School is not a Contest: A brief history of Ashwood School
- scraze
- 2 hours ago
- 9 min read
In 2026, Ashwood School celebrates 50 years of educating children with a mild intellectual disability. Tucked behind Ashwood High School – a place with its own rich history – on Montpellier Road, Ashwood School represents an important era in Victorian school education. But its significance to our community can be easily overlooked when you don’t have a child in need of it.
In medical terms, a mild intellectual disability means a person has an IQ between 50-55 and 70 (the “normal” range is between 85 and 115, with “average” around 100). In practical terms, it means a person can: struggle to understand complex information and manage the complexities of life administration; follow detailed conversations, have trouble with understanding social nuances, among other challenges. The condition often comes with additional diagnoses, including Attention Deficit Disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Down’s Syndrome and behavioural issues.
None of this means that a person with a mild intellectual disability cannot live a fulfilling life with successful relationships, employment, and community engagement. It just means they need some extra help and support getting there. And that’s where a special school comes in.
Recently, I volunteered to assist Ashwood School with commemorating their anniversary. So far, this involves trawling through hundreds of photographs, albums, DVDs and a video cassette tape or two depicting happy students of all ages engaged in all manner of activities: camps, woodworking, gardening, sports day, stage-performing, music-playing, peering at giant monitors of computers featuring floppy disk drives, reading books, cooking, baking, creating bizarre art, and working diligently in the classroom. Pretty much like every other school really.
For the record, everything in this box pictured above now fits on the little red memory stick. With room to spare.
Now to understand how Ashwood School came about, let’s look at the complicated and rage-inducing history of special education in Victoria. Fortunately, there’s a book to help. It’s called Celebrating 100 Years of Special Education in Victoria 1913-2013, by Tony Thomas. It’s at the PMI Victorian History Library if you’re interested in reading more about it.
The beginning of specialist education in Victoria
The idea that all children should receive a free, secular and compulsory education dates to the passing of the Education Act by the Victorian Government in 1872. This was ground-breaking for its time. Four years later, the Government amended the legislation to exempt themselves from providing such an opportunity to children with intellectual disabilities.
For these children, ‘education’ involved incarceration in poorly funded mental asylums. The primary goal of such places was to keep the children subdued and away from society. Then the 1890 Depression hit. Drastic funding and staff cuts caused these asylums to fall into disrepair. One can only imagine the horrors inflicted upon their poor occupants.
But there were people who fought against this grotesque ill-treatment of intellectually disabled children. Witnesses to the Royal Commission of 1884 spoke of their belief that many could be taught independence and interpersonal communication. They just needed special classes and teachers with specific training. To prove this point, in 1897, Dr John Fishbourne used his large home in Puckle Street, Moonee Ponds to open St Aidan’s School: the first private boarding school for children with intellectual disabilities in Victoria. With his dedicated daughter Laeta at the helm, St Aidan’s hosted up to 40 students at a time. Under the Fishbournes’ guidance, St Aidan’s began producing functional and employable graduates.
Dr Fishbourne’s success drew sympathetic and persistent media attention to the need for more special schools across Victoria. In response to this attention, Dr W Ernest Jones, Inspector General for the Insane with the Department of Lunacy (no, I am not making that name up) chaired a review of the six Victorian asylums and found them severely overcrowded, with inadequate staff numbers and outmoded attitudes. Armed with this evidence, Dr Jones began to pressure the Victorian Government to do something about it.
Enter Frank Tate.
Frank Tate and special education
Frank Tate is the reason old cars say “Victoria: The Education State” on their numberplates. Soon after Federation, when Victoria was in hot competition with New South Wales to become the ‘best’ state in Australia, 38-year-old former teacher Frank Tate became the Minister for Education.
