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Towards the end of their study tour to the UK in November and December 2006, we interviewed a few Australian young leaders. You can read the full interview on the schoolsnetwork website, but below is a taster of their opinions on the contrast between Australian and UK education.
Leanne: Well for a start the way education is publicly perceived over here is so different from back home. It seems to have a much higher profile in England, which I think is great; seeing the Prime Minister speak so passionately at the Trust’s conference really brought that home to all of us.
Natalie: We already knew that education in England had been going through a period of real change over the last decade. We were led to believe that everything was very new and innovative here, so we’d expected to find schools much further ahead than back home. Once here though, we realised that we probably haven’t needed to have such drastic educational reforms, because in Australia we didn’t allow education to drop off the agenda in the way that it did here for a while in the 1980s.
It was nice to realise that actually, things are probably about equal; there are great innovations happening in both countries, but in different ways and across different areas.
Leanne: One of the things that’s really struck me has been the realisation that in Victoria our curriculum work is actually very strong. We’ve integrated the different strands of the curriculum together; so the learning outcomes from each lesson usually cover a range of different subjects. It’s all part of a push to get the kids to be more independent and more in charge of their own learning.
It was a real eye opener to see that that was not always the case here in England, where the focus still remains on the teacher to a greater extent. Lesson objectives here seemed more specific and limited and there was usually just one objective for each lesson; whereas we tend to have a wider range of objectives, with a longer-term, project-based method of working towards them over a number of weeks.
Natalie: As well as the distributed curriculum and integrated units, our approach to leadership could also help English schools. Things still seem quite hierarchical here and English leaders could probably learn from our team-based models and distributed and dispersed leadership. Brent Davies’ work around sustainable leadership has helped us to put systems in place that allow us to better implement what we know about pedagogy.
You need the focus of a clear vision of how the project should look in a few years time, but you have to give ownership of the actual elements of the project to the staff. We have a group of teachers that meets every month to look at teaching and learning and pedagogy in the classroom. We work together as a team to explore a particular project. This past year we’ve been investigating an enquiry approach to learning and this year we’ll be looking closely at our new curriculum.
Each member has an individual responsibility within the larger project, which allows them to have a greater sense of ownership of the project. We really try to allow the team’s work to evolve organically, so that the members never feel they are being told what to do. This approach is consequently more sustainable too.
Natasha: Having said that, although Victorian schools might be further ahead with leadership and curriculum development and integration, on the other hand the assessment for learning and learning to learn programmes here are very impressive. English schools seemed better at teaching kids how to think about the ways that they learn. I don’t think we’ve formalised this process as much as you have here; by putting structures in place that support children having conversations about their learning and the ways they learn. That’s something I’ll definitely take back to my classroom.