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Flowers and crocheting are helping students get back to their books, writes Jeremy Roberts
SPEAK to teachers and administrators about Lighthouse education, the federally-funded initiative trialling strategies to improve boys' school performance, and they consistently plead against taking a simplified gender-based view of the program.
"We are not advantaging one group over another in this program -- this is good for the girls too," says one high school teacher in the Adelaide Hills region, who has 30 years' experience in the state education system.
More than 340 schools across Australia are participating in the program, which was expanded in June with the addition of 51 new participating schools.
The second point teachers raise about the Lighthouse project is that they are not talking about all boys. The teachers are at pains to say that the program is not a massive state-run targeted education program for boys in general.
"We are not talking about all boys -- a lot of our boys are fine and don't have an issue," says Joyce Stark, leader of the Boys Education Lighthouse Schools II project (BELS II) for outer suburban and country communities north of Adelaide.
The issues Stark is talking about include so-called "high needs" boys, including a boy who finds it daunting to get to and from school without being accompanied, boys who are active in the playground but not "on task" in the classroom, boys who don't think it is "cool" to be good at the same things girls are, such as reading.
Stark co-ordinates the BELS II program for nine schools in the Salisbury and Elizabeth areas but is also the adaptive education co- ordinator for St Augustine's Parish school of more than 620 students.
In the first year of Lighthouse last year, the school sat on the sidelines but...