Rationale

**Quantitative Evaluation of St Mary’s Campus.**
St Mary’s Campus (SMC) has been in operation for three years or fundamentally 6 semesters. Year 9 students at MacKillop College spend 6 months at SMC in what is virtually ‘a rite of passage’ prior to their pathways years. The curriculum is oriented around an integrated, enquiry approach to learning. It is high on experiential learning and looks closely at community, rituals and relationships (peers, teaching and ancillary teaching staff). It fundamentally focuses on educational and spiritual needs. Qualitatively, the alternative campus has been a resounding success given the anecdotal feedback from students, parents, teachers and the wider community along with the objective trend of reduced number of referrals and detentions given for this specific year. The students who were originally at SMC during 2005 are about the leave MacKillop College after this academic year. It would be remiss of us not to retrospectively evaluate the perceived value in setting up such a campus from both the students and teachers perspective. In this project, existing leaders could walk with potential leaders and the ‘flattened structure’ of leadership that was created for SMC. This current structure embraces the leadership capacity at SMC and in such a shared project could lead to further school improvements i.e. in the vein of ‘mobilising and energising others, with the aim of improving teaching and learning’ (Pascoe, in Leadership in Catholic Schools, 2005: iii). The ‘Leadership in Catholic Schools - Development Frame work and Standards of Practice’ supports this proposal as the research will ‘support the leadership development of others’ and ‘enable teachers to engage in critical self reflection…(Pascoe, 2005:iii)’.