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Year 12 screen and media student Paige O’Neill has spent lockdown six creating her own short animated movie trailer as part of an assessment of her web design skills.

It hasn’t been easy completing the assessment task at home, with just a “slowish” laptop to work on and fewer opportunities to engage with her classmates or ask her teacher for help.

Lockdowns have forced year 12 student Paige O’Neill to complete screen and media assessments on her laptop at home.Credit:Scott McNaughton

Although she enjoyed the creative challenge, she also feels that the finished product is not as good as it might have been.

“It was really rewarding finishing it and being able to say, ‘yeah I did that’, but it’s hard not being able to have the teacher there because it’s really scraping the surface,” the Clonard College student said.

Paige’s screen and media unit is just one of a long list of practical VCE and VCAL subjects that have been disrupted this year, with year 12 students missing as many as eight weeks of in-class learning.

And while the Andrews government has pledged to allow small groups of year 12 students back on campuses to complete school-based assessments that cannot be done online from this week, many students, including Paige, are still waiting to hear when that will happen.

The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority confirmed to schools on Monday that assessments in dance, drama, music and theatre studies can go ahead on-site in groups of up to 10 students.

The wait for confirmation of a return date continues for all other practical subjects, including sciences, visual arts, design and technologies and vocational education and training (VET).

Monique Dalli is a Melbourne secondary school teacher and president of the Design and Technologies Teachers’ Association of Victoria.

She said there were critical aspects of VCE design and technology studies that could never be replicated from home, and that teaching the subjects remotely had exacerbated inequity in the classroom.

“A massive part of their study design is actually applying their learning in a practical setting and designing their own products, and the disparity between what students have access to at home is quite polarising,” Ms Dalli said.

“You can imagine, some kids are living in apartments with parents that don’t have access to tools, machinery, equipment, whereas other students might have a garage and access to things like sewing machines, material to make and do at home.”

In a school setting, students would also have access to technology such as 3D printers and laser cutters. Instead, “everything has become low-tech”, Ms Dalli said.

A VCAA spokesperson said the authority will “progressively add other studies to the list of permitted essential assessments based on the advice of the Chief Health Officer”.

Paige is studying the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL) this year and will not sit exams.

VCAL students will also receive special consideration of the pandemic’s impacts on their studies in assessment, although the process differs from the VCE. Advice to schools on how to do apply special consideration to VCAL students is still being finalised.

Paige said she was keen to know how special consideration would be applied to her year 12 results, but was more anxious about the applied knowledge she was missing, including losing the opportunity to complete an external work placement this year.

“I’m not learning as much along the way, whereas if I was in the classroom I’d at least be able to ask a few more questions,” she said.

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