Berkley Center

Background: As part of the Education and Social Justice Project, in May 2017 undergraduate student Nicholas Na interviewed Kate Hilyard, coordinator of learning support for First Nations students in years seven through nine at St. Ignatius’ College. In this interview, Hilyard discusses the role of proactive academic intervention in increasing successful outcomes for indigenous students.

Hi, Ms. Kate! I’ve actually already heard a lot about you. I’ve done a couple of interviews with your former students, and almost all without fail have mentioned you and your work. Could you describe what your work is and what you do at the school?

I essentially coordinate the academics of the indigenous boys in the day school. I work primarily work with years seven, eight, and nine. I’m liaising with their classroom teachers about curriculum differentiation and modification, adjustments to assessment tasks to meet their learning needs. I coordinate the speech and language pathologists we have coming in on site, also occupational therapists. With all the professionals we work with, it’s really a multidisciplinary approach that we take with these boys. I liaise with the heads of house about pastoral issues if they’re affecting their learning. I now coordinate the boarding tutors for these year seven, eight, and nine boys. I withdraw the boys from class to work with them at least twice a week on curriculum, and that’s really about assessment tasks and assignment planning, preparation, and completion. They’ll be removed from class and will come up to my office. We’ll work one-on-one or in small groups to get tasks completed, corrected, and planned for. I have face-to-face with students, but I also coordinate all the other academics around them. I’m also providing class support with boys with high needs, so I’ll go into classes and team-teach. It’s a lot of meetings, a lot of running around, but I love it! It’s rewarding in many, many ways. 

I hope I give my full self to the boys when they’re present with me. And that’s something I’ve been really working on, because I got a lot of different roles besides working with the First Nations students. I really make a big effort: when a boy walks into this office, I’m solely there for him, and I limit distractions. I’ll sit beside them; they’ll feel like they’ve got my whole attention, and we’ll work together. 

What’s your background?

I’m from a small community up north with a high population of indigenous people. I went to school with a high number of indigenous kids up there. I grew up playing sport with my indigenous friends, and they were really good buddies. I was accepted in community there, and they were accepted in my family at home. Then, I went overseas for a few years and taught.

Where?

Over in London. I was in London for a few years, and then, instead of going home, I moved to Sydney with just more opportunity down here. I happened to just stumble upon this school. One day, I was just out there (I was on playground duty), and a boy who I had taught previously from up north, an indigenous boy, was out there. We were just catching up and having a yarn because we hadn’t seen each other for so long. He had a [football], so I was just tossing the footie with him (I play football as well). A previous boss who worked here in St. Ignatius’ was looking out of the window and saw me just chatting to one of the indigenous boys (a couple of the others were around), and he came up to me and said, “What are you doing?” I thought I was in trouble. He asked how I knew this boy, and I said, “Oh, I know his family, and he’s from up north. I’ve taught him before and a whole bunch of his other mates. Now he’s down here.” He didn’t really say much and just walked off. He then asked around about me. At that point, there was another lady in this faculty who was going away for a term. He said that he wanted me to come up and take her position. Because I just had a good relationship with a few of the indigenous boys, he put me in a role as their tutor—teacher. That’s how it came about. Ten years later, and I’m still here. 

So you started in 2007? Happy 10-year anniversary!

Yeah, thank you! From there, I’ve done two master's [degrees]. I did my first master's online via correspondence in inclusive education at Charles Sturt University, which is a country university. I did two years doing that master's, and I did a specialization in indigenous studies. Then, I did a second master's in leadership education, but specifically focused on communication difficulties with students—pretty much speech and language delays, disorders, weaknesses. I consider myself now an inclusive ed teacher or special ed teacher. I’ve worked really hard to gain qualifications and experience in these things. 

That’s awesome.

I love to learn, so I’ll go back and do another if I have time to do it. But yeah, I love learning. 

It seems like you’re also helping the children here to realize that same goal of learning: to not just learn, but learning to love learning as well.

Yeah, and that’s the thing: the indigenous boys here at times see what other boys have. It’s quite an affluent college, high socioeconomic, and school fees are quite expensive. You are going to go and get that demographic of boys who are from well-off families. But I definitely tell my boys my story. I’m from a small, seaside, surfing village. My parents are blue-collar workers [and] have worked incredibly hard to support my brothers and myself. Nothing came easy for us. My parents are 70 and still working full-time because they can’t afford to retire just yet. My context, of course, is always going to be different to these boys, but it’s similar in ways that I can understand some of their struggles with seeing things around here in terms of money and wealth and opportunity that other boys can get, whereas sometimes my boys feel like they’re constantly fighting for it. So I can definitely say that I’ve fought for being here and had to really work hard to get to the position I’m in. Hopefully it’s those life lessons that encourage them to have a little bit of resilience in their learning, as well as socialization being a minority here. 

