Case Study: Toorak College strengthens students' cybersecurity foundations

With cybersecurity, fundamental to private and public services, Toorak College is already conducting a series of cybersecurity sessions with all a hundred of its female students in year 10.

The pilot series saw cybersecurity learning sessions conducted with all 100 of the college's female students as part of efforts to boost foundation skills in this area.

Kate Brown, head of academic growth and deputy head of senior school at the Victorian-based school told Digital Nation there’s strong “recognition that cybersecurity is now fundamental to all businesses, governments, industry.”

“It doesn't matter where you work or who you work for, you need to have that knowledge of cybersecurity because it is one of the biggest risk factors that businesses and industry and government come across.

“We're very aware that once you go even bigger than that and you start looking at a countrywide, statewide, foreign level, cybersecurity, cyber warfare and cyber threats are very much what the 21st century is going to be about.

Brown added the school would “like our students to be at the forefront of what that solution could be for our country”.

From here the school “stepped back” and sought to reassess the skills it would need to encourage its students to learn.

Brown added in doing this, pushing back on gender-based stereotypes it's still an issue facing its students.

“Being a girl’s school, we do find a lot of stereotypes around what students or what girls should study. We still have that in the community in 2024.

“We still have lots of students that are picking very traditional female pathways. We had that discussion about how we inspire them to look outside of nursing, health courses, and general business courses and see the opportunities that they could contribute in an area like cyber security.”

“Stepping back that further, we then look at our programs, where do we expose them to these ideas, and where do we expose them to these types of careers and females in these careers that they can look up to and be inspired by,” Brown said.

The school has compulsory “computer coding” classes to also build these foundations plus offerings around digital technologies.  

Brown further explained one way to spark interest in digital and computer studies was for students to undertake compulsory learning.

“We looked at year 10 as a prime year because that's when students are picking their VCE [Victorian Certificate of Education] program.”

Partnering with the Tesserent Academy to help materialise its plans, Brown said teachers themselves required upskilling to match its program delivery goals.

“The world moves so fast and I feel like education is always trying to catch up and sometimes we feel like we're a little bit behind.”

The program was customised for its year 10s, “which was age and developmental specific for our students to expose them to everything that's in the world of cybersecurity” including “all the different elements, jobs, pathways and then they deliver that through succession to every single year 10 student.”

According to Brown the student “wanted to pay attention because it was incredibly engaging, but we also made it quite authentic by assessing their knowledge at the end of it.”

Brown adds another aspect of the learning is helping students understand what to expect when entering the workforce and breaking down preconceived notions of what cybersecurity work entails.

Security experts spoke to the students to discuss “big level threats, the way that the government is currently facing threats to electricity grids or to transportation and the girls went, wow, this is a defence issue.”

The talks also covered a range of wider topics to encourage the cohort to expand their understanding of IT and cyber-related issues. 

Brown said it's hoped the school can continue its program however, barriers such as funding are the next challenge.

“Like all of these programs though, funding is a key. Tesserent has very kindly given … all of their time and all of their expertise to the school. Whether we’ll be able to continue to the same level comes down to the funding. 

“This is a real opportunity, a program like this … as something that can go beyond just Toorak College in Tesserent.

“We want to make it available for all. We're about educating girls across Australia, not just educating girls at Toorak College. If we can set up a program that can be pushed around the country, that would be phenomenal,” Brown said.