'Get this region out of the Herald Sun.' These were Minister Lynne Kosky's pleas to newly-appointed Northern Metropolitan Regional Director, Wayne Craig.  What happened during the next eight years involved developing and implementing a courageous narrative of school regeneration and school improvement.

Transcript

Loretta  00:03

You're listening to Loretta Piazza experienced school principal, mentor, and coach. And together were talking out at school. You will hear from leaders who have lived and breathed so many experiences, good and bad, agonized over decisions, and tossed and turned through countless sleepless nights. These are the people who will help you stay ahead of the game.

 

As we journey through the north, it doesn't take long to realize that back in 2006, the landscape was bare and bleak. If the western region was termed the basket case, then there are no words to describe the northern region when Wayne Craig became regional director. The Achievement Improvement Zones or the AIZ, also known as powerful learning, took educational reform to scale. It was essentially a subset of the efforts to lift achievement across all of Victoria at that time. Even to this day, I still recall Wayne's mantra about moral purpose and postcode not defining destiny. Wayne doesn't make this story about himself. And he tells of the collective efforts of all the academic experts, the principals, and the teachers who worked alongside him. His story is more than just school reform at scale. It's really about changing the hearts and minds of the people doing the work. I know this for a fact. I was one of those people.

 

Loretta

Hello, Wayne, welcome to Talking out of school.

 

Wayne  01:48

Thanks, Loretta, nice to be here.

 

Loretta  01:50

Well, I think we've got quite a few things that we can talk about, given that you were my Regional Director between the years of 2005 and 12. So prior to that, what was your role?

 

Wayne  02:08

I was the principal at Box Hill, Senior Secondary, from about 94, I think it was. And that was an interesting place because it had been a merger of a boys Technical School and a girls technical school, but in the round of closures under Jeff Kennett, they chopped out a junior part of the school. So half the staff lost their job. When I went there, it was its first year of operation. So it had no feeder schools at all. You didn't know whether you had an enrollment or not. It was in fair state of disarray when I got there. In fact, I would have walked out the door for the first six months if I'd had an opportunity. But it turned around, it was actually a fantastic place to work and a great experience.

 

Loretta  02:53

Okay, so you mentioned that there were a few challenges. So what were the highlights then?

 

Wayne  02:58

The highlight, I guess, was turning it around. So it had been a school of last resort for a lot of kids, which was fine. But it became kind of a school of first choice for lots of kids. And they were different kids. So some are academics. But we developed sport programs so that kids who went on to be seriously good athletes or develop careers around sport. Introduced probably the first online roll marking and progress reporting system, had laptops for teachers years before the department ever thought about it. So I was just a really good place to work. And, you know, I had sort of strong relationships with other schools in the area over time as well.

 

Loretta  03:47

You're talking about that technical aspect, you know, introducing laptops and so on. Were those ideas from you?

 

Wayne  03:56

Yeah, yeah. The roll marking was basically out of necessity, because it wasn't done well. And it was a very complex place in terms of timetabling. And we had an enrollment audit one year where they took a number of kids off me, which was fair enough, but I vowed and declared that would never happen again. So we looked at, we actually introduced a roll marking system using palm pilots, no one actually knows what they are anymore. But that got us on top of the enrollment of the attendance issues straightaway. And then in maybe 2000, or a bit after we went to online roll marking so parents could check in on the kids at any time, and we could do the same. And then we put in a progress reporting system that the kids loved and we actually attached grade point averages to the progress reports which kids also loved. So that was a long way ahead of its time. And in fact, the guy who developed it with us if he had any business acumen at all, he could have made a fortune out of it as, as Compass John de la Motte and Lucas Filer . So yeah.

 

Loretta  05:13

Turninh things around. That wasn't the first time. Well, that was the first time that you did it. But you actually did it again, when you became regional director of our northern region. How did that come about?

 

Wayne  05:27

It was an accident, like most of my career, I was contacted.....

 

Loretta  05:33

I think you're being very modest.

 

Wayne  05:35

No, no, I've never, I've never had a planned and you know, when I went to Box Hill, I applied for a few schools, basically, because a couple of principals and told me I should and eventually agreed with it. But I chose Box Hill, because of the what they were doing with curriculum. It looked to me to be interesting, I didn't realize all the other issues. And the Regional Director thing was really I was asked if I'd like to be a regional director. And I had no time at all for regions, I thought they blocked and they focused on trivia. And when I was contacted, I said to the person what, you know, what have I done to offend you? Why would you want me to take on that job? And during the interview process, Grant O'Here was the secretary at the time. And it became clear that if I, if I took this job, I'd be going to the north, because part of it at least, was in a state of disarray. So anyway, in the end, it was time for a change. I've been at Box Hill for nearly a dozen years. And we kind of all knew what we were going to say before we said it. So it was time to move on and do something different. And I don't think I was particularly well prepared for it, I had no idea really of the depth of the issues in some parts. My overall impression was that most schools were reasonably comfortable, you know, if, and particularly the ones in more affluent areas. And unfortunately, in some of the tougher areas, I think people had given up largely like, and government would, or the department come along and sort of point a finger at those people and saying it was not doing a very good job, and here's some money, go and fix it. And then they change again. And there were things like in Broadmeadows on on one side of the railway line, they were using a particular set of approaches to try to improve outcomes. And on the other side, they'd be doing something completely different. So it just seemed really bizarre, basically. But it was, you know, it's challenging. The minister was Lynne Kosky and she made it clear that she just wanted the region off the out of the newspapers, out of the Herald Sun. If there was a bad news story, it was quite often to do with the North.

 

Loretta  07:47

Poor North.

