Christine Cawsey Teaching For A Purpose Not An Atar

Our next guest coming up on the Empowering Leaders podcast is the legendary Christine

Corsi, the principal of Rudy Hill High for the past 25 years, an educator that has been

celebrated or needs to be celebrated more, in my opinion.

The singular focus on ATAR that happens a lot in schools is a topic that I discuss,

which I think will be of interest to many parents.

And her idea of building our kids into being meaningful contributors in society and focusing

on our kids in school as a whole person and not just guided towards a score at the end

of year 12.

It's more than a mark.

It's more than an ATAR score.

It's around the skills and capabilities they can bring to the table.

But it's also about their capacity to be contributing citizens, to be self-regulated in situations,

to manage the challenges they face.

And by golly, they face a few at the moment.

It's a conversation I loved.

And ties in very closely to the passion that I have for the work that we're doing at Alita.

If you're motivated to improve your leadership journey or start your leadership journey,

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from sport, industry, social venture, education, the arts, into bespoke facilitated forums

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a pretty life-changing way.

I hope you enjoyed this chat with Christine Corsi.

A remarkable Australian who has made a huge difference in the world of education.

Christine, I've been really wanting to celebrate Australian educators in a more meaningful way.

And I think probably to say congratulations.

It's a lifetime of contribution that you've made in this space.

Oh, thanks, Luke.

And I'm always very nervous of that term legend because one normally only hears it in sport.

And that's just before somebody else decides they're not.

I think it's a term to use with great care.

Well, I think it's a term to use with great care.

I think it's an accurate term in terms of when you look at your contribution.

And I wanted to set the scene a little bit around your school, Rudy Hill High, where

you've been for the last 25 years, just to give people an understanding of the setting.

And please correct me if this is not accurate, but some research that I found, children attending

Rudy Hill High School have a higher chance of having a parent experiencing unemployment

or facing unemployment themselves when they leave school.

They start school with higher rates of social and learning vulnerability and attend primary

schools with NAPLAN schools.

In fact, 80% of students start year seven below grade average for the state.

Rudy Hill High School has 1,100 students from year seven to 12.

55% are from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

5% Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.

And 25% come from the lowest quotient of socio-educational disadvantage.

Now, Christine, you read that and it sounds like the recipe for the most challenging educational

environment you could imagine.

Yet Rudy Hill High is considered the most challenging educational environment in the

world.

And it's consistently the high watermark for great education in Australia.

How have you done it?

What's the secret to your success?

Well, first of all, I suppose it depends how you measure it.

And we are always on any measure, one to 1.5 standard deviations below the average.

But, you know, that's okay because it's an average.

And as we know from, you and I know from footy, there's a top eight on the table.

And then there's the bottom, there's the bottom lot.

So whatever's the average, some are going to be above and some are below.

We don't always understand that.

That doesn't mean that young people don't grow and thrive and make progress, which is

such a critical part of education and yet not well understood.

Parents want to know how their child's progressing.

We want to know about progress.

For us, the progress is in our, at the post-school destinations that our students,

take, and we track them for quite a while after they've left, but also where do our

alumni, those ex-students, end up going, where do they end up being?

And I think that's probably a pretty important part of it too.

Many of them go on to have incredibly happy and successful lives, and some don't.

And that is true of every school in the country, no matter what the socioeconomic background.

Yeah.

What our parents share in common, in my view, is something that's probably true of greater

Western Sydney as well.

And that is that the majority of parents, particularly those whose children arrive at

school below grade average, anywhere you like, they want their children to have better than

they had.

And when you work with aspirational communities and parents who want their children to have

better than they had, it generally happens.

And what some people call, you know, 55% non-English speaking background, so often presented

as a deficit, by golly, when they're applying for jobs and they've left school, the fact

that they speak two or three languages, nobody sees that as a deficit.

And particularly our big global companies, they see having multiple languages and being

able to live and work in global communities as a big asset indeed.

So I think sometimes we get stuck with the big macro picture.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Without looking, that within that picture, there's 1,100 journeys every year and there's

a couple of hundred students graduate every year and they've had a learning journey, which

hopefully has allowed them to make progress and do the best that they can because we gave

them the best opportunity they could have.

And Chris, I love your first answer.

Immediately you said, well, how are we assessing that?

I asked you what the key to success and reading in preparation for this, it sounds like you've

got an obsession with, you know, assessment for students.

You know, assessment for the school, assessment for the community.

You love to measure and research what you're doing.

Is that one of the keys, as you said, that you've got to constantly be understanding

what the improvements are and how you can get better?

Yeah.

I'm what they would call an older teacher at this stage.

I started teaching in the 70s and there was a very famous, well, famous in certainly in

Australia, Alan Luke was one of our best academics in assessment.

And I remember him.

I remember he said in the 70s, we'll be 50 years before we even begin to understand what

types of assessment we need to have for our students.

I think sometimes what happens is that people might think it'll be really good to have this

target.

Let's set this target, you know, a bit like your good old KPIs.

Let's set these KPIs, make the top eight, for example, make the KPIs.

But in reality, because we're talking about young people.

The human beings, they're not units of productivity.

And how we measure their work, it's more than it's more than a mark.

It's more than an ATAR score.

It's around the skills and capabilities they can bring to the table.

But it's also about their capacity to be contributing citizens, to be self-regulated

in situations, to manage the challenges they face.

And by golly, they face a few at the moment.

And so, Chris, is that I think you hear the word assessment and sometimes people have

the hair stand on the back of their neck because your mind immediately goes to right and wrong

and a written test.

And, you know, I'm going to be subjected to the potential to fail.

But you're saying it's in the nuance, to use the word of the times, around assessing

the right things.

And you gave a great list there, didn't you, around greater capabilities.

I hear the word student agency a lot in your language that I've read and students needing

a sense of themselves as learners.

Is that what we should be assessing more?

So let me ask you, come back with the question I asked our school just after our first run

of COVID.

I thought I might just ask the school some questions.

And the question I asked was, are you old enough?

And that's a really important question to ask because people always say, oh, those children

aren't old enough to do that.

I mean, this weekend is splendour in the grass and you have to take someone, an adult with

you.

Is an adult your 19-year-old brother or is it your 47-year-old dad?

I don't know the answer to that question.

