5 February 2025

Join us as we sit down with Chief Executive, Professor Martin Westwell as he takes us through 2024’s key achievements and outlines priorities for 2025. Professor Westwell discusses how South Australia’s education system is a learning system centred on relationships and purpose-driven strategy. The conversation also explores how to create an education system that prioritises innovation, equity, and civics, ensuring students are prepared for the challenges of tomorrow.

Show Notes

Transcript

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 we are doing what we do at the start of every year, which is invite Professor Martin Westwell our Chief Executive, to come and join us. Martin, thanks for joining us.

Martin Westwell: Happy New Year, Dale.

Dale Atkinson: Happy New Year to you as well. Always good at the start of the year to reflect on the previous and look ahead. Touch on perhaps a few of the key achievements from 2024, lessons learned perhaps, and how that's going to shape the department's direction in 2025.

Martin Westwell: When you think about the achievements, when you actually stop and think about the achievements. It is pretty amazing what we've achieved over the last year or two. And the first thing I think to say is that just like the everyday work that goes on in our classrooms, in our preschool sites, that's the achievement, right. That's the work, and whatever other things go on, that's the main game. So another great year doing the main game. Let's not lose sight of that. Just doing a great job in our schools and preschools. When you think about some of the challenges that we've got, you know, perhaps we'll talk about these a bit more. Clearly things like, you know, vacancies that we've got, but what I've seen is in South Australia, we've not got nearly the kind of teacher vacancies that we've got in other states and territories yet.

We're starting the year and there are a few schools that have got some vacancies, but I think actually getting to a position and, you know, with some special authorities to teach and some of those things where we're starting really well, I think is a great achievement as well. Some policy things, Technical colleges going gangbusters, we've got mid year reception, the introduction, that shift from FLO to Tailored Learning Provision, that shift, I think is really important. Enormous amount of work there, not just work from, you know, kind of within Flinders Street but with sites, with leaders, with teachers. Some of the other policy stuff that kind of every school a great school work that we've done really focusing on well, where are we gonna make investments? What's the capital investment look like? How do we support schools perhaps that don't have the best reputation? How do we support to make sure that those schools can be as brilliant as other schools and so people are not driving past them to go to another school down the road but actually they're attracting students to them.

Talk about the country strategy, OSHC, you know, those kinds of things. One of the things that I'm really proud of, and it's just the beginning, is the agreement that we signed with the Anangu people in the APY lands around a partnership with them about what education is going to look like. One of the Anangu talked to me about it and said, we used to be like this and they made a gesture where there's kind of two fists hitting each other. We used to be like this with the department and now we’re like this and showed the two hands next to each other, pushing in the same direction. I really felt proud of all the work that's gone into that and getting us to that place and as I say, that's just the beginning now we've got to honour that.

That's us making a promise with the Anangu about how we're going to do this thing, how we're going to work together. There are some non-negotiables in that, with a lot of ways in which we can work in partnership and now actually getting on and doing some of that work. That's a great achievement from last year that of course will shape some of the work going forwards.

I think some of the other things as well have been, you know, with the strategy. It's the strategy and the structures around it and how people have responded to that. I think some of it is the culture shift, you know, the vibe. I think that's changing. I'm asking leaders and education directors to provide more of that kind of coaching, working alongside, providing support for improvement, that shift has even been in Flinders Street..

The senior executive group working more effectively across divisions. Each division has got a massive amount of work and of course the danger is that we fall into our silos. So us getting out of that, you know, all of that is working towards giving school leaders more autonomy and that notion of the tight and flexible. Tight on what we're going for, but flexible on how it's achieved and just make sure the whole system's getting behind that.

I also think the protecting democracy work that looks like civics and civics professional learning and developing people in terms of their ability and the innovation around teaching civics in secondary. I think, you know, the bigger picture is how are we getting kids to stop and think, not get pushed around by social media? How are we helping students and young people to disagree agreeably? To not fall into, ‘well, if you don't agree with me, you're against me and I hate you.’ And we're seeing so much of that around the world and how it erodes democracy, how it erodes society.

When you look at education, think about the purpose of education and you see one of those challenges, and it's a challenge to childhood, but it's also a challenge to society. If we're not addressing that what's the point? What are we doing? So, I think that work again will be really important for the coming year.

Dale Atkinson: The big process of kind of development and growth. This is a third of the conversations that you and I have had at the start of a calendar year over the last couple of years has been, the development of the strategy, the purpose statement and allowing sites, site leaders and central office to kind of really live with the strategy and try to reflect on it, what does it mean? And put it into practice. What have you seen over the last year has indicated how this has been put into practice and are there some standard examples of success?