 

Wayne  07:48

Yeah, and it was, it was unfair, in a lot of ways, because there were plenty...and most, no one comes to school to do a bad job. And even in the places where things were really difficult, it was like there wasn't much support, and there wasn't much sense of direction, and there wasn't much optimism or hope. And you could understand, and there was also a culture of blame. So you know, people would blame the kids and blame that.... I remember I went to one school and did a session with the staff. And I had one woman tell me, you don't know what it's like here. We need to teach the parents first. And it was like, Well, hang on, you teach the kids who walk through the door full stop. That's your job. But that kind of attitude wasn't across the board. But even in the affluent areas, most of the schools were doing okay. They kind of, they're all aware, all right, we don't need to worry about this stuff. And the reality was, in most cases, they were doing okay, because of the kids who walked through the door, not because of anything in particular, they were doing. I couldn't say that in many cases, there was much value add going on.

 

Loretta  08:50

So would it be fair to say that your job was about school improvement?

 

Wayne  08:56

Yeah. And it was also, I mean, it was the time of the Blueprint. It was time when you had Lynn Kosky saying things like postcode's not destiny. It was time when Darryl Fraser had come in with a focus on school improvement. There was a little bit of money around and there was a bit of flexibility. And there became a little bit more money through national partnerships and so on. But yeah, the focus was very much on school improvement.

 

Loretta  09:23

So what did that mean to you?

 

Wayne  09:28

Basically, in the end, it meant getting the best out of every kid in every school. So which was kind of moral purpose, but also meant re culturing the organization. Because, if you looked at I think they were senior education officers, they were responsible for 40 schools, but they were really accountability bookkeepers. So you know, have you filled in this bit of paper, if you've got a performance plan? Have you done this? So it wasn't really about school improvement. It wasn't about working closely with schools to try and get them to improve their outcomes. So the first part was, how do we change the culture of the organization? And how to, you know, how do we reduce the numbers so that they're manageable, because if, if you're responsible for 40 schools, you simply can't do it. So we managed to get the numbers down to 20 to 25. And there was one Darebin, and whatever the inner North one was. Yarra, they'd been, or Darebin had been two networks that had been Preston, and the sort of area around the south around Fairfield and those places, and they didn't talk to each other. And they didn't actually want, they actually, principals came to me and said, We don't want to, particularly the ones down south, we don't, we're not, we don't want to meet with these principals, we've got nothing in common with them. And it was like, Well, bad luck, you know, this is how the world is, and you're going to meet with them. And in the end, when we started off the Achievement Improvement Zone stuff, the Darebin people were the ones who are most keen to be involved. So things changed fairly quickly. But it was, it was almost a cultural look after myself. And there was a degree of.dishonesty is probably a bit strong, but no one actually talked about what their data was like. If you're in a school that was struggling, you didn't talk about it, because there's almost a stigma attached to poor data. And if you're in one of the good schools, you kind of just let people think you are really good school, when in fact, the data might show you're okay. But you weren't a really good place. So there was all that sort of stuff in the background.

 

Loretta  11:29

Can I let you in on a little secret?  When you started to put the data up for everyone to see, we were all dying a silent death in the hope that it wouldn't be our data

 

Wayne  11:44

Yeah, sure. Yeah.

 

Loretta  11:45

It was so confronting, it had never happened before. We didn't know where to look, didn't know what to say. And then we'd breathe a sigh of relief when we realized it was another school's stuff. And then we'd feel sorry for them. But that changed and I'm really interested in the Achievement Improvement Zones. So it's the AIZ. Where did that come from? The idea behind that?

 

Wayne  12:13

Again, it was was kind of serendipity. I I knew David Hopkins a bit, I'd done some work in, in the UK for a month or so around 2009. I met David and I got on okay with him. We weren't bosom buddies or anything. But the very first conference they had for the region, which I wasn't involved in organizing, David turned out to be one of the guest speakers. And I can remember very clearly that there was a really bad comedian at dinner; it might have been on a Tuesday, I think, and David had been traveling for, I don't know, 38 hours or something to get there. And when David's tired or angry, or both, he gets a stammer. And he sat down beside me at dinner. And he said, Wayne, if you had been traveling for 36 hours, and you saw this comedian, and this food, what would you think the state of education was in the northern provinces of Melbourne? So Well, David, you'd think it'd be pretty bad. And you know what,  it'd be right. So we had a conversation. And he said, Well, basically, how about we go out for a drive and we go to some of these schools? So we spent a week driving around the region and going to different schools, and he was kind of fishing for a bit of work. He was going to be here for a month at a time three times a year, because he had an HSBC visiting fellow thing at Melbourne Uni, and eventually said, Look, I'll work one week, every time I come out pro bono.  And I said, Well, that's fine, except one week's not going to be enough, we'll need more. And then, he'd been involved in Achievement Improvement Zones in the UK. And that was basically one secondary school with maybe four or five primaries. And anyway, came back with that as a suggestion. I said, well, that's not going to work. You know, the problems much bigger than that. We had a third out of the, the worst 50 worst performing primary schools in the state. 38 of them were in the north. And I said, you know, if we just work with it, you know, four or five or six schools, we're kidding ourselves. And he agreed, and there was also the issue of too many schools. So you know, there are lots of really small schools, which people wanted to hang on to, but it was killing principals. And it was killing teachers. Anyway, we came up with this Achievement Improvement Zones, but then it was, so what are they going to actually do? And I've always had this thing about literate, numerate and curious.  I'd had that for a long time. So we worked on that. And then we, we looked around at who we could get to work with us and I knew John Munro, really well. I'd worked with John a lot and John John had become a personal friend.  Peter, the maths guy whose surname I can't remember, he was at Monash and I kind of knew of him. Ray Lewis on classroom management I knew well and worked with. And I knew Patrick Griffin from Melbourne. So we set up this thing about, let's work on those areas. There was a little bit of money around and you could you could fiddle with money. And it turned out schools were prepared to put some in. And basically, the message was, you know, you can do this, but you don't have to, but you have to do something. So, if you don't want to be involved, that's absolutely fine. But I think I was lucky because that stage, schools wer wanting to do something after they actually saw that wasn't just someone coming around to beat them over the head and tell them they're no good or ignore them. Because most of them, I reckon in the past, just ignored them. There was actually a strategy there to try and do something. And it was.....I remember the first week, I had a meeting at Mill Park at the whatever it is the council center there, that was my first meting. Darrell, I think might have turned up to that. And you could tell people were shocked, you know, we've got a performance that isn't good enough. And we've got too many schools, there was kinda silence. And no one you can tell whether people were in, they just looked the other way. It was like I wasn't there. But the next day, I went out to Broadmeadows, and there was a meeting of 500 staff about what they were going to do in broad Meadows. And it all revolved around refurbishing Upfield High School, which is a school that had been closed, and I sat there and I listened to it all morning, and then in the afternoon starting and it was like, you got to be kidding yourself. And I didn't know one person in the room I don't think, and I said Listen, can I just have a talk for a minute? I said, Look, if you think this is going to solve the problems in Broadmeadows, you're kidding yourself. All you're doing was shuffling the deck chairs, let's stop and have a serious look at what schools should look like, for the 21st century, not what they should have been like 20 years because they were.... Broadmeadows was a disaster. And anyway, that that set the ball rolling in that area for it was eventually to become the Regeneration project. But you know, your had pretty much every primary school in the bottom 10% or so in this state. You had one in five, one in three kids choosing to go from one of the primary schools to one of the local secondaries. And there was one chance in five they'd be there at the end of year 12. So it was just collapsed. And you know, there were 1000 kids a day heading out of Broadmeadows to go to another secondary school because they could, but there was a whole bunch of kids who couldn't do it. So it was kind of a mental mindset, a lot of goodwill eventually. And yeah, people just bought into it because they wanted to do the right thing. I reckon moral purpose is a big driver for lots of people on that that engaged many. And when they realized they weren't going to get beaten up for their data, I think that did that did a similar thing.

