Out of the ashes, rises the phoenix: Westfield Park Primary School’s stunning transformation
An “island of calm” is how Westfield Park Primary principal Steve Soames describes the school he has led for eight years.
It is the same primary school that a decade ago was reported to have some of the most vulnerable Year 1 students in the nation.
Most of them were not meeting key developmental benchmarks, including physical health and wellbeing, social competence and emotional maturity before entering school.
During Mr Soames’s first year at the school there were two meth lab explosions, one murder and a shooting in the catchment area.
Nestled in Armadale, one of Perth’s lower-socioeconomic outer suburbs, Westfield Park Primary was once a very different place to what it is today.
“It wasn’t a pretty picture … and there was a fairly fractured relationship with the community,” Mr Soames said.