Martin Westwell: Some of the things that I've seen, when I do site visits and I talk with leaders and, you know, often the story is, you know, we started with the areas of impact, we started getting into them and we thought, what's the template, what are we supposed to do, what does accountability look like in this? and we'll meet that requirement and then you didn't put one out where we thought you were a bit crazy doing that. So we started to have a conversation, we started to dig in and think about what we were already doing and lots of schools, of course, already doing lots around those areas of impact anyway, and thinking about where they would build on and some were saying, well, we just got going on this thing, you know, maybe something around wellbeing or student agency or the site saying, well we were really great, I remember Andamooka primary school, Bronte the principal saying ‘we'd put so much into wellbeing, we really want to keep that going but when we look at the strategy, instead of just carrying on doing wellbeing and saying, well we're doing this pretty well, building on that and shifting that wellbeing to support student agency’ because you know how important that is for students.

So there's a bit of, yeah, we're already doing some of this but look what we can do now. I think the other great things that I heard quite a lot was, we thought we were going to do wellbeing or student agency and then we got into it and we realised that we couldn't do that until we'd worked on this, whatever it might be, and so people change their minds.

I think when people start thinking about something and they set off in a direction with their planning and then they change their minds because they've got good evidence for it, that's incredible, right? And you don't get that from a top-down pushing at compliance saying everybody's got to do this thing. So when you see people changing the minds saying, we think this is going to have a bigger impact on our kids so we've shifted and we're doing that. I think that's amazing!

I think the other thing that we've seen that I see is when people have literally said ‘so we did this thing and we put our school, we've got a journey map, you know, where we started we used to think this, and now we're thinking that, look at where we've been, look at where we're going to’. Schools that expressed their improvement plan as kind of a one pager graphic so they can talk to parents, students, internal conversations, other stakeholders around their school. We can talk to this plan, there's lots more behind it, but they've got this kind of graphical representation.

One of the things that people have said is because we've had these conversations in the school, people have got much more ownership of it and so it's activating people rather than kind of, you know, the danger of the top down stuff is people do it, but it's not necessarily activating them in the system, in their site, in the way that you would hope.

So I think, you know, when you see that kind of aspiration, people do talk a little bit more about kind of joy in the work about creativity. I think that's been really positive. I think the danger is we can fall into an either/or, you know, it's such a focus on literacy and numeracy and we're not doing that anymore we're doing wellbeing and agency. And of course it's not that at all. We're trying to get these things to work together in service of each other.

Dale Atkinson: One of the things you've spoken about a little bit in the past is like the difference between accountability to ourselves, the account to which we hold ourselves and the ways in which we're held accountable externally. Can you talk about how that concept is going to play out through how we measure success of the strategy's implementation in 2025?

Martin Westwell: Yeah, I think this is going to be a big one for us this year. You know, you look at systems around the world and what they do is they have kind of a system measure. We want to increase literacy and numeracy. And what happens is that measure then gets pushed down onto schools and it becomes this kind of compliance.

And that definition of accountability is almost kind of being held to account. You know, it's a high stakes, it's a punishment if you don't improve, if you don't get the thing rather than accountability being saying, well, we agreed we were going to take responsibility for this together, this is what we were going for in our site. Even kind of knowing that might look different with different cohorts of kids, you know, some sites have got kids who might have transient population, so kids who come and go, and other kids who are quite stable and have been there for a period of time and you would expect different things, perhaps for those two different groups. At a site level you've got to be able to think about your accountability in terms of what you're taking responsibility for, how you're making a difference to these two different cohorts of kids. So I've been kind of constantly grappling with this notion of, as soon as you get a system measure, how do we stop it from being a high stakes measure that then drives behaviour in a way that you just don't want it to?

So yeah, you know, as a system, what are we going to report on, we have to report on NAPLAN so that’s done. What else would we see if this strategy, you know, if this thing was working, what else would we see? And I do think we'd see increases in attendance, we'd see increases in retention in schools, some of the kind of big picture things. I think in the longer term as well, we'd start to see some of those equity measures, you know, and the first way in which you'd measure equity would have some of those standard things like NAPLAN results and attendance and retention. For some of those, you know, what people call low equity groups, low SES kids, some of our aboriginal communities, some kids with disability, making sure that the kids are engaging with school and are achieving and are getting what they need out of school.

