More than 10,000 school leavers are expected to flood the costal town of Victor Harbor this weekend for the annual celebration, which officially begins tonight.

Although SA’s schoolies week has yet to shake its trashy stigma, the three-day festival run by Encounter Youth is acknowledged as the safest and most successful schoolies event in Australia.

Since the festival was established in collaboration with emergency services and state and local governments 11 years ago, Victor Harbor Mayor Mary-Lou Corcoran says the schoolies culture has done a U-turn.

“Schoolies has evolved from an uncontrollable event into a celebration of a milestone for the youth,” she said.

“Through the organisation and coordination of the major site event (at Warland Reserve) we’ve been able to limit the damage around the town.”

The decline in the number of police arrests corroborates a cultural improvement during the event.

Superintendent Tom Rieniets said most incidencts involved non-schoolies outside the designated festival site.

“I think from my perspective and based on some of the experiences interstate, it (schoolies) was seen as a bit of a drink-a-thon, but now it is well organised and young people go down to enjoy themselves and not get in any bother,” he said.

“(It is) the people on the fringes who seem to go out of their way to create problems for us and for the younger people attending, and we will be cracking down on them pretty hard this year.

“Given the numbers that attend over the past few years, the number of people we have had to deal with from a police perspective is relatively small.”

Encounter Youth director Nigel Knowles says the “negative atmosphere” of schoolies celebrations gone by, where property damage and violent crime was the norm, has been driven away – largely due to the work of a large volunteer team known as the Green Team.