I certainly have a view.

This notion that when you ask how old are you, are you old enough?

During COVID, we had year six students making their own applications for high school.

We had some of our students in years 9, 10, 11 and 12 working right through COVID because

fast food continued.

So did COVID out of all those super spreader places.

But fast food continued.

They were working sometimes.

Because their parents couldn't, because the industries they worked in closed during lockdown.

So are you old enough?

We asked to do all these kinds of things.

And when you come back to it, are you old enough to care for your mum who got very sick

with COVID?

And then you were put into isolation with your two brothers and sisters and your mum was

still really sick.

Were you old enough to look after your brothers and sisters?

And I think we have a rather romanticised view of the life of young people in that we assume

that they don't have these challenges.

And what do you mean by student agency first and foremost, for people to understand that?

Agency is when you own something.

So you own your own learning, you own your own progress, you know it and understand it.

You are the agent of the decisions that are made.

Now, I'm not dismissing the importance of parents.

One of the huge challenges in our culture and community at the moment, and this is true across a number of countries, is the fact that parents are not the only ones who are the most important part of the decision-making process.

And this is true across a number of countries.

And this is true across a number of countries.

And this is true across a number of OECD countries, is people feel the need to helicopter their children.

Some feel the need to black hawk them.

So, you know, so they're helping their students, their sons and daughters, correct year 11 and 12 homework.

But that's not the job of the parent.

And what we have to be able to do is have our young people take the ownership, therefore the agency, to be able to do their own work.

And part of the challenge is that for some families, very unrealistic expectations have been set.

And I see this quite a bit when we work with other sectors that, you know, that the child has to achieve a top band or a top grade all the time.

And the problem is that when you're based on things on averages, only about 10% are going to achieve that top grade or that top band.

And what happens is that when you're based on things on averages, only about 10% are going to achieve that top grade or that top band.

And what happens is that when you're based on things on averages, only about 10% are going to achieve that top grade or that top band.

And what happens is that when you're based on things on averages, only about 10% are going to achieve that top grade or that top band.

And what happens is that when you're based on things on averages, only about 10% are going to achieve that top grade or that top band.

and what happens is that you then diminish all of the rest

of the work and the effort that that student put

into improving their skills.

So I often tell the story of one of our students who got what would

be described as in most places a pretty average ATAR,

somewhere in the low 70s, and popped off to university

as you do and actually studied something he was pretty

interested in, podiatry.

He has already now completed both his honours and his masters,

working with remote Aboriginal communities on his masters

around the particular issues of good foot care when you're

in remote communities and being able to do that.

And now he's commenced a PhD in public health policy.

And I don't actually think he ever thinks of himself as somebody

who only got a 70-something or other ATAR.

And I think, you know, it's a bit like getting

a driver's license.

It's really important until you've got one.

And if students can pursue their passions and their interests

and their talents, they don't all have to be good at everything.

They have to be good at those things where they're going

to take them and make their life happen with them,

and not just their employment, but also those other things

they want to do.

You know, is it wrong at 16 to want to be a top AFL player?

I think it's a perfectly acceptable pathway to really want,

but it requires...

It requires hours of work and practice.

Where do we write down when those students finish year 12?

Where do we write down, this student is going to be a top AFL player

because this student has this, resilience, capacity to recover

from injury, determination on the field, eye-hand coordination

well beyond the average.

We don't write those things down, do we?

But perhaps we should.

It's a great thought, Chris.

And I love it because the language is around,

and we always hear about this at schools, find your passion,

find your hat to put your hook on, and we'll support that.

And I think sometimes that's spoken a lot, it's harder to deliver on.

I want to come back to ATAR.

There was a quote that I saw you share,

training kids to succeed in knowledge tests is a very different process

than teaching them to understand the world and become curious

about learning more.

As a parent, I'm talking about me from a parent of four,

there is this sense that I've got...

that schools do focus singly on ATAR too much.

They talk a game that they don't, but you see all their advertising,

particularly the big private schools, we're in the top 1% or the top 3%,

and have a look at our high tier.

That becomes the billboards that they advertise through.

Do you see that singular focus on ATAR as a problem?

I don't think it's...

But I don't think it's the school's fault.

I do see that a singular focus on any one score anywhere

can be quite problematic, but what I am pleased to see is that many

of our universities now are looking at not alternative entry pathways,

but actually alternative ways of assessing the entry pathway.

And it seems to me that it's a bit of a challenge where the ATAR single score,

it's so easy, isn't it?

You know, just rank the school, how many ATARs above this did you get on?

But in reality, what does it actually do?

What does it actually mean?

It's very heavily statistically manipulated.

So we could start with the...

So I won't speak for all states, but in New South Wales and Victoria

with the BCE and HSC arrangements, you know, you sit an exam.

That exam is going to be marked by somebody.

If it's 8 o'clock at night and they've taken a break for a coffee

and you're feeling really tired, might they see your result as as good

or not quite so good?

So there's a bit of potential in the marking.

There was the question, where the question's fair.

There's one question got language that a lot of the kids didn't understand.

Maybe the question's not so good.

Blah, blah, blah.

And then we get the mark and then you moderate them all

and then it's moderated against the whatever.

Well, in Victoria, it's the bell curve, which is, of course,

incredibly dangerous, at least in New South Wales.

We have cut off points based on the overall performance of the cohort.

But then what happens from there is, and then that's all thrown

into a big software melting pot.

And then it's re-sorted.

So how did the students in physics go?

Well, they went like this.

So physics will be given this weighting.

And how did the students in English go?

They'll be given this.

And then we combine it all together and then we create a single score from it.

Any statistician, only a relatively smart person knows that it's a proxy

at the best for how students score.

And that's what maths did, because it's actually statistically

heavily moderated all the way through, allowing for mistakes,

allowing for discrepancy.

A student, for example, could miss out on a 90 plus ATAR,

making a mistake on a two-mark question in maths.

So these things can, and these things, if they become too important

in our heads, they become the purpose of going to school.

But the purpose of going to school is to do the goals of education,

to find academic improvement, and then to contribute to society,

to be an active citizen, to be well self-regulated,

to be able to be part of community.

And I think sometimes we have a lot to learn from our First Nations people.

Being part of community is such a critical piece.

