Caroline Milburn, is the Director and Co-founder of OurSchool – a program helping state secondary schools build thriving alumni communities in Austrailia. Here she shares her experience of their two-year pilot program.
Here in Australia there’s been a tradition of private secondary schools developing their alumni communities to benefit students. That tradition exists in the university sector too. But there’s been no such tradition in the state school sector.
State secondary schools are the only high schools in Australia that are tuition free. They were founded on egalitarian principles, established by the state as secular, free and open to all.
It’s therefore no surprise that our state schools have always educated, and continue to educate, the vast majority of students from poorer families. These are the very schools whose students would benefit enormously from a thriving alumni community!
And as a graduate of state schools, I felt my school system was missing out on an aspect of community building that had self-evidently done so much to help students in other education sectors.
It was this conviction that led me to pursue the idea of creating a program to help state secondary schools grow their alumni communities. After more than a year of researching whether such a program would be welcomed by state school principals, I managed to secure seed funding from philanthropists and the Victorian state government to trial a two-year pilot program, delivered via the Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals (VASSP).
We recently reached the halfway point in our two-year pilot. What have we learned? We’ve learned that alumni development is grassroots work; that to achieve progress you need to develop trusting relationships with key teachers.
We’ve learnt that you need to be embedded in the school to start and grow these relationships. We’ve learnt that raising awareness about the program within the schools, among the teachers, students and alumni, is a process that takes much longer than we initially thought it would. It requires constant, focused attention.
We’ve learnt that alumni are incredibly enthusiastic about going back and giving back to their schools and students love to hear their advice. We’ve learnt that connecting alumni to their schools is a joyful experience!