 

Loretta  17:57

That's an interesting term moral purpose.

 

Wayne  18:00

Well if you put it really crudely, it's a desire to do good things. But if you if you actually take, you know, Michael Fullan, David Hopkins, Alma Harris, they all put it as critical in in the improvement process. And now they'll talk about David Hopkins, for example, talks about as changing the life scripts of kids, Michael Fullan. It's about you know, raising the bar and narrowing the gap. What it really is, is stable and generalized intention to which to achieve something that's meaningful for the person, but meaningful to the broader world. And if you have a look at TELUS OECD Teaching and Learning survey from 2018, and more than 90% of Australian teachers, become teachers because they want to do something good for kids. And more than 80% believe that teaching was a means of addressing social digital disadvantage. So in essence, it's about doing good work to improve outcomes for kids to help them fulfill their potential.

 

Loretta  19:13

Okay, so you finished up around 2012?

 

Wayne  19:18

Yeah

 

Loretta  19:19

Given the situation that you inherited, and then what you were able to achieve in your years as Regional Director, and through the AIZ and working with people like David Hopkins and John Munro, and so on. Fast forward to today in 2022. Where, where are we now? What happened? Have we progressed, or have we stagnated or have we gone backwards? How would you compare today to 2012?

 

Wayne  19:55

I think I think maybe in the North things haven't stagnated quite as much as they have in a lot of other locations. But if you if you look at Tom Bentley, who has been an advisor to people like Julia Gillard, and I think now he's at RMIT. He argues that, basically, there's been no improvement in performance for a very long time, despite significant investments. So you know, if you think back over the last 10 15 years, we've had NAPLAN, we've had My School, we've got a universal year of pre service Ed, we've got Professional Standards for Teachers and Principals, we've had Gonski come along, and there's additional funding, and we've had the AEDI come in. And yet, if you look on every measure virtually no NAPLAN data has improved. Since we started basically, it's reasonably stable. And every now and again, one jurisdiction will go ahead a little bit. But overall, performance has been pretty static, our performance on PISA has been going backwards since 2000. And disturbingly going backwards. And, you know, Patrick Griffin, from Melbourne who worked with us a lot, he would argue that what we've done is miss out on doing the best we can for our most capable kids. So w've made some progress with kids who are at the bottom in terms of their performance. But if you look at the top kids, we don't extend and challenge them enough. And I think that shows up in both NAPLAN and the PISA data, TIM's which is the math science test that is for years 4 and 8, is not quite so bleak. So I think in the last round of TIM's stuff, in a couple of the measures, we were in the top 10 in the world, but in all of the others, all the other measures we've gone backwards consistently. And things like PISA are important because they're not just sort of tests of your capacity to regurgitate they are actually test and be problem solving ability. The fact is we've got an other jurisdictions that have gone ahead. But we've gone backwards in real terms. Our performance has actually declined compared to ourselves. So forget about the rest of the world.  Our performance has actually gone backwards over time.

 

Loretta  22:32

Well, how does that happen, given the enormous amount of money via equity funding, support from regions, and a whole range of programs that have been introduced?

 