Beating everybody else?

Well, of course there are going to be times when we want

to beat everybody else.

That's part of life too.

But is the ATAR the right way to score it?

I think it has some purposes in triangulating other data

that we've got, but as the only score, I think it's not robust enough

for what we need in this country.

We keep talking about how badly our students are doing,

but it's a norm reference test.

It's got an average.

It's got a little bell curve.

We actually don't know.

What if our students, in fact, were amongst the top performers

in the world?

It's just we're not playing.

We're not playing the world in the HSC or the VCA.

It's a good question and an interesting thought, Christelle.

My mind was going to a story that I read a few years back

around issues that medicine entrants were having,

or in fact the medical faculty themselves were finding

that because the top ATAR was the score that got you into medicine,

that a lot of students were finding themselves in medicine,

not because they had a passion to want to be a doctor so much,

but because their family saw that as the outcome,

for getting the best score.

And what that was not taking into account

is some of the things you're talking about.

You know, medicine's got huge importance

on emotional intelligence and bedside manner and care

and sense of purpose for wanting to do that.

And so you might have been able to read the chart really well,

but if you haven't got the empathy to deliver it,

you're not maybe going to be suited to medicine.

So maybe that's an extreme example.

But I think all parents, you said before,

that's not parents' role.

I mean, for me, you know, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

As a parent, I feel our role is just to give our kids as much love

and support to find whatever passion they can and support whatever that is

to be the best version of themselves is how I think about our role as parents.

What do you, as a principal, what do you want from the parent community?

Something that we already, I like to think we have most of the time,

and that's a fairly high level of trust, that the experts,

and they are experts, who are teaching your sons or daughters,

that the experts really do know what the, and I think COVID showed that.

Most parents, no matter what their background,

did not want to teach their own children.

There are some parents who could, and they did, and they did a great job,

and they got lots of media articles about them.

But the majority of parents wanted an expert to be teaching their children,

particularly in secondary education.

So that's one thing I like to think for.

But the other thing that I think is very important,

and this is more across the country,

is the, a lot of our students actually take vocational pathways.

Some of them do them concurrent with university.

Some of them do them first and then do uni.

Because around about 40% of students who don't go to university initially,

go to university as an adult later on for some purpose.

There's a piece of research done by the National Council for Voc Ed Research.

And they, that showed that a boy who was average, above average ability,

and it is gendered, who took a trade pathway would be likely

to have a higher income, better health outcomes, and better opportunities

for owning their own homes or whatever than a young man going to university.

And they do it without a hex debt.

The kinds of communities where I work, families can be quite risk averse and debt averse.

Because debt is a really big, you know, you can be homeless,

pretty quickly if you become, if you fall into debt.

So, one of the things that I think is important is to understand that there are,

every pathway can be valuable.

Sometimes in this country, we've dismissed the value.

The Germans have the best manufacturing sector in the world,

and an absolutely high-end, fine precision manufacturing.

We have a bit of it here, but they are the best in the world.

And one of the reasons that I believe that that happens is because around about 40%

of their students automatically choose to take a trade pathway,

to take a vocational pathway, to take a pathway that goes directly

into that kind of practice.

Now, many of them, of course, also then will need higher qualifications.

But I think it's a really, we made perhaps some mistakes in the 90s,

thinking everybody had to go to university.

Everyone had to complete year 12.

Everyone had to go to university.

I don't know that that's necessarily been a really good thing.

I think it's a really good thing.

I think it's a really good thing.

I think it's a really good thing.

I think it's a really good thing.

It's a really good thing for us in the long term.

Yeah, you raise another interesting question, Chris, and I'm not surprised.

I look at all the big private schools that don't produce any trades.

Why is that?

I think you might have given us some clues there that that's not the pathway.

Surely there was, out of the thousands of kids that attend the big private,

surely there was some that were passionate about pursuing a trade or born to do it.

It was in their DNA.

Why aren't we producing them is a question that I think you probably just raised

fairly accurately.

I want to transition to a topic that when I spoke to you on the phone in preparation for this,

it's the most popular TED talk I think ever.

It's had 75 million views.

You know the one I'm talking about was Sir Ken Robinson who passed away in recent times.

The title of the podcast, sorry, of the TED talk, if you haven't heard it, it's called,

the question is, do schools kill creativity?

I look at the amount of people that view that and I think we all care about education.

One, it's a really entertaining speech.

So it's worth.

Having a look if you haven't seen it, but it shows to me, you put education up.

All of us have got thoughts on it.

All of us care about it.

We've all, you know, a lot of us have got kids that we care passionately about.

How do you think about that?

He says in that speech that he thinks creativity is as important as literacy.

Do you agree with that?

Well, I actually do.

And I have seen it several times.

However, I don't agree with him that schools kill creativity.

I think, in fact, for some children, schools are the most creative places they are.

They have opportunities to do things that they would that might be outside the experience

of the adults with whom they normally spend their time.

And in fact, I commend back to you a book by Bill Lucas, who's at Winchester

and the Real Schools Education.

Bill's book is actually on creativity and the capability of creativity and Rooty Hill High

Schools.

Working creativity is actually featured on the back page in our creativity wheel because

we actually agree with you.

Literacy, numeracy, critical and creative thinking.

Pretty much you got those.

You can pretty much do everything, pretty much do everything else.

Maybe not play top AFL, but pretty much do everything else.

My view would be, though, that top AFL also requires a very high level of creativity.

And Bill and his colleagues.

Actually work to identify five what they call dispositions of creativity with 15

sub dispositions, and they're the ones that were used by the OECD to underpin the PISA,

which is the international testing that's done at year 9, 10 level, depending what country

you're in.

They actually designed a creativity assessment, creative and critical thinking assessment

tool.

And some of the.

Some of those tools have been used in the Victorian system.

But yes, it can.

I think if Croneback said that if if an item exists in any amount.

Then that amount can be measured.

And so it's just about how, again, coming back to how you choose to measure it, but I

believe I don't think schools do kill creativity, I think sometimes curriculum

standardisation.

And mandated policies make it a little trickier.

But the great Scottish academic, Macbeth said, principals need to be deeply subversive.

Take those mandated policies, take those documents, take those curriculum and then do what is

best for the students in their schools.

I love the way that you express that.

