Find the latest updates & information for students, as well as our media appearances, media releases and updates about VicSRC!

News & Updates

Trapped at home in isolation for the final week of her summer break, incoming year 12 student Gitaanjali Nair is doing her best to put a positive spin on a bad situation.

“For me, it’s a good thing because I have to finish reading these English texts,” she says.

Gitaanjali is about to start her final year of school at Penleigh and Essendon Grammar and cannot wait to be back in the classroom this week.

She believes it’s a sentiment shared by nearly all of her peers, who are desperate to mix with friends and even teachers in real life, despite the continuing high case numbers of the Omicron variant.

“You might find one per cent of students who don’t want to be face-to-face because school is so much more than just learning the content,” she says.

Gitaanjali is also a member of the executive advisory committee of the Victorian Student Representative Council, a student-run advocacy group that has declared a mental health crisis among students.

She said her schoolmates were more than happy to comply with COVID-19 health measures such as mask wearing and regular testing if it would help stave off another return to remote learning, though two years of lockdowns and remote learning have taught students not to get their hopes up about what 2022 might bring.

“We all have this sort of worry that events and extracurricular activities that we really love could disappear at any time,” she said. “We are hearing that from a lot of students.”

The VCE students of 2020 and 2021 all had their results modified in a process of individual consideration of educational disadvantage due to COVID-19.

Gitaanjali said there is a case for potentially applying it this year too, even if students do not have to learn remotely.

Year 12 student Evonne Lu, who is also on the council’s executive advisory committee, said she was excited for what this year could bring.

Evonne, who attends Mac.Robertson Girls’ High School, a state government select entry school, said she had confidence in the health and safety measures that schools are adopting, including twice-weekly rapid antigen tests, air purification, vaccination and masks.

“It’s really good that our health is being prioritised because I think that good learning can only happen when students are supported in their mental and physical health,” she said.

As primary students get ready for a new school year, they’ll also be venturing into uncharted territory with COVID-19.

Originally published in The Age 30 January 2022.

Want to support student mental health at your school? Check out our 

VicSRC Executive Committee members in The Age

VicSRC in The Age January 2022

Through the Ambassadors program students around Victoria come together to work on changing education at a grassroots level. Through regular meetings and working groups they collaborate on planning and share successful strategies to realise 

Applications are open right now! And will be until 

You can find out more about the program and apply 

VicSRC Ambassador 2022

VicSRC Ambassadors 2022

Last week members of the VicSRC Student Executive Advisory Committee met with decisionmakers at DET and VCAA to talk about student recommendations and the rest of the 2021 school year. We recognise that decisions are being made working with the Department of Health as the priority during the COVID-19 pandemic is the health and safety of all members of our community. A huge thank you to all the students who provided feedback and insight for this meeting, because of you we were able to bring lots of different student voices and opinions to the table.

We had some very honest conversations about what can realistically be changed in the remainder of this year and what simply can’t be changed at this point. Some of this news will be disappointing for a lot of students and we wish there had been the opportunity to provide more clarity earlier about what options were and were not possible.

Here are the key conversation topics, outcomes and what will happen next.

Return to face-to-face learning & possible continuation of remote learning

VicSRC was able to share the recommendations and your responses with Minister Merlino and other key decision-makers before plans are finalised, so that your voices fed into the discussion. There is nowhere else in Australia where students get regular input into state level decision making like this.

However, there are many voices at the table and many competing priorities. The severity of the COVID Delta outbreak was unexpected and decisions about school and assessments have had to be made very quickly based on lots of factors, including health advice. VicSRC continues to ensure students’ voices are always at the table and will keep updating Victorian students on opportunities for feedback and changes to education.

VicSRC meets with DET and VCAA

Here at VicSRC we’re working hard to bring you the latest information on how the ongoing pandemic and lockdowns are going to affect the rest of the 2021 school year. We’re also doing everything we can to get your voices heard at the highest levels of education decision making. We’ll update this page regularly with all the latest information we have on what’s happening with education and what we’re doing and saying about it on your behalf.

Rapid antigen testing is now available for students who are a close contact for a confirmed COVID-19 case outside the home.

All students are currently learning face-to-face unless they have been asked to isolate due to exposure.

