"Like #MeToo, we need a hashtag," Lynne Symons declared. The former principal of the largest school in South Australia – now an educational leadership consultant – was referring to the need for greater awareness of the mental health crisis among Australian principals, ...
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Lighting the flame: Growing lifelong learners
A principal uses her experiences in Tonga and Japan to grow lifelong learners. Trudy Moala has led primary schools for 24 years. Starting her career in Adelaide as a primary school teacher, her life took an intrepid turn when she travelled ...
More »Opinion: schools key to building rich local communities
As educators, much of our attention understandably focuses day-to-day on the academic program and student welfare, and in our pursuit of student outcomes we risk finding ourselves with blinkers on when it comes to investing in engagement with the wider ...
More »NAPLAN week draws multifaceted critique
Months before controversial NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes called for NAPLAN to be scrapped last week, change.org user Sparkt started an online petition in this vein. In the interim, a retired MIT professor slammed the tests, calling them "bizarre". Some Australian experts joined him; ...
More »Create and your school will succeed: Sir Ken Robinson
Sir Ken Robinson's 2006 lecture, Do schools kill creativity?, is apparently the most viewed TED Talk of all time. Regardless of that claim's veracity, it has been viewed 50,727,440 times and counting. Clearly, his words resonate. Now, he hopes to recapture audiences' ...
More »Principal profile: Dr Paul Rijken
After falling into teaching when his original career plans stalled, this Adelaide principal set out to make his mark in education. A dynamic, visionary and authentic Catholic school leader who is passionate about leading contemporary educational change, informed by research, ...
More »Meet Australia’s educator changemakers
When Greg McMahon became principal of Doveton College in 2015, things were tough. The school, situated in Melbourne's southeast – one of Victoria's poorest areas – had poor attendance rates and its students scored low grades. Once buoyed by manufacturing, its ...
More »MySchool 2018 reveals most-improved schools
Today, ACARA cautiously released newly user-friendly 2018 MySchool data, revealing, among other things, individual schools' 2017 NAPLAN performances. “We know that schools are more than just their NAPLAN results. However, literacy and numeracy are the fundamental skills all our children ...
More »One in three principals now experience violence
Australian principals are burnt out and embroiled in conflict, yet somehow still love their jobs. This was revealed in the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education's seventh annual Australian Principals Health and Wellbeing Survey Report, released today. To date, around half of all principals ...
More »Later, ATAR? Exploring a rising qualification competitor
Today's school students likely don't have any living relatives who survived World War Two. If they're undertaking the International Baccalaureate (IB), however, they may do well to know its postwar origins. In 1948, Marie-Thérèse Maurette, a French educator, was stationed in ...
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