And I think you're right.

I love your glass half full.

And I think that's what you're thinking, too, because it's what you're clearly living.

And I had a look at the creativity wheel in preparation for this.

And you go and teach other teachers in other educational settings on how to achieve what

you're achieving.

And again, as you said, I love you see opportunity in the challenge and the diversity that you

have every day in Western Sydney and what you've been able to do with that.

I suppose setting by setting, isn't it?

It needs to come to life with great leadership, and that is what you've done at the helm of

your school for 25 years.

It can come from any point.

If you're in a big jurisdiction like ours, sometimes really creative things come from

the centre.

And sometimes they come from the school.

And sometimes they come in the middle, where a group of folk get together and share ideas.

And then suddenly we're doing something quite different and working quite differently because

it works.

And it's interesting because we talk a lot about evidence-informed practice in education.

And one of the things I think we need to say is what evidence, because it's nice to be

able to say, oh, this policy is in evidence-informed, yeah, but what evidence informed it?

And I do think that one of the great important things of leadership is to be able to ask

good questions.

You need to, don't just sit there and accept that just because somebody said it was evidence-informed

that that evidence might actually be useful at all, because it could on occasions be complete

rubbish.

So not all evidence is equal, Chris.

No.

Of course it's not.

Of course it's not.

And I think that's a great sign of our times, too.

And I'm diverging here in interesting ways.

We've come out of an interesting time where, you know, what does research mean in certain

settings?

What does it mean in medical settings?

Where is that research backed by?

Who's funding particular research?

I suppose, you know, it almost feels like a new currency is going to be truth, isn't

it, in some ways?

Because we have got...

We've got a lot of misinformation to deal with out there.

There is a sport in misinformation.

So how do we teach the next generation to work their way through that?

I mean, that's an interesting question as well.

I think so.

And what's really interesting is that Norway took this challenge on a couple of years ago.

And it is now reported that Norwegian young people have the best fake news meters in the

world because the Norwegian government thought that it was...

It's critical that all of their young people understood when they were working with social

media where the information came from and, indeed, what biases were included.

So they've done quite a bit of work on that.

I think it's an area where we're starting to dip our toes in the water, but we will

obviously need to do more.

And controlling Twitter or Facebook or TikTok or Instagram isn't going to be the answer.

It's actually giving students the skills to know.

So when do you decide not to upload that photo?

Because it might come back 20 years later in your portfolio when you're going for some

important job that you want to think you want to get.

I mean, I have to ask you that question.

I mean, it's the ultimate question I think us as parents are dealing with and you as

educators too is that that massive change in the landscape, isn't it, with access to

those mediums that you just mentioned, TikTok and Instagram and Twitter.

And Facebook and the next one's, you know, only around the corner.

I mean, what are the skills?

Do you think it's just education around using them appropriately?

You're not going to control?

Do you have measures that around the amount of time?

Have you seen real challenges around that?

One of the academics at Sydney University who talked about the parents buy these devices,

were they informed when they bought them for their children that about what was going to

happen?

Or did they do it because it seemed like a good thing at the time?

It was like the, you know, next round of children's toys.

Did it seem like it was going to be okay?

And I think like with any massive innovation, and this is one of them, it does take time

to learn how to manage it.

I have, one of the great things about working at Rudy Hill is our fantastic community.

And I can remember too.

Two mums bringing their year 7s up and we said something about we really wanted to limit

the mobile phone.

Well, did I get an education on what you do to limit mobile phone use at home at night?

My child will never be on at 2am because this is what happens in our house.

It wasn't really but it was almost like a game.

Everybody in the house put their, they had a lock box in the kitchen.

Everybody in the house put it on everybody in the house who was over the age of 12.

In the house that they were working in.

the age of 12 had one night a week or one or two nights a week

where their phone was on for emergency, for alarm,

for this sort of thing, but everybody else had theirs

and everybody modelled it.

Now, these were two pretty ferocious mums.

I was very admiring.

But they had already made up their mind what they wanted

and they didn't want their children up with their blue screens at 2am

and then exhausted through the day because they weren't getting any sleep.

I do really think that is a parent call.

So I said to you, teaching students and correcting their work is our work,

but actually giving your sons and daughters a really good example

of how to do it and how to manage social media.

And, look, all of us have been caught.

I don't know any adult that's not been caught sometime following something

and then realising it was a complete scam.

And I do think that talking about the risks with our kids is really important.

And talking about, you know, telling kind of the stories,

but without necessarily frightening them.

Because some of them are incredibly skilled themselves

at knowing what's a scam and what's not a scam.

I look at my two daughters and they're now,

they had phones in the later part of high school

and they're now in their, one's 29 and one's in her early 30s.

They are so skilled compared to me.

I'm much more likely to make a stupid mistake.

They don't make mistakes.

They are very...

They are very astute users of the platform.

But, Luke, if you wanted to talk about the one that I think is worrying parents

and certainly worrying educators and health professionals a lot,

and that's vaping.

Really?

Yeah.

You're saying that as a bigger challenge again than the social media platforms?

I don't know that it's a bigger challenge,

but I think it's really quite dangerous

and it's been sold in very particular ways.

And I think it's the next...

It's the next piece that we're going to have to learn to manage

because it's been sold as something that would calm your children down

and particularly adolescents who are feeling a bit anxious,

particularly after COVID.

You know, this will help you feel a bit calmer.

It's been sold in a very particular way

and it's a very...

They're very addictive.

And the research is horrible on the outcomes already that you're seeing.

Again, I love your question.

My mind's...

You know, before I make a statement, I'm thinking,

I'm thinking about it more thoughtfully than I would

as, you know, where's the evidence from?

But I think the evidence is overwhelming

that that is not a great thing for your lungs and your health.

I mean, you're selling them, as you said, in bubblegum flavour

and, you know, clearly your target market is very young

given that that is the case.

So, as you said, there's always another emerging challenge

for parents and for educators at the same time.

I started the conversation, Chris, by saying, you know,

the idea of celebrating teachers more is something that I feel

passionate about and, you know, a story that I think of a lot.

I was in Switzerland many years ago with my fiancée, now wife,

and we were meeting my brother-in-law for the first time

and his partner at the time had just graduated university

and she was clearly the smartest person in the region,

one of the smartest people I've ever met.

