By Casey Neill
Doveton College principal Greg McMahon won a $45,000 national teaching prize.
He was among 12 educators announced as Commonwealth Bank Teaching Award recipients at a ceremony in Sydney on Friday 23 March.
“This represents the work the college has done,” Mr McMahon told the Journal.
“I’m just the figurehead of the college.”
The Prep to Year 9 school opened in 2012 thanks to the Colman Foundation.
“To achieve in six years what they’ve done here is enormous,” he said.
Mr McMahon said Julius Colman came to Australia from Poland with his parents as a refugee in 1948.
He became a lawyer and set up a trust.
After retiring he visited the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in Las Vegas and saw the value of parents working with kids.
“He’d been giving scholarships and seeing nothing for them,” Mr McMahon said.
Mr Colman went to then-Premier John Brumby, asked how he could help, and established Doveton College.
“It’s a project based around a school as the centre,” Mr McMahon said.
“We have one of the highest value-adding early learning centres in Australia.
“We have 75 little ones on-site every day, about 110 over the week.
“They get the best of early learning starts.”
He said 13 parents recently graduated from a certificate three course and 12 had already found employment.
There are paediatricians on-site, social workers, breakfast and after-school programs.
“And we have 200 mums learning,” he said.
“This whole model is a model of education based on a community, not based on a school.
“When we enrol the family at the college, we enrol the whole family.
“The government has now signed up with Julius for another six sites.”
Mr McMahon took on the principal role in 2015 following eight a half years as principal at Parkdale Secondary College in Mordialloc.
At that time, only seven per cent of students did any activity after school.
That’s climbed to 80 per cent. The school runs sport, music, dance, art and craft and more on four nights a week.
He said that students used to funnel to just one local school for VCE but are now researching the best fit school for them and their goals.
“They are now aspirational,” he said.
“We do a student survey every year.
“Three years ago, we were in the bottom quartile for state schools.
“Last year we were in the top 10 per cent in many of the indicators of confidence in the school.
“The parents are saying the same thing.”
He said the prize money would go towards staff development.
