One of Australia’s best agricultural high school programs is in Sydney
The search is on the for the country's best high school agricultural programs. It's part of a national strategy to improve teaching resources, counter negative perceptions of ag, and attract more students. Surprisingly, one of the most successful schools is right in the middle of Sydney.
Transcript
00:00 No, it's not a coffee shop.
00:08 This is agricultural education, North Shore style.
00:12 This is the region where coffee is grown in the world.
00:15 Where Sydney-born Scott Graham and his team at Barker College are converting a growing
00:20 number of urban kids to ag.
00:24 Out of our 420 or so students doing agriculture from Year 9 to 12, probably about 8 or so
00:29 are actually borders from rural regional areas.
00:33 The rest of them really are from the North Shore and the northern beaches of Sydney,
00:36 so they have virtually no connection to agriculture at all.
00:39 We've got durian today as our fruit of the week.
00:42 It's probably the smelliest fruit out there.
00:45 It tastes a lot better than it smells.
00:47 What do you think?
00:49 No, no good?
00:51 From coffee classes to exotic fruits, here learning about paddock to plate is done in
00:57 reverse.
00:58 I'd say our philosophy really is plate to paddock.
01:01 In education you really typically start with things that are concrete and you work towards
01:05 things that are abstract.
01:06 It makes the most sense to students.
01:07 And of course they all eat food and wear clothes and so really starting at that point and working
01:13 backwards is the way to really engage them in a metropolitan context.
01:18 When you're surrounded by the city, teaching the paddock part of the syllabus requires
01:22 excursions and a clever use of space.
01:26 So these ones are warraggle greens.
01:29 While these students do get their hands on all types of crops and livestock, a big part
01:34 of the program is focusing on the 60 to 70 per cent of ag jobs that happen off farm,
01:41 with graduates going on to pursue everything from plant breeding and robotics to product
01:47 development.
01:48 Agriculture in metropolitan high schools really has been overlooked.
01:51 I mean two thirds of Australia's population live in only five cities and so if we're really
01:55 going to change the number of people going into agriculture it's going to require something
01:59 different to happen in metropolitan areas in agriculture.
02:06 Schools like Barker are increasingly on Anthony Lee's mind.
02:10 He's the CEO of Australian Country Choice, one of the world's largest family owned cattle
02:17 and beef suppliers.
02:18 What you've got to do is you've got to have a market for everything.
02:22 While some find boning rooms confronting, he thinks students should see what happens
02:27 to animals in between the paddock and plate.
02:31 If you look at a young kid on a bush property, a remote property somewhere, they are exposed
02:36 to it from birth.
02:37 We don't see that in urban Australia, in metro Australia, so it's very foreign to us.
02:42 I have a view that we absolutely expose people to it.
02:46 Yep, now tight, look where you're going, look where you're going.
02:52 Now sparked by his own kids, the Brisbane based father of four is taking his passion
02:57 for education beyond the meat works.
03:01 Because while his children have grown up with a love for the bush and respect for its industries,
03:07 he says they weren't learning much about ag at school and what they did hear was largely
03:13 negative.
03:14 I heard things like, you know, you're part of the problem or I'm hearing that the beef
03:18 industry is really bad and we shouldn't be eating meat.
03:21 Why would a teacher want to teach it?
03:23 Why would a kid want to come into the industry?
03:25 It's all the same issue if they're hearing bad things.
03:28 So for the last year he's been lobbying for an overhaul of agricultural education.
03:35 Most industries would kill to have their industry in the curriculum.
03:39 We have it in there, we just need to get it taught.
03:41 [BLANK_AUDIO]