Four schools in a fortnight

A fortnight of school visits left me inspired, rattled, and quietly grieving for creativity in education

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been in four schools. My head gets bewildered by the maths, but that’s a little over two hundred teenagers taught, coaxed, wrangled, and (hopefully) inspired. My body is tired, my brain is whirring, and I have ended up with the flu.

The first school I visited was in the Western Downs. The town: one street, one servo, one pub, and a bakery owned by a woman who transcends time and makes a vanilla slice that tastes like childhood. Drama isn’t offered in the school there. It doesn’t fit into the timetable or the budget or maybe the vision. But the English teachers — bless them — brought me in to run drama workshops anyway, hoping it might help their students grasp the concept of "voice."

We worked out of a multipurpose hall that felt like an aircraft hangar. The students—three groups of teens—were almost uniformly terrified. Mute-with-dread terrified. Vulnerability in this space was not safe. Creativity was something to be laughed at, mocked, pushed back down where it couldn’t embarrass you.

The climax of the workshop was simple in theory: introduce a character you’ve created with two sentences. In practice? Excruciating. I tried to make a nurturing space. I cracked jokes, shared stories, softened my voice, praised every effort — but it didn’t matter. Every creative risk was met with laughter. Not the fun kind, but the kind that makes you wish you could crawl back inside your hoodie and disappear.

One teacher, ignoring repeated requests, filmed the students during these moments. Not as celebration, not as documentation, but to catch the “funny” bits—the silly voices, the awkwardness. The shame in the room became thick enough to bottle.

Later that week, I found myself at an all-girls private school. The bell was a snippet of classical music. (Of course it was.) I’d been asked to teach physical theatre, and the girls complied with well-trained politeness. We spoke about themes that might interest them — climate change, youth politics, and academic pressure. None landed. What they wanted to talk about was love. Life. Relationships. Is that a function of being in an all-girls environment? Or is it class — the safety net that lets you focus on the personal rather than the political?

A few days later, I was at one of the most expensive schools in the state. This time, it was a dozen teenage boys in drama. I expected to meet a small group of domestic terrorists. Or at least some cynicism and alt-right memes. That YouTube-pilled detachment. But what I found was sensitivity. Awareness. A desire to create a connection. They wanted their audiences to feel something — to feel safe. I left that room more hopeful than I expected.

I spent the longest stretch at a massive public school, running ten English workshops designed to trick teenagers into thinking reading and writing might be fun. The teachers were thrilled with the results, but the environment was brutal. Anyone who claims that all students in Australia have equal educational opportunities is dreaming.

Many of these students were bored, overwhelmed, and disconnected—and that was just the baseline. Classrooms were routinely disrupted by angry, loud, and sometimes violent. I don’t blame them. The system’s barely holding together, and they’re expected to perform joy on demand.

The idea of creative risk in that context? Forget it. When your nervous system is in survival mode, vulnerability looks like suicide. You retreat inward. You don’t play.

And yet — in all of this — there were sparks. A moment of honesty from a kid who barely speaks. A sudden, surprising laugh in the middle of a scene. A story written with such rawness it makes your chest tighten. They are small.

Believe it or not, I left the fortnight feeling positive. Teenagers are different to a few years ago. The conversation that began with the all-girls school continued through my other visits. Kids weren’t interested or even knowledgeable about global affairs. They didn’t want to talk about climate change, the Middle East or social media. They wanted to talk about love, life and relationships. This is a stark contrast to just two years ago, where every classroom still stood in the shadow of COVID and Trump 1.0. Every student wanted to talk about societal stress.

For now, the kids are back to being kids. We just have to hope the structures around them won’t let them fall.

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