I think she'd got first-class honours

and could have done anything in the world.

And the word came through.

The day we were there, I met my brother-in-law for the first time,

future brother-in-law, and we sat down with her family.

She was...

She was...

It was Swiss-German and the word came through,

she'd been accepted as a teacher.

The celebration for the family and the respect and the...

I was blown away by.

It was like that is the highest honour you could have.

I feel like in this part of the world,

we don't get that anywhere near that level.

Is that your experience?

And have you got a theory on why?

Well, I not only have theory, but thanks to my...

Thanks to academic colleague, Nicole Mockler,

we now have evidence because she has just done a piece

of research that's recently been published

on the way that teachers are presented in the image

and the brand, if you like to use that term, in the media.

And she looked at over nearly 150,000 media pieces

about teachers in this country and 95% of them were negative.

So the question I often ask myself is why in Australia,

are teachers, and particularly women,

because 80% of the teaching workforce is women,

why are teachers and women something

that the media thinks can be attacked?

Now, when I was a much younger person,

the media spent a lot of time attacking teenagers.

You were either a victim or a perpetrator.

They're a lot more sensitive with that now

because it's blown up.

So many times.

But the question would be,

for what purpose would we be attacking teachers?

And I think there are some very deliberate

and political purposes around that.

But the long-term damage that is being done

is damage that can never be taken back.

And I'm happy to say this publicly and in when...

I think it's 20...

I'm happy to say this publicly and in when...

I think it's 20 years ago,

in 2008, Rupert Murdoch gave the Boyer Lectures.

They're the ones that, you know,

they're pretty famous lectures given every year.

And although none of his children went to school in Australia

and none of them attended public education,

he presented a thesis there about public education

and the rabid, you know, nature of us and what have you.

And that thesis has pretty much been the same thesis

that I've read now for...

in the 20 years since.

I mean, you know, the, you know, yeah, 15, 20 years since.

And one of the things that concerns me is that

why would you want a position that way?

What is it that you don't like?

Is there a belief that teaching like the ABC,

some sort of left-wing hothouse,

or is it that somehow or other,

professional women are to be watched closely?

And my colleague, Bryony Scott,

who I'm a great admirer of,

who's the principal of Winona,

wrote a beautiful piece this year

where she talked about her teachers and herself.

And she said, I have a number of degrees.

I have considerable expertise over 40 years in teaching.

I've done this, I've done this.

Why do you insist on treating me like a child?

And it's caused quite a storm in the Sydney Ed circles

because it's a very good question, isn't it?

Why would anybody presume she didn't know what she was doing?

You know, she's the principal of an incredibly successful school

where their theory is that their young women leaders

go to change the world.

And I...

I believe our young people at Rooty Hill

go to change their communities and then change the world.

Similar kind of thinking.

But why would we diminish that?

And again, by doing that, we also diminish our young people.

It's another way of attacking our young people in this country

because we tell them all the time they failed PISA

or they failed this.

There's some serious problems with PISA,

the international test that's done in Year 10.

Well, we don't do it in Year 10 here.

That's the first problem.

We do it in Year 9 when we're halfway through the course.

The rest of the country's doing it in Year 10 when they've finished it.

No, don't get me on the PISA soapbox.

But why would we continually want to tell our children

they were failing?

What sort of country does that to its young people

and does it to our teachers who...

The teachers I work with, oh, they're so smart.

Nearly all of them have master's degrees.

Some of them have multiple undergraduate

degrees.

You know, I'm just thinking about one of our teachers

who's quite self-effacing.

And someone said to me, so what are her quals?

And I said, oh, she's got...

It's physics, chemistry and mathematics.

And she got honours in all three.

And someone said to me, and she's a teacher?

So you see, that's the conversation.

But for her, this is her love, her joy, her desire.

And that's what teachers do.

Teachers change lives.

Nearly everyone can remember a teacher who changed

their life.

And if we don't go to work with a purpose to change lives

for young people, and it doesn't matter what their background,

to change lives for young people, then, you know,

it's really hardly worth going.

They're certainly not paying us enough.

We have to go and we have to have fun.

And we have to have young people who feel that they have

to be able to believe in themselves.

So I go back to where I started.

They don't need helicopters.

They actually need to find their own sense of resilience

and understanding.

They need to find their own sense of resilience and agency.

Because these are our adults.

The ones we teach in year 12, the ones we taught last year in year 12,

pretty much all of them voted this year.

Yeah, again, so many interesting places to go with that.

I had a great experience this week just gone.

One of my old schoolmates from 1984, when I was in year four,

he's a guy called John Aloisi, went on to score the winning goal

to put Australia into the World Cup.

And he's a great guy.

And he's a great guy.

And he's a great guy.

And he's a great guy.

And he's a great guy.

And he's a great guy.

And he's a great guy.

And he's a great guy.

And he's a great guy.

And he's a great guy.

And a great person.

We've stayed in touch over the time.

But we both, along the journey, spoke about our year four teacher

as our favourite teacher who had a massive impact.

Peter Muddy Waters, his name is.

And we got in touch 38 years later and had dinner with him.

I'd seen him once before.

I think John hadn't seen him for 38 years.

And so to go back and say thank you for the impact you had on us

as eight and nine-year-olds was such a joyful experience to go back

and, you know, slightly.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

You know, different feeling 38 years later.

But as you said, it was great.

And when we spoke before catching up, you know,

with the teacher shortage crisis as it is,

the numbers you told me that are being predicted in the coming years

is staggering here in Australia.

Can you share with us the crisis that's unfolding?

And it's happening already, you know,

that teachers are in demand and not being replaced quickly enough.

How bad is the problem?

Some work that was done.

And certainly by the teaching unions across the country,

but for New South Wales was that it's going to be around

about 15,000 shortage 2025, 26.

Because there are still people retiring.

And the one that really shocked was, you know,

we're talking about by 2030, 30 to 40,000.

Now, that's worst case scenario.

But the way things are going, you know,

going with the COVID impact as well,

it's worst case scenario is important to think about.

If we know what the worst that can happen here is,

we can start to plan for it.

And if we get lucky and it's not that bad, then we'll be happy.

But as I said to you, it's now become a huge issue in the United States

because they're predicting 325,000 by 2025.