So that’s actually something that’s come up in every interview I’ve had. As soon as the indigenous students come into year seven, they begin the most troublesome year in terms of struggling to fit in, adjusting. And you work directly with the year sevens. If you were to take a step back, what are the broad, common struggles that the year seven First Nations boys have to face?

It’s definitely leaving their home, at the age of 11 [for] some of these boys. So they’re leaving their family and community. That’s massive. And their parents put them in the care of us, and they need to be able to trust us, that we’re doing the right things for their sons, for 10 weeks at a time. Then we send them home, but they come back to us. Homesickness is definitely really big for these boys because we’re drawing upon students who are from small communities, smaller primary schools. Sometimes they can get lost in the system here [with] 250 boys in a year group. When they’re coming from a primary school of maybe 20 in their class, everyone would know everyone. Everyone would know if you were having a good day or a bad day. It was more family-orientated, whereas my students come here and it’s a big family. And sometimes they might feel a little overwhelmed with “Who cares about me? Who can I trust?” because there are so many contact points. 

It almost sounds like there might have been an attention deficit when they come here?

Well, I wouldn’t say that. I’d say it’s an overwhelming feeling of how large the community is here. They probably haven’t been exposed to such a large community where so many people do care for them, so it’s overwhelming. You think about your type of family, and you know that most people care for you. And they have that, but when they come here, they’ve got another 10 people that want to be involved and help them. So you’re getting different angles and just going “This is too much!” sometimes. No, it’s not the attention, because our boys are thriving at the moment. They’re going to have their common struggles: the routines and rigidity of the boarding and the day school. So again, they’re coming from primary school where they had one teacher, and they didn’t really have to move classes at all. The rules at home might have been a little bit relaxed. Now they’ve come here to boarding where you have to get up at this time, you have to be at breakfast at this time, you have to make your bed at this time, you have to shower at this time, you’re only allowed to make phone calls at this time, you have to study at this time, and if you don’t there’s consequences. So many rules and routines that they have to try and master. They do struggle, and I’ve noticed with my boys that they’ll withdraw. 

So is that the resulting behavior?

The result is withdrawal and avoidance. Avoidance of work, avoidance of going to class because they know they have to work, and they find it quite overwhelming. The connections in the brain can’t cope with that release of feeling overwhelmed, and the decision-making processes are all muddled. They really struggle with processing how to feel and how to cope with all of that. 

You mentioned gaps in learning that these students often come with, and it sounds like they’re already stressed out as it is when they come here. On the other side, these boys have not only stayed, but you also mentioned that they are thriving. How do you guys do it? 

We’ll identify their weaknesses before they come to school. I go to their hometown before they come, and I get to go and meet family. I get to go to school, talk with principals, school teachers, get to know the boy a bit more. Then I bring him down for a week transition. I get the para-professionals in to do all the coded assessments. We have education psychologists who run IQ, literacy, numeracy, speech and language. The boys also get their ears and eyes checked. The professionals will do other basic collection of data about where my students are in relation to the chronological age equivalent, with their reading, spelling, writing, maths, everything like that. We collect all this data. We then analyze it. Then when they come to school, we’ve got programs set up for them to already fold into. In this way, we can target specific weakness areas. They won’t fall into mainstream curriculum straight away until I feel like their weaknesses have been reduced. 

In the meantime, they receive adjusted assessment tasks to suit their learning needs. So if it’s something like write a 500-word essay, some of my boys can’t construct coherent sentences using conjunctions at all. Therefore, we would reduce word limit, provide scaffold sentence starters, key vocab. We put all these adjustments in place so that he can access that task. 

I’ll also go in classes and support. Then, if they are trying to do mainstream, I’ll also be in there supporting them. The teachers always come up here and talk about classroom adjustments. I usually have a list of five to 10 teaching strategies that teachers have available for them to use for each boy in making his learning journey a little bit easier in the classroom. 

How many boys are in your support program as of now? 

I’ve got 16 on my caseload. Six year-seven boys, four year-eight boys, and six year-nine boys—all with varying needs. Some are accessing mainstream curriculum; some are not. Some are at year average; some are two to five years behind. 

Sixteen boys! That’s a lot to handle!

Particularly over three year groups! I’ve got to be across three different curriculums. I’ve also got to be liaising with 10 teachers per boy. If you do the sums … that’s a lot of communicating. And as you can see, all these assessment tasks stack up. So it’s a juggling act.

Is there anyone that helps you with this?

With the year sevens, no—it’s just me here in the day schools. But for the other years, my boarding tutors are a great help. I’ve got each of my boys on a Google Doc, and I’ll input what we’ve done in the day school, what’s coming up in terms of assessments or homework, and what I’ve done with him. Then I’ll tell the boarding tutors what to do or what they need to be working on in the boarding house. In effect, I do get a lot of support outside. I believe I have good working relationships with the teachers, and we always collaborate and work together on making suitable adjustments for boys to be able to enjoy learning in each class. Because that’s the whole theme: enjoying learning.