Occupation: Education and training

Location: Gippsland - East Gippsland

Reference: 1550657

Location Profile

The School for Student Leadership (Trading as The Alpine School) is an exciting and unique year-nine specialist school. The school has been operating for 24 years and more than 10,000 students have participated in that time both in Victorian and when an international operation was conducted in China from 2014-2019. It currently consists of four campuses

All campuses are in regional Victoria and include:

Forty-five students live, learn, work, play, recreate and undertake adventures at the schools in a unique (in State Education) highly supported leadership education program. The school has modelled the educational program on an Experiential Education model, and at its core has a project/ inquiry learning and social-enterprise focus.

A highly developed curriculum, pedagogical, assessment and reporting approach relates to the Victorian Curriculum F-10 Capabilities.

An extensive outdoor, environmental and adventure education program is an embedded part of the school learning program. All students participate fully in this as it is an essential component of the character education aspect of leadership and experiential education.

While the school has a highly developed outdoor and adventure education curriculum that honours the DoE and Outdoor Education Policy and operational provisions, the teaching and learning program should be of particular interest.

The curriculum revolves around nine learning concepts that have evolved out of the school values and align with and reflect the F-10 Capabilities.



The school recognises that the concept of leadership is contested and has an agreed position that these concepts combine to measure this construct.

The main visible outcome of the program is the Community Learning Project. This is a student-led and driven project that students implement on return to their home communities upon returning home.

A CLP is referred to as triple A rated learning because it is:

Authentic. It is genuinely developed and delivered by students

Agentic. The project is owned by the students, and they have control over it.

Actioned. The students have to DO something to deliver a project. Leadership is a verb.

The action component is important. The school values and notes that leadership is an action not a position or title.

Core Moral Purpose

The core-moral purpose of the school rests in a mixture of the following:

- best practice middle years education, including appreciating the works of Pendergast (2017) Teaching Middle Years and Bandura (2005) Self Efficacy Beliefs of Adolescents.
- a contemporary interpretation of the adolescent "rite of passage',
- "long service leave" for year nine students, as applied to many Australian industrial settings,
- reinterpretation of contemporary paediatric and adolescent psychological research as applied to education,
- understanding the implications of a student-centred approach to education including
- Maslow's (1943) Hierarchy of Needs
- Glasser's (2000) Choice Theory





- what it means to be a learner in the 21st Century and connection with Nature (Louv).
- An interpretation of Tuckman's forming-storming-norming-performing model.

Agency, authenticity, action-Leadership.

Middle year's experiential educational best practice informs our curriculum content and pedagogy. These include including fundamentally engaging activities as the basis of our work, project-based work, inquiry-based learning, experiential learning, working on concrete work tasks, teamwork, integrated use of ICT, reflective practices, meta-cognitive learning, thinking, and learning profiling and community living. The deliberate limitation of resources and the creation of learning/decision-making tension points, among many others are keys to the success of learning.

Rite of Passage

The contemporary "Rite of Passage" refers to that which many say has been lost in the contemporary, western capitalist paradigm. Put simply, many traditional cultures incorporated a period, at about puberty, of; separation from family, minimal communication with family/community, undertaking a significant, prolonged, and arduous journey in the wilderness, undergoing physical/emotional hardship, solving real problems concerning "survival", learning the spiritual mores of the community from elders and other significant adults among other undertakings. Often, the successful reintegration to community/society after such an undertaking, such a "rite", included in scarring or cicatrisation as a mark of successfully undertaking this hardship/separation/reintegration into the community and as recognition of the acceptance into and responsibilities of, an "adult".

Many suggest

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