22:46

Well, I think none of it sustained for a start. So you, you get a change of government, and you get a change of narrative. And so when Martin Dixon and the Liberals, Martin Dixon, my experience, you know, he'd been a teacher and a principal, and he actually understood what a good school was, and stuff he tried to do, which I can't even remember what it was now, even though I was involved in it, but it was a twist and a different approach. And now, you know, we've got this government that their focus is actually on improving NAPLAN. And what we want to do is improve kids learning ability, and we want to teach as well as we can. And things like NAPLAN will take care of themselves. It's interesting. I'm, I'm doing through Melbourne Uni, some work with South Australia's Leadership Institute. And they've got a target to be a great system by 2028. And you look and think, well, that's a big ask, because the rest of the country is not going forward, particularly here, you are looking to move yourself from where you are when they started in 2015, I think, but they've got a long way to go. But they actually, the targets are not. It's a it's a basket of targets. And they're not being specific about how we want to be here on Pisa, or we want to be here on NAPLAN. But then when you look at, okay, if we're going to do that, we're not going to be teaching the test. We're going to teach kids, we're gonna teach them well. And we'll teach them that how to learn how to think, how to ask questions, teach them how to manage their own learning, that kind of thing. And we, we tend not to do that or have the support from regions. I reckon we've gone back to where we were when I first started.  The people who are the link between the Regions and the schools, the SEILs, they're just bookkeepers. They're not necessarily deeply skilled in school improvement and they're not expected I don't think to really be involved and get their hands dirty. They go around checking up and making sure things have been done. And I think if you look at well, even if you look within the bureaucracy, there's not much in terms of knowledge about school improvement. And so, you know, none of it makes sense. And then the other thing I reckon is, for most bureaucrats, schools are pretty much the same thing. And I've had senior bureaucrats say to me, oh, you know, teaching this Groundhog Day, you do the same thing every year, and they don't understand you're actually dealing with different kids all the time, in school, each school's unique, unique combination of personalities, dispositions and knowledge. And they change every year, at least, because 20% or more of the kids are new, and 20% have gone, then you have a turnover of teaching staff. But there's no real attempt to focus or allow schools to do the work I'm doing at the moment, I think there are schools that know how to take what systems have on offer, and tailor them, tailor those offerings. So they actually meet what they need to do in their school to improve outcomes for their kids. And that was kind of what we did.

 

Loretta  26:00

Okay, if you were to walk into a room, and sit down with a dozen principals who were genuinely keen to bring about improvement in their school, regardless of whether they're high socio economic or low, what  would you say are the most critical factors that they need to focus on to get things happening?

 

Wayne  26:25

Ah, yeah, it's interesting. I think....

 

Loretta  26:29

it's a bit like solving world hunger, isn't it?

 

Wayne  26:33

Yeah, it is. But there's some, well, firstly, focus on teaching and learning. So that would be the, you know, you go straight back to what's instructional leadership. And so the first thing is to develop the schools of purposeful community. So be really clear on what it is we're here for. And we're here, in the end, to improve the learning from our students. The second thing I would look at is guiding change and developing people. So we're going to work if you're not, if you're not changing and trying to do things better, you're actually falling behind. So what do we do there? Well, if we want to develop people, we need kind of intellectual stimulation. So we need to engage them in the work, they need individual support. And we need to be able to model what it is we're trying to achieve. If we're talking about guiding change, we want to strengthen the school culture, we need to modify the organizational structures to manage the new work, and we need to manage the environment. And then the focus on teaching and learning would be about a high degree of consistency, kind of strengthening teachers skills and expanding their repertoire of practice. And I think, you know, the the work itself, David and I have argued this for years, the work itself is technically simple, we pretty much know what to do to boost student learning. And the HITS from the department would be an example of you know, that's technically simple, although they've made it look complex. But it's the challenges the social complexity, how do you overcome individual practice? And then, in terms of what would you do? Well, your work on the right thing. So the right things are things probably that are going to fulfill your moral purpose. So it's about what's in the best interest of kids in our schools. We implement evidence based practice, we improve learning and achievement by becoming more precise with our teaching. We work in teams, and we probably use moral purpose and intrinsic motivation as the drivers for change. And then we're rigorous about whether we're actually achieving what we set out to, so that they're the thing and I'd be saying, well, firstly, you know, you've, you've got to get this vision of what we're going to look like, how will kids benefit? And what will teachers do to achieve this, select the teaching strategies are the pedagogic strategies, put in place professional learning structures that will support teachers to develop those skills. And make sure that what you're doing is consistent, and then check to see whether the culture is changing. And it will be because if culture is what we do around here, if you're improving how you teach, you're actually changing the way you teach. So you're changing the culture of the school, and there's a whole lot of things that sit beside that are part of the equation. But the important thing I reckon, is doing the right work. And I think we get distracted by doing the bureaucracy's work. And you can do both. But I think that pendulum, important swings too much towards the clerical and accountability side and it's not intelligent accountability either. Not sure whether that answers the question or not.....

 

Loretta  29:47

Look, I think in reality there are a whole lot of principals in schools that just feel that they've they've got to get all their technical work done. You know, the occ health and safety. And because it's such a busy work, they don't get into the nitty gritty, what's the most important work, working with the kids in the learning?

 

Wayne  30:09

Yeah. And I think for some people, I think that's true. But I think there are some people who, who are not confident they have the skills to do that other work, whereas they can do the sort of department's busy work. And there's more challenges in doing the school improvement side of things because you actually need to bring people along. And you've got some people are deeply uncomfortable about being asked to change, not because they're, they're bad people, or you know that they're not willing. They just don't understand really what it is they're supposed to do. And they feel like they're doing it alone. And so I think, but there is, there is also still that argument that technical expectations drown the work you need to do. And I was lucky, because when I, when I was a principal, we didn't have email. And I would just say, I never got that letter or replied to that letter six months ago, what have you lost it? That kind of stuff. So you could, but but I think the other thing in that is principals don't realize how important they are to the system. And if they're doing a good job, if they have the support of their community, they're not easily hit on by the bureaucracy, you know, the bureaucracy can't do that much to them except so listen, can you get on with that stuff we need done. And I think part of the job, as a principal is to prioritize what's most important, and absolutely, there are obligations to the system that you have to fulfill. And some of them need to be done urgently. But there are others that don't. And I think, you know, things like occ health and safety policies, can have a look at those. They're the same in every school. So you don't need to spend years dwelling on what the health and safety policy looks like. Put your energies into the right work, you know, what is the right work? What's the workloads that schools exist, so kids will learn more efficiently and effectively than they would without them? That's the primary focus. So it's the right work, put most of your energies into that.

 

Loretta  32:18

So what does the future hold for you?

