Donna Loughran knows the challenges facing her students better than most.
The popular new principal of Doonside High School, who failed to get her own school certificate in year 10 after two years of disengagement and truancy, is today among the first group of top teachers to be recognised and awarded under the NSW government's plans to lift teacher quality statewide.
Growing up in a Housing Commission estate in Shalvey, the fourth child of a security guard and a Coles deli worker, no one among Ms Loughran's family and friends had finished high school, let alone been to university.
But it was great teachers, she says, who stopped her from "falling through the cracks" and set her on a better path in life.
"None of my friends finished school – that wasn't the done thing in Shalvey and Mount Druitt back then," she says. "Going off to university just wasn't the done thing. You worked full time if you weren't having babies."
In year 10, Ms Loughran's truancy – she says she skipped school mainly to work her part-time job at a milk bar – led to her failing year 10. It was a wake up call when she tried to find a senior school to take her on without a school certificate.
Eventually, Cambridge Park High School near Penrith did, and she "took the opportunity with both hands".
She credits her legal studies teacher Steve Duclos, now deputy principal at Penrith High School, with helping her find her potential. Ultimately she won a scholarship to study education at the University of Sydney.
"I had amazing teachers that looked beyond the postcode, beyond the rough-and-ready, and saw that potential and made sure that potential was achieved," she says.
She did her first teacher prac at Doonside, and worked for many years at Mount Druitt High School and also at Campbelltown Performing Arts High School before becoming principal at Doonside High School this year.
All are schools with diverse student bodies, with many kids who have English as a second language, students in out-of-home care or facing challenging conditions at home.
"Their postcode doesn't determine their intelligence and their postcode should never determine their destiny," she says of her students.
"Sometimes, when I work with particularly young teachers, they come in with this philosophy that they're here to 'save' the students. It's actually not about that, it's like any student, they've got abilities and it's about getting them to recognise and understand their abilities and make sure they're being stretched.
"The levels of resilience in the students – that's the thing I admire most about the schools I've worked in: the grit. I want to make sure the kids understand and are really proud of it: they dust themselves off, they get on with it, do what they need to do and they don't get bogged down in that victim mentality that 'the world owes me something'.
"As a kid I saw that with a lot of my friends and even in my family to some extent. The world doesn't owe you anything, you've got to make it happen."
Ms Loughran is one of 59 teachers being accredited for the first time by the Board of Studies, Teaching and Educational Standards as Lead Teachers, along with 92 others from public and private schools who have achieved Highly Accomplished Teacher status.
The accreditation, announced at a ceremony in Sydney on Wednesday, recognises teachers who positively influence the quality of teaching not just in their own classroom but in their whole school and wider community.
The recognition of this new level of top teachers is part of the NSW government's Great Teaching Inspired Learning reforms, which are geared at encouraging teachers' professional development and improving NSW students' slipping standards.
"What sets teachers accredited at the levels of Highly Accomplished and Lead apart is a proven commitment to building a collaborative and reflective teaching culture in NSW," said BOSTES president Tom Alegounarias.
