When Charlie Mooney started secondary school, he didn’t expect to finish it. The Cronulla High student planned to drop out after year 10 and go into a trade.
But doing work experience with a local builder in year 10 led him to realise it wasn’t the career for him, and he returned to class with a new sense of motivation.
Then came a big turnaround.
The following year, he was awarded a First in five of his subjects – business, timber, maths, english and construction.
And on Wednesday, Mooney was one of 128 year 12 graduates across New South Wales to be issued a First in Course award – recording the best score in the state for the Vocational Education and Training (Vet) subject, construction.
“I’d never seen myself as a top-achieving student but I’ve completely proved myself, my teachers, friends and family wrong,” Mooney says.
“I realised I had it in me to do well at school.”
He is now planning to go on to study construction project management at UTS.
“Work experience is a great thing schools offer – you get to see if it’s for you. But if it’s not, you just give it a crack and keep going.
“When I kept studying construction, I said to my deputy principal that I wanted to get [a] state rank. And here we are.”
For Khang Nguyen Ho, his First in Course award has meant as much to his family as it has to him.
His parents arrived in Australia from Vietnam two decades ago, and rarely spoke English at home.
Yet the North Sydney Boys High graduate has gone on to top the state in english advanced – despite lamenting his language skills were “quite average” until year 10.
Nguyen Ho says his proud parents are “surprised and speechless”.
“I think I said ‘wow – OK’,” he says with a laugh.
“It was unbelievable,” adds his dad, Viet Tri Ho. “We got a call from the premier’s office … we really couldn’t believe it.”
To reach his selective public school, Nguyen Ho travelled on public transport for three hours a day, commuting from the south-west suburb of Bankstown.
“[The] HSC is a stressful period for everyone, but I knew if I could tough it out, I could overcome any hard events in the future,” he says.
“This award showed me what I’m capable of.”
The deputy premier and minister for education, Prue Car, says if Nguyen Ho’s results weren’t a “success story of what education can do, I don’t know what is”.
“It fills me with great hope for the future,” she says. “We still have so much more work to do to improve our system. We’re doing [it]. And these kids are the reason why.”
Almost half the students who’ve been awarded First in Course honours are from the public system, with recipients from across “all four corners” of the state.
“It’s a very, very proud day for a lot of parents and teachers, and particularly for the students who are going to get their full results tomorrow, and then take on the world,” Car says.
“I can’t wait to see what they do.”
Atar results will be released to about 69,000 NSW students on Thursday morning. Victorian students received their results on Monday.
Car says students who don’t receive the rank they hope for should remember it’s just “one moment” determining future pathways.
“Every single student has tried their absolute best and studied their guts out,” she says.
“More and more students are realising there are new, innovative, different ways of achieving their career goals, their life goals.”
Yara Natfaji has had her eye on the future throughout her studies.
The Al Noori Muslim school student in south-west Sydney topped her peers in urban and environmental science, a subject she was drawn to instinctively.
“It’s contemporary – it touches on climate change, mining practices, things we see happening now,” she says.
“It’s important to understand the science behind it all so we can take our individual actions.”
Change has been consistent in her family. Her parents, first-generation migrants, arrived in Australia from Syria just before she was born.
Natfaji, who hopes to continue in the STEM field and go on to work in healthcare, says her longstanding dreams have kept her going.
“To stay motivated, you have to know what you want – you have to have a goal,” she says. “That gives you the intrinsic sense of motivation.”