That's a huge number.

They do everything at scale.

Of course, but that's a huge number.

So if we think we're going to recruit in the U.S.,

it's pretty unlikely.

The Canadians also have shortages.

So all those traditional places where we might have thought we might go

to recruit come to sunny Australia.

Although if you live on the East Coast this year, not so likely,

but come to sunny Australia, which we did a lot of in the 70s.

And I still have a number of friends who came to teach in Australia

from the U.S. in the 70s.

That isn't probably going to happen again.

Yeah.

We also have the states competing with each other.

And I believe that as so often happens in football,

Western Australia has been very successful in recruiting across Australia

in terms of the number of teachers who've decided to move to sunny WA

and work in their systems.

So you can't say, oh, we've got this many more teachers

when you're really just redistributing the pie.

Yeah, it's a big issue, isn't it,

when you start putting those numbers together

and think what that means school by school

and in the end of the day, the outcomes for our kids

and the future, it's enormous.

Chris, there's so many places to take your life.

And I mentioned your contribution to the Smith family,

which celebrated its 100 years, an incredible organisation

and your passion for that and combining education and philanthropy,

I think it's been another great piece of your life and contribution.

I wanted to move, Christine, we've been catching up

with a range of leaders from different backgrounds,

whether it be sport or education.

Education or industry or the arts,

about what we think great leadership looks like in different settings.

And so please, I'd love you to expand on these dimensions of leadership

as we see them in any way you like.

But self-leadership, we feel all leaders have an understanding

of what self-leadership means.

Does that term resonate with you?

Yes, I think one of the most useful lessons I ever learnt

was a very, very smart coach who said,

this is when I was doing some coaching training,

if you can't manage yourself, you can't manage others.

If you can't self-regulate, you can't ask others to regulate.

And I think that type of language, if you're not well,

you need to actually look after yourself because you can do a lot

of damage once you're in, particularly if you're a formal leader.

You can do a lot of damage as a formal leader if you're not

on top of your game when you go in.

And we've all had moments, I'm sure, like that.

And the same applies for some of the informal leaders.

If there's a young person in the school who's had a lot

of influence in particular ways, if something happens

to that person, and sometimes bad things do happen

to good people, and if something happens to that person,

there's almost like a whole collective breath taken.

How will we deal with this?

Because that person has given us certainty.

We don't have to give people rules.

They just...

There's a...

There's a thing about safety and certainty.

You pick up on something I haven't discussed, you know,

for a while, which is people in formal leadership role,

we always talk about the opportunity to do good,

but there's also that other opportunity too, isn't it?

If you haven't got the skills or the self-leadership,

you know, to use your words just then, you can do damage.

And it's why, you know, one of the reasons we're so passionate

about sharing the example of collaborating for good

because it does affect people, people in formal leadership roles

without that self-awareness.

We know that the negative impact can be huge without the skills

or the self-reflection, positively impacting others

and their environment.

I mean, your story is all about that for me,

and you're very humble in the way that you talk about it,

but clearly, you know, in an area of Australia that, you know,

has social issues, you've made an amazing contribution.

How have you thought about that positively impacting people

in your environment every day?

It's interesting, isn't it, that it is the little things you do,

there's that great Buddhist quote, isn't it,

be careful what you think because your thoughts become your words,

be careful about your words because your words become your actions,

be careful about your actions because your actions become your life.

People don't judge us on what we were thinking,

they judge us on what we did.

And one of the big insights I've had in the last couple of years

and particularly I'm very interested in the work of BJ Hogg,

The Tiny Habits That Make a Difference,

it is the, in particular, I'm sure it's true in all industries,

but it's particularly true in education.

It is what others see you doing every day and it's what you do every day.

Your behaviours are what they're looking at.

So teaching does require routine repetition and all of those things,

but it also requires adaptability, flexibility.

If the kid makes the best job,

if the kid makes the best joke ever,

it requires that ability to just let the class go

and just take the best joke ever, you know,

and it's what they see you do.

You walk your values.

No one has no values.

Everyone's got values.

But you don't necessarily have to say, these are my values,

because every day, I remember a former prime minister said

public schools had no values.

I couldn't resist it.

I just had to go out on that day and say, listen,

when I rolled out,

I got out of bed this morning.

By the time I'd got into work, everyone knew what my values were.

Everything I said and everything I did all day told the story

of what mattered.

And I do think we sometimes forget that importance of language.

We forget that importance of watching what people are doing.

How do most people learn?

They don't necessarily learn by, as someone said,

just recently this week, they don't necessarily learn

by doing teaching and learning on values.

You learn them because of the group that you're with.

So when parents, for example, choose a school,

they want to choose where they have the ability to choose,

because a lot of parents, of course, aren't able to choose.

But where parents can choose a school,

they choose the school hopefully for the values of the school

and hopefully the values align with theirs.

And that's a really big decision because once you send your son

or daughter to whatever school it is, you're having trust

that that school is going to bring out in your sons

and daughters the things that you think are the most important.

And so it's important that schools are places where parents

are also safe to say, I'm a bit concerned about the values here,

or safe to say, I really like these school values

and I really hope you'll push them more.

And when you look at it,

look up your school because you can see the values are there.

Persist, I think, is the acronym and it's clear.

And I looked at it and you felt compelled to read it

and you got a sense of what it would be like as an outsider looking in.

And so clearly that is something that is at the forefront of your mind.

It's across all the things when you research about what you do.

We see leaders really conscious about creating and sharing their vision.

And part of that was just our conversation.

Wasn't it?

The values of what you're wanting to achieve as a principal at Rooty Hill

and in your other areas and your other philanthropy work

and in the Smith family and other areas.

How have you gone about creating and sharing those visions?

Well, you just have to walk the talk.

One of the things I do love is when the alumni come back to Rooty Hill,

they all remember Persist.

It's quite amazing.

And we had a staff activity recently.

We have a number of our ex-students working with us in part-time positions

while they're starting at uni, which is fabulous

because we're getting all this amazing skill set.

But interestingly, schools pay for our admin teams quite a good rate

compared to fast food, I might say.

Not quite a good rate compared to some others, but fast food.

And these wonderful young people.

And we were having a conversation about some of the key platforms

in the school and about the school values.

