Holy Spirit College celebrates assistant principal's teaching gong, commitment to inclusive learning

A prestigious award for her contribution to education and inclusive learning has come as a last-minute surprise to Holy Spirit College’s assistant principal of diversity thanks to some cunning manoeuvring by her “beautiful but very tricky colleagues”.

Lisa Hurst, who reimaged the development and delivery of individualised learning plans (ILP) at the school’s Cooktown and two Cairns campuses, has been named by Schools Plus as one of 22 recipients of a 2024 Commonwealth Bank Teaching Award for making education more accessible to students for whom mainstream education was unattainable.

Ms Hurst was nominated by her colleagues and admitted she thought the emails she was receiving from the organisation were spam before one of them asked whether she had seen one about an award.

“I’ve got beautiful but very tricky colleagues who nominated me under the guise we’d started a partnership with Schools Plus,” she laughed.

“I wasn’t really taking much notice and then I opened an email I thought was spam and saw I was part of this awards process; I didn’t actually find out about it until I found out I’d got to the top 25 in Australia.

“It is a very big deal and I’m very, very honoured.”

Schools Plus was founded following a recommendation in the first Gonski review, which identified a need for philanthropic funding in schools to help close the education gap caused by disadvantage.

Ms Hurst explained every student at Holy Spirit College was coming from a position of disengagement and that the ILPs had been utilised to identify each unique strength, weakness and ambition.

“All three campuses are so different from each other – the young people we serve and the staff and the needs of our campuses are all so unique,” she said.

“We really place the young people at the centre of everything we do; knowing how they learn and knowing what they want is really important.

“What we’ve found in the past is that the ILPs were box ticking, but that they didn’t really capture the individual spirit of every student at Holy Spirt.

“Now, it’s about their voice their journey; they can tell us what their strengths are and what their challenges are in school, and they can tell us about what they want to do.”

With students coming from communities all across Cape York, Ms Hurst said a blanket approach to education simply was not workable.

“We’ve got young people from really remote Cape communities,” she said.

“We can’t just throw them back into a school and say ‘we’re going to teach you how to read and write, and do maths’ – you can’t do that if you blanket everyone.

“We want to hear their story and honour that – a young person from Wujal Wujal has a very different story from someone who comes from the centre of Cairns.

Ms Hurst used the award ceremony to speak briefly to federal Minister for Education Jason Clare about Holy Spirit College and said she was buoyed by the interest he showed, adding she hoped her win would provide a foothold to be a disruptor in the education space.

“Any exposure we can get through the award is great,” she said.

“The work we do is real, and we’re working with young people who require us to think outside the box and be disruptors.

“I intend to use the win to keep letting people know about our college, our staff and, of course, our beautiful young people.”