8 December 2021
Reflecting on 2021, Heathfield High School Principal Roy Page shares the highs and lows, and everything there is to look forward to in 2022.
Show Notes
Transcript
Dale Atkinson: Hello, and welcome back to Teach the podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from the Department for Education. And today I'm joined by Roy Page, who is Principal at Heathfield High School for a bit of an informal chat about the year in review. Correct me if I'm wrong on any of these details, Roy, but it's what about 800, 900 students about 90 staff?
Roy Page: That's right. And we'll expand to about 1,050 next year with the year sevens coming into high school.
Dale Atkinson: It's a pretty exciting time. So we're just talking to one of the leaders just about what it's like to be a leader in a public school. And just to look back on some of the things that have been achieved and look ahead at what's being planned for 2022. Just the first question 2021 was supposed to get easier after 2020. Right. What happened to that?
Roy Page: Well, look, you know, it's that ever changing pandemic called COVID and of course, for us, a lot of anticipation about new building works. We of course started the year with the infamous falling crane. So I went from a high to a low, quite early in the year, but there's been lots of things to celebrate. And I look forward to getting into those through this conversation.
Dale Atkinson: You touched on the building works, but let's talk a little bit about the complexity of the school that you lead. So you've got 800, 900 students. You're going up to a thousand next year, 90 staff, you've got 9 VET subject areas. You've got a $13 million capital works project underway as the leader of all of those various different strands. How do you stay across it all?
Roy Page: You've gotta be able to have a strong team around you and trust, I guess, the delegation of your leadership structure, to be able to carry out really important functions and with their support and having really clear, I guess, vision and school improvement, planning processes in place. It's that support that enables you to keep across it. Cause if you didn't have that, it would be extremely difficult to keep across at all.
Dale Atkinson: So at the start of 2021, what were the goals that you set yourself as a school and as a leadership group.
Roy Page: Well, we're always about building the capacity of everyone in the site. And so from a curriculum perspective, that was about really trying to engage with the curriculum resources from the DFE this year, and trying to incorporate those into what were our existing unit plans, taking the best from the DFE and adding value to what we already did. And then I think also, we've had a really long term focus now for the last three years on high grade achievement.
So Heathfield's a category 7 school and our community rightly so has really high expectations on us. And we have therefore high expectations on ourselves and the students to meet their potential. And so meeting that potential really looks like using VET as a pathway. Students this year, 14 of them got apprenticeships before the end of the year, which was our highest ever. And then we're on track to probably get our best SACE results ever. And so we're really excited by that and we're excited that our curriculum, but also our pathway conversations with students led by leaders and home group teachers is really supporting students to make the right choices on pathways earlier.
And we're starting to see dividends from that in terms of first choice university entry or out to work then into a pathway that there's passion in. And then that success that we're seeing within apprenticeships from school.
Dale Atkinson: At the time of recording were a couple of weeks away from those SACE results coming through, which you've referenced there. What have been the challenges about, particularly in that senior secondary to keeping the kids on track in the kind of COVID setting that we've had in the last two years now?
Roy Page: I've been really impressed with the resilience of the students because we hear a lot of airplay around young people not having resilience. And what I, my observation in the last 18 months is that our students have had bucket loads of resilience and have been, I guess, in partnership with us around raising any concerns they might have around the external environment and how that might impact on their learning.
So, you know, for example, once the crane fell over, there were year 12 classes in corridors, in halls and in outdoor areas. And, you know, they put up with that for, for three to four weeks and were really on board with the school going through the right channels to say, hey look, you know this is working for us, but this isn't, what can you do to help us out? And so I was really impressed with that maturity and the fact that they still had the focus, even though they might have been unsure of what it meant for their future. There still was a focus on the future and doing well.
Dale Atkinson: So I guess there's a correlation there, between the key skills, I guess, of leadership and what you're trying to build in, in your students, which is adaptability and resilience, is that right?
Roy Page: Yeah, absolutely. And I think student leadership is really important and the school has a long history of that through it's big brother - big sister program, where we have 48 students from year 11 and 12, who sit next year in year seven and eight home groups for the full year.
And they're working through with the youngest students around the challenges of going through a secondary school and what they need to do to build that character in each year, those year 11 and 12 students put their hand up and apply to become a big brother - big sister, cascading that experience down and building the capacity of the student body over time.
Dale Atkinson: And how's that going to continue when you introduce your year 7s to high school next year?
Roy Page: So we've just expanded the program. So instead of having what would have been 25 big brother - big sisters next year, we've got 48. And we actually had more people applying for those roles, than we needed to place. So, and so I guess there's a legacy of giving back to the community. That's built into the culture of the school, which is fantastic.
Dale Atkinson: Yeah. It's also about sort of more rounded development of your students as well. So you've got the academic pathways, but you're also trying to make them good corporate citizens.
Roy Page: Absolutely. And I think one of the real successes and highs of this year has been the development of student leadership through a range of different avenues. So we've been partnered with Melbourne University, SASPA and across sector project and Learning Creates Australia on how do you actually improve student agency across the school site. And the partnerships with other schools we've worked with Glenunga and looking at their excellent work on the learner profile register.
We've tapped into work that was done at Craigmore High School some years ago on building student agency around curriculum and assessment. And so we've taken the good work from other schools and really tried to use that, to inform what that means for us and how are we gonna use that and that's been really successful. And I think one of the things that we've been asking through these pilot projects, particularly around the development of student capabilities, is if we get that right, then the sense of belonging in school increases, the achievement is there, but we then end up now with a well-rounded situation. And I wouldn't say it's embedded yet, but we're getting close to it.
Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's really exciting stuff. You spoke a little bit earlier about the $30 million capital works project that's going on at your site. Has managing or helping to manage those big projects been an area of personal development for you as a leader?
Roy Page: Absolutely. You know, it was an opportunity to upskill other leaders in the school, particularly the business leader who took on a real project management role, and that's been challenging for all of us, because there are a lot of moving parts and knowing the responsibility and accountability for where certain decisions lie and who you can influence in that situation has been an ongoing challenge.
Dale Atkinson: So do you think you've deepened your understanding of how the departmental systems have worked for you as a leader?
Roy Page: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the support there from whether it's capital works or year seven transition to high school. There's always been people monitoring behind the scenes and getting on the phone or setting up meetings to try and assist when he could say things, you know, and particularly during the crane incident could be unpacked or, you know, support could have been provided to the school.
Dale Atkinson: So one of the things you've been doing this year alongside a very big leadership role in a very sizable school, is working a day a week at the central office helping to shape the policy and providing sort of frontline experience to the decision making process here at 31 Flinders. What have you learned from that experience and what value do you think you've added?
Roy Page: What I've learned is that our system is massive and that creating change systemically is very complex work. And if it was easy, we would have done it yesterday. And so understanding how every person within Flinders Street has the same aspiration and vision as we do in schools. And we all want that vision of a world-class education for all our kids that, you know, any student going to school in South Australia has got as good a education, or if not better than anywhere else.
So I think that that's something that I've learned is that the centre has the same and is driving that, aspiration and everyone working here has that vision as well. So the value then of being a part of the reform coordination team, I think has been to just provide a school-based lens to how we maybe receive information or process policy ideas that come into schools and how we might interpret something or how it could be packaged differently to support implementation in schools.
Dale Atkinson: I think one of the things that our Chief Executive Rick talks about a lot is increasing their kind of permeability , in central office with, I guess, a greater sharing and shifting of roles and relationships with schools and the centre and people moving in between the two, the experience that you've had. Is that something that you would recommend to other leaders and teachers to come in and get a sense and provide their experience internally?
Roy Page: Yeah, I think it's an absolute value add that we can all have, and there are lots of different places teachers and leaders could do that. You know, so you've got the full range of roles that we have within schools could be influenced certainly in the centre and taken back into schools.
And I know that there's certainly an appetite for that model of people coming into the centre, doing a bit of work, and then going back into schools to try and take that permeability or which is really information sharing backwards and forwards into school because obviously any change that is systemic by the time it's embedded in schools can take a while and any action or strategy that can kind of shorten that timeframe for the benefit of students is obviously a good idea.
Dale Atkinson: Yeah. An incredible experience. Speaking to you, it's been very mutually beneficial. I think a bit of a change of gear - you got any advice for educators in terms of how they unwind or should unwind over the holidays coming up?
Roy Page: Yep. Turn your emails off, make sure you put the out of office reply. I know a lot of people do that. Personally, I find, unless I go away, it's really hard to switch off, which now that we've got open borders at time to actually leave the area, so to speak, so that you're out of contact in a different, complete physical context certainly helps me to unwind. I find that unless I go on a holiday somewhere, I find it hard to actually switch off. So that will be my plan over the holidays.
Dale Atkinson: I think it's probably double for you. You're also married to a principle, which I think begs the question. When do you to actually get to see each other?
Roy Page: Generally between 7:30 after the kids go to bed and 10:30 on the couch where we both have our laptops continuing to, generally, we don't, we're not working because you're not very productive at that time, but it's usually talking about things that have gone on in the school day and you know, how would you do this? How would you do that? But yeah, it's generally that time. They're just between the witching hour of 7:30 to 10:30 at night.
Dale Atkinson: I think you both probably deserve a bit of time away, somewhere, very different. And this is an ambitious question to ask a father of small children, but what, if anything, have you got on your holiday reading list?
Roy Page: That's a good question. I was looking at Steven Pinker's book, which I've got for awhile, which is, I think in called Enlightenment, which is basically, it's been on my list for a couple of years, but there's a lot of statistical analysis in there saying that actually today's time is the best time to have ever lived in history and given that we, I think at times at the moment have a quite pessimistic view of the future. This book provides quite a lot of counter-arguments to that, which I think is really important as a school leader to be, I guess, optimistic for the future, both for young people and for our colleagues.
Dale Atkinson: There's probably never been a better time to have some sort of reinforced optimistic messaging.
Roy Page: Yeah, absolutely. Because there was something that I ended the year 12 graduation talk on a couple of years ago when COVID was just coming out, was actually guys, you know, you've got to understand that the media that's going on around, and we tend to pick the most negative stories. Actually, there's lots of positive stuff going on and it's about paying attention to that as well.
Dale Atkinson: Is that going to be the same message to the kids this year?
Roy Page: It was, and it was also that being a young person in South Australia, there is lots of opportunity. The other message was refine the uniqueness within yourself that whatever your result says about you, it was just, I guess, a reflection of a point in time achievement. It's not you as an individual, but more around their experience over the last five years and how they improve their ability to think relate to others is actually going to have a much bigger impact on their future than their ATAR.
Dale Atkinson: I think there's something in that for all of us. Roy Page, thank you very much for your time.
Roy Page: No worries. Thanks very much for asking.
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