Peter Armstrong

My first awareness of technical high schools was in 1952 when I was attending The Marist Brothers College at Alberton, and the brothers also had another school at Thebarton which was a technical school. We used to meet students from that school on occasions such as sports days. On the tram home one day I was talking to a boy who said he attended ‘Thebby Tech’ which I assumed was the ‘Thebarton Technical School’ I knew of, but he was wearing the wrong colours! I refused to believe him, and it was only a couple of years later that I found out there were actually two ‘Thebby Techs’, one run by the Marist Brothers, the other a state school.¹²

The second tech school I heard of was Nailsworth (boys) when some of my contemporaries and neighbours started going there – we lived at Enfield at the time. My only lasting impression was that they were a pretty rough crowd. There was a slightly different breed whom I used to encounter on the bus and tram on my way to the city when I was at secondary school – these were from Adelaide Tech which was at that time on North Terrace. By then – this was 1956 or ’57 – I knew enough to know that this school was different – it had both girls and boys. At least I think it did although it does tend to blur in my mind with Urrbrae which was the other school I was aware of that was in some way distinctive. I think at that stage, as a private school student, I had picked up one feature which Adelaide Tech and Urrbrae had in common with the private secondary schools, namely that they did not seem to cater for a particular suburb like the other high and tech highs I was aware of.

At Teachers College we studied the history of education in South Australia and indeed Adelaide Tech and Urrbrae did feature as being different. The other school which I can recall being singled out for special attention in the lectures was Whyalla Technical High School, mainly because of its sharing of the campus with the Apprentice School, so I was quite pleased when my first appointment turned out to be to Whyalla THS in 1964. As it was the only secondary school in the city, it was in many ways a hybrid of the characteristics of a typical high school of the time and the technical high schools. It was in its second year of running a Leaving Honours class, which attracted students from other Eyre Peninsula towns. (There were 22 students in this class in 1963 and the same number in 1964.) I feel this may have been the only technical high school at the time with a fifth year class (although I’m not quite sure what the situation was in Mt Gambier and at Adelaide Technical High School).

Because the school catered for the full range of students it offered a pretty broad (or so it seemed to me at the time) range of subjects. PEB certificates were available in Leaving Honours, Leaving and Intermediate, and Technical School certificates were available for Leaving and Intermediate. There was also a wide range of extra-curricular activities, both sporting and cultural. Sports listed in the 1964 magazine include cross-country, tennis, table tennis, cricket, hockey, basketball, softball, baseball, football, soccer, swimming, athletics. Cultural activities were reflected in a number of clubs and specific events including drama, debating, mathematics, art, yachting, Junior Red Cross, model-making, dancing, garden, science, RSPCA, a news group, photography, chess and a Christian group. One group typifies, in my mind, the positive aspects of the ethos of the technical high school in the 1960s, this was the maintenance club. Their report for the year in the school magazine includes the following:

The club consists of six lads who have worked on many jobs around the school. Work has been done on doors, windows, lockers, the cleaning of desk tops and the mending of many parts loosened from plenty of use.

Good use was made of the woodwork shop and the use of tools made the work much easier. Desks which had been damaged were taken from the classrooms and into the workshop where they were sanded, smoothed and then sealed. Altogether about 50 desks were worked on and completed.

I was reminded of this 15 years later when teaching at Elizabeth High School. The deputy principal was Geoff Ellis, a woodwork teacher whom I had worked with at Croydon BTHS in the meantime. Geoff decided that the desks at Elizabeth HS were a disgrace – graffiti and gougings – and decided to get up working bees to sand down damaged desks and to paint every desk in the school in a very short space of time. It did solve the problem to a large extent, and I felt that this was a typically ‘tech high’ response to a ‘high school’ problem: practical and efficient, involving staff and students in a co-operative task to benefit both the school and the students.

Interwoven with the various sporting activities, although not confined solely to the sports arena, was the house competition. The four houses were Baron, Duke, Monarch and Prince. The main focus was on various sporting carnivals, athletics and swimming but points could also be gained through regular in-school competition in the various sports and in various academic and cultural pursuits.

