A world where instead of competing for students, schools from both systems could share specialist teachers and offer a wider range of subjects. Sounds impossible? A naive utopian proposal?

Not at Nathalia, a small rural town in northern Victoria, where four Catholic and state schools have forged an unusual alliance to provide a better education for all kids in the area.

"We share VCE subjects," says the principal of St Mary of the Angels College, Leonie Irwin. "The only thing that's different is we do VCE English in the home school and being a Catholic school, we also deliver religious education classes."

The partnership means St Mary of the Angels and Nathalia Secondary College are able to offer more than 50 VCE subjects plus Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning subjects, literacy, numeracy and personal development.

This is a large number of subjects for any school let alone those in a small rural town, which are traditionally dogged by a shortage of specialist teachers.

The two secondary schools also joined forces with St Augustine's College in Kyabram to establish a trade training centre, with six vocational subjects offered across the three schools.

The funding allowed St Mary of the Angels to build a commercial kitchen to teach hospitality. It also offers automotives while Nathalia Secondary School offers building and construction and hairdressing.

"If we just had our own set of subjects, students wouldn't have half the choice," Ms Irwin says.

"It's keeping kids in the town - otherwise if they wanted to do VET subjects like building and construction, they would have to go to Shepparton to TAFE."

The Nathalia schools partnership is one of four pilots run by the Country Education Project, where schools in defined geographic areas are encouraged to collaborate.

Schools in Far East Gippsland (Orbost to Mallacoota), St Arnaud and Korumburra are also participating in their own alliances.

Country Education Project executive officer Phil Brown believes this model of clustering rural and remote schools is the most effective strategy to overcome disadvantage.

One of the philosophies driving the alliances is a moral belief that all kids in a community deserve the best possible education regardless of which school they attend.

"It's still in its infancy, the concept of sharing resources so you get economies of scale," Mr Brown says.

In Nathalia, the years three and four students at Nathalia Primary and St Francis Catholic Primary have banded together to enter a side in the local footy competition.

"It starts to have bigger repercussions - it goes beyond the school and really does bring the community together," says St Francis Catholic deputy principal Veronica Williams.

She says teachers at the schools also share professional development and ideas with their "across the road buddies". "Isolation can be a big thing in a small town. If teachers are feeling better connected we are more likely to keep them and that has a huge impact on our community."

Alysia Oakes is one of about five students at Nathalia Secondary who studies VCE psychology at St Mary of the Angels. It is a subject her principal, John Sciacca, says she would have been unable to enrol in without the partnership.

"It felt a little bit weird in year 7 being in a different school, but it doesn't feel weird at all now - it just feels like an extended campus," Alysia says.

In turn St Mary students join Alysia and her classmates for VCE visual communications and design at Nathalia Secondary.

"We've always offered that here - St Mary is pretty happy about that," Mr Sciacca says.

Initially, the Nathalia alliance was contentious in some quarters. Some parents who had chosen a secular school questioned why their children were being taught in a religious school. Others questioned why they were paying fees for a Catholic school when their children were receiving a similar education to those at the state school.

"There were all these barriers to contend with but if you put the child at the centre of everything you do, then we are doing the best thing for them," Mr Sciacca says.

"Usually families are 100 percent behind us."

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