So you'd have some of those measures as well. But again, even if you look at something like attendance, the danger is that attendance strategies start to create behaviours that you don't want, you know, it's driving kids to come to school and they might be attending in person but they're not attending in heart and mind. And so that's not actually what we want. We want them to attend and we want them to be present as well. Attendance strategies, you know, the strategy. Should be driving attendance rather than looking for ways in which we kind of push on attendance, that balance is a really tricky one. So making schools accountable in that responsibility way and then saying, okay, so how do we all work together to achieve this.

Dale Atkinson: Now we focus a little bit as a system now under the new kind of way that we're approaching things and certainly under the what we're going after is, the purpose of public education on the human paradigm of, how we're interacting with these kids and the environment in which we're preparing them, AI and other influences, and what we're going to need them in terms of capabilities to have when they reach maturity in the workforce. So in terms of that focus on the human paradigm, how's that shifting the way we want to lead and learn within our system?

Martin Westwell: Yeah, that human paradigm stuff comes from that Michael Fullan work, doesn't it? About what actually are system drivers, and he's kind of, he's shifted his thinking a little bit and he contrasts the human paradigm to what he calls the bloodless paradigm. You know, there's just no heart or humanity in it. And so bringing the heart and humanity back to it, I think is clearly what Fullan's getting at. And that’s the core of the strategy, that notion of the choice that we made was to be purpose driven around learning and thriving and not being data driven. It drives you crazy when people talk about data driven. I'm such a data nerd and data is really important. It gives us great insight into how we might achieve our purpose, how we're going, where we might put our efforts, resources as a system or as a school level. So the data is crucially important, but we're not driven by it, we're driven by our purpose and the data can give us insights.

I think there's a recognition that we're a people business and this people business runs on relationships. And you can see that from students, you know, that notion of particularly when students get to high school, how important that relationship is with an adult in a school in order for students to attend and to be present. So we know it's about relationships. It's very much about kind of teachers learning from each other. You know, so a lot of that is about us as people working together. Now then that means, I think as a system, truly being a learning system, you know, what does it mean to be, a learning system, to be able to try out things together, to be able to learn from each other, for the system to provide opportunities for us to do that?

One of the great strengths that we have as a public education system is that we're a system and we've got amazing people all over this system and we should be connecting them to each other. Sometimes those will be connections that persist, and sometimes it might be connections getting people together because you want to address a particular thing, or you either solve a problem, or move forward and innovate and find new ways of doing things, getting people together to do that.

And I think the AI work is a good example of that. Right? So we set out, you know, most people know this story. We didn't ban chat GPT when it came out and that was an interesting thing when everybody else was banning it. Because we said we're going to learn and then we put it into the hands of teachers and students and said, well, we're, we just want to learn from this. We're going to provide the guardrails, provide some protection, but we just want to learn from our teachers. Let's really listen to our teachers. Let's really listen to our students, kind of explicitly, what are they actually telling us? But also using some of the data around how people are using AI to have a positive impact and how do we amplify that within our systems.

Then rolling out our own AI EDchat to all of our staff, all of our site staff, to give them the opportunity to have a play with it, just learn to have conversations together and to think about then, well, what are the resources, what's professional learning, how do we support that? I think that's a really good example of the kind of thing that we want to be doing as a learning system, really making the most of the expertise that we've got in the system and the relationships between people.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. Relationships between people is such a critical piece of work. You spoke a bit earlier about the civics and citizenship, kind of program that's pulled together. We're also doing quite a lot of work in terms of student agency and involvement and a critical part of the civics and citizenship is we're actually going to ask kids, what do they think about it? What role is that kind of approach going to start playing within the system for us?

Martin Westwell: One of the things, again, kind of a big pitch thing that you're going to grapple with is the relevance of education. We've got our purpose, but that could be expressed in lots of different ways in terms of the kind of curriculum and what kids are learning and how you go about that.

And one of the things that we learned from putting the strategy together in the first instance was just what you learn from students. And you're only learning if you're surprised by something. So there was a lot in that original work with the students that we weren't surprised by, but there was a lot that we were.

And of course that's the stuff that changes your thinking, that's the stuff that helps you do a better job. And so I think it's the same when we're thinking about What students want to learn, how they want to learn it, how we make the biggest difference to them, you know, students really being partners in that learning with us, that's going to be more and more of what we do at a school level and a system level as well.

