LEEDERVILLE’S School of Isolated and Distance Education (SIDE) is celebrating 100 years of teaching students.
Beginning as The Correspondence School, SIDE was established in 1918 as Western Australia’s first distance education school with 55 students and one teacher.
Principal Noel Chamberlain said it had been an extraordinary privilege to be part of the service.
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READ NOW“SIDE and its predecessors have been bridging the tyranny of distance to provide students in rural and remote areas with access to a quality education,” he said.
“Over the past 15 years, SIDE has moved from a correspondence model to an eLearning model of educational provision – no longer do students need to wait for the arrival of the mail.”
Mr Chamberlain said SIDE used digital technology to deliver in excess of 4000 online lessons per month to more than 2000 students from kindergarten to Year 12.
SIDE’s Leederville site has been continuously used for education since the 1890s, with Leederville Primary and The Infant’s School both calling it home.
The Distance Education Centre moved there in 1993, before opening after extensive renovations and additions as SIDE in 1995.