The principal in 1964 was Kevin Dungey, in his second year at the school. His predecessor had been Hugh Fitzgerald who, by this time, was one of the inspectors of technical schools and who carried out the annual inspection of the school that year. I don’t recall much about that inspection except that in one of my classes there was a reference to too many gaps in my marks book, and I suspect he was a little unsure about my hair which was, at that time, just a touch longer than average (but nowhere near as long as the Beatles!). I don’t feel that I got to know the principal very well – relationships were quite formal. He seemed quite fair and reasonable to me but as a ‘first year out’ teacher, much of what went on at management levels in the school escaped my attention. As I didn’t know any different, I didn’t question that. My main points of contact with the administration were through the deputy principal, Charlie Williams, with whom I had a good working relationship, and my three senior masters, whom I also got on well with – Milton Haseloff (English), John Ryan (science) and Dave Darr (mathematics).

Curriculum was very tightly prescribed, and the seniors played a major role in the implementation of this. In English, texts were prescribed, programmes were common within the various year levels, and weekly testing – standard across all classes – was the norm (as indeed I gather it was in all subjects). My teaching load was the usual five classes: first year English and maths, two second year English classes and third year general science. (I also took a Leaving English night class – a handy opportunity for a lot of us who were young, single and broke.)

I can’t recall any detail of the timetable, nor do I remember anything about relief lessons. My only clear recollection of yard duty was of the very first day of the year, when I was on before school yard duty in the main yard. When the siren went there was a general milling around in the yard, with the focus being the daïs and microphone out the front. Nothing happened for quite a while and I wondered if it was maybe up to me to call the assembly to order. Fortunately one of the seniors appeared and took over and I pondered afterwards what sort of fool I would have made of myself if I had got up on that daïs.

There were 42 in my first year English and mathematics class – the same group – and that did not seem to be unduly large (although of course I had nothing to compare it with). I don’t have information on the sizes of my other classes but I guess they were of the same order. My two second year English classes were required to follow basically the same syllabus. One was an academic class (2B) while the other was defiantly non-academic (2H). The total enrolment of the school was about 900 at the beginning of the year, with steady growth throughout the year. There were 50 teaching staff and seven other staff. I have no idea how many students were involved in the Apprentice Section but there were 11 teachers. There was actually very little contact between the two sections of the school. I presume they were staffed separately even though it was classified as one institution.

At the end of the year, we had the customary formal staff dinner (the last Monday night of term from memory) to mark the end of the year and to farewell departing colleagues. There was a reasonably large contingent of people transferring out. The next day another group, including myself, was handed letters at morning recess. They were transfer notices. The group included three of us who were in our first year of teaching. I think we were all equally stunned especially as there had not been even the slightest hint that this was likely to happen.

I didn’t know if that lack of communication was a characteristic of the whole education system, the Technical High Schools Branch, or that particular school. In retrospect, I think it may have been the third option, because I came to realise in subsequent years that the Technical High Schools Branch managed its teachers on a reasonably personal and humane basis – there were people in ‘head office’ who knew the schools intimately, knew the staff and, in the case of the inspectors in most subject areas, knew virtually all of the teachers connected with their subjects. So I left reluctantly and headed back to town to Croydon Boys Tech.

I had felt quite comfortable in Whyalla THS. A few ‘first year out’ teething problems of course, but nothing too drastic. My concept of what a school should be and how it should operate was naturally enough influenced largely by my own schooling. My knowledge of schools consisted of the Catholic College I had attended for my secondary education and vicarious knowledge of schools encountered in literature (mainly the English Public School model.) Teaching practice during Teachers College years gave me a glimpse of the high school system (Enfield) and the technical high school system (Strathmont Boys and Strathmont Girls). I had preferred the technical high school model, even though it was further from my own experience. Even at that early and rather naïve stage of my career I think I sensed that communication with students was easier, or more satisfying, and I found the two tech high schools of my teaching practice friendlier and perhaps more relaxed than the high school. (Size may have had something to do with this, but I’m sure there were other factors.) I found that Whyalla still had enough things in common with my own schooling for me to feel reasonably at home there. I’m thinking of things like the house competition, the ‘whole school’ events such as the athletics carnival, the school concert, inter-school competitions, open night and formal school socials. There were curriculum features I was at ease with such as the regular testing already mentioned and formal exams. The prefect system, the magazine, the various clubs, all fitted my subconscious model of how a school community operates. I did know, partly from what we had learnt at Teachers College and partly through contact with friends in other schools, that it was not really a typical technical high school. I suspect that even this was part of the appeal of the place for me.

So to Croydon. Quite strong culture shock at first – a smaller school (although still quite big), single sex (from memory there was only one female teacher on the staff in that first year 1965, the teacher-librarian; a few more would trickle in over the subsequent five years), a much clearer focus on the ‘technical’ side of the school’s curriculum. It also seemed rather old-fashioned compared to Whyalla, although I can’t be specific about what gave me that impression. The principal was Bill Richards. Bill had been the principal for many years – since the mid-1940s. His health was in decline so much of the running of the school was left to the deputy principal, Alan Duell. Prominent seniors during my time at Croydon included Ben Evans (English), Bill Sims and Dick Arnold (science), Ian Bennetts (social studies) and Colin Adams (craft).

