30 January 2023

Join us as the Department for Education’s Chief Executive Martin Westwell shares his vision for 2023, why student voice is so important and why he’s a fan of northern soul music.

Show Notes

• Purpose statement for public education

Transcript

Intro

Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders, past, present, and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education. And today something a little bit different, we're joined by the big boss, Professor Martin Westwell, Chief Executive of the Department. Professor Westwell, welcome.

Professor Martin Westwell: Oh, good on you, Dale. Looking forward to it.

Dale Atkinson: So, nine months into the job now, it's a reasonably solid gestation period. What would you say you've learned so far?

Professor Martin Westwell: Look, how long have you got? It's a steep learning curve when you go into a new job. And no different with this job. When you think about our system, lots of people complain about the bureaucracy, and so they should. That's what we do. But, you know, coming into department, one of the things that I have learned is just how impressive the work that we do, the people that we've got in the department, really are having a kind of central corporate function, all the things that go on here.

Professor Martin Westwell: Learnt so much about that and the support for schools. And just the way that people think about the support that they're providing for schools. I think especially during things like, you know, COVID and now the floods in the Riverland, how we're able to bring resources to support schools. It's just amazing. And also I think I try to get out and go to sites, preschools, primary schools, high schools to see the work, see the system from their point of view because you can't see the system from this office in Flinders Street.

Professor Martin Westwell: You've got to get out there and see that in all the different contexts that we're doing work. I kind of knew it in my head, but just seeing the breadth that we've got, you know, we've got some amazing educators supporting kids in amazing ways and a knew it, but just never seen the breadth of it. And that's been something that I've learned.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's pretty impressive, isn't it? And I know you've made a deliberate and conscious effort to go out to sites a lot this year. Are there any specific kind of things that stick with you from your experience over the last nine months?

Professor Martin Westwell: So, so many examples and it's hard to pick. I think one of the things is kind of got trapped in this thing where we talk about good schools being schools that get, you know, the highest grades. And what I've seen a good schools, great sites, amazing kindies, you know, just sitting down with the kids. There was one down in the South East, and I sat down and sat with a group of kids in the kindy, and they were playing hairdressers. And so, they had the brushes out and the hairdryer and they said, ‘Can we do your hair?’ And they thought that was hilarious because anybody who knows me, knows I've got no hair at all. So that was hilarious. And then they decided that was a bit boring because there was no hair. So, they started doing my makeup. So, but actually what I saw in that was the results of the efforts that the people on site put in to develop the kids and the kid’s interaction. And one kid kind of tried to get another kid to do something and that child wasn't having it and just gently said, ‘No, I don't want to do that.’ And the other child backed off. It's those moments that you really get to see. You know, you can see the impact that we're having on young people.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that's interesting you say that. I was out at a meeting with a principal and the Governing Council chair, and the principal was talking about implementing project-based learning as a way of preparing young people with a breadth of skills academic, social, interactive that would really help those kids to thrive and prosper in, you know, the modern workplace, the modern world.

And the Governing Council chair brought it back and he said, ‘Look, that sounds fantastic, but what does that mean for teaching pure academic stuff to my kids?’ He says, ‘Everything we see kind of indicates, you know, NAPLAN scores, PISA scores. That's what we're looking at when we're looking at the quality of education’. We've done an amazing job, I think, conditioning parents to look to those things as an indicator of educational quality.

What does that tell us, that interaction, about how we should be talking to parents about the broader purpose of education and the role of schools?

Professor Martin Westwell: Yeah, our structures kind of corral parents into this way of thinking. And one of the ways in which has been expressed is this idea about, you know, parents asking the question, how well is my child doing? As if there is kind of one line. And what we want to know is how far are my kids along that line, how far are my kids along that line in comparison to other kids?

We want to know where our kids are developmentally. You know, even when your child's born, you know, you might follow the weight in the growth compared to the averages. But if you're not average, that's fine as well, because you're not supposed to be average. Yet, somehow in education, we've got to narrow this thing down to the average or some comparison on one single measure.