 

Wayne  32:22

Who knows? Finish off this doctorate. I'm doing what I'm doing a bit of work, which is not really what I intended to be doing. It's quite nice to, as you're finding, just to be able to sort of suit yourself when you do things and don't do things. But I want to finish the doctorate off.  I've just had a conversation with my supervisors and things have slowed down a bit because of COVID. So I'm looking at maybe taking a six month break, so schools can say...... what I'm looking at is workplace curiosity, driving improvements in student learning. And it's impacted by moral purpose on schools' capital. And the main part of it is a survey of teachers and principals, and I've done I've got about 200 responses so far. And it's really interesting. I mean, things like moral purpose do matter for teachers. And if they stay, moral purpose doesn't decrease over time. There's obviously some people who leave, because they just can't do it anymore. But moral purpose matters. Workplace curiosity seems to be important. Intellectual Capital, and social capital are really important, I think, when there's a guide. David Hargraves, who first did that work and I met in the UK a long time ago. And his argument was, if you want to improve student learning, that's improving their intellectual capital, you need to improve the intellectual capital of your staff, your teachers who do the work. I'd argue it's broader. And you need to have strong social capital and social capital has got two parts. One is the levels of trust within an organization. And the other is how efficiently a school can spread knowledge. So as we're learning something new, can we spread that across the whole school? And when you start to think about professional learning like that, it changes the way you go about business? I think. So yeah.

 

Loretta  34:24

Well, I mean, despite COVID, it sounds like a fabulous project, and it sounds like you're getting lots of support. So I certainly wish you very well in completing your research, because it certainly will have an impact on the way schools move forward and principals think, but I'd like to say thank you for your insights. And I can honestly say having been been in the North for more than 22 years as a principal that your legacy does still live on in many, many ways.  We might not talk about the AIZ, or we might not talk about, say, David Hopkins, but a lot of that learning still does remain in our schools.

 

Wayne  35:12

Now, that's terrific. I think that's true too. There's a lot of teachers and principals who who know that stuff deeply now.

 

Loretta  35:21

So wishing you all the best.

 

Wayne  35:24

Same to you. Thank you, Loretta.

 

Loretta  35:27

Thanks for listening to this latest episode of talking out of school, where we cover topics and dilemmas associated with the ups and downs, and even the downright curious of the school leaders job. Want to know more? Then visit me at shaping leaders.com.au But for now, here's to staying ahead of the game.

'Listen girlie...'  A former Regional Director recalls the challenges associated with lifting standards.  In six years, Katherine Henderson took the Western Metropolitan Region from basket case to the highest performing in the state of Victoria.  Here's how she did it....

Transcript

Loretta  00:03

You're listening to Loretta Piazza, experienced school principal, mentor and coach. And together we're talking out at school. You will hear from leaders who have lived and breathed so many experiences good and bad, agonized over decisions and tossed and turned through countless sleepless nights. These are the people who will help you stay ahead of the game.

She was tasked with not only lifting the standards in schools in the former Western Metropolitan Region, but also giving women principals a voice. Back in 2008 when Katherine Henderson was appointed Regional Director, about half of all primary schools were led by female principals. What stands out about our regional directors at that time, and for the next five or six years, is that they were a force to be reckoned with. Their profile was high. They were integral to network meetings by their sheer presence alone. Principals didn't see them as bureaucrats far removed from the work of principals. Admittedly our regions have now doubled in size. But somehow, I can't help thinking that the two former regional directors that I know would have let that stop them from doing the complex school improvement work. Today's episode is part one of school improvement at scale. Despite Katherine Henderson being proud to call herself a bureaucrat, and not wearing the 'former principal' label, she has all the hallmarks of what we truly value in our school leaders. A few years back, I had the privilege of working with her in the University of Melbourne Network of Schools initiative and what I learned then increased my literacy and numeracy knowledge tenfold. Katherine will go down in history as being the only Regional Director to take a basket case of a region and within a few years, turn it into the highest performing in the state.

Loretta

Hello, Katherine. Welcome to talking out of school.

 

Katherine  02:14

Hi, Loretta, thank you for asking me to talk.

 

Loretta  02:18

Now, I'm actually very interested in your journey as regional director, which was from I believe, 2008 to 2013. How did you end up in that role?

 

Katherine  02:33

Basically, I was asked to, if I would be happy to transfer into that role, because the department was struggling to find someone they were confident to put into the role after, after the previous regional director moved on to another role. And I was very, very happy to do that. Because I love working in a space where you're working with practitioners and backing them so that they can do really, really precious work, which I believe school principals, do.

 

Loretta  03:06

So what was the work that you were tasked to do?

 

Katherine  03:11

I was tasked with two things. The primary thing was to support the region to improve student learning outcomes, because they were really low. But as well, there was a concern that women, many of the principles were women, that women weren't being heard, and their contribution wasn't being valued. And so I was asked to pay attention to that, which I did.

 

Loretta  03:34

How many women were actually principals back then?

 

Katherine  03:38

A good proportion of the principals who are women, I don't have the exact numbers, but certainly around 50%, at least in the primary schools.

 

Loretta  03:49

So in terms of improving student outcomes, let's start with that. How did you know what work had to be done?

 

