In classrooms across Youth Off The Streets high schools, some of the most powerful moments of learning happen quietly – beside a student, not in front of them.
This is where Student Learning Support Officers (SLSOs) can be found: guiding, observing, adjusting and encouraging. They’re the calm presence students lean on and often the first adults to notice when a young person is struggling – or succeeding in ways they can’t yet see.
For Raghida Issa, a Student Learning Support Officer at Craig Davis College with more than 17 years of experience as an SLSO, supporting young people means doing “anything they need to help them learn by empowering them to take ownership of their own learning journey”.
This can look like supporting them with assessments, doing one-on-one learning or intervention groups in literacy and numeracy, helping them regulate in the classroom, adjusting their worksheets, scribing for them if needed and helping them achieve the goals in their Individual Learning Plan (ILP).
“It’s not about limiting what students are capable of, it’s about supporting them in ways that help them produce something they’re proud of at the end of the day,” says Raghida. “It’s not about doing things for young people, but with them.”
Being adaptive and in tune with the emotions of students is key to the SLSO’s role.
“No two days are ever the same,” says Raghida. “It all depends on the way the student has come in, what’s happened the night before or that morning and what’s shaped their thinking that day.”
“The role is about meeting them where they’re at in that moment because what worked yesterday might not work today – and that’s okay.”
SLSOs often act as a bridge between teacher and student.
“We’re often the first people to notice an academic struggle or challenge in the classroom because we work closely with students one-on-one,” says Raghida. That relationship means students will often share things with an SLSO that they’re too embarrassed to say to a teacher – whether it’s “I can’t read this” or “I don’t understand”.
A big part of the role, Raghida explains, is advocacy.
“When we identify a learning challenge or a strength – such as a student struggling with a task or requiring an extension – we communicate our observations to the teacher at the end of the lesson.”
The teacher ultimately determines the learning adjustments, but strong collaboration gives SLSOs the autonomy to act in real time.
“I source booklets, I source worksheets that are age-appropriate to the young person I’m working with because I know what their level is,” says Raghida.
Ensuring students get the right support is key to maintaining dignity and engagement in the classroom.
When students start behind, SLSOs help them move forward
For many young people who come to Youth Off The Streets’ schools, the classroom is a place they’ve been disconnected from for a long time.
“A lot of the young people who come to us have massive gaps in their learning,” says Raghida. “Some haven’t attended school for six months or a year, or they’ve just gone sporadically.”
Those gaps are often the direct result of trauma. At intake, most students are working significantly below the level expected of their age, not because of ability but because of disrupted learning and the neurological impacts of stress.
“Their processing speed may be quite slow – their information retention has been really impacted by their trauma,” says Raghida. “What they learn today, they may easily forget tomorrow. It’s not that they’re not disengaged; their responses are often shaped by the way they process and respond to learning.”
This makes the patience, consistency and trauma-informed practice of SLSOs so essential. They are the ones sitting beside students who are in Year 11 or 12 but are still unable to read easily, or who want to sit their L-plates driving test but can’t because they don’t understand the written questions.
“Verbally, he could pass with flying colours,” Raghida says of one student. “But it’s his literacy level that’s the barrier.”
On top of this, many young people arrive without the formal diagnoses that would normally guide learning adjustments. Dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia and other learning differences go undocumented due to unstable home lives or lack of access to specialists.
“Our young people don’t have that documentation,” says Raghida. “So we have to impute based on what we see.”
Seeing the impact
For SLSOs, the impact of their work is often felt long before it can be measured.
Over her 17 years supporting young people, Raghida has kept a thick folder of handwritten thank-you notes from students.
“They don’t say ‘thank you for helping me with my maths’ or ‘thank you for helping me finish this assessment’,” she says. “They all say, ‘thank you for believing in me’ or ‘thank you for telling me you’re proud of me’. They’re the things you can’t really measure, just what they felt internally.”
Raghida recalls a student who was convinced he was “no good” at literacy or numeracy after years of disrupted schooling and near-total disengagement.
“He didn’t have any confidence in his abilites,” she says. But when his assessment results came back above average for his age group, everything shifted. “Telling him that lit him up. He looked like a kid at Christmas.”
Student Learning Support Officers often act as a bridge between teachers and students, identifying learning strengths and challenges.
Moments like this don’t happen by accident. They come from trust – something that can’t be rushed and must be earned every day.
“For a young person to tell you they don’t know how to do something, they have to trust you,” says Raghida.
That’s why she makes it a priority to greet every student each morning and to ask about their lives, remember the details and follow up the next day.
The impact of SLSOs is not just in academic progress, but in rebuilding confidence, identity and belief – often after years of feeling incapable. By showing up, listening and offering steady encouragement, SLSOs help young people rediscover their abilities and see themselves differently.
Meeting a growing need
Between 2019 and 2025, independent school enrolments far outpaced government school enrolments. With more young people reporting feeling disengaged from school, the need for specialist support is more important than ever.
“SLSOs play a critical role in our schools,” says Melanie Andrews, our Head of Education. “Our schools already maintain low student-to-teacher ratios and our SLSOs enable us to focus on each young person as an individual.”
The impact is clear. In 2025, feedback from students across Youth Off The Streets schools showed that 80 percent feel safe at school and 74 percent feel a sense of belonging – results that exceed benchmarks reported in mainstream education.
Much of that success comes back to the quiet, consistent presence of SLSOs.
“They’re the unsung heroes of our classrooms and schools and the backbone of how we support young people to re-engage with learning,” says Melanie.
As learning needs grow more complex, SLSOs are becoming one of the most important – and increasingly essential – parts of the alternative education landscape.
