HSC from home: how NSW students and teachers handled a year of Covid disruption

When the NSW government first announced the HSC was to be postponed back in August, it felt like another blow for Lockyer. The hardest part was keeping up the motivation to study without burning out.

“It gets really exhausting, to get up out of bed and drive to sit on the hill all day … it feels like the end is just a black hole, the finish line is there but it just kept getting moved and moved,” she says.

For Rachel Coulton, who is preparing to sit for her HSC at Warialda High School, the postponement meant she had to change her plans for university.

“I probably would have gone to uni, but because the offers come out so late it doesn’t give us a lot of time to prepare for uni.”

Instead, Coulton is excited to start a traineeship at the Gwydir shire council and hopes to attend university online. Despite the challenges of lockdown to mental health and motivation, Coulton feels that many of her teachers were fabulous during the entire process.

Across the state, many teachers went above and beyond to help students struggling with lockdown.

Joanna Towers teaches primary industries and agriculture at St Catherine’s Catholic College in Singleton. She found that many of her students had poor access to the internet because they were using satellite, or often had no internet access at all.

Some students would hotspot off their parents’ phones, with families with multiple children taking it in turns to connect.

During the HSC trial exams, this became particularly challenging with many students hotspotting or going to neighbours’ houses to access their online exams.

On one occasion Towers had to drive and drop off a physical copy to a student, then drive back to pick it up when it was completed.

“It was a struggle, but we had a really good system to make sure everyone was doing it [the exams],” she says.

“The students had to text the principal or the assistant principal at the start of each exam … and if they hadn’t there would be phone calls and checks.”

There have been stories across the state of teachers driving long distances to drop off work to students and making phone calls to families to check how everyone was coping.

At Tingha Public School, in the small town of Tingha in northern NSW, they organised schoolwork almost entirely in paper copies knowing that many families didn’t have good internet access.

In addition to the work, teachers would send resource packages with pencils, counters, charts and chocolate. In the lead up to Father’s Day the school sent gifts for the children to give to their parents.

Many schools across both rural and metropolitan NSW sent out hampers during lockdown, with many teachers delivering them personally.

Melinda Partridge, the principal of Tingha public, feels that a silver lining to come out of lockdown was an increased connection with parents.

“We made regular phone calls to parents and students, touching base, building those relationships,” she says.

“Sometimes the parents would be up for a yarn about whatever was going on because they just wanted some of that contact as well.”

Angelo Gavrielatos, the president of the NSW Teacher’s Federation, says that many teachers put in large amounts of extra work helping children who could not access remote learning.

“When we talk about remote learning, the immediate assumption is that kids have got access to multiple devices, have got desks in their rooms and space to study. That’s not the reality for many students,” he says.

“Instead, what we saw in school after school was teachers and principals continuously preparing satchels of material, photocopying reams of paper, stuffing envelopes and dispatching them … in many instances driving around dropping off material.”

While many schools in rural places put in a lot of extra effort, it was still a difficult time. Helen Young, the deputy principal of Warialda High School, says that while they also had success with a combination of online learning and hard copies, many children struggled with the work.

“These kids have never had to experience independent learning before, and their parents often have a limited understanding of the curriculum too. And there was this helplessness, they want to help their kids, but they can’t because they don’t know how to do it,” she says.