Katherine  03:58

I describe the way that I like things to work as layered learning. So that's a way of both bringing everybody in, engaging people, but also learning. And so when I knew I had the job, but I had several, like, you know, three months before I took it up, the first thing I did was interview anybody I could who could tell me anything about the region that included people in head office. And but it also included principals in the region and even other people who worked in the region and even parents. So because I wanted to get a feel for it. So that was a kind of personal learning and development for me. And of course, I looked at the data. And I looked at the data around student learning, I looked at the data around teacher and leader wellbeing or the proxies of that which might be you know, teacher absenteeism, for example. And that gave me a picture and I was really interested in the demographic of the students, and it was the region with the highest number of refugees as a proportion in the state. It was the region with on any measure, both related to teacher wellbeing, but particularly student learning outcomes, in student wellbeing at the time that we started, was the was the lowest, including all the rural regions. So that gave me a picture and just talking to people at the same time as I was building relationships, which were precious over the time I worked there, I was learning a lot about what the issues were in the region, what the culture was. And it's fair to say my judgment was that the people who worked in the west were fabulous. They are very strong values based belief driven in their work. They, they absolutely cared about the kids and the kids wellbeing. But there is a sense in which people didn't really believe that kids could learn. Not enough anyway, to make sure the kids did learn.  They were absolutely concerned for the wellbeing in the future of the children, but they weren't focused on the learning. And there was some.... a sentence would start: Katherine, yes, but yes, but you know, you don't know these, these kids and their families. And I used to think at the time, look, some of these children come from families, whose parents have sat in refugee camps for 10 years, and they've got themselves here for the sake of their children. So they are relying on us, you know, it was so important for those families. Katherine, do you think that these educator were making excuses by saying, yeah, but? I feel, I actually think that they didn't, they weren't confident that they could make a difference to kids' learning. And yes, you could say they were making excuses, but they would need and I would need in that situation, to have a reason for myself, you know, rationalization. And I think the work we did, was all about creating possibility, building confidence, and energy and action, the right work, getting the focus right, and working together and proving to ourselves that these kids could learn, and they did learn. And that was, that was the joy. And I think, I think many, many people in the region were excited by the changes that we we created, that did mean that many more children learnt than had been learning. I'm not saying either, that it's just a simple, easy thing to do. And to the families, the children, families, in many cases, face quite challenging circumstances and had challenging backgrounds. This, you know, that wasn't an easy fix for the people who were doing the work. But they got there.

 

Loretta  08:01

You came up with this really big picture idea of where the region needed to go in order to improve student outcomes. How did you actually make it happen?

 

Katherine  08:14

Well, the first thing I want to talk about and how we made it happen was how we set it up. So I had some good, the first thing that I did with the principals was say to them, we've you know, we've got I was upfront, the data is not okay, the kids aren't learning enough. They can do better than that. And so can we, and I, and I put put a question to them. I said, how do we become the most in how do we be the region with the most improvement in most improving regions in student learning outcomes in the state of Victoria? I didn't say how can we become the best? Because all sorts of things affect the best, including education, socioeconomic status of parents or money in a school, you know? So you could say that some of the most elite private schools are the best because they get the highest results. We weren't interested in that. We were interested in learning growth. How do we become the most improved region in student learning outcomes? For most without question, then we the next thing we did was we actually spent a whole year, not a month or a week or maybe writing a strategic plan. We spent a year and I had someone working full time on this. Designing the methods we used to consult and work with people at every level in the region, exploring that question, what do we need to do? How are we going to do it? And so we had discussed focus groups with principals, with APs, with teachers, with people working in schools as in teacher aides or you know, lollipop ladies, that sort of group people who weren't educators, and were parents. And then in that August that year, we had a conference, drawing on all those different groups. And we were asking ourselves, what do we have to do? How are we going to do it and we built a plan together, we built a three year plan together. And in that three year plan where...and this was before money came in, which supported us on this, we made a commitment that we would improve student numeracy and literacy as building blocks for access to a rich curriculum, we weren't dumbing it down for the kids, we weren't just going to try and make them do better reading and throw phonics at them, we were going to build their literacy and numeracy as building blocks or for access to a full curriculum, and we were going to provide a full curriculum. And that was, by the time we made that plan, I think we had really strong buy in and the buy in was because we worked with people, we didn't just write something on a piece of paper in an office and hand it out. And then the next thing that happened was that as part of that plan, every school committed to having somebody with time release in their school, to support literacy, and somebody with time release in their school to support numeracy, serendipitously, just as we're about to start at the beginning of the next year, funds came through for schools to have people with that role. So our schools all had a literacy coordinator and a numeracy coordinator. And that was great. But we really needed to be very, very precise about the kinds of pedagogy, the kinds of teaching that we were asking of people, which we had evidence for, that would make sure that kids learned and to do that we had so we had the coordinators in the schools. We had, and they were our school coaches. I think we called them then regional coaches. Funding came through for those people. And then we tendered, as a region for people with expertise in literacy and numeracy who, who were there to support and develop our regional coaches in our school based coaches. So those three groups work together. So a second really critical element of what we did as a region was coherence. The focus was student learning, what we consider was going to be powerful was coherence. People working on the in the suited to their particular conditions, or the students are working with at the kind of school they're working in. But with coherence around how we did things. And as it turned out, principals would say to me, after a couple of years that we prefer to recruit from from the western region to our school, because our teachers have got a shared practice, and they can work with each other. And I'm now working in another area with for the Menzies Foundation, and we're looking at collective efficacy. And you know, that that's now John Hattie's number one impact strategy or HIT. And what we were doing was building collective efficacy. Probably didn't use that language at the time, but we certainly did use the language of collaboration. So we so we, we set the challenge, which was the question, we built the shared purpose, which was the plan. And then we actually worked actively towards collective efficacy. And so we had three, I'd say three stages of implementation. The early implementation was very much about the regional leadership, relentless communication around implementing the priorities. And communication wasn't one way we worked with every network group. I, I and the Deputy Regional Director made commitments to each other that we would try and be in schools, at least two days a week every week, and we came close, we didn't do that exactly. So we had the Equip Professional Learning Program, which was around that coherent, shared curriculum for all of us around instruction, we brought in the expert consultants, and we had monthly professional learning and planning for those school based coaches, the regional coaches, with the expert consultants. So that was just an example of what I'm calling the layered learning. And then those school based coaches worked with teachers. We also ran an immense number of workshops for teachers, again, with this shared approach at all times. Who are the experts that you called upon to help?S So first and foremost and in which there is an OECD case study, which uses the case study of that improvement in the western region, I can talk about the detail of what the improvement was, but the person who was our most significant and important critical friend and expert was Diane Snowball, who had led the same kind of work in in New York and other parts of America. And her particular expertise is in reading and literacy or literacy more generally, but but also in supporting teachers to become more effective in their teaching practice. So she was our advisor, she and through her, we were able to recruit some amazing people who were already highly skilled at working with working in schools and with coaches. We, you know, on every level, we nutted things out together, we had a weekly meeting of the regional network leaders with me and the ARD, and the person responsible for teaching and learning in the regional office, a weekly meeting, because we thought it was important to keep close to each other and be able to hold each other to account and stick to our focus and our purpose. I pick up that you're very humble, Katherine. Yeah. Look, you said, Look, I've never been a principal. I, you know, I know something about education. I know a bit, but you know, not as much as maybe others. You surrounded yourself with really competent, knowledgeable experts. By doing that, you are able to get the results that you wanted. I always say that I'm a bureaucrat, and I'm proud to be a bureaucrat, and my definition of a bureaucrat is a person who makes it possible for things to happen. So I've worked in health and education, and particularly, and that local government, state government, and my absolute passion is making things happen, implementing, seeing a change. And it's always for me, of course, about improvement for people. So yeah, if you're going to do that, and you don't have the professional knowledge, you need to either get it yourself, we certainly need to get a broad overview. So and you need to find the people, the right people, good people. And the third thing, I think, became more and more important to me as a regional director was the word respect. And it was about respecting the people we were working with, because so many people in the community, wag their fingers about what schools ought to do and what principals ought to do and what teachers ought to do. And there are more experts about education than anywhere else, because everyone's been to school. And a lot of them a lot of those people are wrong. And so, and principal, I think being a principal is a lonely job, it's people, people, people 24 hours a day, but you're the one that you know, it's on your shoulders, it rests on you. And, and I also think people who are principals, a lot of people, including teachers, but principals in particular, don't get the sort of glory and the feedback that say people in business might get or in other sectors. They, and they are people who are very different personalities, but they're not generally show ponies, and they're because they want to promote themselves. So I think that that word respect becomes really important. Because if you want to work with people and support them, then they have to trust you, you know, you have to show that you respect them. We went into a school, I think we talked about this the other day. And I saw children sitting in rows going mat, red, set, fat, hat, back, and they were 15. And I thought this is wrong. I didn't know any more about it. I just knew it was wrong, because you shouldn't do that to young adults. And I went back to the regional office and said that to the people who are fantastic people working on teaching practice. And they said, Well, you know, we've got to tell them to stop it. Tell them to stop it, Katherine, you're the regional director. And I said, I'm not going to tell them to stop it. And they were horrified. And I said, I'm not going to tell them to stop it till we've got something better. Because these are people who are trying, they've made a decision they want their kids to learn. And they've caught on to a program and they think it's the ants pants. And so until we've convinced them that we've got something better then I'm not walking in and telling and that's what I mean, by respect. I think that matters a lot to me in my work.

