This island was once a mental asylum. Now, a top Sydney school uses it to improve HSC scores

When Benjamin Boutkaska was a primary school student, two years before he gained entry to the state’s top selective school, he gave up soccer and tennis. “I sacrificed a lot of my extracurricular activities for that test,” he says. The hard work paid off, and he chose North Sydney Boys over other selective schools because it offered plenty of sporting opportunities.

Fast forward five years, Benjamin is standing next to a chlorinated pool on Milson Island in the Hawkesbury River with his classmates as they begin year 12. They have been issued with plastic bottles, bread crates, planks of wood and rope. A camp instructor says they must trade materials and build a raft which can float. For North Sydney Boys students, who top the state in subjects like maths and physics, the challenge should be easy. It is not.

“Why are you selling the extra ropes,” one student yells once the challenge is underway. “They’re sabotaging us,” another says. At the end of the competition, some rafts float, others sink instantly.

In the aftermath of the raft building frenzy, school prefect Benjamin, 17, says the purpose of the three-day Year 12 study camp is to help students work as a team. “Especially with the group activities like with the raft building, everyone’s kind of working together,” he said.

Working together. Teamwork. Collaboration. They are what a cynic might call a holy trinity of 1980s hollow corporate buzzwords. But North Sydney Boys will actually have to put those words practice if it is to top the state in the HSC in 360-odd days’ time – as it has done for the past two years after it dethroned intellectual powerhouse James Ruse, which held the top position for 27 years.

Milson Island was a mental asylum for hundreds of men and boys throughout the 20th century, but it is now used by the NSW government for school camps. When the Herald visited for a few hours, the main preoccupation of those at the study camp was not beating James Ruse in the HSC league tables, but on being admitted to medicine. To achieve that, these students will need a top ATAR and top HSC marks.

The HSC is unique in that student scores are determined, in part, by the performance of their school, as well as a student’s internal rank within a subject. The rank is used to moderate performance on assessment tasks completed throughout the year. Helping others with their work has the potential to push down a student’s own internal rank and boost the person they are helping. In competitive schools, it can be easy for students to develop a scarcity mindset, and indulge a loss protection instinct by refusing to help others – a practice known as “rank protection”.

North Sydney students attribute their spot at the top of the table to doing the opposite. In an annual meeting in the staff lounge, outgoing prefects hand over to the newly elected ones. This year, the older ones said: continue the tradition, resist the urge for rank protection, and work across the entire cohort to help every student – everyone will benefit.

To help everyone succeed, the library will be open, so students can assist one another and the top performers in each subject can help tutor those who are struggling. “I think what we really stress is: we’re pretty much one cohort, and this idea of working together and trying not to leave anyone behind, is the main thing,” Benjamin said.

Fellow prefect Linus Wang, 16, says the three days spent on the island are critical. “It’s more than just a camp,” he said. “We’re here to learn HSC tips, strategies, but also to foster a sense of camaraderie and just have faith and build strong connections between one another. We know we have each others’ backs going into the HSC.”

He said having supportive teachers was invaluable. “They’re always happy to help, during class, after class. You can email them, like, during the weekend, and they’ll reply,” he says.

After a dinner of curry and rice, about 100 students gathered to hear from Year 12 adviser Emma Dell. Gripping a microphone and standing in front of a PowerPoint presentation, Dell knew how repetitive phrases like “wellbeing” and diatribes about the importance of sleep had become to the students sitting in front of her. “I know we have banged on endlessly about sleep, okay? It’s because, generally, it is a core component of good wellbeing and mental health,” she said.

Dell discouraged what she called “grind culture”, saying she didn’t want to hear anyone bragging about studying so much they only slept five hours per night. She also instructed students not to catastrophise failure.

“What we often hear, as teachers, is people having this very kind of black and white thinking of: ‘If I don’t get this specific mark in this specific exam, then it’s going to have this run-on effect, where it compromises my internal rank, which in turn, compromises my HSC mark, and my ATAR’.”

Other lessons were equally direct. “This is very preachy, but do not make the mistake of thinking that your failure defines you. It does not dictate your self-worth. It probably is not going to have the long reaching consequences that you’re agonising over. Getting a 17 out of 20 in an English Advanced essay is not ruining your chances of getting into medicine.”

Some people are highly critical of selective schools and the perception they breed a hyper-competitive culture. But at the Year 12 camp, Dell’s speech is punctured by disruption: bursts of laughter, boys chanting, jokes and the eruption of conversations; she is forced to repeatedly request that students stop talking.

Principal Brian Ferguson paints a picture of a desire for educational success and competition, albeit a friendly one. “Some people play Monopoly. People play cards. To them, this is their game,” he says.

He says success is not achieved by “shouldering other people out of the way” but rather helping one another do their best. “Ultimately, that’s what education is. It’s not necessarily about the ATAR or rankings or anything like that. It’s about your education. The whole process itself is about having options for after school.”

To ensure that the school cohort continues to work together, Ferguson has given some prefects the portfolio of school culture. “Their responsibility is to stop the rank protection if they start to hear about it, and I want them to build the collective efficacy of the year group and make sure that everybody’s included,” he said.

Former student Arnav Grover, 20, came to the camp to share what being a medicine student – the goal for so many present — was really like. He was in the class that first toppled James Ruse in 2023.

“We always joked about how we could dethrone James Ruse, but I don’t think we really believed that it could happen because, they had such a long history of being such a good school,” he said.

“Towards the end, we all really came together, and we were all sharing our resources, and everyone was trying to help each other, to pull everyone up, which I think really helped us in our overall HSC score.”

About 10 students from that cohort got into medicine at the University of NSW, where they met students who had graduated from James Ruse that year. “The people from James Ruse, like, joked about it at the start,” he said.

Now, they are friends.

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