‘The Implementation Challenge – Turning Bright Spots of Education Outperformance into a Bright System’
Michael Traill AM, Chair of the Paul Ramsay Foundation (PRF)
This is the transcript from the 2024 MPF La Trobe Oration presented by Michael Traill AM.
Michael Traill: Tonight it’s important I do two things at the outset:
1. Outline the ground I want to cover & in that spirit rise to the challenge of reflecting on the key opportunities to make a real difference on the reasonable consensus that we can do better in many of the key gap areas Mark Scott’s report was designed to address: the slope of access & opportunity; teacher quality & retention; consistency of pedagogy & curriculum
2. I’ve given some personal context – but noting everyone has a view on education because pretty much everyone has had an engagement with the education system. I do so in the spirit of allowing you to adjust for whatever personal & experiential bias & limitations I bring.
I should say upfront I’m a huge believer that the work of the ‘No Limits’ partnership that has driven such impressive progress in Peninsula schools. That partnership between MPF/Latrobe Uni and Knowledge Society which PRF has been proud to be a part of, is making a real difference.
To me, it’s a great example of what good can look like in backing evidence based innovation and change. It deeply aligns with the Social Ventures Australia/PRF experiences I have seen where the common denominator is making a difference by deeply respecting the need for local and community engagement, with an eye on the prize of system change.
I think of what I saw at Crib Point as an outstanding ‘Bright Spot’ of high quality practice and teaching, evidence based, which is making for transformational change. Our challenge is how do we repeat what is making that work and get it to happen system wide.
I want to frame my core thesis in four parts:
1 We’ve got a reasonable system but it can and should be so much better.
(Good news) There is building consensus on the need to focus on evidence based practice to improve performance.
The challenge is not what needs to be done, but how to make sure it happens – implementation across the system is the issue.
We need to think differently & practically about the implementation challenge & draw from best practice.
To do that we must be open minded and look not just at high quality education systems from around the world, but exemplars of implementation to scale in other sectors. What I will suggest this tell us is:
1. Top down implementation doesn’t work – bottom up, evidence based is key
2. Gonski was right, we MUST fund to need
3. The supply side for teachers is critical – we have to demand better quality teacher training
4. Leadership & professional development is central in the war for talent
Michael Traill background:
So let me get some skeletons out of the closet!
In this polarised world where it is easy to get pigeonholed as having a particular ideology, I think it’s important I put my background and biases on the line. You will have sensed a proud background in the state education system – in a context where there is a continuing debate about the merits & positioning of public v private schools, I should say that someone who knows me best, my wife & life partner of 35 years Jenny, would accurately describe me as not losing a bit of a chip on my shoulder as the kid from a country high school.
I think that’s true – and it’s a chip that I wear with some pride.
And now that I’m in the confession box, If you’d told me 20 years on that I’d be on the board of St Ignatius College Riverview, an elite Jesuit school on Sydney’s lower north shore, I know I would have blanched – but I have to say that 6 year experience turned out to be a deep & in many respects inspiring learning experience that left me with very high regard for what an elite private school infused with Jesuit values could be & a deeper & more balanced understanding of the private school system. I put that on the table because I do want to address what has become ‘an elephant in the room’ issue – the frequently polarising debate about our globally unique generosity in funding elective private schools & the consequences of that.
My broader personal reflection is a truth that I’ve always felt either a bit of an outlier or imposter throughout a career where I have done a range of things in different sectors. As it turns out, that has taught me a lot, & in particular the power of keeping an open mind & focusing on the evidence of what works as I’ve wrestled with having what I know is an intensely competitive personality and the very frequently deep discomfort of trying to work out what the hell I was doing & how to try & be good at it.
A defining conclusion - and central to anything I have been involved in across the sectors - is the unwavering understanding that the correlation between high quality, high integrity leaders & the performance of the things they are involved in is exceptionally strong.
In a career that has included experience across the non-profit, business, philanthropic & government sectors I have one defining conclusion: Leadership & quality of management really matters.
My personal journey in the education space has been very deeply informed through the work of SVA, Goodstart & PRF. In all those organisations there was a driving motive of improving access & opportunities through better quality education for excluded Australians. And through each, I’ve had the great opportunity to connect to some of the best thinkers & doers locally & globally in education.
What I have to say today is deeply shaped by people I think of as ‘pracademics’. What’s a pracademic? It’s someone who has the academic street cred that I lack but is compelled to apply evidence & research to make a real & practical difference. I think of the intel inside the partnership work between La Trobe, MPF/PRF & the schools in Mornington as being driven by pracademics. In case you are wondering, it is a compliment!
