Abstract:
As part of the current push towards increased student retention rates, grants have been provided in 1990-1991 to selected low-retention schools through the federally-funded Students-At-Risk (STAR) programme. Keebra Park State High School, a medium sized school on Queensland's Gold Coast, used its 1990 STAR grant to fund a comprehensive research project. The project used both questionnaires and interviews administered to over 500 current and past students, parents and teachers, to investigate a range of issues related to the satisfaction, academic performance and retention of the school's Year 9-12 students. This paper reports some of the findings from this study, and describes the ways in which these findings have been used to develop a set of strategies which seek to assist at risk students.