Tina Coumbe
Crib Point Primary School, VIC
Boonwurrung
Teaching Fellow
With over 30 years in education, Tina Coumbe has led a remarkable transformation at Crib Point Primary School on the Mornington Peninsula, where she has reimagined the school as a thriving centre of learning and community connection.
Under Tina’s leadership, the school adopted a Structured Literacy approach well ahead of system-wide reforms — embedding Sounds-Write training, progress-monitoring tools like mCLASS, and targeted interventions including Corrective Reading. These efforts have delivered remarkable improvements in literacy, with DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) accuracy gains of up to 29 percentage points across year levels.
Tina is widely respected for her systems thinking and equity-driven leadership. She led the No Limits project from a single-school partnership to a multi-school collaboration and now supports a 10-school cluster to embed effective literacy practices. Her school has become a model for others, frequently hosting visiting educators and contributing to the Momentum Project at La Trobe University.
Tina’s community engagement is just as powerful. She redesigned the school environment to foster trust with families, created leadership opportunities for staff and students and personally delivered a reading intervention for Year 2 students experiencing significant challenges — with outstanding results. A passionate advocate for public education, Tina leads with humility, clarity and a belief that every child deserves to thrive.