So what follows is drawn particularly from a broad network of pracademics, many of whom have views infused by their own lived experience in the trenches of teaching in tough schools but get & want to address the system change issues. And of course, in my nod to these guides & mentors incl the team PRF & especially our education lead John Bush – many of whom have provided helpful input into this oration – is the acknowledgment that the threading together of how the evidence, & omissions that go with it – are my own work...
We’ve got a reasonable system but it can & should be so much better
I’m always leery of being glass half empty and the broad global context for the Australian education system would suggest at a very macro level we are doing ‘ok’.
Data shows 3.8% improvement in attainment of Yr 12/Cert III equivalent in the 8 years since 2013… this is good, but if we look at the cohorts of exclusion & disadvantage we are particularly focused on at PRF eg remote/OOHC/Indig/disability 56-68%... not so good. [Slide below is from JBush: Ed data for MT slide 2]
[Slide below M Bruniges deck 19 for PRF fellowship]
The data tells us the number of schools with concentrations of disadvantage is growing, not declining. (i.e. Schools with more than 50% of students coming from the bottom quartile of the socio-economic distribution)
There is no question that all sectors, Catholic, Independent and Government schools support students with disadvantage.
However, it is overwhelmingly schools in the government system who carry the heaviest load.
In 2023, in NSW overall, 9% of students are in such schools and this has nearly doubled since 2017. ( from approx. 57,000 students to around 111,000 students).
[Below slide 3 from PRF fellowship M Bruniges deck]
Our position globally with respect to the change in the concentration of disadvantaged students in disadvantaged schools has deteriorated sharply in the 9 years from 2006 to 2015. This is not a table you want to be at the top of.
2. (The relatively Good News). There is building consensus on the need to focus on evidence based practice to improve performance:
Central to change is the power & quality of teaching. As Mark Scott told us in last year’s oration: “… if you have great teachers, well supported, you unleash the transformative power of education.”
My observation is that there has been an emerging consensus on what good teaching looks like, informed by the kind of pracademic work so in evidence at my school visit to Crib Point. Sound pedagogy, disciplined & attentive kids in class, supportive leaders & critical wrap around support for kids & families often living on the edge.
And with results that show the kind of transformative change Mark spoke of.
In the early days of SVA we connected to Ben Jensen then at the Grattan Institute and were a funding partner for a forum he hosted called ‘Learning from the Best’ that drew on lessons from outperforming global systems including Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore. The discipline, alignment & approach were deeply instructive.
My observation is that the continuing work & focus on critical building blocks to enable well resourced & supported teachers, with clear instructional pedagogy has itself become much more aligned. I am conscious as an educational outsider that there has often been an unedifying, frequently non evidenced based, debate about different teaching approaches. I give great credit to the practical work & advocacy of people like Ben Jensen & his successor Jordana Hunter at the Grattan Institute with a focus on classroom practice; the pioneering work of Jennifer Buckingham at the Centre for Independent Studies on phonics. Elena Douglas (here tonight) has been a passionate contributor to this work & of course Pam Snow from Latrobe who was recently listed as the no. 2 most influential person in Australian education circles after Jason Clare!
As Mark summarised last year, “effective pedagogy, explicit instruction, a focus on phonics, clear understanding of how the brain work, a consistency around classroom management. These are the tools that have been used to bring success.”
I’ve co-opted the Bright Spots headline from work at SVA that goes back more than a decade. The SVA “Bright Spots” program, which was spawned out of some brilliant work Maxine McKew led which drew together the leaders from schools who had defied the gravity of low expecations in schools in the ‘wrong’ postcodes. The clear common denominators were all the things referenced by Mark. And absolutely central to each was a quality, courage & integrity of leadership to turn things around. All of the Bright Spots Schools Leaders – which is now a program embracing over 60 schools around the country have high expectations of their students.
This leadership piece is so fundamental & a theme I will return to.
3. The challenge is not what needs to be done, but how to make sure it happens – implementation across the system is the issue
I often start start strategy reviews of entities I am involved in or programs we are looking to support at PRF with a simple question:
“What does good look like?”
It’s a simple but demanding question that forces a focus on painting a clear and practical picture of what long term positive outcomes would be.
In the national education context, with a clarity & cut through that defined the whole report & recommendations, the Gonski review in [2012] said:
‘Australia must aspire to have a schooling sysem that is among the best in the world for its quality and equity, and must prioritise support for its lowest performing students. Every child should have access to the best possible education, regardless of where they live, the income of their family, or the school they attend.”
The executive summary went on to identify the economic and moral imperative, highlighting that returns to educational investments are particularly high for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The data I shared in the introduction will tell us we are falling short on the issues of access and opportunity. A core contributor is the accelerating divide with the clustering of disadvantage.
