Earlier this year, Lake Colac School relocated to purpose-built facilities, better matching the specialist education programs it offers. Principal Mr Cameron Peverett shares how the school is preparing students for life beyond the classroom.
Mr Cameron Peverett was appointed Principal of Lake Colac School in 2017. During his tenure, the school has moved site and been renamed. Mr Peverett is also President of the Principals’ Association of Specialist Schools (PASS), and was this year re-appointed for a further two-year term.
What is the history of the school?
Lake Colac School was established in 1985 as the Colanda Education Unit, which was a part of the Colanda Centre, a residential service for adults with disabilities.
In 1986 the school was renamed Colac Special Developmental School and accepted students up to 25 years of age. In 1997, the age limit for the school became 18 years of age, and the following year, in 1998, the school was renamed Colac Specialist School. In 1999, the school relocated to Wilson Street, where it remained in relocatable buildings until 2023.
In 2024, the school changed its name to Lake Colac School and relocated to purpose-built facilities on the previous Colac High School site, utilising the original school building constructed in 1911.
The Colac High School merged with Colac College in 2008 and relocated to Queen Street. This left the former Colac High School site abandoned for 16 years prior to Lake Colac School now being located there.
What is the school’s student and staff population?
Lake Colac School has approximately 65 students, ranging in age from five to 18. We also have an Early Education Program on site, with 12 pre-schoolers currently enrolled. We treat that as a school-readiness program. Not all the students who go through that program enrol with us; we try to supplement or complement Kindergarten programs by having our students here become as school-ready as possible.
The students enter the program with having some form of developmental delay, not necessarily an intellectual disability. We get them as ready for school as possible; some enter into prep at Lake Colac, and others go into prep in mainstream schools.
We have 41 staff, some of whom are part-time; the full-time equivalent is about 35. We have a teacher and two teacher aides in all classrooms, bar one or two. Our smallest class has four students, with three staff.
What is your background?
This is my eighth year as Principal at Lake Colac School. Prior to that, I was Principal at a specialist school in Hamilton; the school was renamed Hamilton Parklands School during my seven-year tenure.
I’ve got about 19 years of special education under my belt. I’ve been President of the Principals’ Association of Specialist Schools (PASS) for five years, taking on the role in 2019. I’ve recently been granted tenure of a further two years.
PASS has more than 200 members, comprising principals and assistant principals. We represent all government specialist schools, including schools for students with intellectual disability, autism, physical disability, or who are deaf; the whole gamut. Currently, we have 100% membership of all eligible schools – every single specialist school has at least one member in PASS.
What is Lake Colac School’s philosophy and how does it guide you and your staff?
Our philosophy is built around all students being able to achieve their personal and academic best. We try to provide the same or similar types of educational and whole-of-life opportunities for our kids so that they’ve got the greatest opportunities in life beyond schooling, once they graduate from Lake Colac School.
A large part of our curriculum is around foundational learning and becoming as literate and numerate as possible. As our students enter into the senior years of the school, they then start being able to apply their knowledge and skills into the workforce or further learning beyond school.
How does the school differ from other schools?
We have highly tailored programs on an individual basis for all our students – hence why there’s such a large staffing profile. Every student has an individual learning plan; every student is working at their level, at their capacity, at their rate of learning. We don’t rush learning – we make sure that learning is consolidated and embedded before moving on to the next thing, which sometimes means the process can take a little longer than usual. However, we know that through their learning, we’re more confident that they have the knowledge and the skills required to advance into their community, through employment or further learning.
We’ve got a robust literacy program, based around a structured, systematic synthetic phonics program, which we embed across the entire school, except in our senior program. Students participate in the program for 45 minutes a day, four days a week. It’s intensive and at their level so that we get our kids reading – and reading competently – with a heavy structure around developing their comprehension at the same time. We’re seeing enormous gains in their learning, and in their reading ability particularly, because of the way that we’ve structured that, all based on the evidence of what works.
When students move into our senior programs, it’s again highly tailored to the individual. All of our students, when they turn 15, complete work experience in the community, regardless of ability – just the level of support will differ.
We also run what we call ‘Enterprise Education’, where the students create micro businesses. They’re responsible for the name of their enterprise, their uniforms, their logo design, the products and services they’re delivering, and they’re responsible for the budget, so there’s a lot of built in literacy and numeracy.
