Catherine Shaw

But it's so cool to have a school that allows children to really connect with the natural world and spend a whole lot of their childhood outside.

So we're a kindergarten to year 10 school.

We cater for about 200 students.

And we teach the same curriculum as every other school in New South Wales.

So we're not doing anything radically different with what we're teaching, but we do radically different things in how we're doing that teaching.

So I say to teachers, teach inside if you have to.

And a lot of the time they're teaching outside.

We have base mats set up under the trees for a maths lesson or an English lesson.

And a lot of the time we're not even on site at school.

We have three nature school branded mini buses and every day of the week is somebody's adventure day.

The teachers have their light rigid license to drive the buses.

And so on any given day of the week, I have a class jumping in the magic school bus with their teacher to go and have their full day of regular learning offsite in Port Macquarie.

They might be learning on the beach or learning in the bush or learning at the community gardens.

The whole of the Port Macquarie region is our classroom.

And so our students have this really exciting, nature-based, experiential kind of approach to their learning.

We're low-tech, but we're not no-tech.

So I don't think we need to have interactive digital screens in kindergarten classrooms.

But we do need kindy kids who can work an iPad, and they need to be able to use those digital devices purposefully, not just in game-based ways.

We do have MacBooks for all of our students who are a Mac school, but they don't need to have an email address when they're in year four.

They need that when they're in high school.