We are a significant outlier in both the nature & level of government funding provided for private schools and the 35% of students in the private system is a consequence.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion from the global pracademics who highlight the need for consistent, high quality public schools, well supported & resourced. The systems that do that, and generally perform better than us (think Canada and UK of comparable scale, and Finland & Singapore at a smaller scale) provide either minimal to modest funding to independent & faith based schools or they are very explicit that where funding is provided it will be subject to maximising equity; access to all students; generally being fee free & being accountable for delivery against defined outcomes.
There is to me little doubt that our unique, exceptionally complicated & deeply flawed funding model is a key contributor to the social divide apparent in the data.
It’s hard for me not to personalise that. As one of the students in our later years high school English & History classes who had read the books & done the homework I can visualise the shift over a generation. The data tells us that on average 3 or 4 of those relatively advantaged students (who like me was strongly supported at home by parents who valued education & reinforced that in every possible way) – are no longer in the classroom. Our funding model has allowed, indeed encouraged, the relatively motivated & advantaged students to leave the public school system & go to a private school.
The best systems don’t do that. They fund & resource public schools so that there is no sense of a social divide where parents who can afford it pay money to access better facilities & better resourced schools, with at the top end an unedifying arms race on 5 star sporting fields and extra curricular cultural resources.
As most in this room know, that funding model also has a deep and emotional political and policy. The Gonski review does a superb and secular job of explaining how it all came to this.
I’m a political realist and I start from the premise that wholesale change to the funding model is unlikely to be achievable.
But I also believe that the Gonski diagnosis of explicitly focusing on needs based funding and where that investment should be made is as valid today as it was when this landmark report was tabled.
I think there is political will to drive improved performance.
So let’s come back to the glass half full approach & review what we can learn from the things that have worked and the systems that have performed pretty well, especially in driving a more equitable education system. Let us be inspired by the Bright Spots schools & in a spirit Ben Jensen captured two decades ago: “learn from the best”.
i) Top down systems change in the social purpose world does not work – respect for school & community engagement is not negotiable
What the ‘No Limits’ work on the Peninsula work highlights is the value of what I think of as ‘competitive collaboration’. The idea that a network of leaders and schools can work closely together. In the discussion post school visit I sat it in on, the power of this was clear. Shared learning, shared resources & a real spirit not just of ‘we are in this together’ but how can we collaborate & compete by swapping notes on practices that have worked - & some that haven’t, so we lift the performance of all the kids in all our schools.
The local engagement was palpable.
Where change is mandated from on high in a big system, it generally fails.
I frequently get asked in my own ‘jump ship’ journey what is it that I have experienced that is most different in moving from the business world to the social purpose world. My answer is that repeating & replicating good performance in the social purpose sector must have very expicit regard to local context, local leadership, & local community.
Otherwise it just doesn’t happen.
My experience in replicating business growth is that this is generally a little easier. I think that’s for a range of reasons that are beyond the scope of this speech, but it does have a lot to do with the critical need for genuine family & community engagement in the human services sector.
In this, I am deeply informed by the work & perspective of Sir Kevan Collins, who was founding CEO of the Education Endowment Fund (EEF), a globally respected pioneer in practical education research & a fellow director with me at Goodstart Early Learning.
The impact of his work is visible in the UK’s relatively quite strong performance in the global PISA surveys over the last three surveys.
What is particularly interesting in this performance lift is how the EEF in its work has really shifted to an emphasis not just on what the evidence says is working, but an intensive focus on what it takes for that to be implemented.
As Kevan has said to me, “the big lesson was that while we knew we were doing some great work in objectively diagnosing what good implementation practice looks like, the actual embrace of that in schools wasn’t nearly as consistent as we would like to have seen. It wasn’t until we really leant in on understanding how to make sure good practice was implemented that we got to the point of seeing that good practice diffused much more broadly around the system.”
ii) Gonski was right. Schools with concentrated disdvantage need more funding – - but how it is applied needs to change
In my afternoon at Crib Point I heard multiple stories that spoke to the need for what I think of as funding applied respectful of local need. The most glaring example was the critical work of diagnosing specific child & family need & relevant support. The work of Trudy & Laura at the Westernport Community Support Centre in linking relevant external need & support into the schools & being able to engage with the school families is clearly vital.
That this is currently underfunded by government & exists through significant philanthropic top up funding speaks to the heart of Gonski. This kind of funding will be less required in those schools with less disadvantage; of course it is vital and needed but how effectively it will be used will be 90% a product of the relationships that the school and its leaders particularly have with relevant service providers & community leaders. Respectfully, how is it possible for that be determined effectively by fiat or formula from Canberra or Spring Street?
