The school was shortlisted in the 'outstanding school improvement' category along with Bentleigh West Primary School and Western Port Secondary College.
Cobram Primary is being recognised for its complete overhaul of school culture and teaching practices which has seen the school achieve dramatic improvements to its NAPLAN results in 2018.
Principal Matthew Knight explained how the school was not reaching its full potential in the years prior to 2017.
“Our academic results were not great and our parents, staff and students were concerned about certain aspects of the school,” he said.
“We knew we were not doing good enough so in 2016 we undertook a school review.
“We focused on classroom climate which would go towards improving teaching outcomes.
“Our staff undertook extensive training and upskilling in an effort to improve consistency across classrooms.
“We wanted to improve our consistency, our planning and our delivery and we hired a literacy consultant who implemented our reading and writing workshop.”
Cobram Primary recently received its 2019 NAPLAN results and the positive trends have continued with the school having equal or better relative growth than the state average across the four components which include numeracy, writing, reading and spelling.
The most eye-catching improvement has been the school's numeracy figures with 54 per cent of Year 5 students achieving high growth compared to the state average of 25 per cent and 17 per cent in similarly classed schools.
Mr Knight said the turnaround was something which needed to happen for the future of the town as school played a vital role in setting local children up for their futures.
“(Cobram Primary) is enormously important in the local community,” he said.
“This change was about achieving an aspirational change, to allow kids to believe and feel as if they are valuable members of society.
“We want to make sure these kids are set up to become valuable members of the community who, by the time they are (old enough), are confident to contribute to the workforce or engage in further academic pursuits.
“Social and emotional well-being was also important in this and we employed a social worker to help manage this.
“We needed all our staff to believe they could make a difference in the lives of students — they have all come together to improve this school's outcomes.”
The winner will be announced on Friday, October 25.