Telstra Thanks Presents Katy Perry - This Is How We Do Our School...

This post comes because I'm a little annoyed at the results of this competition. A couple of months ago, Telstra ran a nation-wide competition for schools to make a video showing how their school is creative and unique, with the winning school receiving a $10,000 grant for their arts department along with 20 tickets to their closest Katy Perry concert and a visit at school from Katy Perry herself. Two runner up schools receive $5000 each for their arts departments. I will preface this post by also stating (as some of you probably know) that I am a teacher at a public primary school in suburban Melbourne. One of our amazing teachers put together an entry for this competition, and it was very clever. I haven't watched all the videos so I don't know if it should have won, but I do think it was definitely more creative and entertaining than the winner.

The winning school was Loreto Mandeville Hall in Toorak, probably the most affluent suburb in Melbourne, and one of the most expensive Catholic girls' schools to attend. Fees in 2015 for Prep are $16,317, moving up to $24,585 for Year 12, plus an annual building levy of $2085. At around 1000 students, that is a lot of money they are raking in each year, before even considering their government funding and Catholic church funding.

Sure, a visit from Katy Perry is an amazing prize (although, having attended a pretty strict Catholic girls' secondary college myself, I'm not sure how much Katy Perry's style and music fits in with a traditional Catholic ethos, but that is another post altogether), but is this a school that really needs a $10,000 grant for their arts department? I don't think so.

This is a school that boasts an orchestra in its video entry to the competition, for goodness sake! Their website tells of the 'industry professionals' its visual arts department is comprised of. Music camps are offered to students. The fees the four girls who apparently were the masterminds behind creating the entry video accumulate to almost $72,000 - a $10,000 grant being a pretty small slice of that pie of four students alone, let alone the whole school's fees.

Should a school that is so affluent be eligible for a competition such as this? I think not. Even people from the competition were quoted in newspapers as saying that, upon attending the school for Katy Perry's visit on Thursday and viewing the grounds and facilities, they didn't feel this school needed $10,000. This competition should have only been open to public schools across the country, who receive less funding and charge nominal fees to parents (my school is currently around $200 per child per year, in a school of around 240 students, which is reduced for extra children in the family), in order to better support the lack of private funding they receive. Some people may argue that private schools, both religious and independent, receive less government funding than state schools, which may be true, but this is purely balancing out all the additional sources of revenue that state schools simply can't access. A visit from Katy Perry is an exciting prize, but a $10,000 grant is an opportunity that Loreto simply did not need. Our school's video was filmed on a 5 year old FlipCam, and put together in iMovie on a staff laptop (which staff have to rent from the department of education). Again, I'm not saying our school should have necessarily won, but I am saying that only state schools should have been eligible for entry, given their comparable facilities, budgets, and sources of income.

Take a look at the winning video here  along with some other videos that were entered in the competition. The video alone isn't the most entertaining and creative of all of them out there, and I'll let you be the judge on how much professional technology was used in the creation of the video.

Take a look at Loreto's website and you be the judge on whether or not this school needed $10,000. I'd be very keen to hear exactly how Loreto plans on spending their newly acquired 'loose change', because in a school that affluent, that sum of money is simply just that.

I would love to hear your thoughts. Should a competition that involves such a substantial grant be open to all schools, regardless of affluence, sources of income, and resources? Is the only way to make a competition such as this to open it to all schools in Australia? Should there be some sort of entry criteria, such as my proposal that only state schools should be invited to enter? Is this then disadvantaging our private school student counterparts, excluding them just because their parents have chosen or are able to afford to send them to a private school?