Tech School

Mechanics Institutes flourished across Victoria, the term mechanic meaning artisan or trade worker. These volunteer-led organisations provided adult education classes for local communities. There were practical classes alongside chess clubs and debates.

The Working Men's College opened in June 1887, and despite its name, provided education for both men and women. Students could learn architectural drawing, mechanics, plumbing, carpentry, arithmetic, shorthand, physics, physiology and photography. Enrolments superseded Ormond’s expectation, reaching 2000 in just the first two years.

Over the years the College changed names eventually becoming the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (RMIT) in 1992.

One of the first tech schools for teenagers was Collingwood Junior Technical School on the corner of Smith and Johnston streets, which opened in 1912. It is now an arts precinct called Collingwood Yards.
 
This industrial part of the city had a large manufacturing base among working class families so courses included furniture and shoe making. Alfred Whybrow's boot factories were famous for employing Collingwood Tech School graduates.  

Attracting teenagers to study is never easy, as new principal Alexander Strang discovered arriving one evening to no students. He proceeded to ring a large bell at the front gate "…and to the assembled crowd expounded the advantage to be derived from a course of study in the local technical school." (Harrison) By August, 57 students had enrolled in evening classes. 

Technical schools for girls were often single-sex, for example Box Hill Technical School for Girls and Women which opened in 1924 with a fee-free junior school (12-14 years) and a senior school for girls over 14 years, offering both day and evening classes.

The vocational subjects generally prepared them for the hospitality and clothing industries, with classes in dressmaking, millinery, cookery and even laundry on offer. 

These subjects also served as education towards life as a wife and mother, classes were even named as such, housewifery or household management. While classes on folding laundry may seem trivial, in the 1920s a woman’s home duties were linked to the health of the nation. 

Percy Everett adopted a range of modernist styles, and for technical schools he liked Brick Expressionism, imbued with socialist ideals and often applied to working-class housing estates, and schools in 1920s Netherlands. It included bold streamlined forms and intricate geometric brick work. Firmly focused on the modernist ethos of functionality, Everett considered acoustics, sight-lines, airflow and above all else, the availability of natural light.

To service the boom in student numbers after 1950 Percy Everett designed a school classroom model that was cheap and repeatable: the Light Timber Construction school or an 'LTC' School. It was a group of single storey classrooms with sloping corrugated iron roofs, zigzag steel rafters connected by open pathways or long hallways which were notoriously cold in winter and hot in summer. They were described as "Not architectural gems…" by the Herald in 1954. 

By the 1980s there was a growing belief across the government that co-educational comprehensive schools (a single high school system) would ensure that teenage boys and girls could both access mechanics and science.   

During the early 1970s a national technical training system at tertiary level called Technical and Further Education (TAFE) was introduced by the Whitlam Government. Large amounts of Federal Government funding went into tertiary (16 years +) technical education. This became the new pathway for learning a trade.
 
When the last technical high school closed in 1990 (apart from a handful) the need for servicing local industries wasn’t as necessary because off-shore manufacturing had forced factories to close.
 
Parallel to this was the rise of new universities and subsidised university fees so students were encouraged to pursue a career in the ‘knowledge based economy’ rather than a trade.
 
This era emphasised the completion of twelve years at high school and going to university became the dominant social expectation.

In 1991, Northland Secondary College (formerly Preston East Technical School) was named in the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody as a positive school model that valued Aboriginal knowledge systems and created an environment where Koori kids could succeed. It fostered harmony, far removed from the chronic racial abuse that Aboriginal children were finding at other schools. In fact, it made students from all different cultures feel as though they’d found a place to belong. Despite its success, Northland was one of hundreds of state technical schools ordered to close in 1992. The local community were outraged and defiant. Students Muthama Sinnappan and Bruce Foley immediately lodged a complaint with the Equal Opportunity Board claiming the State’s decision to shut down their school was an act of systemic racial discrimination. In 1995 they won the case in the Supreme Court and Northland Secondary College was re-opened. The school became the Northern College of the Arts and Technology in 2011.

Fifteen years after the closure of Technical Schools, the late Victorian Minister of Education Lynne Kosky, expressed her opinion that some form of high school technical education was important. By 2015 a new model for high school technical education was unveiled by the Department of Education. New technical high school hubs were built across the state in 2018 offering courses in coding, smart farming, design thinking and sustainability (among other innovative technical focused courses). Students from either public or private schools can attend. The courses are unique to each region, but aim to future proof emerging industries in the areas of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).


When technical schools were closed, some of their records were transferred to Public Record Office Victoria for preservation, enabling this exhibition to be made possible using records from the Department of Education.