Day itinerary
8:30
Arrival
Students arrive at the school and work together with the student kitchen team to ensure that the assembly space is ready for the morning start.
8:45
Common session
We begin the morning by discussing our collective objectives in a quiet setting that helps everyone prepare mentally for their upcoming studies.
9:00
Focused learning
The children spend time working on mathematics and literacy using personalized tools that allow them to practice skills at a comfortable speed.
10:42
Period for reflection
During this mid-morning break, teachers guide the students through mindful exercises that are designed to support their social development today.
11:00
Recess
This time allows the students to go outside for exercise and socializing, which helps them recharge before they begin their creative projects.
11:30
Applied studies
During the late morning, the classes shift toward active language acquisition and solving practical problems in an outdoor learning environment.
1:00
Lunch
Everyone gathers for a community meal that promotes healthy social bonds and provides essential nutrition for the afternoon studio sessions.
1:45
Creative workshop
Our students work in small groups on integrated projects that combine physical movement with engineering and various forms of artistic design.
3:00
Closing group
The whole group meets to talk about the achievements of the day and to prepare for the learning activities that will take place the next day.
3:30
Dismiss
The school day concludes with a calm goodbye as students depart for home with a feeling of pride in the new milestones they reached together.
At a glance
One day, in one bar
The whole design of the school is visible in the shape of a single day. Cobalt is the two hours with the AI tutor. Ochre is the four hours of human time. Grey is a break.
8:30
8:45
Academic morning with the AI tutor
9:00
Recess
11:00
Speaking and writing
11:30
Lunch
1:00
Project block
1:45
Tribe time
3:00
2
hours with the AI tutor, every school day
4
hours of speaking, making, cooking, gardening and being with people
0
hours of homework
Hour by hour
Wednesday, from drop-off to pickup
8:30
Drop-off
Drop-off happens between 8:30 and 8:45, and most children walk themselves in by Year 2. Bags go on hooks in the tribe rooms, which are multi-age home groups of about a dozen children spanning the primary years, each with a coach who stays with that tribe across their whole time at the school.
8:45
Morning circle
The tribes gather in the courtyard for a short morning circle, run by a different Stage 3 student each week. They take the roll, share a thought for the day, and have a moment of quiet before the academic block.
9:00
The academic morning
Each child is at a workstation in one of three large open rooms, set up by Stage group, headphones on, working with their AI tutor. The tutor knows where each child sits against every NSW outcome they have done and not done. Mia is in Year 6 and is working through a tricky bit of MA3-RN-01, operations with whole numbers. Her tutor noticed two weeks ago that she had been quietly bluffing her way through long division since Year 4, and she is now backfilling, fast, with the kind of one-to-one attention she would never get in a class of twenty-nine. Three workstations along, a Year 1 boy is doing rapid-fire phoneme-to-grapheme practice for EN1-PHOKW-01, because he is behind on his decoding and the system has him on a slightly different track from his cohort. A coach, fully NESA-accredited, moves quietly between students, runs a small-group conference for children who have just finished a learning unit, and pulls Mia aside for a five-minute check-in on the piece of writing she has been working on at home. Nobody is teaching from the front, which is the part most visiting principals notice first. The room is quiet, not the suppressed quiet of a strict classroom but the quiet of a small library where everyone is working on something they have, more or less, chosen to care about.
11:00
Recess
Real food, brought from home or made in the school kitchen, and no phones, ever. Children run around outside on the grass, which is also where most of them eat. Recess is half an hour, and it is the only break in the day where the children are entirely unstructured.
11:30
The speaking and writing block
The day shifts gears completely. On this Wednesday the Stage 2 cohort is rehearsing for tomorrow's session at the Surry Hills senior centre, where they will interview five elderly Sydneysiders about what childhood was like in the 1950s and produce three-minute audio pieces for the local community. The Stage 3 cohort is workshopping persuasive letters to the local council about a missing pedestrian crossing near the school. Kindergarten is in a yarning circle on the rug with their coach and a visiting Bidjigal Elder, who is teaching them a few words of language and the story that goes with them.
1:00
Lunch, cooked by Year 5
Lunch has been cooked by Year 5, who are on the lunch rotation this fortnight. The menu is sausage rolls and a green salad, with vegetables from the school garden, planned and costed by the children within a real budget. The whole school eats outside.
