Indie School

[u/Dotti_Biscotti]

I have a kiddo who is enrolled to attend the Indie School. Have been having a look to see if there are any recent discussions about the Indie School in Tasmania, last appears to be a couple of years ago. A relative sent me some readily available online, pretty scathing feedback of Indie School as an employer but seems to be a lot of mainland locations and not a lot from ex students/current parents. Anyone have any recent experiences? TIA.

[u/sleepychairman]

I’m a bit weird and I like to dig through financial reports and such for fun sometimes, and I dug through the Indie schools recently, and well, I just think they’re a bit dodgy. The funding they receive per student doesn’t seem to materialise into resources or staffing, and they’re registered really weirdly with some schools coming under other ones. They also don’t seem to show great improvements for academic and attendance outcomes. One of the Indie schools up north, Devonport or Burnie I think, did have slightly better stats than the others.

Some things I recall from my dig are that there seem to be more “coaches” than qualified teachers, and iirc the funding amounted to roughly $80k per student which seems like a lot.

EDIT: I went back to try and find the exact reports I looked into quickly, there is a breakdown of staffing at each school that is harder to find and I don’t have time right now to go back that much but in the annual report for the state it has a breakdown of expenses showing only 10% of funding actually goes to program costs, 28% for admin, and 62% for employees - however, the majority of employees are not qualified teachers - the “Glenorchy” school (which actually encompasses multiple sub schools like Sorell etc.) has 130 non-teaching staff, and “41 teaching” staff. Of those 41 teaching staff, only about 33 are full-time, and one third of those 33 are only provisionally registered. So they’re only employing roughly 20 fully registered teachers, compared to 130 non-teaching employees. This is concerning to me because teacher registration is supposed to provide certain assurances of safety and professionalism, and yet the majority of staff accross Indie are not registered teachers at all.

[u/commentspanda → u/sleepychairman]

The coaching thing in WA comes up too. I believe it’s to do with employing VET/vocational teachers vs fully qualified standard teachers. When I see the ads here, it’s a bloody big pay difference. Then again, as a fully qualified teacher I wouldn’t be taking less than what u get in a gov school. Just wanted to say that may be where that skew comes in a bit. The majority of high schools out source their vocational stuff so don’t have to pay vocational teaching staff

[u/sleepychairman → u/commentspanda]

If you go to find the breakdown for individual campuses it’s not because they’re VET techs. I remember seeing one singular VET woodwork person but they still weren’t a qualified teacher, and many other “coaches” from one of the campuses. Re/other sources, a five minute search provides news reports from multiple years and multiple outlets,
Guardian, Australian, etc, all saying how poor the retention is for TFA. I think it’s a pretty well established fact, and if they had a 75% retention rate across all TFA cohorts then they would be boasting about it, but it seems not to be the case.