And I asked each team, asked the whole staff to divide themselves.

I thought it was going to be decade groups, but let's just say we had six 1995ers

and it was pretty fun.

So they all got into groups and talked about the songs of their era

and then they talked about what they understood about the school values

and the platforms and what have you.

And what was really interesting in them doing that was that they were

the younger ones when they – so I put the youngest group

with one of the middle groups and someone who was in the middle group,

said about the younger ones, actually, they know more about this than we do

because they grew up through it.

They know the school values.

They know about the things that we value and the things that we think

are important and the things we try to do well.

And I think you just have to – if you really believe in things

and you have a set of beliefs about what's important,

then you walk that talk and you deal with it when things don't fit the values.

You don't walk past it.

You don't do bystander behaviour.

You actually stand and be counted.

And I am most proud when I see our students and their families

stand and be counted because sometimes difficult things do happen.

And to see them sort of walk with us to get their son or daughter

to the best journey they can, that's one of my most fulfilling times.

Christine, we see curiosity.

A key word that comes up with leaders that we talk to in this space

and through curiosity, that's how they approach learning and development.

Does that ring true with you?

So while I said it kind of didn't matter, a lot of things don't matter,

intellectual grunt, which is what I call it, which is what our teachers have

and a lot of our students are developing, that wanting to know more about something

so you are better informed about it.

And –

Yeah.

Backing yourself to try something innovative but also backing it

by also making sure is there evidence that supports this kind of approach.

So, for example, one of the things that we're very proud of at Rudy Hill

that we've tried was based on some research done by Andrew Martin

and his team at the – at Uni of New South Wales.

And this is goal setting within each individual subject.

So our students at the beginning of a semester set their goal

for each subject with their teachers.

You know, it's in the context.

And then there are little checkpoints along the way.

And then at the end of the semester, they write their own report comment.

That's agency that says this is how I got on my goal.

This is what skills I've developed or whatever.

And we're only just trying it.

We don't know if it'll 100% work.

We're going to give it three years to see how it goes because it normally takes

three to four years to embed something in practice in a school.

So we'll give it three to four years.

The interesting thing is that Andrew Martin's research says,

yes, that where young people set their own academic goals

and work towards achieving them, there is a significant improvement

in their results, particularly in schools where there

are disadvantaged children.

So we're going to have a go of that.

We're going to have a bit of a run, a bit of a test.

Will it work?

It was a bit like our creativity project.

Will it work?

If you don't – and I think that's part of the – it's part of the curiosity bits,

part of –

who we – how we have become as a school.

We are curious to see if we can do better because, you know,

everyone would forgive us because you're just a school in Western Sydney,

just a public comprehensive school, you know.

They forgive you for low expectations.

But if you're going to travel along and you want to do something just to be more

than one standard deviation below average, you actually give yourself the permission,

John McBeath, be subversive.

Give yourself the permission to try something different because if you keep doing what you're

always doing, you're going to – and you may not get what you always got.

Something else might change, but you're not likely to get much different.

And part of our challenge for education is that some of the decision makers with whom

we work and at very senior levels really want school to be like it was in the 50s and 60s

and 70s.

And, for example, for our One Nations kids, it wasn't a very safe place to be at all.

Sorry, our First Nations kids, it wasn't a safe place to be.

For our children of non-English speaking backgrounds, it wasn't always a safe

or happy place.

We are much better now than we were then, but we don't necessarily count that in our

list of achievements of our education system in Australia.

Yeah, well said.

And I love that story of applying curiosity.

Correctly, yeah.

And the study, you know, if it's close to being what it sounds like, is going to be

brilliant.

It's setting your own goal, so you immediately take ownership of it, working towards it.

I'll be fascinated to see.

And that's the genius of what you've done, Chris, is take things, trial them, and then

share them with other educators and other schools, you know.

And I love the fact that it's coming out of, as you said, under the radar where the

expectation is low, but the results are consistently better than just that.

We see leaders in it.

And I say our expectations are not low.

Yeah, I can sense very clearly that they're the opposite of that.

That's true of nearly every school in the area where I work.

Yeah.

Because they know they have to make – kids only get one shot.

Teachers can come back next year.

Yeah.

Communicating with clarity is a dimension of leadership we see really common across

different industries and different backgrounds.

Is that real?

Is that part of the leadership that you focus on?

I think it is pretty critical.

But again, when you're working with highly professional teams, you have to be really

quite sophisticated about that.

When does it become the team's team?

When is the communication something that's part of the team's team?

I do think communication really matters.

I think direction needs to be treated very carefully.

We've just come out of three years of effectively crisis management, what I call the bushfire

scenario, where our senior people come out and they're all dressed in their beautiful

uniforms and what have you, and they tell you exactly what to do.

Or in the flood that we've just had here in Western Sydney, they tell you what to do.

We did that during COVID.

We got memos every single day.

Some days.

I couldn't believe it.

But I would ritually read them and I would send them back out to our staff or whomever

or our families and I would summarise them into English.

Not summarise them into English.

I'd summarise them into English that people could read because sometimes memos that come

from government can be just a tad written by university people and can be just a tad

above the reading age of the majority of the population and use very technical terms and

lots of acronyms.

So I think that communication, it needs to have, it needs to be leveraged in a way that

responds to what does the community need.

I know this is going to sound really trite.

I started to make these little Facebook videos and I would do one every week.

I tried to do it in a different, either different part of my backyard or on the two days that

I was on site at school because I live in the lockdown LGA, so I was allowed to go to

work.

I try to find different places to do them.

I've now got this collection of rather bizarre.

Rather bizarre Facebook things talking about COVID and talking about, you know, if you

need help with this or if you need help with that, because in the end, what our community

actually wanted, they wanted a face-to-face communication, but they could have it online.

So I'm not, I do believe in strong communication, but I also think you use it judiciously.

Don't over bury people in our COVID situation here in New South Wales now.

I think most people are just confused.

It'd be really nice just to have something straightforward that said all other policies

go to this way, to the side.

And now this is the guideline for the next two weeks or the next four weeks.

This is what you do.

But we do seem to have the most enormous amount of it.

And that's the lesson I've learned.

Don't communicate, don't over communicate.

And when you do, make sure it's about the important stuff that people need to know right

away.

