There are barely 250 kids at Coomealla High School.
But its staff and students are consistently punching above their weight – most recently a dozen of them signed on for a week in a woolshed to see if the wanted to become shearers.
And ag teacher Michelle Graham, who organised the occasion, is pretty confident she might have three or four (maybe one or two more) who seem pretty keen to give it a go – but for the sake of full disclosure, one or two of them may also have parents already working in shearing teams.
Michelle says this was the first course she has done in partnership with TAFE NSW but she reckons it was a no-brainer.
Option one was a course at Wagga – that’s an 1100km round trip, required two teachers to be absent from school and apart from travel costs would also involve accommodation and more expense.
“We didn’t get many takers for that one so I approach TAFE and put it to them I could get a dozen students to attend if they would bring the course to Coomealla,” Michelle explains.
“They have received a lot of funding from Canberra to train shearers because there is a worsening shortage nationally so they said if we could find a shed, they would come to us – and we did and so did they.
“We organised Tapio Station, which is owned by Bill Barnfield who works with TAFE, and he ran the course for us.
“It was great because that’s a 30km round trip so the kids got to stay at home each day and it worked so much better for us (Bill also provided the students with all the sheep they would need to shear).”
Michelle has been at Coomealla since 2019 after leaving the food industry with her food science degree to retrain as a teacher, arriving just in time for COVID and all its chaos and confusion.
Today the school offers a suite of agricultural courses, including a Primary Industry Certificate II, which has an emphasis on livestock, covering every aspect of husbandry as well as OH&S, the environment and quad bike safety.
The ag education begins in Year 7 and there are options for every year, with some courses, such as ag technology for Years 9/10, having 22 participants – a healthy number in such a small school.
“But the course was also an eye-opener for some of the other students,” Michelle says.
“Several of them, when they saw what a day in the shed involved, went ‘Wow, I don’t want to do all that’.
“When they saw that the normal day went from 7.30am to 5pm – and could go six or seven days depending on the shed and the team – they were already reconfiguring their career goals, even though shearers now get up to $5 a head and can pump through 100 per run, with some sheds having four runs a day, meaning good shearers could be looking at $200,000-plus.
“As for rouseabouts, they are earning at least $70 a run, but in more and more shed it can go as high a $1000.
“Overall I think it went really well.
“All the kids enjoyed it and we would look at doing another one – so far they have now been held with schools in Crookwell, Wagga and Dubbo.”
And just to show you can always learn something, Michelle will join two other local women to take the wool-classer course, which is now an eight-month course mostly done online but requiring a monthly face-to-face with lecturers and mentors.
She says one of the women is doing the course to also be an owner/classer on her own property.
Principal Kathryn Steward says this year’s course has been the school’s first in conjunction with TAFE NSW and involved students from Years 10 and 11 to give them a look at the whole industry.
Ms Steward says the course is full-on, with participants expected to put in some hard yakka throughout the week.
“We had a dozen students put their hands up for the course, 10 boys and two girls, and we got involved because our ag teacher, Michelle Graham, is aware of the growing shortage of shearers so saw this as a career opportunity for the students to have a try,” she says.
“A lot of the students here come off farms so they have some understanding, but we also have some of the town youngsters enrolled for the week as well, which is encouraging.
“We certainly hope it gives them all another option to consider as they move towards Year 12 and the wider world beyond.”