So, this question, ‘how well is my child doing?’ is almost the wrong question. The question really should be, ‘how is my child doing well?’. Trying to capture that kind of diversity of what so many ways of doing well and being ready for the world. More and more we see employers saying not interested in university, not interested in how much you know, I can help you to develop that knowing, What I'm really looking for.

Doesn’t matter which industry students or young people are working in, what I’m really looking for is resilience. What I'm really looking for is that ability to learn. What we're really looking for is that good communication and ability to work with others, you know, whatever those things might be. And yet we leave those to emerge from education. Parents go, ‘Well, that's all okay, just as you said, that's all okay, but come on, the main game games over here, isn’t it?’

Well, no, it's not anymore. It hasn't been for a long time, but what we really see now is the world really demanding that shift. I was talking to the Industry Skills Council, so people from industries all across South Australia and I talked about this and the shift. I think that we do need to make to get that balance right.

A bloke came up to me afterwards and said he was a potato grower down in the South East, and I thought, oh, what's he going to say? He's going to say ‘oh, I just want skills.’ And he didn't. He said, ‘that’s the best thing I've heard, that's exactly what we need for young people.’ Now, of course, getting a job isn't just the only purpose of education, but what we are seeing is the world asking us to think differently about education.

And I think that will come through with that conversation with parents as well. The question being, ‘How are you, the Education Department, best preparing my child to get into the world and be brilliant? Come on. How are you doing that?’ That's what I want parents to ask, not ‘how well is my child doing?’

Dale Atkinson: So, what does that mean for an educator in terms of how they know whether they're doing a great job? What are the indicators we're looking for from educators in that sort of space?

Professor Martin Westwell: That's really why we've started off this conversation about the purpose of public education in South Australia because we have to really have a settlement on what we agree that we're going to jointly be responsible for. And then things like the Australian Curriculum that I think are full of lots of knowledge, which is great, students need knowledge, subject specific skills, but perhaps not some of these other the things that we know are so important.

So, if you just think about something like self-regulation skills, some research just came out that you can teach self-regulation skills. And if you do, what happens is it has a big impact on students’ academic achievement. But what it also does is it has a big impact on students’ ability to control some behaviours, ability to stop and think and make better decisions.

That's making students brilliant, not just in academics, but also in other aspects of life and in the way that they interact with other people, the way that they make decisions, the way that they participate in a democracy. Not all the information, all the misinformation that's thrown at them to be able to just stop and think and say, well, actually my emotional response to that is this.

But my second thinking is actually, well, hang on a minute and do that thinking. That's what makes a brilliant mathematician, or contributes to making a brilliant mathematician, a fantastic historian. And it also helps to find your way in the world.

Dale Atkinson: Gives you that space. The clarity of thought, I guess, is where you need to be. You've spoken before about South Australia being historically a leader in public education, stretching back to the 1800s. It's probably not the public perception now, albeit we know that there's plenty of innovative practice in that field. What can we do collectively to reclaim that position as innovators and leaders in public education?

Professor Martin Westwell: Got to be able to tell a good story, right? I think going back to this kind of purpose, you know, what are we here for and tell that story. You know, there's a famous story that's probably not true of JFK going to NASA in the sixties and meeting a janitor and going over and saying, well, what do you do?

He said, ‘Well, Mr. President, I'm helping to send a man to the moon.’ And I love that, even though it's probably not true, I love it because what it is, you know, we've got this thing that we're going for and everybody knows what it is, and we can be really clear about what it is that we're going for.

And of course, it’s not enough just to start the story, kind of do the thing as well. Right. They actually did put a man on the moon. So, you have got to be brilliant. But if you look back at the story, South Australia, you know, some of those amazing people like the likes of people like Alby Jones, Garth Boomer, South Australia was known for meeting the needs of students.

Having a system that really focused on students, on students being effective learners compared to know us. To be an effective learner, you’ve got to know stuff, you can’t be knowledge free. You got to know stuff, you got to have skills in the subjects in the areas in which you're doing learning. But I think South Australia was known for being effective learners.

