This project examined the needs of the community of a multicultural urban high school. A survey instrument was designed to find out what the school community thought of the school, and it was intended that the results be used to guide the school's future progress and enable it to increase its rate of student retention in Years 11 and 12. The questionnaire elicited responses to questions concerned with the things the school should do for the students, sought opinions on how the school should develop, and recorded information specific to teachers, parents and members of the local community, and present and past students. The return rates were generally good. The results of the survey are discussed under the headings of ‘Background Information from Respondents’ and ‘Areas of Community Concern’. An interesting background response was that 70% of present students stated that they wanted to complete Year 12, but only 21% of the past students said that they had stayed on until the end of this final year. The areas of community concern were divided into two categories. For the first, which comprised questions concerned with the responsibilities the school had towards its students, all school community groups recorded very strong support for what was described as basic literacy and numeracy, and for a practical application of the former. Also considered a high priority school task was sex and drug education. The questions in this category on which the school community groups differed generally showed the teachers to be less positive than the parents and students. A striking and important example of this was the teachers’ response to the matter of the school encouraging its students to remain after Year 10. Only 20% of them thought that this was an important or very important job of the school, compared with 66% of the rest of the school community. Consideration of these responses indicated that there was strong demand for the introduction of both a comprehensive literacy and numeracy program, and a sex and drug education program. The low level of teacher support for students staying at school after Year 10 was in sharp contradiction to the stated aims of the Participation and Equity Program, and it indicated a need to change this negative attitude if these aims were to be realized in this and similar schools. For the second category ‘How should your high school develop?’, all school community groups gave relatively strong support for more school-based career relevant courses. This indicated widespread community demand for the introduction of these courses, and their introduction might be expected to reduce the large gap between strong desire of students to complete Year 12 and the reality of a very low rate of retention.