It's been really interesting hearing about schools that have invited students into some of the pupil free days and students are turning up on a day off from school and actually reporting how much they get out of it and are enjoying it. And again, the thing that really stands out is when the teachers are surprised because the students are saying things and there's conversations going on that are not necessarily going on in the classrooms. And, you know, there's not necessarily space being created to have these conversations. And when we do that and we have those surprises, it's always an opportunity for us to do a better job. And, you know, again, it's this notion of ‘better job’. Who defines what a ‘better job’ is? And of course, serving the students, that helps us, I think that's the better job, making the biggest difference for the students. And you've got to temper that a little bit, right? Because first thing when you say to students, how could school be better? They'll say, longer recess, more sport, you know, you get those kinds of things from students. But it's kind of getting underneath that and actually really grappling together with students on about how this thing could be better.

Dale Atkinson: You've emphasized over the last two years about the importance of a learning system. You've created your own personal learning system in the off season. Talk to me about welding.

Martin Westwell: Welding for me is kind of one of those skills that I think, you know everybody should have. It seems like such a great thing to be able to do. So I kind of set off with that, with a few mates and again, it was that importance of people. If you want to do a transactional thing I learned a lot from, I think lots of us do, you know, YouTube. You know, how do I fix that particular thing in the car, look at a couple of videos, find that thing out and that particular kind of almost like, it's not a micro connection, but it's kind of micro skill that you then develop a tiny little thing, that's great.

But when you're doing a kind of bigger, broader skill or bigger kind of learning and development. I think it's hard to do it as an individual. You kind of, you got to do it with people. It makes more meaning, you connect it more, from a neuroscience background, you make more connections in your brain because it's not just kind of this self contained little bit of knowledge.

It's connected to the experiences that you have together. The questions that other people have that I wouldn't think of, you think, ‘Oh, Amazing’. And so what it does is it kind of reminds you of how hard learning is, but it reminds you about how uncomfortable it can be sometimes. It also reminds you about how important it is to get a bit of fun in it as well, you know, I don't think I've had many real lasting learning experiences that haven't involved some laughter in some way or another.

Laughter often is a part of it because of those relationships and so it gives that kind of emotion that, that you did learn in that emotional sense as well. So it's a bit meta, you know, kind of learning this skill, but also just applying that, I'm thinking, ‘yeah, this is what learning looks like’.

Dale Atkinson: And what have you welded, what have you made?

Martin Westwell: Not much yet, I've got to say. By my shed, there's lots of bits of, bits of old metal.

Dale Atkinson: Incredibly well connected.

Martin Westwell: Yeah, that's good.

Dale Atkinson: Finally, what message would you like to share with educators and leaders and staff at the start of 2025?

Martin Westwell: Yeah. Look, I think obviously there's a keep going message. What we've got in South Australia. With the strategy and with the work is a great ambition. And I think that ambition has been recognized nationally and, and increasingly internationally.

You know, the AI work was really ambitious. I think the work that we're doing around the strategy and what that means for school improvement or for curriculum, what it means for the ramp up and the work on inclusion are Aboriginal learners is really ambitious. And I'm really keen for everybody to kind of be in on that ambition, especially in a period of time when I look around some of the parts of South Australia, particularly Australia, look around Australia and I don't feel like education has got ambition.

I feel like it's got the danger of this mediocrity, that it's focusing kind of too much on itself, and not on the kids that it, you know, standardized test results, all of that stuff. And, you know, it's okay. We've got good education systems, but I'm not sure that education is really doing it for our kids.

And I think in South Australia, we've got that ambition. So I think something about being proud to be. South Australian, you know, I get that opportunity to go out and talk, say, like, nationally and internationally. And the feedback I get about what we're doing is incredibly positive. And, and I do hope that people feel that as well, you know.

I know it's hard work too but I think the ambition, the focus on, you know, that educators always have on making the biggest difference we can for our kids and using the opportunity of the strategy with that notion of the kind of tight and flexible, with that notion of us being a learning system.

And so I want everyone, including our educators, to be great learners within that system, recognizing some of the pragmatic challenges that teachers have, you know, day on day. That's how I want us to shift. So our students and our teachers are feeling more joy in the everyday experience of school.

Teachers have got that agency, that wellbeing. Teachers are effective learners and then all that that means for the flow through to our students. We had some visitors last year from, well, Ron Berger from the States and Gwyn App Harry from the XP schools in the UK. And one of the things that they talked about was how student culture never exceeds the staff culture.

So for us to work on us, for us to focus on us for a bit and think about how we are developing with agency and with our wellbeing, with being effective learners, I think that's something really important for this coming year.

Dale Atkinson: There you go - Be proud, be ambitious. Professor Martin Westwell, thanks for your time.

Martin Westwell: Thanks Dale.