Foundation Principal Ms Jackie Vaughan is leading Evelyn Scott School, a modern campus built in a new suburb in the nation’s expanding capital, on a trajectory of growth and connection.
What year was the school established?
Located in Denman Prospect, a new suburb in the Molonglo Valley district of Canberra, Evelyn Scott School provides state-of-the-art education for P-10 students focusing on modern education philosophies.
In its name, the school has commemorated an advocate for reconciliation and the advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and women for more than 30 years. It is the first school in Canberra to be named after an accomplished Aboriginal woman and has maintained a connection to its namesake by engaging Ms Charmaene Scott, Dr Evelyn Scott’s daughter, as a member of its school board.
Evelyn Scott School’s Junior Campus opened in 2021, catering for students from preschool to Year 5. It had 180 students in its first year but has now grown to almost 700 students. Ultimately the Junior Campus can accommodate 88 preschool and 600 primary school students.
The Senior Campus for Year 7-10 students, located on the same site, opened at the start of the 2023 with approximately 120 students, and can accommodate 600. After graduating, many students will continue their education at Canberra College, a public school which educates students from Year 11 to Year 12.
Currently, Evelyn Scott School has approximately 50 teachers.
How does the school differ from other schools?
Evelyn Scott School is Canberra’s 89th public school and second zero-emissions school in the ACT. The school’s design has a focus on sustainability; it won the Master Builders Association 2022 Sustainable Commercial Project Award.
Our school was recognised for being a state-of-the-art education facility, designed to cater for 1,288 students from preschool to Year 10. The project involved the construction of eight individual buildings, four carparks, two indoor basketball/netball courts and an expansive sporting oval.
The rich Aboriginal culture and history was made an integral part of the learning experience with nature play, yarning circles and digging pits featured in the outdoor areas.
Designed by Hayball Architects and built by Joss Construction, the emphasis on sustainability contributed to the builders diverting 98.53% of waste from going to landfill.
Earlier this year, Evelyn Scott School won the Innovative Education Initiative category in the 2024 Learning Environments Australasia Design (LEAD) Awards, which celebrates best practice in educational design across the country.
The Innovative Education Initiative category is awarded to projects that showcase significant contributions to learning environments by schools, educators, students, designers, or community organisations.
Our collaboration with Dr Dion Tuckwell from Monash University and Hayball architect Dr Fiona Young was awarded for a unique project in which we worked directly with teachers to enhance their spatial literacy as they grappled with delivering curriculum in a new learning environment.
In bestowing the award, the jury said Evelyn Scott School’s submission demonstrated that education can be a dynamic, multi-faceted and democratic platform for future focussed change with innovative use of space as a vital component.
The jury also said our extensive planning included engagement with experts and teachers and was contextualised to the school to ensure alignment with our educational goals and culture.
What is the school’s philosophy and how does it guide you and your staff?
We are a contemporary, connected, future-focused school, guided by the four principles of the Future of Education Strategy: equity, student agency, access, and inclusion.
The ACT Future of Education Strategy outlines the plan for education in the ACT for the next decade. It is based on what the ACT Government has heard through a conversation with the ACT community and an analysis of issues by a range of experts. The strategy is based on four foundations and four principles for implementation that form a ‘roadmap’ for the future.
The vision of the strategy is to build a future-focused education system that equips children and young people with knowledge, skills and understanding to prepare them to embrace the opportunities and face the challenges that are emerging in our rapidly changing world.
At Evelyn Scott School, the ACT Future of Education Strategy has informed our whole school vision of co-creating a contemporary and connected school with our community. We have aligned our approaches to learning and wellbeing to the Future of Education Strategy and we revisit it regularly to review and refine our practices.
Additionally, the Future of Education Strategy is embedded into the way in which the Leadership Team have formulated our two strategic priorities for the school: one) to build learners’ capacity to solve problems, be critical and creative thinkers, and self-directed learners, and two) to develop learners’ belonging and connection to the school.
How do you provide support and leadership to your staff?
At Evelyn Scott School, we promote a culture of excellence by delivering high levels of support to our staff. We are a family friendly organisation, and we have explicitly documented how we operate and how we all contribute to our positive workplace in our ‘Evelyn Scott School Culture Guide’.
We lead fortnightly Future Focused Learning Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) whereby our teachers engage in shifts of practice and reflect on their practice with their colleagues across campuses. This is ACT Teacher Quality Institute-accredited Professional Learning and requires our teachers to remain accountable and on track with the same strong contemporary vision for our school.
Describe your journey to becoming a principal
My journey to principalship has been unconventional. After graduating, my first teaching job was at Calwell High School in Canberra followed by a range of other ACT high schools and Lake Tuggeranong College as an Executive Teacher of Student Wellbeing. I then worked in the ACT Education Directorate, which gave me a broader knowledge of the system level of public schools, governmental systems and processes how to make change from within.
My first principalship was principal of Flexible Education, where we brought together all the alternative education settings within Canberra, including Murrumbidgee School, which is the school within Bimberi Youth Justice Centre, and the Hospital School at Canberra Hospital.
I was responsible for a youth support worker program for all ACT schools and a range of other programs, including establishing an alternative program for Year 7-10 students with complex and challenging needs who needed to access a range of supports and personalised learning before re-engaging in mainstream education. The program was called ‘Muliyan’. It was a great project to be involved in and to lead; we brought together an outstanding team of people working across campuses in all these flexible education settings.