The school had a policy at the time that all teachers new to the school in the general subject areas would, where possible, have only one class and would take that one class for all academic subjects. Thus I had one first year class for English, mathematics, social studies, and science. It was put to us that they (the school administration) were not all that interested in what we had done in the past, we were all to be treated equally. It wasn’t said, but I imagine there was also the consideration for the students that their transition to secondary school would not be as traumatic if they had the one familiar teacher for most of their subjects, as in primary school. Whatever the motivation, I feel that it worked well. Those of us working within that framework were able to establish class identities, with the security of rooms which were pretty well exclusive to the respective classes and their teachers. It also had the plus for me of a lighter teaching load (four classes), with free lessons in blocks, corresponding to the times my class had woodwork, metalwork, art, physical education and other subjects in double lessons or four lesson blocks. A further plus with this was that I was able to show an interest in the activities of my class in these other subjects, which helped build up the rapport and the sense of group identity.

In my second year at the school the same principle was followed in allocating my classes with the addition of a second year mathematics class. In my third and subsequent years I began to specialise more in English and history with more senior classes.

The system of IQ testing applied to all secondary school entrants throughout the state at this time. Students were allocated into classes in first year on the basis of the IQ test administered on the first Wednesday morning of Term 1. (The students went home that afternoon each year while the teachers marked the test, ranked the students and put them in the streamed classes.)

The school day consisted of eight lessons equally spread with morning recess, lunch and a five minute afternoon recess. There was a morning class period of 15 minutes and an end of day class period of five minutes. I gather this was the structure of the day in most of the single-sex tech high schools of the time. Morning class period was mainly taken up with lunch orders, which were an important part of the day’s routine, and daily notices (delivered over the public address system by the principal or deputy, with anyone else who thought they had something to say joining in.) The teacher’s job included marking the roll, checking the lunch orders and money, making sure it got to the canteen in time.

For teachers such as myself whose teaching load was lower than the staffing allocation would indicate, part of the gap was made up by being timetabled (one or two lessons a week) to count and bag the canteen money for banking. Other timetabled duties could include collecting staff tea money (3/- a fortnight in 1965), looking after the making of the staffroom tea (whoever had this job had to roster boys to do the actual work), and assisting in the library.

An extra duty I had from my third year in the school was vocational guidance, which mainly entailed administering the VG cards and other student records such as reports. My office had files of the VG cards for all students who had ever attended the school, going back to its days as Croydon Central School in the 1920s and ’30s. This duty also constituted part of my teaching load – it was equivalent to one class.¹³

As part of its vocational focus, Croydon had to keep abreast of changes in trades as a result of industrial changes. One of the major post war changes was the rapid growth of road transport. Therefore in addition to the standard craft ‘fare’ of metalwork and woodwork, Croydon also specialised in a subject called, at the time, ‘heat engines’. It was basically an automotive course. This was available to boys in their senior years.

Croydon Speech and Hearing Centre was part of the school. Boys at the Centre attended some of their classes with the mainstream classes (mainly tech studies I believe), while girls attended the neighbouring Croydon Girls Technical High School. Even though the boys’ and girls’ schools shared the same grounds, contact between the two institutions was minimal. There were no shared activities for either students or staff. In my six years at Croydon I think I entered the girls’ school once.

In my final year at Croydon, 1970, plans were announced to amalgamate the two schools into Croydon High School. From 1968 Croydon Boys had fifth year classes, both PEB and Education Department certificates. These were mixed classes – a lot of the girls transferred from Woodville High School, and there were quite a few from various private schools. There were also a number of Malaysian students, many of whom, after 1968, came to Australia specifically to study matriculation at Croydon. (There was a rumour that a number of them let it be known at home, in Malaysia, that they were studying at places like St Peter’s College, with very high fees and very high ongoing expenses. Certainly many of them were driving much more impressive cars than most of us. One of the fifth years opened a successful restaurant in Rundle Street part way through the year.)

There wasn’t the range of extra-curricular activities which I had experienced at Whyalla. I suppose this was because Whyalla was a bigger school and catered for a wider range of students and their needs. Sport was quite important at Croydon. There were regular inter-school sporting competitions. I was involved with the baseball team, but my memory (fading) suggests that we mainly played against Angle Park Boys Technical High School. There was also an inter-school competition with Whyalla instituted in 1965 and continuing into 1966. I can’t remember it lasting beyond that time.

