It’s double the fun for this year’s incoming Year 7s at Greater Shepparton Secondary College.
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The intake of roughly 300 students boasts not one, not two, but eight sets of twins.
Jayda and Karla Dunstan, Mikhail and Nikolai Maksacheff, Zach and Zoey Fiskilis-Malaran, Braxton and Savannah Alcaniz, Damon and Quinton Berry, Demi and Makayla McMahon, Levi and Xavier Clarke, and Hussain and Zahra Alkhateeb all started their first day of Year 7 on Thursday, January 30.
For at least half of the sets of twins, this is the first time they’ve been in a class with others who share the experience.
Gathered together on their first day of high school, there was the typical pre-teen awkwardness among the group.
Some twins sat next to each other, others didn’t.
When asked what it was like to be in a year level with so many other sets of twins, 12-year-old Karla Dunstan said it’s “amazing”.
For identical twins Damon and Quinton Berry, it feels normal to have other twins around.
“I think at one point we had three sets of twins in one class,” Damon said.
While many of the GSSC twins look similar — at least half of them are identical — they have their own unique personalities and interests.
Mikhail and Nikolai Maskacheff are looking forward to different subjects in their first year of high school.
Mikhail is excited about science, while Nikolai is looking forward to maths.
Both boys said it felt good to have other twins in their year level.
GSSC staff said it was their understanding that they had the second-largest twin cohort in a Year 7 intake in state schools.
To La Trobe University senior lecturer of biomedical science Dr Cathryn Hogarth, it struck her as a high number for one year level.
“Eight, to me, really did sound like a lot,” Dr Hogarth said when first contacted.
After hearing the size of the year level, she said perhaps 16 out of 300 children being multiples wasn’t totally out of the ordinary.
While there was no research looking specifically at rates in regional Victoria, Dr Hogarth said there had been an increase in twin births across the country over the past 20 years.
She said assisted reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilisation, or IVF, had a lot to do with that rise.
“The number of multiple births is increasing because of increased access to these newer technologies,” she said.
Initially, assisted reproductive technologies were unattainable for many due to obstacles such as high costs, but that’s changed over time, and the technologies have also progressed.
As women were waiting longer to conceive, Dr Hogarth said more couples were also looking to access these technologies to help them have children.
Dr Hogarth said the hormones used to assist some women in becoming pregnant could result in the release of multiple eggs, and sometimes more than one embryo was implanted during IVF.
Additionally, while the overall chances remained low, Dr Hogarth said the chances of an IVF embryo splitting in two and resulting in twins were higher than for a naturally conceived embryo.
Despite the increase in the number of multiple births over the past two decades, these kids remain part of a relatively exclusive group.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, roughly 1.5 per cent of pregnancies in 2023 resulted in multiple births.
In Victoria, 1053 sets of twins were born in 2023, out of a total of 72,906 registered births.
Twins Research Australia estimates there are roughly 750,000 people in the country who are twins, triplets or higher multiples.
Dr Hogarth doesn’t just know the science behind multiple births, she has personal experience, too, with twins of her own.
“It’s a really lovely thing to watch, the twin bond,” she said.
Dr Hogarth said having multiple sets of twins in a year level, from her experience, had benefits, especially for parents.
“It’s lovely, there’s a little community of twin parents,” she said.
Parenting multiples comes with its own joys and challenges.
Dr Hogarth said it was nice to have peers who understood the experience.
“It’s lovely to have other twin parents to bounce ideas off … and reminisce with,” she said.
As this school year gets under way, the Year 7 twins at GSSC, and their families, will have plenty of people around who understand them.
Senior Journalist