Northern Bay student appointment to VicSRC

A STUDENT from Northern Bay College is the only local student to earn a place on the Victorian Student Representative Council (VicSRC).

The council was created by students to be a voice for students at the highest levels of decision making in Victorian education.

It is led by a team of 15 secondary school aged students – the Student Executive Advisory Committee – that make decisions collaboratively with the Board of Trustees about how VicSRC operates, what programs it offers, and how it hears from students about what educational changes need to be made.

Ashton Stonehouse, a year 12 student and vice-captain at Northern Bay College, has successfully applied to be part of the VicSRC’s student representative committee.

“I really see this as an opportunity to change the curriculum for any future students that go into the program, and it’ll benefit so many people,” Ashton said.

“Rather than me going ‘I’ll just do this because it looks really good on my resume or it’ll be really good for myself’, I was aware that anything that I do in the VicSRC will not directly benefit me.

“It’ll benefit next year’s year 12, it’ll benefit the year 11s after that, and everyone else, really, and that was the whole point for me.” Ashton said VicSRC’s misson to “stand with and for students to elevate their voices to be heard” was particularly resonant.

“That is the reason that I do leadership,” she said.

“It’s always about empowering people and pushing them to overcome any, like any nervousness or anything step outside the box and just, you know, take a leap and do something different.

“Or if there’s something they see and they’re like, well, I really don’t like this, I think it could be done like this. It would be really good to have the platform to be able to say that.

“I feel like me doing leadership stuff is giving, not just myself, but other people that platform and it’s something that I think is really important. You know, it’s our education. It is our future, and we should be the ones who build it, really.” Ashton hopes to work in healthcare.

“I’d love to be able to help other people. I think my big interest is like emergency medicine. Whether that be paramedicine, which has always been sort of my goal, or a nurse in the emergency room or just anything emergency health related, really,” she said.