Tate set about implementing his goal of state-funded mandatory primary school education for all children up to the age of 14 and providing state-funded secondary education for them too. In 1906, Tate got together with Dr Jones and Dr Fishbourne to discuss the educational needs of children with disabilities (intellectual, physical, sensory and otherwise) housed in the awful asylums. Together, they devised a path forward. They proposed the establishment of government-funded special schools in Melbourne, the suburbs and large country towns. A year later, Royal Park Special School (known as Baltara today) opened. Other schools, including the Victorian Deaf and Dumb Institution, the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind, and Fitzroy Special School followed by 1913.
Tate’s ground-breaking Education Act of 1910 included a section relating to children with disabilities. It enshrined an obligation on parents to provide educational instruction for their child at home or send them to a special school. Any parent who did not comply with this directive needed to provide him with a justification as to why.
Tate’s Education Act separated people with a disability from those with mental illness by their educational needs. It also became the first major piece of equal opportunity legislation for Victorians with disabilities. Tate’s inclusion of the clause about parent justification indicated that parent attitudes were one of the major barriers to intellectually disabled children attending a special school. Unfortunately, in my personal experience, this remains a significant problem today.
It will not surprise you that Tate’s good intentions clashed with reality.
Out of sight, out of mind
Over the next 60 years, special schools dedicated to the needs of children with intellectual, social, sensory and physical disabilities slowly expanded across Victoria into the more populated suburbs of Melbourne and Victoria’s larger towns. But the long wait lists showed there was never a time when supply adequately met demand. Funding was always grossly inadequate and the schools relied on charity to survive. Oversight came under 14 different government branches, creating inefficiency and a fragmentation in funding and operational matters. For years, the long-running conservative governments of Henry Bolte and then Dick Hamer refused to do anything about it; employing an “out of sight out of mind” philosophy.
The catalyst for change came in 1968 when Premier Henry Bolte finally reorganised the Education Department to create a Special Services Division dedicated to the educational needs of students with intellectual and physical disabilities. This coincided with more progressive thinking on how best to educate these children. Research results showed that moving away from approaching education through the lens of disability towards encouraging a child’s potential and strengths created a far more beneficial outcome for the child.
This new way of thinking coincided with the Whitlam Government’s Karmel Report into the state of the Australian education system. The Reporting Committee dedicated an entire chapter to special education and it revealed that Australia’s effort was significantly lower than other countries. The Karmel Report recommended capacity needed to be at least doubled, if not tripled from a meagre 1.7 per cent of its student population.
The Karmel Report prompted The Age to run a series called The Minus Children; forceful articles on the plight of children with special educational needs in Victoria and the struggle their families experienced. One article focused on the appalling conditions at Kew Cottages, where there were no lavatory facilities or play area for the children.
Even Alan Scanlan, the State Minister for Health at the time admitted, ‘the children stank. The whole place was oppressive, with open sewers, a muddy quadrangle and an open tin shed for a recreation room.’
Over eight months, The Age’s series created a groundswell of community outrage. Commonwealth Minister for Education Kim Beazley described the state of Victoria’s special education system as archaic and threatened to take it over. Under immense pressure, Premier Hamer finally agreed to accept the considerable amount of funding on offer from the Whitlam Government. Over only a few years, the Whitlam Government provided Victoria with $660 million for education; 30 per cent ($198.6 million) earmarked for special schools including: teacher training and providing opportunities for advancement, providing additional support workers (speech therapists, social workers and teachers’ aides etc), renovating existing buildings, and building new schools.
Ashwood Special School, as it was called then, emerged from this giant pool of funding.
The beginning of Ashwood Special School
Ashwood (a portmanteau of neighbouring Ashburton and Burwood) in the early 1970s was a pretty typical eastern Melbourne suburb that developed in the 1950s. Before WWII, the area was entirely rural, dominated by the large grazing estate of the Jordan family. The Jordanville train station, opened in 1930, took its name from the family. In 1947, the Housing Commission purchased a large tranche of land on the south side of High Street Road towards the Holmesglen Factory that became the Jordanville Housing Estate.
