Good Weekend's Who Mattered 2019: Education

Vicki Baczynskyj, Peter Shergold and Geoff Masters.Credit: Wolter Peeters; Christopher Pearce. Artwork by Stephen Tierney

Peter Shergold

In the past year, national attention has shifted towards a debate about skills, and whether Australia’s education system is doing enough for kids who may not be university-bound. Vocational courses have often been designed for those with lower academic ability, and they struggle to shake that stigma.

Peter Shergold, the former head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and now Western Sydney University chancellor, is leading a national review that promises to transform the thinking around vocational courses. Shergold’s report, which could land with state and federal education ministers as soon as the end of the year, and for public consultation early next year, is expected to say that Australia needs a more rigorous and demanding range of vocational courses, and to explore how they can be embedded in schools.

“Professor Shergold is a Renaissance man of public policy,” says Jordan Baker, education editor of The Sydney Morning Herald. “He has led reviews on everything from building compliance to refugee services, but his review of senior secondary pathways is one of the most important. Its reforms could be felt in schools, universities and workplaces for decades.”

Shergold’s report could also dilute the control that universities have had over schooling’s senior years, via the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR). “Senior schooling effectively streams students into vocational and academic paths,” says Baker. “Shergold thinks that needs to change, as it does not reflect the workforce they’ll end up in. We are moving towards a tertiary system that gives students more power over their own pathway – a bit of uni, a bit of skills training, a bit of industry apprenticeship – and the school system needs to adapt.”

Geoff Masters

Victoria-based Geoff Masters runs the Australian Council for Educational Research, and has just delivered the most comprehensive curriculum review in NSW in three decades. He has put forward some big ideas, the boldest of which is a restructure of subject syllabuses that would focus on attainment levels rather than age groups. This means more capable students could advance through schooling stages faster, rather than being artificially held back, while those who are struggling would receive more help to ensure they attain the required knowledge and practical application before progressing.

“The big topic in education at the moment is how to ensure all kids are progressing, no matter what their capabilities,” says The Sydney Morning Herald’s Baker. “There are concerns that the curriculum as it is now focuses too much on the middle kids, and lets kids at the top and bottom fall through the cracks. Masters’ suggestion is a bold attempt to address this, although there are still big questions over how this would work in the classroom.”

Masters’ report makes suggestions rather than recommendations. So far, it’s been well received by the different stakeholders, from teachers and principals to unions, parents and business leaders. If NSW embraces this focus on attainment levels, it will be watched by education system chiefs across the world. “His work on the NSW curriculum review cements Masters at the forefront of education reform in Australia,” says Baker.

Vicki Baczynskyj

Vicki Baczynskyj is the principal of Canterbury Vale School at Lakemba, in Sydney’s south-west. Founded in 2006, it’s a school for our times: one for kids with real behavioural challenges and/or high emotional needs. They come to Canterbury Vale for a year, with the aim that they learn how to survive at school without being constantly suspended or anxious. By the end of the year, the hope is that they’re able to return to a mainstream school setting. In the past, many such kids would have dropped out of school altogether.

“Schools, particularly primary schools, are dealing with an unprecedented complexity of needs from students,” says The Sydney Morning Herald’s Baker. Along with statistically higher levels of anxiety and depression among kids than ever before, she says, “autism diagnoses are soaring – in NSW schools, rates are going up 15 per cent a year – and there are many students with undiagnosed learning difficulties and regulation disorders.

“There are still more students arriving at kindergarten who have already experienced complex trauma. This is an issue many schools are grappling with, and educators such as Baczynskyj are at the forefront of trying to ensure that schools can be safe places not only for these students, but for all students.”

Demand for schools like Canterbury Vale is growing, and education experts are watching with interest. Others trialling new ways of doing things include inner-west Melbourne’s Caroline Chisholm Catholic College, which – at a time when many schools are turning to tech – has reinvested in its neglected library, in so doing achieving a remarkable turnaround in reading results. North of the Melbourne CBD, Thornbury Primary School won an Education Excellence Award for a Koorie program which saw Indigenous students outperform non-Indigenous ones in many areas.

Elsewhere, in western Sydney, Plumpton High School’s Tim Lloyd invites businesses into the school to help students understand the relevance of what they’re learning to the outside world. He was named Government School Principal of the Year at this year’s Australian Education Awards.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.