All reasonable safety precautions are being put in place to ensure the safety of students and staff during the return to on-site learning.

Additional investments and plans being rolled out this term and into 2022 include:

statement calling for greater inclusion of student voice in planning for the remainder of the 2021 school year along with three recommendations from students

As a result of the support for this petition we met with the Department of Education and Training and VCAA on Thursday 17 September to talk about student recommendations and the rest of the 2021 school year. A huge thank you to all the students who provided feedback and insight for this meeting, because of you we were able to bring lots of different student voices and opinions to the table.

Read about what we talked about and the outcomes here

On Wednesday 15 September the Minister for Education (and Mental Health) announced new support through the ongoing mental and public health crises. You can read the original press release

but we’ve included the key points below.

This is in addition to the current funding and reform happening in response to the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System.

VicSRC is pleased by the new support and eager to see the rollout, particularly in underserved regional areas where it will be extremely helpful to students who are struggling with their mental health.

We will update as further information becomes available. As always if you have any questions feel free to get in touch at students@vicsrc.org.au

Updates & Info for School in 2021

It’s a new era for VicSRC! As we step out on our own and become VicSRC Ltd we have all kinds of exciting things on the horizon! Check out our full strategic plan for 2020-2024 or just get a glimpse with the two page summary. They’re both available below!

VicSRC Strategic Plan 2020-2024 (2 pager)

VicSRC Strategic Plan 2020-2024-compressed.pdf

VicSRC Strategic Plan 2020-2024

You probably already know that DET is changing the senior secondary certificate in Victoria to combine VCAL and VCE into just one certificate. But what does that actually mean? Never fear, we’re here to translate all the information for you as it comes out. Make sure you’re following us across social media to stay up to date!

Credit for subjects studied under VCAL or Foundation VCAL will transfer into VCE Vocational Specialisation when students enrol in 2023.

If you’ve got any questions or concerns about any of this let us know in the comments below so we can take your feedback to the Department of Education and Training! We’ll keep you posted as we know more.

Senior secondary certificate reform

Victorian Student Representative Council welcomes the recent announcement to make teaching about consent mandatory in Victorian government schools. This announcement is a powerful statement to students about the value of their voice in creating solutions in education.

Teaching consent was identified as an important aspect of inclusive sex education by Victorian students at VicSRC Congress 2020. Consent is an essential part of all relationships – particularly intimate and sexual relationships. Students in Victoria have expressed their frustrations with what they have described as “inadequate sexuality education” in schools and are calling on Victorian educators to step up to work with them to address this area. Students are calling for sexuality education that is relevant to everyone regardless of sexuality and gender identity and consent it an important part of that. Mandatory education about consent demonstrates a commitment to a broader cultural shift in our society that empowers students to have agency over their bodies and lives, as well as promoting child safety.

It is vital that students are included in conversations about what sexuality education is relevant to them on every level, from government mandated policy to the school and individual classroom level. VicSRC encourages everyone from the Department of Education and Training to individual schools and teachers in Victoria to work with students to give them a leading role in shaping their own consent and sexuality education.

To help start this conversation VicSRC is hosting

a student-facilitated webinar for educators

. The mandate from Victorian Minister for Education, James Merlino has left some teachers feeling uncertain about how to approach this important topic. While there are excellent resources available for schools VicSRC is providing this unique opportunity for teachers to hear directly from students, parents and sex education experts.

Supported by Department of Education and Training, Parents Victoria and Family Planning Victoria the webinar will be happening Wednesday 12th May 4-5pm on Zoom – you can book your tickets

Mandatory consent education in Victoria response

Victorian Student Representative Council is encouraged by the recommendations outlined in the final report from Royal Commission into Mental Health and feels hopeful that the emphasis on informal and community support will extend to more robust mental health education and peer support for students in schools.

VicSRC’s Student Executive Advisory Committee has described the current mental health situation in Victoria as a crisis that needs an immediate response, and while students are excited by the report’s recommendations to restructure the mental health system to include specific age based service streams for children and young people, it is imperative that students are empowered to be active in their own mental health support and their peers. The targets of introducing thirteen Infant, Child and Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing Services by the end of 2022 is fantastic to see but we are looking forward to working with the Minister for Education and Health to ensure that appropriate strength based supports for children and young people are in place in the interim.

