A Grounded Theory Analysis of the Impacts of Multicampus Colleges' Structural Reform on Pedagogies and Learning in 14 Public Secondary Schools in New South Wales

Introduction: Background to the ResearchIn 1998, the New South Wales Department of Education and Training embarked upon an ambitious restructuring program which reconfigured some of its Years 7-12 comprehensive high schools into a new model called the "Collegiate", popularly known in the Department of Education and Training as the multicampus college model. Each college comprised one senior campus and several middle school campuses, set up in different geographical locales but to function as one educational entity, under the governance of a single School Council or Board (Department of Education and Training, 1998). The basic design of the model was three schools configured with Years 7-10 middle school cohorts and integrated with a senior campus comprising only Years 11 and 12 cohorts. Variations on this basic configuration were allowed to reflect differences in local contexts. For example, in small country towns such as Moree, only one middle school campus was integrated with one senior campus to set up a multicampus college.The introductory model was rather controversial. For a start, it was new to New South Wales, so there was the 'fear of the unknown' element. More fundamentally, the model challenged the Wyndham (1958) orthodox Years 7-12 comprehensive high school model which had served New South Wales quite well for nearly 50 years. This had provided a kind of cultural equilibrium known to be conducive to organisational inertia which Stoll and Fink (2001, p. 5) and Stanford (2005, pp. 237-238), suggest leads to resistance to change. The restructuring was controversial because it folded existing Years 7-12 schools into Years 7-10 middle schools. This provoked opposition from many stakeholders:* Parents felt that their comprehensive high schools were being partly closed.* Parents with children in Year 10 were challenged with the logistics of moving them to another school in Years 11 and 12.* Students were apprehensive about transferring to another school for Years 11 and 12.* Teachers too were anxious. For example, those who had taught Years 11 and 12 were now to be 'boxed' into Years 7-10 middle school campuses. Similarly, those who had been happy to teach across the Years 7-12 continuum were now to be restricted to either middle school years or senior cohorts only.* Principals who had operated autonomously were told that they had to integrate and learn to collaborate as a "Collegiate".All this was a recipe for pedagogical challenges in new contexts for students, teachers and principals in those schools as well as for the students' parents. Consequently, the proposal of the new model attracted substantial resistance.Nevertheless, the Department of Education and Training persisted and by 2004 a total of 34 schools had been folded into 11 multicampus colleges. 10% of all secondary schools in the state were in multicampus college structures (Department of Education and Training, 2004, p. 255). Of the 305,199 secondary school students enrolled fulltime in all New South Wales government secondary schools in 2004, nearly 8% were in multicampus colleges (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004, p. 13). The multicampus colleges had an average Years 7-12 apparent retention rate that was 44.12% higher than the state average. (Apparent retention rates are calculated using the total number of students progressing from year to year, including those who join the cohorts any time during the year [Department of Education and Training, 2004, p. 285].)However, in spite of the above significant statistics, coupled with such a fast rate of establishment, and despite the fact that multicampus colleges are widely spread not only in metropolitan and rural areas in New South Wales (Department of Education and Training, 2004) but also in Queensland (Emmaus College, 2005), Victoria (Xavier College, 2002), Western Australia (Catholic Education Office of Western Australia, 2005) and Tasmania (Association of Independent Schools of Tasmania, 2005), available literature shows that generally there is a gap in the information about the impact of multicampus college reforms on pedagogies and learning in these colleges. …