What is Blue Gum?

As a school we are always looking for ways to make the story of our educational programs more visible and knowable to our Blue Gum families and to the wider community. We are determined to get our story ‘out there’! As teachers, we live ‘behind the curtain’ in the world of education, and from that position backstage, we are so committed to the notion that re-imagining what school can be like is not a ‘nice to have’, it’s an imperative. Interestingly, for many of our team, we are further impacted in this pursuit of building a new school, by our experiences as parents, as we look back on the Preschool and Primary experiences of our own children. From that perspective, we unanimously agree that we all wish (looking back) that Blue Gum had been around for our own children!

So, what makes Blue Gum, Blue Gum?

When we opened our doors in 2022, it was not to simply be, ‘another school’ in the area. Instead, building Blue Gum was a choice to create a school that would be for every child, offering a new and hopeful option for families in the area, bravely reclaiming school as a place of engagement, joy, commitment and connection. A place where every child is known and finds voice.

In designing this new school we have been intentional in our resistance of the trappings of traditional schooling that grew out of the modern era, when schools were first designed to train workers for factories – where the most important thing was uniformity, compliance, following instructions without question, and avoiding thinking outside the box! Sound familiar!? At Blue Gum, this factory model of schooling is nowhere to be seen! The school has been built in a stunning and heritage-listed Arts & Craft Mansion, the spaces are warm and inviting, there’s not a uniform in sight and your children call their teachers by their first names. Our ratios of teachers to students (1:12 in Primary; 1:8 in Preschool) are above the mandated state ratios and powerfully enable us to place significant and supportive relationships at the centre of our curriculum.

Also, distinctive Blue Gum’s culture, is our determination to be anti-competition. We don’t use stickers or certificate as motivators for behaviour. Instead, we focus on supporting their students to develop intrinsic motivation and a desire to live well for the sake of themselves and others! In a world where schools can give preference to ‘certain types’ of learning (and certain types of learners) above others and position students in comparison to one another, the choice to design a school experience for students that is about learning with others, not competing against them, is at a foundational aspect of our culture! In this collaborative community, we see the diversity of our students as a gift to be nurtured, not a challenge to be avoided. Never has it been more important for students (and adults) to learn how to live well alongside each other, making room for alternate perspectives, and developing ways to stick together, despite our inevitable differences. At Blue Gum, this is our intent, to together find ways across the school to learn with and from each other and to stay in conversations, even when they’re hard, to develop our skills at doing life well together, resisting the easier, but inevitably lonelier, road of living isolated from one another.

Another distinction of our approach at Blue Gum – is the way our educational programs are both meaningful and authentic, in both the Preschool and Primary School. Learning experiences are contextualised in real-life, students learn in and from the local community and ‘busy’ mindless tasks are avoided at all times. We don’t do pretend and boring - ever! Our school is a place of doing, a place of thinking and relating and important it is a place of joy! Our learning programs are founded on experiences that invite all our students to lean into to their learning, to think with others, and importantly to re-think and reflect, going deep with their questions and consideration of concepts.

As such, at Blue Gum, to make this possible, working in small groups is our normal, as we make time for dialogue, listening and the consideration of different ideas. Our students have time to think, to play, to test theories, explore concepts and to revisit their ideas, in order to take their learning further and deeper. And their voices have genuine influence, in the way our program evolves, shaping the inquiries they take. The students at Blue Gum are taken seriously - as thinkers and feelers, and in turn they take themselves and each other seriously. Importantly, our students have time to engage with commitment, in Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of ‘flow’, working with meaning, having influence, and shaping their own story every day!

In all this, because of our small size, it is not unusual to see our Blue Gum students out and about in the local community, visiting Hornsby Library or wandering through Lisgar Gardens. With no bells or interruptions in our days, there is time for these important encounters together - to have fun, to invest and to simply be! The world (not just our four walls) are our classroom! And in our opinion, we embrace just enough gazing at the stars, with our feet still firmly on the ground!

Another distinction of Blue Gum is the way we intentionally and passionately resist power-over, manipulative forms of teaching, that position students as ‘less than’, where compliance is valued above all else. In this way, we hold high expectations of ourselves as teachers, as well as of our students. It would never be ok for a teacher at Blue Gum to shout at or shame a student! As a team, we talk about, ‘calling our students up’ into who they can be, not ‘calling them out’. It seems crazy in this day and age that we would even need to design a place where this is a possible reality for students- but we do. There is way too much inappropriate strong arming of children by adults in schools – a behaviour that would never be welcome in our school.

In an era where the individual is paramount, and we are more separate from each other than ever, we believe in the importance of community – in the power of the group, the importance of embracing otherness, and our need to learn from multiple perspectives.  Our practice is rooted in a strong belief in the social construction of knowledge – we learn in and through relationship! As such, our program is built on the understanding that powerful learning occurs with others, and that learning is shaped by inquiry, meaning and a commitment to thinking in and through community - and that that way of being at school is the right of every child (and adult). This isn’t always easy, in fact creating a school where everyone was happily on their own path, would be much more straightforward! But learning to walk this thing called life together is definitely worth it!

 We often hear parents talk about looking for a school where their child will ‘do well’. At Blue Gum, leaning into this question, recognising its importance, we have often wondered, “Do well at what?’ For us, we want ‘doing well’ at school to look like this:

We want our students learn how to be more human together, to develop deep understandings of concepts, to learn to write in order to author texts, to fall in love with books, so they become life-long readers, to engage with mathematics, design, science, history and so much more, in order to better understand the world and to be able to contribute to it with intention, imagination and empathy! We want them to investigate, to discover and to invent, to navigate difficulties and learn from mistakes, to accept themselves as just a part of a bigger story and in doing so, recognise their need of each other! And in that we want them to leave us confident in who they are, loving learning, humble and switched on, knowing that they matter and they belong. We don’t want our students to ‘do well’ at surviving school. We want them to thrive. 

What an honour is to walk with your children as their humanity unfolds. In Aristotle’s famous words,

 ‘Give me a child until he is 7, and I will give you the man.’

Here’s to our Blue Gum story finding its way to others, so that this project of re-imagining school as a place of deep connection, thinking and joy grows and grows.