VicSRC welcomes Recommendation 17 which supports social and emotional wellbeing in schools. Students in Victoria have regularly stated that their mental health is supported when schools prioritise wellbeing at school over academic achievement. VicSRC advises that long term anti-bullying and anti-stigma programs and initiatives that support cultural change at school are prioritised over single touch point activities.

VicSRC is also pleased to see specific mention of the complexities facing rural and regional students and welcomes Recommendation 39. Victorian rural students in particular have been clear about the challenges they face when accessing support for mental health and VicSRC is hopeful that this recommendation will also address these.

VicSRC look forward to discussing the recommendations with Minister Merlino in the next few weeks and how Victorian schools can be key to mental health support for children and young people through education and empowerment.

Royal Commission into Mental Health Report Response

What a year 2020’s been! From the #AustralianBushFires at the start of the year, to #COVID19 taking the world by storm, multiple lockdowns, school closures and learning from home, it’s certainly been a year like no other. Students across Victoria have faced many unexpected challenges this year and have persevered through it all with resilience, adaptability, and sheer brilliance! But what else have we at VicSRC gotten up to in 2020?

VicSRC had its biggest year ever, with a full complement of nine staff members, and students from all over the state getting to know us through programs both virtual and face-to-face. We’ve seen students at our first ever virtual Congress, students nominating and voting for their Student Executive Advisory Committee and over five hundred students told us what they thought of remote learning! We’ve seen and heard from more of you on video calls, social media and emails than ever before and we can’t wait to see and hear even more from student across Victoria next year!

Despite the struggles of 2020 keeping us out of schools for most of the year, Teach the Teacher carried on! Not only did we switch (almost seamlessly) to delivering our Teach the Teacher sessions remotely through video call and chat in schools that were keen to go ahead, we also brought Teach the Teacher to a wider audience with a focused webinar series on the underpinning student voice principles and how to use them to improve your practice in 2021! Keep an eye out on our social media to find out when you can watch recordings of these.

After a few years of work, the VicSRC Student Editorial Team kicked into high gear in 2020! Made up of fifteen to twenty secondary students from all around the state, the team was only able to meet in person once before the pandemic took their work online. But that didn’t stop them! Publishing more than twenty student-written and edited pieces, the team tackled topics from boredom in isolation and lockdown to how to stay safe online and the ways discrimination can affect disabled students in the Victorian education system. Keep your eyes peeled for the opportunity to join the editorial team in 2021 or just to read their fabulous new pieces.

Here at VicSRC we’re always hard at work on the advocacy projects that students tell us matter to them. And advocacy was an even stringer focus for us in 2020, as decisions about moving to remote learning happened with little notice and student life shifted overnight. We’ve had a huge number of wins this year, including the announced integration of VCE and VCAL bringing more robust real world skills to the curriculum, student access to devices improving, teachers receiving professional development accreditation for student voice, increased support for students experiencing financial difficulties and disabled students and new investment in student mental health. And we’re not done! Watch our socials to see how we’re taking your Congress priorities into 2021 and what you can do to help.

This year has been a lot. It’s involved a lot of screen time and a lot of information coming at us all very quickly and sometimes in ways that makes it very hard to understand. Early on after the pandemic started VicSRC noticed that the information coming from the Department of Education and Training (DET) was not pitched at students. It was also often written in a way that made it confusing and hard to follow. To fix this, we took up translating information from the DET into Plain English as it became available, sharing it on the Student Voice Hub through twelve different blog posts and across our social media. We saw amazing feedback and are glad to have been able to make this year even a little bit easier for students!

In between all the advocating and translating, we also wanted to hear what students had to say about the experience of learning remotely – mostly so we could do our advocating and translating better! We weren’t sure how many students would want to talk about it when we launched our first remote learning survey, but it turned out the answer was a lot: we heard from more than five hundred students on our first survey, and from that we crafted our ‘Learning from remote learning’ report with six recommendations. But while we were still talking about it with all kinds of education stakeholders, lockdown came back around! So we scoured the information we had and produced a Return to remote learning report, then when round two was done we did another survey and put out our Learning from remote learning: round 2 report. We’re still talking to lots of people about them and we’re excited about the ways the experience of remote learning can help make school work better for students in the long run!

