Podcast Final

Milpera State High School in Brisbane does not require uniforms to allow cultural expression and create a relaxed atmosphere for its students. Many students at Milpera face economic disadvantage and post-migration trauma. Research shows a link between lower socio-economic status and struggling in school. Milpera provides support such as breakfast and basic supplies to improve outcomes for these students. The school incorporates students' cultural knowledge into the curriculum. Teacher Jessica Smith emphasizes the importance of building rapport with culturally and linguistically diverse students. Students at Milpera often have limited education and may be operating at a primary school level in certain subjects. Despite challenges, there have been success stories of students from Milpera going on to higher education or becoming professionals. However, social class and social mobility continue to impact educational opportunities. The sun is shining on a beautiful Queensland morning and students in all types of uniforms, some with blazers and ties, are making their way to school. However at one school in the leafy suburbs of Chelmer in Brisbane, uniforms are not required. Milpera State High School is an intensive English language school and the absence of a uniform requirement is designed to allow cultural expression and enable students to participate in a relaxed atmosphere. Chelmer is in an area that has generally lower levels of educational disadvantage. However, many of the students at Milpera experience economic disadvantage, grief and loss and post-migration trauma in their short lives. Socio-economic status is based on the wealth, income, occupation and educational attainment of parents within a family or a combination of all these measures. There is a well-established link between students with a lower socio-economic status being less likely to attend university and typically struggling in school. Sociologist Pierre Boudot's theory is that there are forms of capital which determine society's pecking order and which represent constraints on our ability to get ahead in life. Students at Milpera may lack capital in these areas and would probably most likely identify with being in the established working class if asked to complete a survey. Unfortunately, in the field of education, capital is seen as being at stake as the education system is biased and the knowledges of white middle class are valued over all other knowledges. So how well will these students do at school if social class determines their life chances? Both qualitative and quantitative research has attempted to answer this complex question with neither academic researcher seeing eye to eye on their method of research style. Jessica Smith is a relief teacher at Milpera School and other schools in the surrounding area and we will be talking to her about her experiences today. I have worked at many schools in the suburbs close to Milpera and the students at Milpera are quite different to those in my other schools. One of the major factors at play is socio-economic status and the students at Milpera have a lower socio-economic status than the students at my other schools. I have noticed that students at Milpera are required to help much more in their own homes with housework. Some are travelling great distances to get to school because they can't just get a lift from their parents. A lot of the students are helping with the minding of their siblings and many are also from big families with lots of children. A lot of the basics are provided at the school such as computers. There is no possibility of implementing something like a BYOD program which are in place at many of my other schools. The school also provides breakfast for students who may be hungry when they arrive at school. As you can see there are a lot of measures in place to lessen the impact of socio-economic status and improve the outcomes for these students while they are at Milpera. A BYOD program asks students to bring their own device at school. However, students who have never used a computer or iPad previously should not be required to supply one. As these students are coming to Australia with limited education with 15% never having attended school, it would place unrealistic expectations and pressures on the students and their families. In 2019 to 2020, 1,800 children between 12 to 17 years of age settled under the Refugee Humanitarian Program in Australia. All students who attend Milpera are speakers of languages other than English and half of all the students were victims of war and political unrest in their home countries in 2022. However, state schools which are specifically designed to address English skills are rare. Milpera differs from the surrounding schools due to its low socio-economic status in comparison to the private schools in neighbouring wealthier suburbs. Based on the index of cultural and social educational advantage, Milpera is on a level of less than 1,000 which makes it less than the Australian mean. By comparison, a nearby public school has a rate of 1,034 and a local private school has a rating of 1,202. This demonstrates the disparity between Milpera and the neighbouring high schools. Every teacher should know their students and how they learn. Jessica highlights this importance when working with this culturally and linguistically diverse group of students as building rapport is paramount. The work that they complete in the classroom is intertwined with their cultural backgrounds as a means of learning about their students. The students often get activities where they are required to translate an English word in their own language, whether that is Farsi, Dari, Swahili, etc. and then find the meaning of that word in English. Additionally, the students often do group activities where they must talk to other students and this is designed to improve their spoken English. For instance, the students might speak about a topic like food and discuss how food is eaten in the home, what types of food are eaten and who is doing the cooking in their house. Not only are they improving their communication skills in these activities, but they are also including their cultural knowledge which can be shared with the rest of the class. This demonstrates the teacher drawing on the student's fund of knowledge which includes the skills and the student's rich cultural knowledge and practices from their home life to deliver the curriculum in relation to their life. Milpera's school enacts the curriculum into teaching strategies and specific learning contexts to cater for the needs of the students and becomes a negotiated curriculum. As a white teacher coming from a middle class background, Jess attended an Anglo-Centric school with little cultural diversity so working at Milpera would have presented many challenges for her. She observes in the classroom that working hard does not always bring a student success. I came from a school where almost all the students would have identified as Anglo-Saxon. Unfortunately there was racism occurring in the school when I was there. My attitude to other cultures and ethnicities changed during my time at university and has become more inclusive. Working at a school like Milpera requires a teacher to remain positive about the outcomes for these students as it is certainly possible to focus too much on the great hurdles which they must overcome to be successful. I met a past Milpera student who is now a lawyer so that was fantastic. It also requires you to not have the attitude that because they are at a certain age that they should be at an educational level like peers in other schools. Some of these students have never been in a formal school context so even in subjects such as mathematics they may be operating at a primary school level, Jessica says. It appears that the teachers at Milpera school advocate for a standpoint approach to pedagogy which aims to place students who are least privileged by normalised education discourses at the centre of the learning process. Jessica's words solidify the importance of improving student learning. It is by understanding the context and content of the teaching and allowing ideas to be developed by the students themselves. Students completing their education at Milpera will go on to attend another state school with only a small minority of students attending a private school according to the 2022 Milpera annual school report. Anecdotally Jess has heard that many of Milpera's students continue to struggle when they are mainstreamed in their local high schools, often in lower socio-economic areas, a problem which continues in disadvantaged SES areas within the Australian education system and society. This is unfortunate but evidence does suggest students from low SES backgrounds have lower levels of engagement with education which reflects that factors emanating outside of the school continue to be problematic. The students at Milpera have inherited their social status from their parents, of that there is no doubt. Regardless of the students at Milpera's social status, one can only hope that their hard work will provide decent educational opportunities for them and the notion of a meritocracy to succeed is not a myth, or else we must accept the myth that our education system is a genuine meritocracy, where only the smartest and most worthy students come out on top. Social class is a complex and highly contested issue and no one wants to admit that they are on the bottom of the social pile, but that does not mean that somehow magically it all fails to exist. The ability to move between different status groups or social mobility connects between education and life chances, often making education a vehicle for conflict and competition. There is little evidence of social mobility displayed at this early stage in education with the students at Milpera, but the story Jessica tells of a former student becoming a lawyer must give other hopes for their future, despite their social class.