Pine Community School

Pine Community School is an independent democratic community primary school for children situated in the leafy bushland of Arana Hills, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. We are committed to providing a caring, harmonious environment where the academic, physical, social, emotional and creative development of each individual student is attained to their maximum potential. This is achieved through small, multi-age settings, with a high teacher to student ratio, where teachers, parents and the community work together to nurture positive self-esteem and encourage all students to become responsible and motivated.

A Democratic School is a school which is, in some capacity, self-governing, with each community member having influence on decisions and outcomes. A contrast might be made with more ‘autocratic’ school structures, in which power and authority are concentrated in the teachers and adult administrators. In democratic educational philosophy, students, including and especially children, are seen as active participants in their own learning and their environment. Each student’s voice is given weight in decision-making both personal — for instance, the direction of his or her own education — and communal — the rules and adjudications by which the school functions as a whole.

Pine’s motto is “Happy Children Learn”, and everything in our philosophy and approach stems from that. It starts with the well researched idea that children learn best when they are happy and relaxed and engaged – when they are actually interested in what they are doing.

So how do we make this happen? What does it mean to be happy? How do we help our children be happy, and thus learn well? For a start, Pine allows children to “have a childhood” – allowing lots of time for play, allowing them to take risks and understand consequences, not enforcing needless structure and control. We allow children to have “down time”, when they’re not interested in learning, and we maximise the “up time” when they’re keen and excited and engaged.

Pine teachers are amazingly good at capitalizing on children’s ever-changing interests. One of the many examples of this was in late 2007, when a few of the students became very interested in writing their own comic books. This was allowed and encouraged, and the interest spread, and a number of students set up their own “comic book shop” in the school’s library room, spending most of each day there for a number of weeks. They defined roles for themselves (the boss, bodyguard(!), artists, writers etc), and produced comics for all the other kids to read. In this process, kids who normally hated writing were writing like crazy; kids who weren’t good readers were loving reading the comics, and all the kids involved learned a lot about negotiation and teamwork.

Pine Community School is committed to providing a caring, harmonious environment where the academic, physical, social, emotional and creative development of each individual student is attained to their maximum potential. This is achieved through small, multi-age settings where teachers, parents and the community work together to nurture positive self-esteem and encourage all students to become responsible and motivated.

Pine Community School is an independent, democratic community primary school. We offer multi-age groupings with a low student/teacher ratio in a caring, harmonious environment. We are committed to partnerships with parents and students that support children’s individual learning development in a holistic manner (addressing the whole child including academic, social, physical, emotional and aesthetic needs). Through child-centred, co-constructed curriculum, we provide hands-on learning opportunities that challenge and support students’ needs and interests. We are passionate about using research-based best practice to engage our students, providing opportunities to learn and develop in play-based and real life contexts, as well as having a positive outlook and self-identity. We believe that our school helps children to become confident, capable and happy learners who care about others and make good choices as citizens. We aim to develop these skills throughout the primary years. Our motto is ‘Happy Children Learn’ through a partnership of home and school environments.