Victoria education: The schools with some of Victoria’s best teachers – and how they’ve improved students’ results

It was 1984 when Mary Zervos first became a teacher.

She taught through the introduction of the internet, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the pandemic, adopting new teaching and learning ideologies along the way.

Vermont Secondary College’s Mary Zervos is a finalist for outstanding secondary teacher in the 2025 Victorian Teaching Excellence Awards. Credit: Eddie Jim

But how do you shift a student from hating maths to loving it? It’s something Zervos is most proud of.

Before Zervos took over as head of maths and numeracy at Vermont Secondary College in 2013, there was only one advanced maths class at the school, and now there are five. There were just three students achieving perfect ATAR scores in maths. Since she took over, there have been 15. One student even represented Australi