Date/Time: November 6, 2026 | 1:00 – 2:00 pm

Room: TAHOMA 5

Abstract: Wurun Senior Campus is a multi-award winning six-level vertical school on Melbourne’s city edge, created to deliver a new Program Partnership for senior secondary students. Opened for the 2022 school year, the campus brings together two existing schools into a shared learning environment, requiring a genuine “whole-of-school” approach that integrates different cultures, histories and ways of working.

Rather than organising learning around classrooms and periods, the building is designed around contemporary tertiary and post-pandemic learning models that place the individual learner at the centre. Learning is understood as distributed, technology-enabled and project-driven. The campus therefore provides a connected but highly differentiated set of spaces that allow students to move fluidly between collaboration, guidance and independent work.

The architecture supports learning built around:

• Project-based work
• Self-direction
• Investigation and experimentation
• Making and fabrication
• Exhibition of work in progress
• Flexible, scalable teaming
• Students develop personal learning plans shaped by their interests, interdisciplinary projects and post-school pathways.

To support this, the school operates with a flexible schedule that allows students meaningful control over how they use their time. Block scheduling, long-term projects, advisory groups, mentoring, looping, industry engagement and extended staff–student relationships replace the traditional bell-driven school day.

Teaching practice is aligned to this model, emphasizing inquiry, project-based learning, performance assessment, differentiation, internships, community-based learning, portfolios and student mentoring.

The building enables this pedagogy through a rich mix of learning settings. Multiple routes through the campus connect indoor and outdoor learning settings and sports facilities on each level. Large multidisciplinary project spaces are supported by smaller focus rooms, booths, nooks and advisory spaces that allow students to move between peripheral observation, guided engagement and deep independent work. Sliding and folding walls and internal glazing allow spaces to expand and contract as teams and activities change, while video-enabled rooms support connection with other campuses, home-based learners and industry mentors.

Dedicated technology, fabrication and project presentation spaces support learning through “making and demonstrating” and provide individuals and small groups access to specialist tools and equipment. Flexible 360-degree learning areas allow the building to host workshops, studios, critiques and examinations without privileging any single mode of teaching.

Integration is not only spatial but cognitive: the inherent navigability and transparent connectivity provides places where learners can pause, settle and absorb—transforming activity into understanding. In this way, the campus supports both current curriculum and future learning models, allowing the school to evolve without needing to be rebuilt.

Wurun Senior Campus demonstrates how good architecture can help schools relinquish rigid schedules and instead support personal mastery, evolving teacher roles and the 21st-century life skills that students need.