So you go to a janitor, in a school in South Australia and say, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I'm helping to develop effective learners.’ That would be pretty amazing if we had that story. We had the evidence to back it up and say, this is what we're doing, this is how we're changing the world, this is how we're changing South Australia.

So, I think that both, we can do that, and I think we can tell a better story about how we're doing that.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, a group of 30,000 people all targeting one direction. You've identified student agency as a key factor in gaining traction in learning. So, my dad would say ‘why would you ask a six-year-old what they want to learn?’ What does it mean? Student agency, in terms of curriculum, design and pedagogy?

Professor Martin Westwell: Two things, just first of all, one of them is the student agency in learning. That's a kind of means to an end. So, what we want to do this learning, you want to get this achievement, you want to do brilliantly in NAPLAN and SACE and other assessments. And so, there's a question about how the student agency support that.

And you can think about student agency as an end in itself. We want young people who have got agency, can take agency, can use their agency in their lives. We want young women, young men who can use the agency. We also want young people, gender diverse people say, this is who I am, and I am taking agency my life to achieve my goals in my life, to support other people, to help other people to change South Australia.

And the opposite, of course, of agency is just that passivity of sitting back and letting the world do what the world wants to do to you. And so now we think about student agency, the development of agency as an end as well as a means and something that's going to be important in the world. Back to kind of what it means for us in terms of our system.

It's not about saying, you know, you choose, we'll stand back and cheer from the sidelines. You know, it's not that, if we're purposely going to be developing a student agency and it's an intentional outcome and we're going to get in there and support students to do that. And it might be some choice about what they're learning.

It might be some choice about how they're learning, it might be some choice about how they're going to show us the evidence of their learning, through our assessments and other things. And it might be some big things. So, imagine if we had student voice in some of the policy decisions we're making about curriculum, about the way that we run our schools, the way that we run our system.

Because then if they've got that voice, they've got some of the ownership, the part of the story. And so now they become active partners in that work rather than again sitting back and letting it be done to them. I also think that the student agency we can see has a big impact on student’s self-concept in their learning, on the sense of belonging, the idea that, you know, yeah, this is something I'm taking this personally, this is something I can do, I can be part of.

So, I see it as being crucially important in moving forward in education, no matter where we are in the world. And I do think we have to think about how we incorporate it into our practice and how do we support our educators to incorporate it into their practice.

Dale Atkinson: And that's a process that's already started. Last year we held a number of student forums across the state. Can you tell us a bit about that project and why that was so important?

Professor Martin Westwell: This is starting with students, purposefully, asking our students about their aspirations for the future, trying to reveal the thinking underneath that. Also thinking about how are they partners in this process. So, this idea about getting to our purpose, you know, the example that's often given around the world is Kodak. Kodak thought that they were in the business of film and chemicals, and they sold more film and chemicals. And even in their own labs, then they invented digital photography and they put it to one side. Why? Because they were in the film and chemical business, and it decimated the company. It made them irrelevant because the main game moved and went to digital photography. Now, if they thought they were in the business of photography, the business might have moved and changed and maintained its relevance.

So, the reason why I give that example is, when we talk about our purpose, we have got to make sure that we remain relevant. And who do we have to remain relevant to? Clearly, our students. So, what does relevance to our students mean? So, talking with our students is important to do that work and to make sure that our students feel like they're part of the story, that they're activated in that work.

But what we're also seeing there is students telling us, you know, they don't use this language, but telling us something about equity, telling us something about wanting to be challenged more. You know, we put some of the data in front of them about things like their cognitive engagement, talked about what cognitive engagement was. Then showed them their own data from the Wellbeing and Engagement survey and said, what do you notice about this data, first of all?

Then we asked them, why do you think things are like this? And then ask them, how might we improve if we do it differently? What could we start with? What should we stop doing? Amazing insights from our young people to help us move the system forward.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's incredibly powerful, isn't it, to talk to those kids. So, this is the opening salvo in that discussion around the purpose of public education. What are the next steps in that process?