 

Loretta  19:03

Well, I think that's a really beautiful way of putting it because if you want to, to get people on board that respect and honoring the work they do and appreciative and then as time goes by, as they learn, they will replace their actions and what they're doing with the new things that they're learning. So that that's how it works.

 

Katherine  19:25

I'll tell you another one. We heard one network and it was the it was on the on the measures the department used at the time it was point nine something on SES, which means it was really, really one of the poorest networks. It was the probably and there there were, I don't know maybe about 14 principals in it. Maybe more actually. So maybe about 19 principals, and they were all men except one. There was one woman in the room. And this guy, Frank, he won't mind me saying this, he folded his arms like this and he said, almost like: listen, girlie. Although those arent the exact words. Listen, girlie? Listen, Katherine, I've been a principal for 10 years. We're working as hard as we can, and we can't do more. And I said, Thanks, Frank, thank you for letting me know about that. And I went back to that network. You know, I used to go to them, most of them regularly. And I went back to that about two years later, I'd been there lots of times. And Frank said, Katherine, what you said, you're right, we're on it. That was a hard nut to crack. And it was so exciting when he said that. So because he was sucked in we and we gave... Richard Elmore talks about reciprocity. If you want to ask people to do something, you've got to be prepared to back them to do it. And that might mean quite explicitly with resources, or it might be another way, it might be just listening to them, you know, might be paying attention, but we had a set of values. And that was a really important one in our values.

 

Loretta  21:03

What did you achieve? How would you sum up your achievements?

 

Katherine  21:08

Well, first of all, there is absolute, it's unquestionable that we had a huge impact on student learning. And there's data that supports that. And in fact, there's a beautiful slide by Professor John Hattie, which showed our region making phenomenal progress over two years. In in, going from very low to the top region in in, in student learning outcomes in I think it was numeracy or literacy was one of those for the years, seven to nine, which is a hard group to move. So you know, on on, we went from being the bottom in every, in every measure, and under NAPLAN, making significant progress. And there were several different measures. It's unquestionable that we made really big gains in student learning. And that becomes a spiral because the teachers start to believe that they can make a difference. And I think it was Roger Goddard's definition of collective efficacy. If the teachers believe that children can learn, students can learn. If the children believe that they can learn and if the teacher is confident that they know how to teach them, that's collective efficacy. According to Roger Goddard, you'll get a significant improvement. And that's what we did. And I think that's what we created. So we I think we also created a working environment for people where they had great pride and joy in what they were doing. I'm not saying that it was all a perfect world, but it changed the culture. And, and a lot of it lasted for some time. So some of those networks were still there were informal networks meeting around particular areas, and they were still going a couple of years later. And I think up until at least three years later, there was one group that met that used to invite me to come which I like so. And either Patrick, I think it was Patrick Griffin, it might have been Fields said to me, Katherine, if it's not written down, is that it goes, it disappears. So the OECD case study is written down, that I sort of properly documented, but I'm not an academic. So I haven't got a PhD.

 

Loretta  23:25

Yet, yet. Quite a legacy. I'm also very curious, because you were talking about one of the things that you were tasked to do was to give women voice.