1:45
The project block
This term the whole-school project is the working market garden at the back of the school, and the work is spread across cross-age teams of Year 3 to 6 children. They are building beds, planting natives with a local Bidjigal educator who comes in once a fortnight, running compost data they will write up as a science report, costing seedlings, and drafting the menu for the parent fundraiser in July. Kindergarten and Year 1 are in the music room with the resident musician, working on a piece they will perform for parents at the end of term. Year 2 is in the maker space, halfway through individual woodwork projects that most of them will take home to keep.
3:00
Tribe time
The multi-age home groups come back together for reflection, planning, and the occasional raucous debate about something that happened during the day. The coach who runs the tribe is the same person who was there on the child's first day and will still be there in Year 6.
3:30
Pickup
Pickup is at 3:30, with an extended-care option until 5:30 that is closer to a bushcraft and music studio than to holding-pen babysitting. There is no homework set as a matter of routine. Two hours in the morning is enough, and the afternoon work, which is essentially the project work most schools would send home, has been done with other people, in the world, where it belongs.
Nobody is teaching from the front. The whole front-of-room setup, which has anchored Western schooling for a hundred and fifty years, is just absent.
The first thing most visiting principals notice.
What else you would notice by lunchtime
Every child in the room is working on a different outcome, and none of them is waiting for the class to catch up.
The coach is beside a child, not in front of a class.
The quiet is the quiet of a library, not a detention.
There is not a phone anywhere in the building, in any pocket, at any age.
Lunch was cooked by ten-year-olds, and it was good.
The youngest children are learning Bidjigal words from someone whose language it is.
Every week
The weekly fixtures
- Mondays: yarning circles.
- Thursdays: debating, from Year 3.
- Three mornings a week: Year 6 children run reading sessions with Kindergarten.
- Weekly instrument lessons for every child, with daily practice logged.
- Daily visual arts in the studio, with a working artist.
- Journalism, oral history and persuasive writing for a real cause, woven through the rest of the week.
The rhythm
Not every day is a Wednesday
A Friday looks different from this Wednesday, and a Tuesday looks different again. The school runs on a rhythm of weeks, fortnights, terms and years rather than the same timetable every day, and a fair bit of it happens outside the building.
Every fortnight
The fortnightly fixtures
- The whole school goes off-site for a day: the Royal National Park in autumn, the harbour in spring, the courthouse on a sitting day, the kitchen of a working restaurant on a quiet midweek.
- The same children visit the same residents at the local senior centre.
- A Year 5 or Year 6 team runs the microbusiness stall at the Bondi Markets on the Saturday.
- A team cooks lunch for the whole school from a planned menu and a real budget.
- Year 4 publishes the school podcast.
- A local Bidjigal educator works in the market garden with the cross-age teams.
Every term and every year
The big fixtures
- Once a term: an overnight camp.
- Twice a year: a full theatrical production, written, designed and directed in part by the children.
- Twice a year: a written portrait of each child from their coach, in place of a report card.
- Once a year: Stage 3 does an extended wilderness immersion in the Blue Mountains.
- Once a year: Stage 2 does a week-long exchange with a Western Sydney primary, and there is a further exchange with a regional NSW primary, with families hosting in both directions.
- End of year: the Year 6 TEDx-style event, to a public audience including local media.
- Every year: an independent privacy audit, published openly.
Seven years
The journey from Kindergarten to Year 6
The challenges are sequenced so that each year asks a little more of a child than the one before. By the time they leave, they have done hard things in public often enough that courage has become part of who they are.
Kindergarten
- Tells a story to the whole school.
- Bidjigal language basics begin.
- Yarning circles on the rug with the coach and a visiting Elder.
- Meets their tribe and the coach who will stay with them.
Year 1
- Runs 2km after weeks of preparation.
- First overnight camp.
- Bidjigal language continues.
- Reading sessions with Year 6 buddies, three mornings a week.
Year 2
- Walks themselves in at drop-off.
- Begins assessing their own work.
- Individual woodwork project in the maker space, taken home at the end of term.
- Music with the resident musician, performed for parents.
Year 3
- Three-minute talk at the local cafe, to adults who did not have to come.
- Runs 5km.
- Debating begins.
- Joins the cross-age market garden teams.
- Sailing and kayaking from Stage 2.
Year 4
- Produces the fortnightly school podcast.
- Rehearses and records oral histories with elderly Sydneysiders.
- Marine biology citizen science with University of Sydney researchers.
- Week-long Western Sydney exchange, families hosting both ways.
Year 5
- Writes letters to council that get answered, and submissions to inquiries that get acknowledged.
- Runs 10km.
- Sits through a council meeting.
- Cooks lunch for the school on rotation.
- Microbusiness stall at the Bondi Markets.
Year 6
- TEDx-style talk to a public audience, including local media.