Professor Martin Westwell: We've got all this input now from our students and just working through that feedback now and getting that together. And then for us to be able to share that with leaders, educators across the system, to help that to inform some of our thinking, of course, using some of the best research from around the world to inform our thinking as well, but also, of course, the expertise and experience that we have in our system.

So, engaging with our educators and with our leaders again to think about what is it that we're going to have the shared responsibility for. From that, when we think about that purpose and those components of what we're taking responsibility for, what we want our system to look like, we've had a lot of focus on excellence, quite rightly over the last few years.

But I think we need to think more about equity in our system. What do we mean by that and how do we get an equitable system? Because we know that if you drive a more equitable system, you get more excellence from it. Those two things work together really well. And thinking about, you know, the wellbeing of our students, developing that, developing some of these capabilities of students that are going to make them brilliant in the world and brilliant learners.

And of course, again, to improve that achievement. So, we want to kind of bring those principles together and then say, okay, so if this is what we do, we want to be responsible for how do we know if we're going to be successful? So, what are some of those measures? And we're going to need to put in place across the system to understand that we are being successful in those things?

Clearly, from a school's point of view, if there's a dozen different measures of ways of being successful, you're not going to do all 12 or however many there are. That's too much. But schools will know where they can really focus to get the biggest impact they can for their students and perhaps focusing on two or three of those measures going for those things to make the biggest difference outcomes for our students.

Dale Atkinson: It's interesting you say that schools will know. Speaking to a teaching colleague, they were saying that generally in their opinion, a 2 to 5 year lag between a change in systemic strategic direction and that adjustment gaining traction in the classroom. How do we address that? What do we do to meet that kind of need and make sure that the educators themselves aren't suffering from initiative fatigue or feel like they have too many competing priorities?

Professor Martin Westwell: Yeah, so look, I agree with that. I mean, it's really clear that even with an intensive focus on one particular thing, sustained change happens over at least an 18-month period to get sustainable change. You could focus on that for at least an 18-month period. And I think your point about initiative fatigue is a really good one.

If we're doing lots of bits and pieces, there's no clear understanding of, you know, why we're doing this. We don't have our man on the moon discourse. It feels like you've just been asked to do a lot of stuff, you know, it's unconnected stuff. We've got this thing or initiative going on over here and that initiative going on over there.

It’s all piling in on schools. So, I think there's a couple of things. One is we're actively thinking about now is how to relieve some of that pressure on schools. What are we currently asking teachers to do and principals to do, leaders of preschool sites as well? What are we asking them to do that really, we shouldn't be asking them to do?

So, what can we take off whilst making sure that you've got student agency, but we'll want to make sure there's enough room for teacher agency as well, and for principal, site director agency in the system too. That's a balance to get right. Sometimes you can think that you're taking a load off teachers, but what you end up doing is taking choice off them as well.

So, we've got to get that balance right. So, if you have lots of different initiatives that don't seem to be connected and don't resonate with educators in terms of how is this making a difference for kids, how is this helping me to express my professional identity as an educator? Because this is what we're here for. I’m here to make a difference for the kids.

If you don't feel like it's all connected, then you’re just doing stuff for the sake of it. That's draining. But I think that with our purpose statement, with this shift of balance from just excellence to excellence and equity, we're thinking about what are the components of wellbeing that support our students to be successful in the world as well as in their learning, and perhaps some broadening to think about how are we developing some of these capabilities for our students.

I think when we've got that story settled in South Australia, anything that we do will then be guided by that. So, everyone should be able to see that this initiative, this piece of work, this offering, this opportunity is connected to putting a man on the moon. Our version of that. I think things will make much more sense and educators will see the connection to their professional identity and to their professional purpose in making the biggest difference to kids.

I think that will help, as well as the streamlining that's necessary along the way.

Dale Atkinson: We're speaking with Professor Martin Westwell, Chief Executive of South Australia's Department for Education. Now you're new to the role, ish, do we still claim newish? Nine months? How do we go?

Professor Martin Westwell: Still lots to learn, I reckon.