It was a very different first principalship that helped prepare me for the role of Foundation Principal at Evelyn Scott School. I only had a term or so to build a team and prepare for the first cohort of students who started at the beginning of 2021.
There is a danger in thinking nostalgically about education. Just because something worked for you when you went to school doesn’t mean it will serve the needs of our future generations. There is something to be said about questioning authority and thinking for yourself, and extrapolating from that, re-examining schooling and asking just because it’s always been done that way, should it continue that way?
When I was appointed Foundation Principal, I worked with Lee Crockett, author of Future-Focused Learning: Ten Essential Shifts of Everyday Practice (Changing Teaching Practices to Support Authentic Learning for the 21st Century) and came up with three pillars for our school; we are a contemporary school, we are a connected P-10 school, and we work with our community.
Contemporary learning is about getting students to see that the curriculum is connected. This is why we have seen national movements to combine disciplines such as STEAMD (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths and Design Technology). It is almost impossible to separate subjects because there are connected threads across and throughout every discipline. Compartmentalising the curriculum is an outdated concept which leads to confusion for our students. Integrated studies makes meaningful connections for children and young people.
Our Leadership Team has made a deliberate investment in best-fit teachers; teachers who are proficient and able to build their capacity in contemporary pedagogies.
We have recruited two highly experienced Future Focused Learning Coaches who deliver differentiated training to staff and co-construct a positive and professional culture of reflection.
Our Future Focused Learning Coaches mentor teachers to develop their classroom practices. Together, we work towards a shared vision of strengthening Future Focused Learning principles and provide engaging and student-centred units of inquiry. We frequently communicate to ensure that we remain connected with families and celebrate learners’ growth and progress.
Prior to 2021, our Leadership Team invested time during the project planning phase to meet with all of our enrolled families. These family meetings allowed a valuable opportunity to build quality family relationships and explain our future focused learning model, recognising that families are the experts of their own children. We strive to enrol the family too and want parents and carers to be active participants in school life, involved in the learning of their children.
How do you encourage wellbeing among your staff and students?
We have invested heavily in wellbeing because we understand that learning and wellbeing are inextricably linked. We recognise the evidence-based association between safety, wellbeing and learning.
We extended our Wellbeing Team in 2023 when we opened our high school; we have a Wellbeing Coach and a school psychologist in both our Junior and Senior Campuses, a careers support officer, School Nurse, School Psychologist in the Senior Campus, a number of Learning Support Assistants and a small but highly skilled Youth Support Worker Team.
We use the Australian Student Wellbeing Framework to create safe, supportive and respectful teaching and learning communities.
What role do you play in the day-to-day activities of your students?
One of my key roles is meeting with prospective families. Being a new school in a new suburb, with capacity for 1,400 students, we attract a lot of interest. I often guide families through a tour of the school, which is a great platform to showcase the school’s philosophy in action. I am also highly visible and make sure that I remain connected to the daily work with children and young people by engaging with issues as they arise and working with my team to support them and address their needs.
Bridging the gap between design and use
The Evelyn Scott School Teacher Professional Learning (PL) program supports educators in shifting their practice to enhance their use of innovative learning environments (ILEs).
Designed to support the ACT Future of Education Strategy, Evelyn Scott School has a wide variety of spatial settings from open plan to breakout learning spaces, to enable a broad pedagogical repertoire including co-teaching, individualised conferencing, and small and whole-class group work.
Recognising the need to support staff in using the new spaces, Foundation Principal Ms Jackie Vaughan worked with Hayball Architects and Monash University to create the PL program which was implemented in 2023.
Prior to the beginning of the program, teachers had a wide array of understandings and perceptions of space. These range from Preschool teachers working in the Reggio Emilia approach in which space is the ‘Third Teacher’, to others who noted that they didn’t think about space in relation to their teaching practice.
The 2023 program comprised five workshops across the year based on the tools developed by Dr Dion Tuckwell (Monash University) and Dr Fiona Young (Hayball) through their respective PhDs as part of the Innovative Learning Environment and Teacher Change (ILETC) project at the University of Melbourne.
This work drew upon the expertise of Dr Julia Atkin, who worked on the original plans for Evelyn Scott School, and also Richard Leonard (Hayball) who led the CEFPI (now known as LEA) ‘Don’t Just Stuff It’ Guide exercise.
The termly workshops set the context for teachers to consider how space can enable or constrain their own practices. They then began to evolve their individual practices toward one of a collective, working together as a Community of Practice focused on enhancing the relationship between pedagogy and space. The culminating workshop consolidated the year’s focus on collective use of space to optimise opportunities offered by the school’s innovative learning environments.
The success of the first iteration of the program in 2023 has led to the decision for the school to continue the program into a second year, in 2024. This year will focus on working with the staff to collectively develop a ‘user guide’ to support the thinking to be embedded into the life of the school and for new teachers to learn about the thinking that has taken place before.
Ms Vaughan, Dr Tuckwell, and Dr Young presented the PL program at EduTECH in 2023 and again at the Doing Schools Differently conference in Brisbane in June 2024. They have also presented a webinar for LEA and a podcast which explains this work in greater detail.
They aim to share this work with other schools, publish their work as a case study to support others to also bridge the gap between design and use.