One of the staples of the VicSRC calendar is our annual Congress, where students from around Victoria come together to discuss the biggest issues in education and what actions we can take to address them. Early in the year our Congress Coordinator and Student Executive Advisory Committee made the call that Congress 2020 couldn’t go ahead as planned. Instead, we postponed Congress until the September-October school holidays, and set about taking it online. Despite all the challenges (or perhaps because of them!) virtual Congress was a huge success!! Across four days, students put together some of the best action plans we’ve ever seen and we’re excited to work on them with and for you as we head into 2021!

After fifteen years as an auspiced organisation, 2020 saw VicSRC take its first steps out from under the wings of Youth Affairs Council Victoria (YACVic) to stand and soar as an independent organisation. After appointing our inaugural board in 2019 and starting the paperwork it hardly felt real when we officially became VicSRC Ltd! This was only possible due to the incredibly hard work of Jonathan Teh and Angela Liu from Russell Kennedy as well as the members of the Governance Advisory Group: Mitch Sprague, Bri Hines, Julia Jeong, Spencer Davis, Kristen Sellings, David Trevorrow, Krista Seddon, Ed Vong, Peter Hutton and Scott Duncan.

We couldn’t have done this without each and every person who has helped build VicSRC into what it is today – here’s to another fifteen years of brilliant student voice!

VicSRC in 2020 – what a year!

VicSRC is delighted to see significant investment in this years state budget into programs and reforms that will ensure Victorian students receive  education that is flexible, supportive and relevant to the 21st century.

This budget will provide crucial funding to areas that the VicSRC student community have identified as priorities for change and ensure Victorian students can focus on what they can do instead of what they can’t. 

Students have repeatedly spoken, at VicSRC’s annual Congress and more widely, about the need to reform VCE and better deliver the real world skills already included in the curriculum. We are excited to see $38 million over four years dedicated to developing an integrated senior secondary certificate, which will give all students the opportunity to choose academic and practical subjects and gain the skills needed for life after school. This funding will also cover new Jobs, Skills and Pathways Coordinators to provide support and advice for students choosing vocational and applied learning programs.

This new certificate will help reduce the stigma surrounding vocational pathways, increase student agency and provide further opportunities for senior students to learn real world skills in school. There will also be a new Foundation pathway certificate – for those who don’t go all the way to year 12 as well as all students who fully or partially complete vocational subject.

VicSRC looks forward to working with the government on this reform to ensure that student voices are front and centre.

One of the recommendations from VicSRC’s LFRL report was to enable all students to keep access to digital devices at home after the remote learning period finished. We were very pleased to see $24.5 million for government schools to be reimbursed so that 71,000 mobile devices that were loaned out during remote learning can be kept by the students. VicSRC look forward to working with the DET around what this means in practice and how to ensure all students that need devices can get them now and in the future. There is also additional funding of $20.5 million that will go towards building the capacity of teachers to use digital technology.

To support government school students experiencing financial difficulties, there is $31.6 million to help with the costs of camps, sports and excursions as well as buying uniforms via State Schools Relief. 

VicSRC is also very excited to see a huge investment to support students with disabilities which will increase the number of students that are eligible to receive classroom support. This amount also includes support for staff  to deliver more inclusive education for every student – an important goal of VicSRC’s vision.

There is funding for Initial Teacher Education, designed to encourage graduates to work in education settings in their local community, which will create opportunities for Aboriginal peoples to work as teachers on Country. Students identified this as an action in the Congress priority Igniting Indigenous Inclusion.

VicSRC welcomes the pre-budget mental health in schools announcement and encourages the government to consider providing teen mental health first aid training for all secondary students to increase the capacity of young people to manage their own mental health and support their peers. 

This budget clearly hears and responds to many of the issues in education that are regularly identified by students and amplified by VicSRC. It is an investment in the future of all students and will go a long way to reaching the Victorian Education State’s goal of equity and excellence. It shows a good understanding of the benefits of involving students in decisions around their education and takes great steps forward in listening to and respecting them.