- Half marathon.
- Visits a working courtroom and writes about it.
- Swims a kilometre in open water.
- Multi-day wilderness immersion in the Blue Mountains.
- Graduation sign-off from their coach, a community Elder and an external practitioner.
The spaces
Where the day happens
The building is not the point, and the plan does not depend on a purpose-built campus. It depends on a handful of spaces that most older primary schools already have or could make.
The Stage rooms
Three large open rooms, one per Stage group, set up with workstations for the academic morning. No front of room.
The market garden
Working beds out the back, run by cross-age teams from Year 3 to 6, with produce that ends up in the school lunch.
The tribe rooms
Where bags go on hooks in the morning and where the multi-age tribes come back together at 3:00.
The studio and the maker space
Daily visual arts with real materials, and woodwork, sewing, ceramics, electronics and fixing.
The courtyard and the grass
Morning circle, recess, and where most of the school eats lunch.
The hall
Doubles as a theatre for two full productions a year and the Year 6 event.
The kitchen
Where a team of children cooks lunch for the whole school every fortnight, from a planned menu and a real budget.
The music room
Weekly lessons with the resident musician, and the daily practice that goes with them.
The people
Who a child spends the day with
The adults in this model are coaches rather than deliverers, and a good many of them are not teachers at all. A child here grows up around a wider cast of grown-ups than a conventional school can fit into its timetable.
The coach
A NESA-accredited teacher, paid significantly more than teachers currently are, who stays with the same tribe of about a dozen children from their first day to their last. During the academic morning the coach moves between students and pulls children out for conversations. In the afternoon the coach teaches writing line by line, runs the yarning circle, and holds the standard when a child wants to give up.
Bidjigal educators and Elders
Teach language to Kindergarten and Year 1, lead on-Country lessons, work with the market garden teams once a fortnight, and share Dreaming stories with cultural protocol. A community Elder is one of the three adults who signs off each Year 6 graduate.
The resident musician
Runs the weekly instrument lessons and the pieces the younger children perform for parents at the end of each term.
Older Australians
The same residents at one local senior centre, visited by the same children fortnightly over years, and invited into the school to teach gardening, woodwork, mending and story-telling.
The working artist
Teaches daily in the studio, and is around the school often enough that the children know what the artist's own work looks like.
Researchers and practitioners
University of Sydney marine biologists running citizen science with the children on the harbour, and an external practitioner in each child's area of growing expertise who signs off their graduation.
The comparison
A conventional day and this one, side by side
The current classroom timetable is built on an industrial compromise: one teacher, thirty children, one lesson, one pace. This is what changes when that compromise is no longer necessary.
Who sets the pace
Where the teacher is
Academic block
Groupings
Screens
Phones
Who cooks lunch
Audiences
Homework
A conventional NSW day
The class median
At the front, delivering
Most of the day, whole class
One year group, about thirty children
Across the day on whatever devices the school has, then the bus home
Policed
Nobody, or the canteen
An assembly or a concert, occasionally
Most nights
A PrimarAI Wednesday
Each child's own edge
Beside the child, coaching
Two hours, one to one with a tutor and a coach
A multi-age tribe of about a dozen for the bookends of the day, a Stage group for the morning
Two hours in a closed system with no notifications, then off
None, ever
A team of children, every fortnight, on a real budget
Adults who did not have to come, from Kindergarten onwards
None, as a matter of routine
Questions
What parents ask about the day
WHY IT IS SHAPED THIS WAY
The six hours are the education, not preparation for one
These are hours we have been quietly stealing from children for a hundred years to do timetable management, and this design returns them, more or less without apology. The morning is where AI does what it does well, which is patient, adaptive, one-to-one practice. The afternoon is where children build the things AI cannot give them: taste, judgement, agency, the ability to be with other people and to make and fix and perform real things. A child who can prompt, verify and direct AI, and who can also work with their hands, hold a difficult conversation and lead a project to completion, is exactly the kind of adult the coming economy will most want around.
15
demonstrable graduation requirements
6
layers of assessment in place of one grade
1
coach, from the first day to the last
The ask
Come and argue with it
This Wednesday has never happened yet. It is a design, written by one NSW teacher and parent, and it gets better every time someone with a real classroom, a real school or a real child pushes back on it. I do not need a school built, or funding, or a board. I need one principal at one NSW primary school willing to let me run the afternoon for a term. Not the AI part. The afternoon. Four hours a day of the five Cs with a real class: public speaking to adults who did not have to come, a market garden that has to actually produce, and a microbusiness with a budget that has to balance.