Students also run a cafe and a school lunch program; they take the orders, make the food and deliver it to staff and students. We know this practical application of their literacy and numeracy skills is working because over the last six years, every student who has graduated from our school has gone into open or supported employment, trending towards open. If you go to McDonald’s in Colac, it’s highly likely that you will be served by one of our former students.
We do a lot of planning and preparation with the kids and employers to make sure that it’s going to work. We don’t want to burn any bridges along the way by having a mismatched placement or not enough support wrapped around the student when they go out there. We’ve got former students employed in local industry, in supermarkets, real estate agents, dairies, on farms, at McDonald’s: they’re everywhere.
How do you provide support and leadership to your staff?
Leadership is dynamic; there are different types of leadership you need at different times. I describe my leadership style as a combination of instructional and distributed leadership. I like to build the capacity of my staff and get them into low-level leadership roles early and increase that through their time with us to take on portfolios for the school. Most of the teachers who have been with us for a couple of years have some additional portfolio that they are in charge of, which means I can provide a light touch, with gentle guidance.
Another important part of leadership, particularly in a specialist setting, is to be present. I try to follow the motto of visiting ‘every classroom, everyday’, even if it’s only for a couple of minutes, just to pop in to say G’day to the kids and the staff, and make sure that I’m present and visible. On the rare occasion things go pear-shaped, I’m in there, helping the staff at the same time with everyone else. I think that’s really important.
I try to be, as best I can, a ‘people by day, paper by night’ kind of person. I try to be as accessible as I can, although that’s not always possible, particularly with the role as President of PASS as well. But I try to be as available as I possibly can. Having a clearly articulated vision, and then building the capacity of those around you to help enable that, is crucial. I don’t want all the great programs that we’ve got fall over should someone change their role or move on. If you’ve built the culture of the place, and the ethos and leadership within the school, then disruption is minimised as changes happen.
How do you encourage wellbeing among your students?
Our school has an overarching wellbeing strategy, which is multilayered. The main thrust is around school-wide positive behaviour support, which caters for all students across the school. It is taught through our school values and behaviour expectations – these are the behaviours that we expect, and this is how we explicitly teach those behaviours.
Underneath that sits the Berry Street Educational Model (BSEM), which is taught in the classroom as part of the curriculum. We’ve got kids who come from trauma background, so they need something a little different, which is supported through the BSEM. It is taught through our social/emotional learning sessions and house meetings and includes the teaching of our character strengths curriculum.
All our students, because of intellectual disability, have communication delays, so we have very clear strategies around how we support the communication needs of our kids.
There are certain strategies that you might put in place for a student who may have an intellectual disability, but that won’t necessarily work in the same way for a kid who has experienced trauma. We need to have a lot of tools in our toolkit to be able to support and co-regulate the behaviour with the students, leading into the students being able to self-regulate their behaviour.
What are some of the challenges faced by teachers in the specialist school sector?
I come from a teaching lens. I think there’s two main factors that the Department of Education is still catching up with. Part of that is around having a robust and agreed curriculum, and the way that we teach kids with disability. There has been a lack of sophistication from a department level around how do we teach the kids in the best ways that’s going to make the most impact, and how do we assess their growth because the kids don’t learn a year for a year, like their mainstream counterparts generally do.
It’s a lot harder to assess the impact of the teaching and learning for that particular child when their growth is not at the same rate as their mainstream peers who don’t have intellectual disabilities. I think that’s something for us to work our way through.
Specialist schools sit under the same curriculum and assessment standards as government schools. Our curriculum is the Victorian Curriculum. A lot of our students operate in the pre-Foundational years. However, as a result of our systematic synthetic phonics program, we have fewer students who are sitting in that level because of the way that we’re teaching. We’ve got kids who are at the same level or just below their mainstream peers, particularly in the early years.
Schools like ourselves are able to capture that data but there isn’t a system-wide way of doing it, so when we have to report back to the Department of Education on the curriculum levels of our kids, they’re not going to see much, if any, growth. Whereas we can show the growth that kids have within any given content descriptor to show that while they can’t do it perfect yet, they can do it with an extra level of independence that they couldn’t before, or they’ve achieved a couple of the goals within that level, they just haven’t achieved all of them.
Any final words?
I have loved every bit of my journey in specialist education and I am looking forward to many years to come working with students, staff and the families in these communities.
