Belconnen Super School

On this site stood Ginninderra High School, unfairly maligned in its time, but now gone (the shell having been used, for a time, for anti-terrorist training). In its place is a building site of the new Belconnen Super School. For a history and background reports visit the Canberra Online site.
West Belconnen Regional School (the name will change) will open for Business in February 2009 with up to 1,000 students from P-10 (ages 4 to 15). Hartbeat Multimedia put up a proposal to the ACT Department of Education to shoot a documentary recording the first year of operation of the school. The outcome is to be a series of interwoven stories about students, families, teachers, school leaders and the community that might reveal some universal truths about the state of Australian education.
The project was agreed at a meeting with the ACT Education Department and the newly-appointed Principal, Richard Powell (previously Principal of Hawker College).
A documentary about a school is not a new idea. In Être et Avoir Nicholas Philibert covered a year in the life of a one-teacher school in rural France; Frederick Wiseman’s High School is a fly-on-the wall observation of the life of a school in Philadelphia; more recently Chen Weijun’s wonderful Please Vote For Me shows a class of 8 year olds in a Wuhan school voting for the position of Class Monitor – a microcosm of modern China.
I don’t know whether our School for the Future project will achieve this quality. It will be an ethnographic documentary, not structured by interviews or set pieces. The narrative of the course of the year will shape the content of the film.