepare teachers for an environment where they will develop the curriculum, they develop the assessment instruments and they'd be responsible for assessing the students," she said.

A key change was to ditch external, high-stakes exams that formed the cornerstone of the NSW Higher School Certificate, in favour of continuous, school-based assessment.

"There was that concern and that traditional approach was one of control, of disempowering [student], using the exams to control the whole operation," Mr Lee said.

"There was a strong community feeling, particularly amongst parents, and teachers, that we needed to move to a situation whereby the students have greater agency over what they did."

Mrs Strauch said there was a high retention rate in the ACT and so many students didn't suit exam-based subjects.

"We needed to cater for a much broader range of interests. And we needed an environment and system which did that," she said.

The Australian National University played a crucial role in ensuring the new senior secondary system would be accepted by the higher education institutions.

The interim authority surveyed year 10 students to find out what subjects they wanted to study and then set about finding specialists teachers to run the courses.

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The colleges were designed to be state-of-the art facilities that were more like university campuses than traditional schools.

When the senior colleges opened in 1976, students were allowed to address their teachers by first name, they didn't wear uniforms and they went home early on Fridays so they could work on Friday night.

Ms Strauch was teaching geography at Hawker College where she took advantage of the open-plan areas to try team-teaching with her colleagues.

"It was an exciting time and I guess because we were young and enthusiastic and had been involved in the writing of the courses, we took the opportunities that were available," she said.

Mr Lee said they were "probably a bit naive" in setting up the entire system in 1974 and 1975.

"When one thinks back, one can do anything in one's 20s. And so the notion that we only had two years to prepare never became an impediment," he said.

Nevertheless, the architects think the school system has proven to be a flexible and robust system that will serve the territory for another 50 years.

"The system was about people. Trusting people, trusting the students, trusting the teachers. It wasn't about scores or indicators," Mr Lee said.

"It was about doing the right thing by people and providing a model that could carry on in the ACT situation. And there's no reason why it can't work for many years to come."

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