Dale Atkinson: Still lots to learn, and still lots for people to know about you, I think too. So, we've established a little fast round here of questions for you so you so people can get to know you a little bit better. Are you ready?

Professor Martin Westwell: I’m not sure, but let’s do it.

Dale Atkinson: All right. So first off, I know you're from the north of England originally. So, this first question, it's very important. AFL or Premier League?

Professor Martin Westwell: I'm going to say neither, Rugby League.

Dale Atkinson: Rugby league.

Professor Martin Westwell: So born in Wigan in Lancashire, which is just, Rugby League country.

Dale Atkinson: So, do you still follow the rugby league?

Professor Martin Westwell: Yeah. So, we adopted our Australian team when we first got here. The kids were five and nine and there were a few Poms playing for the Rabbitohs. So, we follow the Rabbitohs and get to see some games and of course the State of Origin gets played in Adelaide from time to time. So that's always a good day out.

Dale Atkinson: So corporate office or classroom and I'll be shocked if you answered corporate office.

Professor Martin Westwell: There's some things you can do from a corporate office, right? So, there's levers. You know, you get to influence the system, but you know, it's the reason for being is the classroom and what goes on in the classroom to make that difference to kids.

Dale Atkinson: Favourite band?

Professor Martin Westwell: Tricky one. I reckon, anything Northern Soul. Wigan was the centre of the Northern Soul area in the UK. I grew up in the late eighties, early nineties, probably Stone Roses. And you know and you go to WOMAD and see some of those bands that you're never going to see again. And so, some got into things like there's a band called Elephant Sessions, but really love and would never have, you know, really obscure.But that's the great thing about going to WOMAD.

Dale Atkinson: So Northern Soul, does that mean you've got a pair of bowling shoes at home, and you can do the, the kind of shuffle dance?

Professor Martin Westwell: Yeah, that’s right. Years and years ago, you know, people used to come out with talcum powder at the trouser legs and sprinkle it on the floor, just to get the moves going.

Dale Atkinson: And I would encourage anyone who is not aware of Northern Soul, to just type that into YouTube and have a look at kids going crazy.

One book every educator should read?

Professor Martin Westwell: If I had to pick one, it would be Ken and Kate Robinson's ‘Imagine If’ that came out recently. I think that's a really great short read. Captures Ken Robinson's philosophy. But things like even G.H. Hardy’s ‘Mathematician's Apology’. I think anybody who works in science, maths, physical sciences, that's an incredible read and I don't think I can go past Garth Boomer’s ‘Negotiating the Curriculum’ either, and the contribution from South Australian educators to that volume.

Dale Atkinson: We'll look to see a little bump on the Amazon list there.

If you could achieve one thing in 2023, it would be?

Professor Martin Westwell: Look, there's so many things, lots of medium sized things and big things, you know. So, landing this purpose conversation, obviously that's something I'm really focused on. Some of the national stuff. Minister working hard to improve school funding and the way that school funding occurs for public schools in South Australia. So, negotiations with the Commonwealth Government. But 2023 has to be a year of hope.

It's raising the levels of hope in the profession. It's been such a tough couple of years. Things have been really difficult, but now I think we're coming out of it and so just thinking about what we want to achieve as professionals can flourish, can grow in 2023 in a way that's just not been able to over the last couple of years.

Dale Atkinson: So, in that light, if you could say one thing to South Australia's educators and support staff in week zero, what would it be?

Professor Martin Westwell: I’m not sure this can be one thing. So do you think, you know, think about the possibilities that we've got in front of us, be part of the purpose and feed into that process. Look after yourself. But also, you've got to look after yourself, you've got to feed your soul in this work. And Ken Robinson, going back to Ken, said, ‘What you do for yourself dies with you when you leave this world.

What you do for others lives forever.’ I think that teachers, more than most, are able to change the lives of others children, young people to change the life of South Australia. So, what I'd really say is go on, live forever.

Dale Atkinson: I think it's a lovely way to wrap it up. Professor Martin Westwell, thank you for your time.

Professor Martin Westwell: Thank you.