Australia Day Awards 2017: William Richard Mulford, AO
WILLIAM Mulford, of Sandy Bay, will be honoured with an Officer of the Order of Australia award.
Tasmania
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EDUCATION has been William Mulford’s passion for almost 60 years and during that time the most dramatic change he has witnessed is the increased input of politicians and governments in schools.
The emeritus professor will today be honoured with an Officer of the Order of Australia award for his years of service to academic administration, as a researcher into educational leadership and through a variety of roles with professional associations.
Prof Mulford began training for a career in teaching in 1959 at the Bathurst Teachers College in NSW.
He went on to hold several teaching and principal positions in Australia, Britain and Canada.
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He also worked for the Papua New Guinea Department of Education, University of Canberra, Tasmanian State Institute of Technology, the Australian Council of Deans of Education, Australian Council for Educational Leaders and the Commonwealth Council for Educational Administration and Management.
Prof Mulford, of Sandy Bay, said he still teaches overseas in Canadian summer schools and at Monash and Melbourne universities, where he runs programs for people who want to improve skills as principals.
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“The most dramatic change in the last section of my career and now into retirement is the increasing involvement of politicians and departments of education and that has worried me,” he said.
“I’m particularly worried about the profession and [whether] it is a profession if somebody else is telling [teachers] what they should be doing.
“The second [concern] is the quality of schooling and it is much wider than just cognitive test results. NAPLAN and all these kind of test results [are] not what education is about, it’s about a whole range of values, attitudes and skills that are more than cognitive testing.”
See today’s Mercury for more on Tasmania’s Australia Day Awards recipients.
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