And then when it's something that they need to work on for a longer time, the

project-based approach seems to me to be the one that works best.

Yeah, again, great examples in your environment.

I've seen your Facebook videos, Chris.

They were well articulated.

And I love, you know, anyone who has tried to read a government document, you know, it's

incredibly confusing.

So, you know, again, a great living story of just how to, you know, otherwise it wouldn't

have been read, let's be honest with you.

I mean, I delete as many emails and, you know, without being, I'll get in trouble here because

the schools my kids attend.

But sometimes the community...

Communication is just too much and you can't, you know, you can't put it into the item where

you feel like you've got time to digest it.

Collaboration is something we see leaders are really focused on now more than ever.

How do you think about collaboration?

I think it has worked very well for us at Rooty Hill around our strategic projects.

But I also see it as something that works particularly well when you've got...

It does work particularly well in education.

When you've got people who...

Who not only have a shared interest in what they're doing, but also have a shared expertise.

I think we face some real challenges of embarrassing people when we insist on having people forced

collaboration.

I like to think of...

I actually don't try not to use the word too much.

We did a big executive project where we tried to define collaboration at Rooty Hill High

School.

And what we ended up deciding was we weren't very collaborative.

We were just a school.

And it was...

It was pretty funny because we read everything.

We read everything and it ended up being the most hilarious discussion as we tried to put it

together.

But what we...

Those with an interest need to be able to share it.

That's collaborative.

And collaborative is...

It's really quite critical for building your culture if you want to have a kind of shared

culture.

So one of the reasons the student agency is so important at Rooty Hill is because they're

part of the collaboration.

They're very much part of the collaboration and they're very much part of the conversation.

So, again, we must never think that young people should be left out of it.

They're not there to be done to.

They're there to interact with us and give us feedback and help us.

I like to think we have a very high level of collaboration at Rooty Hill.

And I also work with a number of colleagues in our local area and I like to think we're

highly collaborative too.

But boy, COVID.

Posts some challenges.

Yeah.

And I think, again, I just hear your language around the students.

It sounds unique because in some schools it is that the teachers see the students as part

of the solutions and not, as you said, to be done to.

So I love that language.

Well, it's not unique at all.

Well...

Well, the colleagues that I work with...

Yeah.

Look, there's something about Western Sydney, you know.

You just can't...

Kids just don't get bossed around.

That's the way it's played.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It'll not play.

It's brilliant.

Well, maybe it's not unique in your environment because you've created it, but I sense it

is in others.

And so it's why it's great to share these stories and hear, you know, and unpack the

success, why it is such a great story of success.

I've been asking these two questions, Christine, to all the leaders I've spoken to, starting

with who has been the greatest leader in your life?

There's so many of them, really.

So I'm just going to come back.

To my mum and dad.

And my mum, who never wanted me to be a teacher.

Can I ask why?

She just...

She had four kids.

So she just decided...

She...

I don't think she ever really...

I don't even know if she liked me when I was a teacher.

But she modelled...

She was a woman of her time.

But also...

She was a very adventurous woman.

And she taught me...

She taught me that it was okay to try to be adventurous.

And she was much more adventurous, however, than I am.

And my dad, because...

My dad came from the background that many of his generation did.

He was the first in his family to go to university.

He was the first in his family...

He was the first in his family to hold the particular position

that he ended up holding in the banking industry.

And I do think that...

I do think that what he showed us, both positively and negatively,

was how to...

I think...

There were three girls initially in our family.

So to dad...

Dad lost any chance to go all sexist.

He used to sort of do, you know,

let a woman in my life and carry on all this trade.

But...

But what he showed us was both the good and the bad.

He showed us the dangers of overworking

because he worked such long hours.

He'd come home and then he would have dinner

and then he'd start again.

As people do who work in high-paced professions.

But he also showed us how to have a great holiday.

He was a very handy man and a son of a builder, as he said,

and a very handy guy.

So I was very privileged to have those two people in my life.

There are other people in my professional life

who have taught me so much.

And the only thing I'd say is

some of them have come from the most surprising places.

So there we are.

Yeah, it's a great answer.

And I love the people that had that influence from their parents.

It's where they go to almost inevitably straight away.

And it feels like a blessing, doesn't it?

If you had that sort of influence to start your life,

it's a gift that keeps on...

Yeah, it doesn't...

It doesn't diminish that, does it?

I feel exactly the same if I was asked the same question.

Again, the second question's around collaboration.

If you could collaborate with anyone in the world on anything...

Chris, we're speaking a lot about your history in education,

but your history in charity space,

and clearly you love a sport as well.

Has there been anyone you thought, you know,

that I professionally or in any part of your life

that you'd love to collaborate with?

That I haven't already?

Yeah, you have done extensively.

You absolutely have.

Yeah.

Let me just...

Take a second there.

I don't mean to waste your time, Luke.

Let me just take a second.

There's a group of academics working out of Germany

who are part of the International Congress

of School Effectiveness and Improvement.

And they are doing some absolutely brilliant work

in the areas that I love around data and assessment,

but particularly...

And there's also a Canadian that I very much admire

who are doing a lot of work around the ethical use of data.

And if I was to take a next step,

that's the place I'd probably like to go.

And I don't know whether they'd let me collaborate,

but, boy golly, I'd like to learn from them a bit more.

I'm sure that that would be a collaboration

that they would love to have.

If you listen to you and hear your passion and your expertise

and your history, it's extraordinary.

So I thought...

The final word might go to an ex-student that I read.

There was so much great feedback from the alumni,

as you've called them across this conversation,

from one of your ex-students.

Rudy Hill High School instils a strong sense of belief in its students.

It's a culture that is infectious.

It doesn't matter where you come from or who you are,

you determine your own path.

And I think that may sum up everything that you've created

in your great history.

And it's been a great pleasure to catch up with you today.

I thank you for your time and well done again

on all the incredible contribution.

Thanks, Luke.

And thank you for inviting me to speak to you.

Empowering Leaders was presented by me, Luke Darcy,

produced by Matt Dwyer,

with audio production by Darcy Thompson.

To start your leadership journey,

I encourage you to go to elitacollective.com,

take our Empowering Leaders indicator tool

and understand the impact you have on your environment.

Join us at Elita to learn, lead and collaborate.

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