Parents are prioritising their children’s education in the family budget, with rising costs of living failing to dent enrolments at Australia’s independent schools.

Almost one in every six students is now educated at a private independent school – up from one in eight in 2000 – driven by parents’ choices to immerse their children in the values, philosophy or religion of their community, reports Rosanne Barrett from The Australian.

Extract from article Strength in Numbers from The Australian Independent Schools Guide 2023.

This emphasis on skills is also in play at many of the diverse independent schools.

At St Catherine’s School in Melbourne, the all-girls’ school introduced a new framework last year to make their education more contemporary and accessible to all their students.

Developed after the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic era, the way the school teaches has shifted to focus on how to learn over what to learn.

Deputy principal of teaching and learning Ceri Lloyd says the research-based approach was built around enabling students to apply, evaluate and reflect on their own learning.

“We wanted them not to passively just receive rote-learning anymore, we wanted them to engage and step into a learning-to-think and thinking-to-learn model,” she says.

“It’s a culture of thinking. It’s not about saturating them with knowledge and content, it’s about how to engage them with a strategy to understand that content. It’s very much a teacher working in partnership and building the student’s skillset.”

She says the program was made possible by the school’s support for innovation and their smaller class sizes, of no more than about 18 students.