General News
15 January, 2025
Education Precinct working hard to improve services for students
A state government trial program is showing promising signs in Mount Isa.
Outgoing Mount Isa Educational Precincts coordinator Mark Wrigley says a state government trial program to better steer the rollout of education and social services towards the specific local needs of school children in the city will provide a solid foundation to help at-risk youth for years to come.
Mr Wrigley, who this month will be replaced by long-serving Mount Isa educator Chris Pocock in the coordinator role, says the unique “place-based” approach being developed by the Mount Isa Educational Precincts team at the Queensland Department of Education facility on Miles Street, is already seeing improved communication between the nine state schools in Mount Isa and more than 50 government and social service operators across the city that work with young people.
The Educational Precincts initiative focuses on the cross pollination of ideas and service delivery to seek improvement across three primary areas – attendance and engagement of students at local schools, coordination of case management across all ages and needs and easier transitioning for students moving between school grades and into the post-schooling workforce.
With children in rural and remote areas at increased risk of truancy as well as not completing their schooling, Mr Wrigley said there was an identified need to better address any shortfalls in social service delivery for at-risk children by first improving coordination among frontline stakeholders.
“Our role has been about how we can work together, without duplication, to support young people and their families reengage in education to ultimately set themselves up for a better future,” he said.
“And through this Precinct, we are taking a ground up approach rather than a system down approach.
“Education Queensland developed its plan around equity and excellence, which looked at ways things could be done differently – and the concept of Education Precincts grew out of that.
“Across Australia there is already a lot of placed based approaches underway and so it was decided to have Education Queensland take the lead in its own initiative as teachers are at the frontline of these issues.
“There are isolated communities like Mount Isa, and it was decided we needed to find a better way to work across the local community to focus on local priorities.
“We couldn’t just take the work our team has done and apply it to Longreach – what we are doing is very specific to Mount Isa, which has come about through our role in listening to this community.”
A major component of the early work of the Precinct has been on creating the data collection systems that will enable information from various social service and education providers to be collated to determine where there are shortfalls in local case management needs, whether that be among specific demographic groups or assistance programs.
The Precinct has plans to collate these findings into a delivery roadmap later this year. It is hoped this will provide information that can be shared with government when making relevant policy decisions.
The team has also been working towards developing a three-pronged governance structure that will enable frontline education and social service providers to meet regularly, with community leaders and regional senior government officials also included in the communication structure, which aims to further enhance the quality of information sharing across the relevant inter-government agency and stakeholder groups.
The precinct, which was an initiate of the previous state government, had originally only intended to be operational for one year in just a handful of locations.
However, the early success of the Mount Isa team’s work has seen the program extended to at least the end of 2025.