The balance that needs to be struck is between providing that funding fully and appropriately, and reasonably placing appropriate accountability measures around it. The fact that funding per student has increased 21% in the decade since Gonski would suggest in business terms a failure to generate an appropriate return on investment based on our overall poor PISA and NAPLAN results. Efficiency & accountability of outcomes is a reasonable demand. In the UK, the obligation to report on the use of additional funding through the ‘Pupil Premium’ (the UK version of Gonski additional needs funding) is rigorously based on analysis of need & reporting against that with data to assess if it has provided value for money. These are public documents & examined as part of the school inspection process.
iii) The supply side needs to lift. Universities that don’t use evidence supported teaching methodology should be squeezed out of the system
I have a vivid recollection of the Learning from the Best forum I mentioned earlier that Ben Jensen facilitated in which the issue of the quality of university teacher training came up. There was a wryly amusing but telling exchange in which then Secretary of Education Lisa Paul candidly confessed how frustrating it was for the department to have spent $54m on developing a program targeting the building blocks of literacy & numeracy particularly for Queensland. Only one of 17 universities (which for the record was Griffith University) applied the program to their curriculum despite continuing evidence of poor results & poor understanding of graduating teachers to understand the evidence based process of what it took to build these critical skills.
At this point her counterpart from South Korea said, expressing shock: “I feel for you. This is not a problem in our system. We simply stop funding recalcitrant university!”
I think there is now a fair amount of ‘leaning in’ on this sensitive but critical issue. The signs of bipartisan political leadership & the growing number of campuses, like La Trobe, who see this is a not negotiable in training teachers so they are well equipped to perform and make a difference in classrooms is encouraging.
It's a battle that can’t be shied away from.
iv) Leadership & professional development matter hugely & need a ‘business discipline for social purpose’ lense
My friend and educational mentor Tony Mackay, a man whose many roles include as an education advisor to the OECD, was instrumental in setting up a fascinating learning experience for me in Singapore.
Following the Learning from the Best forum, it was clear just how aligned the Singaporean system was in terms of emphasis on teacher quality & training, setting up schools in networks to succeed & swap notes on continuous improvement & aligned government policy & funding support.
Of course, there were many who pointed to the unique cultural nature of Singapore as a frequently controversial, small state, benevolent dictatorship… but their education results globally were consistently excellent so in the spirit of learning from the best I spent a week courtesy of Tony’s network engaging with the leaders in the system both from the highly regarded National Institute of Education (NIE, the main teacher training campus) to principals, key bureaucrats & policy advisors.
What was particularly striking was the alignment of the Singaporean system, & especially the commitment to high quality professional development. At the front end, teaching is a valued and sought after profession. The Head of the NIE told me that approximately 1:4 applicants for the course were accepted & it was regarded as being on a par with the bulge bracket investment banks & consulting firms & the highly respected senior public service agency positions.
It was clear the system really invested in thoughtful long term professional development. Early on in teacher’s professional careers, the opportunity to specialise as master teachers; experts in curriculum & pedagogy development or as leaders were made clear with a range of highly practical & supportive progams to support that.
And when Singapore talks about leadership training, they learn from the best, scouring the leading business schools like Harvard & Stanford for example, to help populate the experience. The ability for high quality leaders to move around the system, from roles as leaders in schools, to the NIE & into key roles in the education public service also highlighted the practical & reinforcing alignment that existed.
TALUS is a global survey which polls teachers responses on how well the system supports career growth, rewards & recognition. It tells us Australia is not doing this well. The need to commit to this & provide both quality & flexibility is so fundamental.
Deeply instructive to me was the initial panel Maxine McKew facilitated which included outstanding Principals like Christine Cawsey from Rooty Hill HS, Glenn Proctor from Hume Secondary College. The common denominators they shared in connecting with the community & creating high expectations for students and families; enforcing a disciplined & accountable learning environment in schools & themselves taking a leadership position in what were frequently exceptionally challenging turnaround circumstances, speak to the unimpeachable power of high quality leadership.
It is a not negotiable.
I’m far from convinced that the leadership & professional development support meets the need I hear in conversations with the capable & motivated teachers I hear from coming through the system. We simply just have to do better to create the high quality & tailored career paths to do what is so obviously in the best interests of the system: retaining those high quality, high performing, deeply motivated teachers in the game, including by giving them the flexibility to learn & as appropriate, move around different elements of the system to add value in the way Singapore has so clearly & successfully done.
This has been quite a long speech.
In the spirit of a punchy campaign slogan & in the hope we can build on the emerging bipartisan consensus of what it takes to make our education system great; can I propose The Education Performance we want is all about Implementation. We must:
Fund to Need
Empower locally & accountably
Build the Profession
Find & Resource True Leaders