There were two interstate trips while I was at Croydon. Both were open to students from all year levels, and were in the September holidays. The first, 1969, was to Perth with about 75 students and four teachers. The trip to Perth was by bus, camping at various sites across the Nullarbor, a trip which took about six days. There were then three or four days in Perth, staying at an hotel, and then a return trip by train. Somehow Croydon had, at some time in the past, acquired one of the mile posts from John Forrest’s original crossing of the Nullarbor. We decided as a goodwill gesture to take it with us and present it to John Forrest High School in Perth. We all visited that school one morning, it was a fairly low-key affair – we got the impression that they really were not all that interested in what we had to offer them.

In 1970 a similar number went east to Sydney via Canberra and the Snowy. This was by bus both ways, with camping stops along the way, a motel in Canberra and an hotel in Kings Cross. We were less than 24 hours into the trip when one boy was found smoking and was put on the Overland back home. One memorable feature of this trip was the discovery in Canberra that we had a case of hepatitis among us, necessitating vaccinations all round. Another highlight was the musical Hair, to which we took the fourth and fifth year boys in the group.

On a different scale, I decided in 1966 to take my first year class to Port Pirie as part of their social studies course, but not as a full scale school excursion. I took about a third of the class on each of three successive Saturdays. I recruited a former colleague, the late Barry Crannaford, who was willing to accompany me each Saturday with a carload of first year boys. Even though this was in their own time, all except, I think, two from the class were able to join in one of these trips. By the third Saturday, Barry and I were both getting a bit sick of Port Pirie so after we had driven up and down the main street, we decided to head for Whyalla instead. They had a good look around Whyalla and we still got them home by a reasonable hour.

School uniform was quite rigidly enforced through my years at Croydon. In my first year, 1965, there was one boy, a first year student, whose uniform included the school cap (green and yellow with the school badge). His was the only one of these I ever saw. It never seemed to bother him that he was the only boy in the school wearing one. He abandoned it halfway through the year. Girls who attended the school from 1968 onwards wore the Croydon Girls uniform (blue) even though they had no contact with the girls’ school.

My abiding impression of this school is of a place which was relatively relaxed to work in. It seemed that its administration was sensible and very humane towards both staff and students. There were of course inconsistencies, as there would be in any large organisation, but I felt that these were minor. Relationships between staff and students were generally relaxed and positive, and the school seemed to me to be very ‘alive’ professionally. New ideas were welcomed. There was a willingness to try things out, but this was not allowed to jeopardise proven practices or ideas.

For instance, I was able to experiment with the use of video. My first contact with it came in 1969. Ampex loaned a video recorder to Croydon BTHS for a couple of weeks. They had an enterprising salesman who was hoping to get into the education market. It was my job to test drive it. It was quite big and took two people to carry it. I could just fit it into the boot of my Valiant. It used one-inch open reel tape. It could only record via its camera, it could not record off-air. I did record one programme on a Sunday afternoon (I think it was a documentary on D.H. Lawrence in Australia) by setting up the camera in front of a TV set. I then played the tape the next day to my leaving English class. I also did some in-class recording with a third year class. I think I can fairly confidently claim to have been the first teacher in South Australia to use videotape in a classroom. The next year a more manageable video recorder came on the market. This was a Shibaden recorder, which used open-reel half-inch tape. Croydon bought one late in 1970, shortly before Audio-visual Education Centre (AVEC) announced that it was supplying one Shibaden video recorder free to every secondary school.

These years, the final years of the sixties, saw the beginnings of significant changes in the teaching of English. Garth Boomer, as English consultant, was beginning to open up English classrooms. I was able, in 1970, to organise my two third year English classes for the third term into a high degree of self-motivation, with a lot of co-operative work and a lot of group work. To a degree, these students were negotiating their own curriculum (although the terminology had not emerged at that stage). I was able to minimise my own intervention into what they were doing, to the degree that I only formally spent one lesson a week with each of the classes. They were able to work on their own for the remainder of the time. (But I was never far away!).

I feel it was a tribute to the ethos of the school, and its general atmosphere, that this was able to happen. I have not taught in any other school where I could leave a class to its own devices for the majority of the timetabled lessons for a whole term without feeling, or being made to feel, that I was neglecting my responsibilities, but in this case I had the full support of my senior and the administration.

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