Larrakeyah Primary School

How to build healthy lives and healthy futures

Larrakeyah Primary School, a public school in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, designed a model that helps prepare its students for the future by nurturing them holistically. Its programmes improve their overall wellbeing as well as their career prospects.

Larrakeyah Primary School is an accredited Cambridge International School, the first to be granted such a status in Northern Territory. Its students come from diverse backgrounds with 40% speaking a second language at home while 20% have special needs and 2% identify as Aboriginal.

The school’s QUEST programme is designed to connect and inspire, bringing real life contexts to the classroom through the process of inquiry. The aim of QUEST is to allow students to prepare for jobs that do not yet exist by developing 21st Century Skills of Collaboration, Creativity, Communication and Critical Thinking. Teachers facilitate a small group of students and focus on an area of inquiry, working with industry professionals and members of the community to obtain specific knowledge and skills.

Students can choose projects they are passionate about, leading to higher engagement. Working with industry professionals allows students to explore and discover careers that are of interest to them, eliminating worries about their career prospects.

The school also has a cooking and gardening programme supporting health, hygiene and nutrition. Some of the food used in school meals is grown in the school garden and the students take an active part in helping grow the produce. The school runs a ‘Friends at Break Programme’ in the library during each recess to promote social skills and friendships between students.

Larrakeyah Primary School also uses an app to help students monitor their own social and emotional learning. It helps the user monitor their moods and has helped students become more self-aware of their emotions and gain the resilience they need to bounce back from setbacks more quickly.

If Larrakeyah Primary School were to win the World’s Best School Prize for Supporting Healthy Lives, it would use the funds to expand the QUEST programme to all grade levels throughout the school. The money would also be used to market and promote QUEST to entice more industry professionals to get involved with the project.