The Education Department purchased the large block of land remaining between High Street Road, Kooyong Koot (Gardiners) Creek and Cassinia Avenue. In the 1950s, they built Ashwood High School and Jordanville Technical School on the other side of Vannam Drive; and Ashwood Primary School on High Street Road. Jordanville South Primary School catered to the children living in the Chadstone end of the Estate.
The kids of Jordanville and later Ashwood got along fine at primary school until they were divided academically between the High School and Technical School. The area quickly developed a rough reputation that took several decades to shake. By the early 1970s, it was home to sharpie gangs, including the Jordy Boys from the Tech School.
Perhaps an effort to protect special needs kids from the daily verbal and sometimes physical battles between the students of the two schools explains why the Education Department abandoned their original plan to build Ashwood Special School on the corner of Cassinia Avenue and Parkhill Drive, behind Ashwood High School. Fortunately, there was still a chunk of old Jordan family land available over the hill and the school site was moved to Montpellier Road. They then sold the land between for housing.
Ashwood’s architectural design did not follow the standard layout of a Victorian primary school. The Karmel funding enabled the architecture of the new special schools to reflect the needs of the children, rather than the other way around. After wide consultation, its architects created a model of classrooms, demonstration units and special education units that rolled out in Bendigo, Bulleen, St Albans and Ashwood.
According to the Public Records Office documents on the school, the school buildings were erected quite quickly. A little too quickly according to John Sharp, Ashwood’s first principal.
“Such was the Department’s preparedness for the opening of the new schools that all the toilet paper and tissues were delivered to Ashwood the day before school started for the principals from the other new schools to pick up and take to their schools,” John Sharp wrote in Thomas’ history.
Almost every day a new problem cropped up.
“Your attention is drawn to the fact that no ventilation provision has been made for the washing machine and clothes dryer in the laundry section of the homecrafts area in this new special school,” Sharp wrote to the Education Department, a few weeks after opening day.
The grounds were not completed and he soon discovered the School suffered from persistent weeds and inconvenient grass growth on the oval, the legacy of its prior land use as pasture.
Fortunately, John Sharp was an experienced and dedicated principal in charge of a team of equally enthusiastic teachers. The school had a capacity for 144 pupils and contained a preschool (unusual for its time), Junior and Senior groups, employment training facilities and opportunities to return to ‘normal’ schools. Sharp initiated the vocational training room, liaising with local industry and businesses to provide work experience for students and building important community connections. Programs including homecrafts, physical education, art and craft, speech, library, music and school camps followed.
Many of Ashwood’s first students came from other special schools but transferred there because it was closer to their home. Before long the school’s reputation grew so much that students came from all over Melbourne to attend. By the new century, the School housed over 200 students, stretching the capacity of its limited grounds and buildings. Over the next two decades, the school received funding for a new gymnasium, fitness centre, library, meeting and therapy rooms, and additional classrooms.
In the 2000s, Ashwood School (for the name was changed to drop the “special”) ran a fully costumed and choreographed musical production every two years and a debutante ball (later called a ‘presentation ball’ for its graduates every year.
Full disclosure: I grew up in Perth and we just had a ‘school ball’ so I don’t get the whole ‘deb’ thing here. But it must be important because Ashwood School’s ball was the subject of a documentary series called ‘The Ball’ that screened on ABC TV in 2010.
The School also ensures its students participate in vocational programs (often off-campus) outdoor education, wellbeing, values, respectful relationship and sex education programs. Preparation for work is also fundamental to the development of older students.
All of this could not have been possible without a phenomenal amount of teacher and parent support. The school has had only five principals in its 40 years of operation. Teacher turnover is also lower than average. While I was rummaging through the archives, several teachers stopped to tell me about how they had been here for over 25 years, over half the duration of the school’s operational history, so if I had any questions...
They all seem a happy and cheerful cohort, working hard to prepare children who were thrown a few extra curveballs at birth for a fruitful and productive life.
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