Campus Review Volume 28 - Issue 1 | January 2018 | Seite 29

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five, and I had outstanding teachers in what
was the social science faculty at the time.
They taught geography and commerce,
and I chose subjects of that kind for
Year 11 and 12.
I actually chose business studies,
economics, geography and legal studies
because I had three outstanding teachers
from that faculty area. Two of them I still
meet with to this day. They brought in a lot
of passion in their subject area. They were
outstandingly committed teachers and I
used to wonder if I could be like them. I just
didn’t have the confidence to articulate that
and say I wanted to be a teacher.
After achieving an ATAR of 99.95 and
being the school dux, I just went with what
you’re meant to do: law or medicine. And
two years in, with a distinction average,
I just walked away and did what I really
wanted to do.
You recently went to Harvard on a
scholarship from the Public Education
Foundation to do a leadership course. What
did you learn there?
The course I did was called ‘Leadership for
the 21st Century’ and centred on adaptive
leadership – a practice of mobilising people
to tackle tough challenges and thrive
in education.
I learned quite clearly that leadership
is a practice, not a position. You don’t
get positional authority, you earn respect
and credibility through the educational
expertise and practice you bring to the fore.
It means that you’re growing leadership
at all layers. It’s important for me to grow
that across the organisation and in a
school. It’s important that the principal
grows that beyond the executive roles in
the school.
Adaptive change – because change is a
constant part of our educational landscape
– can make people uncomfortable
because it challenges your deeply held
beliefs and views. You’ve got to bring
competing perspectives and commitments
to the table. That’s what a school leader
does well. They take a staff, community
and students with them through periods of
educational change.
They’re some of the things that stood
out to me.
And also the fact that there are no simple
solutions to the most complex problems.
If there were, we would have solved them.
Leadership should not jump to technical
fixes for adaptive challenges. You’ve got
to go to the root causes, and you’ve got
to spend time discussing and debating
those root causes if you’re going to make a
difference in tackling those areas.
They’re things that I’m bringing to my
role daily, to the directors I work with who
oversee principals, and messages that I’ve
been relaying in a number of presentations
and forums that I’ve had with principals.
It was a phenomenal experience. I was
part of a cohort of 77 senior leaders from
17 countries across the world. You learn a
lot from each other.
How do you assiduously prepare leaders as
they come through their careers so that they
can be very confident in their ability to lead
and manage a school community?
It’s a very complex role leading a very large
organisation. A school of 500 students
has 1000 parents and carers. When you
combine teaching and non-teaching staff
and you use your equity loading for further
staff, you can nudge 80 to 100 staff in that
setting. Everyone has expertise because
they’ve attended school, so you’re dealing
with a political and parental expectation of
outcomes, so delivering on that platform to
students can be challeng ing.
That’s the next big challenge that we’re
tackling – that is, how do we best prepare
our leaders?
We’ve announced that we’re creating a
school leadership institute. We’ve provided
greater resourcing for school leaders in our
resource allocation model. We’re looking
for tailored professional learning and
scholarships to grow capacity in stronger
induction, mentoring, and coaching that’s
available for school principals as well.
Another massive challenge in education
for everyone across the world is, how do
you effectively cater for every student
knowing that they’re going to graduate, if
they’ve entered kindergarten this year, in
the 2030s, knowing that the world of work
and further education is going to be vastly
different to what it is now, and knowing that
in an artificial intelligence world, skill sets
of cooperation, resilience, communication
and collaboration are going to be just as
important as technical knowledge that we
might develop for schooling? That’s a very
challenging landscape.
Teaching holds up well in an artificial
intelligence world. We’re always going to
need teachers, but what we’re teaching
needs to keep evolving so we can best
meet the needs of young learners.
They’re three significant challenges
we face here in NSW that I dare say are
being faced right across the country and
internationally.
What about some good things that are
happening in education?
Fantastic things are happening every day.
We recently had the Schools Spectacular
– 5500 public school students lighting up
Qudos Bank Arena with their performing
arts talent – and it was just exceptional.
We’re proud of the diversity of our school
context and settings. This is a system of
2200 schools that has specialist settings
from juvenile justice centres to catering
for students with very high levels of
disability, personal care and need, to fully
comprehensive settings with support units,
to fully academically selective settings, to
sports high schools, to performing arts
high schools.
We’re proud of the collaboration that’s
occurring where we’re picking from
best practice in our schools to grow our
collective capacity of what works best.
We’re proud of the fact that we’re
bringing evidence and rigour to our
decision-making for school planning, and
system planning, again, around what works
best to lift a school, to lift a system.
We are proud of meeting the premier’s
priority to lift the two NAPLAN bands in
reading and numeracy across the system.
We met our 2019 targeting in 2017. That
means further pushing the literacy and
numeracy foundations for our young
people, knowing that they’re critical if
students are to have the best possible
access to the best possible success in
their education.
We’re proud of our industry and
workforce connections that provide
learning opportunities beyond the school
gates for our young people.
We’re proud of the investment we’re
making in leadership and teacher quality
for our Great Teaching, Inspired Learning
initiative, which is designed to continue
to grow our workforce and its capability,
knowing that the great experience is not
between one school and another, but
between classrooms within a school.
To grow teacher capacity and quality
right across the system alongside
leadership capacity is really important to
us. We’ve got record professional learning
allocation for our staff. We’re proud
of that.  ■
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