As Tasmanian students return to school today, three primary schools will kick off a nation-leading trial the government hopes will stop the state's education system lagging behind the rest of the country.
Tasmania is trialling a model that allows schools to collaborate more closely by sharing resources, staff, and knowledge. It is based on a UK model, with the aim that higher-performing schools lift up underperforming ones and all schools ultimately see improvement.
As Tasmanian students return to school today, three primary schools will kick off a nation-leading trial that the government is hoping will turn the state's education system around. Australia's smallest state consistently lags behind the rest of the country when it comes to education.Australia's school attendance levels have dropped since the pandemic but education experts are particularly concerned about Tasmania — a state with an already notoriously low literacy rate. The most recent shake-up to how the state teaches literacy is showing some signs of success, according to an independent review commissioned by the government, but that change alone is not enough to lift the state's results. The latest National Assessment Program of Literacy and Numeracy reveals almost four in 10 Tasmanian students are behind in literacy and numeracy.Of those, 79 per cent passed Year 12, but only 44 per cent achieved an ATAR — the ranking needed to enter university.Education Minister Jo Palmer said "some extraordinary reforms" were put in place in Tasmania over the last decade."So we have looked at a model on the other side of the world which is seeing incredible outcomes for children … teachers and for principals."The multi-academy trust system allows schools to collaborate more closely, share resources, staff, and knowledge, while the executive team takes much of the administrative load shouldered by principals.In an increasingly complex financial world of buy-now-pay-later schemes, scams, and social media marketing, there are renewed calls for financial literacy to become a mandatory part of the school curriculum. It flew Tasmania's education minister, the department secretary, and the principals from the trial schools to the UK to check out how the system works.Former Grattan Institute education program director Jordana Hunter is about to take up a position with McKinnon and will work on Tasmania's trial.In theory, the model means schools can share teachers and techniques to deal with different behaviours, and principals work together to pass on knowledge. The aim is that higher-performing schools lift up underperforming ones — but ultimately, all schools see improvement.One of the main differences is that the executive teams will be under the department, rather than their own legal entities.She said the role was often filled by an experienced principal and had an office in one of the schools. " executive leader is in and out of the schools constantly, and they're hearing what's working. They're hearing what's not working very well," she said.Risdon Vale, Moonah and New Town primary schools have been selected to take part in the trial. Risdon Vale principal Rachael Wells visited some of the schools in MATs in England — and came back impressed. "We saw students who had some challenges and yet they were able to engage in learning and able to achieve some really huge improvements," she said. "Every time you went into the classroom, you could see students focused, engaged in that learning, and it was translating to results. "It was really hard to look past that, and I could see how that was very comparable to what we were dealing with here." While it officially kicks off this term, the three schools have already embraced an informal collaborative relationship."We've never worked in a way where we're having teachers regularly collaborate and regularly support each other across schools. "And we've never worked in a way where principals are working as a team and dividing the workload amongst them so that we're not duplicating the same work."It can take on anything from risk assessments to staffing to organising a new school mower. For Ms Wells, that means time to actually work in classrooms with teachers, giving them feedback, and helping with their professional development. "Most of us become teachers because we're passionate about learning and we want to improve student learning," she said. "Then once you become a principal, you're really removed from that work … which is ironic because that's the stuff that we tend to be really good at and we're really passionate about."A 2016 UK Parliamentary inquiry into MATs concluded there was a "high degree of uncertainty" around their effectiveness. In its submission, social mobility charity The Sutton Trust found the best MATs were "having a transformational impact on pupils' life chances, but others have seriously underperformed and have expanded too rapidly". In 2018, the UK's Education Policy Institute found MATs were over-represented in the lowest-performing groups."What we have to do is not just focus on the good," branch president David Genford said."We need to also focus on that this hasn't worked for everyone.""When you see a trial last for five years, I think you need to be really careful in regards to: is this just an expectation that it's going to continue?" Mr Genford said.That concern was shared by Labor leader and former teacher Josh Willie."This is like a 101 on how to do education reform badly in Tasmania, and the minister has clearly learned nothing from history. "She's gone overseas, she's picked a pet project, she's come back here to Tasmania, and says, 'We're doing this reform no matter what and I don't care what the workforce tells me about it.'""There's nothing wrong with doing that, but it's not going to be the silver bullet again that they're presenting this as." But former Grattan researcher Dr Hunter said people should be careful when looking at the research in England and comparing it to the Australian model. "Some of them definitely grew too quickly and they were too geographically spread out over England, and that definitely created some challenges for them," Dr Hunter said.Reform a 'game changer', minister saysMs Palmer said that allowed the government to respond to feedback throughout the trial.Ms Palmer believed this reform would be a "game changer" for students and schools. "It touches on every aspect of the concerns that our education stakeholders have here in Tasmania," she said. "It's answering the questions that they have. It's addressing the concerns that they are putting forward and first and foremost, it is changing the educational outcomes of our children.
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