 

Katherine  23:41

Oh yeah. I'm sure we did. What I didn't do is ignore them and pretend they weren't in the room and work to the blokes. So I don't know that we.... I certainly know that the very people who had raised this issue with the relevant Dep Sec, who was at the time, Darrell Fraser, came to me later and said yes, yes, it's changed. I didn't go out actively, you know, I didn't set up anything special for women or do anything like that. But also I think we shifted the percentage of women who were principals. It was more the fact that I was a woman probably was a good start.

 

Loretta  24:28

You know, though, looking back at that time, I think women were particularly drawn to that educational leadership focus that looked, you know, like the education arena today. It's probably not all that different but. I think now, it's very heavily managed from the central office. We know we've got FISO, and the HITS and FISO 2 but it's not as strong from the regions. So, I mean, I suppose the intent is still the same to improve student outcomes. But if you are giving advice to principals today about how best to achieve school improvement, and at the same time look after themselves, what advice generally would you be giving to them?

 

Katherine  25:30

I think you're right about the centre, there's more, there's more focus, well certainly from the central office. There wasn't a lot but there was beginning. More focus on resources and support for people around teaching and learning. So, and structures, like, I can't remember what there's, there was a whole project from the center about PLCs, or PLTS. But if I were a principal, I would be thinking about several things. But one of them is I'd want to know, my school and what's happening here, what the content or what the, you know, what the culture is, and who the people were. And so I'd be wanting to get to know my people early, and as much as possible. And using that as a way of developing some sort of personal analysis, but also engaging them in that exercise. I'd be really, really concerned as a, as a principal, it's a concern for experienced principals. How do I hold focus? How do I get clear what my what our focus should be? But how do I hold it because the demands on principals are unbelievable. And you have to have, you have to have that, that theory, that idea that you don't have to do everything that head office says. Because if you have that idea, you're going to fall over. And the way I think of it is there's people in little units all over head office, and they're all working busily on their stuff, and they want the schools to do it, and it comes out and someone's deputy said, yeah, it's a good idea, we'll get the schools to do it. So you have to be able to make those judgments. So focus, really strong understanding of your local context, culture and your people. And holding that word that I value around respect. So you're respecting what people are doing. And building on that to develop a mental model. It's not, you know, we've got to chuck it all out with the bathwater. I mean, some schools we've had to close and reopen, because they were such, you know, a basket case. I'm not saying don't be responsible about that. And it's about I suppose, creating an environment where people will work together, challenge each other, and also get some recognition and joy from each other. And remember that you've got the best job in the world, because it's kids and you're creating the future. I think the other thing that's really important for principals is to not go it alone. I think they need to build if there's not a network that they naturally feel comfortable in, you need to build it, particularly as you're starting. Build your network of mentors and supporters and people who you can trust and people who you can ring up and say, Look, I'm stuffed, if I know what to do about this thing that just come out, it's not going to work for me, what do I do that kind of relationship, and you need as a principal, I believe to be building those relationships, yourself, taking on that responsibility with your colleagues, because it can be, as I said, it can be a very lonely role, despite the fact that it's it's a very demanding role around people, children, parents, department, the world.

 

Loretta  28:52

And that's the advice that I to give to my colleagues. Make sure that you've got a strong network of people around you be able to pick up the phone, have a chat to them, go for a coffee, whatever it is you need.

 

Katherine  29:07

I don't think we can underestimate there's plenty of things that principals do almost daily that I'm not sure I could do. But just that handling the range of people you've got to deal with. And then some of those people in almost every school, inappropriately badly behaved. I mean, might be parents, might be kids, doesn't matter. I mean, it's just high pressure, and not fully understood by the world. And you just really need to be able to back each other up and have some people you can call on and say help I'm going under. That's how you're feeling because you won't be alone in that feeling from time to time.

 

Loretta  29:51

Katherine, that's great advice. Thank you very much. I do remember your time as a regional director. And I remember also seeing that slide that you talk about the one that John Hattie put up. And I think for, for us in the north, I think probably the most confronting thing that we ever experienced was the first time that our data was actually put up. And our data wasn't great back then. And it was, it was a horrible feeling to know that there was a strong possibility that our school data might be shown to everybody and what will my colleagues think of me? Today, data goes up, we don't even think about it. We're so used to it. So we've come an exceptionally long way, in terms of student achievement. I guess the demands of the job haven't really changed that much. If anything, the the job is now more demanding.

 

Katherine  30:54

I think that it was such joy for me working in the region, because I think not that everyone's perfect, or even that everyone's good, but en masse as a group, culturally, people who work in schools are lovely people. Because you can't be a saddist or sort of brutal person now and run the school, it's, you know, you just used to be able to when I was at school as a kid, and so you have to be a combination of these things. They generally like kids and want to do and want the best for the kids. They have good capacity for relationship. And it just comes together to me as a lovely, lovely group of people to work with, and also a highly skilled group. So it's a special thing, I think, to be in a relationship with a whole lot of school principals.

 

Loretta  31:44

Oh, that's, that's a great vote of confidence. And I know the principals and the assistant principals listening to this will greatly appreciate your words. Katherine, where to now?

 

Katherine  31:58

For me I'm involved in work which I'm really enjoying because it connects me to schools again. And ultimately I hope it supports schools in a really good way. I like, I love work and where to now apart from that, you know, whatever you do when your 73 (don't put that in the podcast!)  I haven't got used to the idea that I'm supposed to stay home and you know, make scones or whatever. And I don't intend to ever get used to that idea.

 

Loretta  32:34

Well, Katherine, thank you very much for your time. Thanks for your insights and the great stories of when you were regional director and best of luck with the Menzies Foundation and all the great work you're doing there.  Thanks for listening to this latest episode of talking out of school, where we cover topics and dilemmas associated with the ups and downs and even the downright curious of the school leaders' job. Want to know more? Then visit me at shaping leaders.com.au But for now, here's to staying ahead of the game.