Co-Educational Learning at Edgecliff

As of 2024, Edgecliff launched a range of age-appropriate co-educational learning experiences which span from Kindergarten to Year Six. Activities include both curriculum-based and co-curricular opportunities, with meaningful connections being created with several independent girls’ schools in the local area, including Ascham, Kincoppal and St Catherine’s. Whilst proudly advocating for and providing all-boys formal schooling, Edgecliff believes in honouring our moral obligation to offer a wider window into real-world learning experiences, which ultimately involves interactions with all boys and girls.

The co-education programme at Edgecliff equips the boys with the skills and personality attributes to work collaboratively with different people from a wide range of cultural and social backgrounds. It also values the importance of teaching, assisting and forming skills for building meaningful and respectful relationships with both boys and girls. Establishing and fostering longer term friendships, relationships and connections with partner girls’ schools is a key priority, within both pupil interactions and staff collegiality; all co-educational initiatives have been designed to facilitate this, as opposed to arranging ‘one-off’ tokenistic ventures.

Year Four Edgecliff boys welcomed the Year Four girls from Ascham for a creative feast of sushi making from recycled materials, aiming to raise awareness about the shocking volume of plastic in our oceans and the related threat on marine life. Getting to know each other in small groups, the boys and girls were tasked with creating sushi pieces for the ‘Sham Shushi Shop’, where each group made sushi by hand, and attended to the details of notating ingredients and price labels. Although the sushi was not edible… the boys and girls had a blast while creating their very own sushi pieces under the expert guidance of Edgecliff’s very own (returning) Artist-In-Residence, Jane Gillings.

Edgecliff’s Year Six boys travelled to St Catherine’s to start their co-education programme for the year, and participated in a day of ‘learning about leadership’. The pupils were challenged by an energetic team from ‘Character Builders’ to explore the skills which are required for effective leadership followed by a shared conversational lunch together. A term later, the St Catherine’s Year Six girls joined Edgecliff’s Year Six boys to embrace the ‘World of Maths’ for an exciting and thought-provoking journey through a range of problem-solving activities and conceptual mathematical conundrums, as well as integrated engineering and ‘chance’ tasks! Again, working in small collaborative groups, the day presented a wonderful opportunity to build interpersonal skills, push the pupils out of their ‘comfort zone’ and take a risk in talking to someone new or just voicing an idea within a different dynamic.

Ascham’s Year Five girls joined Edgecliff’s Year Five cohort for a day full of Drama. Led by Mr Ian McPhee, the pupils had a blast with a series of invigorating, energising and ‘just really fun’ warm-up activities. After the ice was well and truly broken, small group activities followed, which included character creation, character development, and script writing that culminated with performances of the day’s work on stage and under ‘the lights’.

Throughout the day, it was evident that both Edgecliff and Ascham were challenged by constraints of the short time frame, getting to know each other and generally ‘getting over’ inhibitions of this new experience! However, by the end of the day it was evident that significant progress had been made in ‘gelling’ and there was a real ‘buzz’ in the learning dynamic. Performances were incredibly entertaining and credit to the attitude and investment of energy, from staff and pupils, across the day. Ascham and Grammar staff were in agreement as they observed the progressive shift and significant learning across the day – in academic capacity, but most importantly in the building of self-efficacy, confidence and interpersonal skills between the two schools.

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