When Place Leads: Lessons from Bankstown and Vincentia
Nadine Haddad
Last week, I had the privilege of spending time with two extraordinary schools: Bankstown Senior College in Western Sydney and the Firefly initiative at Vincentia High School on New South Wales’ south coast. Despite operating in vastly different contexts, both are achieving deeply impactful outcomes through community-led approaches that centre the voices, strengths, and lived realities of those they serve.
What struck me most was the extraordinary alignment in philosophy. Across diverse geographies, histories, and demographics, these initiatives are delivering grounded, relational, and dignified models of support. It’s a powerful reminder that place-based approaches are not about geography alone; they’re about designing with and for people in ways that are human, contextual, and rooted in trust.
Bankstown Senior College: A Hub of Care and Possibility
At Bankstown Senior College, the Health and Flexi Hub has become a lifeline for young people navigating the intersecting challenges of displacement, trauma, language barriers, and socioeconomic disadvantage. This is a school that serves post-compulsory-age students — many of them refugees and asylum seekers — not simply by delivering a curriculum, but by embedding health, wellbeing, trauma support, and allied services directly into the school environment. It’s not an add-on; it’s the model.
The impact is undeniable. Students who arrive alone and traumatised are met with stability, care, and possibility. One student shared, “For the first time in my life, I feel special. I feel like someone is looking after me.” That feeling of being seen, safe, and supported is what unlocks learning.
But the challenges are real. As student numbers grow and needs become more complex, the pressure on this highly personalised model intensifies. Coordination across multiple providers requires time, trust, and tenacity — all underpinned by fragile, piecemeal funding. There is extraordinary practice here. But as one teacher put it, “The complexity of this school is acknowledged, but it’s not always supported.”
Vincentia’s Firefly Initiative: Youth Leading Change
At Vincentia, a standout example of transformative practice is the Firefly Youth Voice initiative, a project that’s intentionally creating space for students to speak up, lead, and engage with real-world issues. This isn’t about tokenistic consultation; it’s a living practice of leadership, agency, and connection. When young people are truly heard and trusted, they thrive. Firefly is showing us that student voices aren’t a side note; they’re central to cultural and systemic change.
Students are stepping into leadership roles, tackling community challenges, and shaping the future of their school. Supported by a committed team and community partners, such as Uniting, they are developing skills and confidence that will extend far beyond the school gates. This is what it looks like when a school invests in young people not just as learners, but as civic actors and changemakers.
Flexi Hubs and the Paradox of Systems Ownership
Equally powerful is the Flexi Hub, a multidisciplinary model embedded within Vincentia High that brings together GPs, mental health clinicians, counsellors, and educators under one roof. It delivers integrated, student-centred support that keeps young people engaged and thriving. It works, but it constantly runs into a systems paradox: who owns it? Is it Health? Education? Youth? Everyone agrees it’s valuable, yet no one funds it sustainably.
How Does the Money Follow the Child?
This leads us to a deeper systemic question: How does the money follow the child?
Here is a radical proposition. What if we stopped allocating budgets by department and instead allocated them on a per-case basis? Imagine a system where funding is not siloed by health, education, or justice, but is flexible and personalised, where the budget is attached to the child, not the sector.
It flips the question from “Which department pays?” to “What does this child need, and how do we collectively respond?” Instead of $1 million for a department, it's $12,000 per child, to be used wherever it's most needed — whether that’s for a speech therapist, a housing broker, or a literacy tutor. It positions communities and families as active agents, not passive recipients. And it reshapes systems around the lived experience of children, not the architecture of government.
Reimagining Government as a Steward of Shared Outcomes
It’s revolutionary. But perhaps it’s also the only way forward if we’re serious about ending fragmentation, moving beyond pilot projects, and embedding community-led, place-based innovation into the heart of our systems.
Of course, such a shift calls for more than programmatic reform; it requires thoughtful leadership and a willingness to work across traditional boundaries. It means reimagining the role of government as a collaborative steward of shared outcomes, with a collective focus on supporting children and families.
From Whole-of-Government to Whole-of-Society
The question is: can we finally move beyond the rhetoric of a “whole-of-government” approach — a phrase we’ve heard for decades — and make it real? Or even better, can we transcend it?
Because what these communities are modelling is more than a joined-up bureaucracy. It’s a whole-of-society approach, where schools, families, Elders, service providers, philanthropy, and government work together as one cohesive ecosystem, where power is genuinely shared. Where place is not an afterthought, but the centrepiece.
The Invitation
The promise is there.
The practice is there.
The invitation is clear.
Will our systems be bold enough to follow?