Celebrations
01-Jun-2001

Winners of the ACS National Innovation in School Careers Programs Award 2000 by Martin Murley
The winners of the Australian Careers Service (ACS) National Innovation in School Careers Programs Award 2000 were announced at the Hobart AACC National Conference in April.
Winners with H Van Beek	The Award is the key annual activity of the Australian Careers Service (ACS). The prime focus of the ACS is school-based careers programs and the careers practitioners that deliver these programs.
It aims to promote career education as a professional and recognised field of endeavour, and encourages networking and knowledge sharing across the profession. Already over 1100 school based careers practitioners are registered members of the ACS. WA Strikes The inaugural ACS National Innovation in School Careers Programs Award was presented at the Australian Association of Careers Counsellors (AACC) conference in Hobart last month. In a shock in the Award’s first year, the judging panel were unable to separate two of the five finalists, deciding to jointly award the winner’s prize. As a further surprise, both the award-winning programs were from Western Australia! At a social function held at the ‘Antarctic Adventure’ in Hobart’s Salamanca Place, the Chief Executive Officer of the Enterprise and Career Education Foundation (ECEF), Harris van Beek, presented the Award to the joint winners; Ocean Reef Senior High School and Hamilton Senior High School. The two WA schools were chosen from a finalist list that also included excellent programs from Mirani State High School (Qld), Scotch Oakburn College (Tas) and the Coopers Plains District (Qld). In presenting the Award, van Beek outlined the vision of the ECEF, and commended all nominees for the Award, noting that interest for the 2001 Award is likely to be high given the profile of the 2000 Award. Nominees for the Award self-judged their own programs against the Careers Education Quality Framework (CEQF), jointly developed by the ECEF and the Career Education Association of Victoria (CEAV). Two staff from each Award winning school were flown to the AACC conference in Hobart (and provided with registration and accommodation) to receive the Award as part of their prize. The Award winners also participated in a CEQF workshop at the conference. Accepting the Award on behalf of Hamilton Senior High School, Valerie House praised the support her school recevied. ‘At Hamilton, students access careers programs at all levels from transition in Year 8, Unilink in Year 10, to TEE seminar programs and traineeships in upper school,’ Val said. ‘The administration is very supportive of the careers education program across the whole school with timetabling, funding and encouraging new ideas.’ All Year 10 students at the Hamilton studied career education as a separate subject and completed one week’s work experience. The Unilink program also allowed 25 of the Year 10 students to attend Murdoch University for a week to get an idea of life at university. ‘This whole education corridor has a very low uptake of students into university,’ Val said. ‘We have a very thorough counselling program for the selection of subjects in upper school. Students have a one-on-one interview with a counsellor and then a second interview where the parents are invited to come in too. The students can then make fairly wise choices backed up by the career education classes, it’s a two pronged approach.’ Val said the school had also established strong community and industry links through the Excellence in Education Compact. Doug Gibson from Ocean Reef Senior High School said he had entered the competition to see how well Ocean Reef’s program rated according to the national framework. ‘I felt we had quite an innovative program, the things we do are quite original and decided to just have a go,’ he said. ‘We have two wonderful teachers in Zena Hesford and Alastair MacNeill, who are both more than happy to express their ideas and try new things.’ Doug also praised the strong support the careers education program received from the school’s teaching and administration staff. Every Year 8, 9 and 10 student had one career education lesson each week while upper school students had access to a work studies course. He said the program was designed to equip students with the skills to make decisions about their future career by learning about themselves and the workplace. Doug said that the CEQF helped confirm that the school was doing many of the things it should be doing with careers, counselling and the VET program. Both schools spoke of the benefit of using the CEQF to review their programs, indicating that the while the Award provided welcome recognition for their programs and the schools, the process of applying the CEQF to their programs was an invaluable exercise. It helped to identify the positives and the shortfalls in each careers program, providing both schools with some direction for future developments. In spite of the amount of detail within the CEQF, both schools found the framework surprisingly easy to use, following a simple step by step process. Hamilton Senior HS is even putting together a brochure for parents based on the outcomes of completing the CEQF, using the same performance indicators as the Framework. In addition to completing a written nomination form, all Award finalists were interviewed by the selection panel. The Award was administered by the ACS and kindly supported by the ECEF. Nominations for the 2001 ACS National Innovation in School Careers Programs Award will open in September 2001, and details will be made available to all ACS members. (Extracts of this article were sourced with thanks from WA School Matters, Edition 4).
Related websites
Details: the ACS website

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