On Thursday and Friday last week, myself, Ms. Whiteman and Mr. Chalk attended the Bayside School Leaders Conference with the school leaders from three local school networks, Beachside, Kingston and SAGE.

The conference provided a wonderful opportunity to connect with other school leaders and learn more about our neighbouring Secondary Schools and the local Primary Schools that many of our students attended. The local Primary Schools made it clear to me that they relish the opportunity to come into BSC for the Primary School Teacher Visit (Thursday March 27), because they love to hear how their former students are doing!

Keynote speakers were Vic Zbar, Lorraine Hammond AM, Todd Macbeth and Dr. Judi Newman, and the conference included a large focus on the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model 2.0, which, in my personal opinion, is the most useful documentation that the Department of Education has released – every part of the documentation is evidence-based best practice, which provides a fantastic framework for the schools who implement it with fidelity.

Vic Zbar’s keynote Driving School Improvement – Building Towards Successful Implementation of DET Priorities was the session that most resonated with me. I have drawn on Zbar’s School Improvement philosophy throughout my career and with my recent appointment to BSC it was a timely reminder of those core principles.

Zbar has 10 lessons for sustained school improvement, are four preconditions:

Strong leadership that is shared, stable, strategic and sustained over time
High levels of expectation and teacher efficacy
Ensuring an orderly but supportive learning environment
A focus on what matters most

Firmly establishing these preconditions at BSC is paramount in the early part of my tenure at BSC.

The following six lessons are for sustained school improvement:

Building teaching and leadership expertise
Structured teaching to ensure all students succeed
Using data to drive improvement
A staff culture of sharing and responsibility
Initiatives tailored to the direction of the school
Engender pride in the school

The early indicators of the preconditions for school improvement are intangible, subtle shifts in language; the way that we talk and think about our practice, our classrooms, our students and our community will shift; collectively, we will take greater ownership, we will lift the expectations we have of ourselves and our students and we will notice and highlight more of the positive behaviours and strengths of our staff and students. Things will just ‘feel different’, and it is evident to me that this change had begun last year and it’s the responsibility of our leadership team to keep moving in the right direction.

In Term 2 our students complete the students Attitudes to School Survey (AtoSS) and in Term 3 our staff complete the School Staff Survey (SSS), within the surveys we expect to see some tangible indicators in key areas that confirm that changed practice is now leading to an improved learning culture.

Strategic leadership with a narrow focus (a focus on what matters most) will see a school improvement journey that feels a little like a staircase where each step has a natural incline. The natural incline of each step is the work that happens throughout the course of each year; the cultural change that leads to practice change. Each step on the staircase is the improvement felt between each year, where our school improvement journey is able to make a significant jump through structural changes that better position our school to meet the needs of our students and the community.

Cultural change can and does happen far more quickly than you might anticipate, but it is hard to notice it as it’s changing, the change becomes evident as you reflect. In 2021, Adam Carey, the then, Education Editor at The Age wrote an article, Former struggle school stuns with two-year turnaround, about the cultural change that was occurring at my former school, Monterey Secondary College. The most critical indicator of cultural change highlighted in the article was the change in teachers perception that their classrooms were orderly and focused which moved from 15% of teachers in 2019 to 89% in 2021.

To make and sustain that vast improvement, practice change occurred on a day-to-day in all classrooms through professional learning, classroom observations and feedback, and coaching, together, representing the ‘incline on each step’.

Systemic and structural change occurred through improved processes for seeking support with students who had become dysregulated and a more robust and capable leadership team who were able to better coregulate with students as well as building appropriate plans so reduce instances of dysregulation occurring for each student.

In 2024, my final year at Monterey Secondary College, teachers perception that their classrooms were orderly and focused remained high, at 71%, much higher than the 15% in 2019 but a good margin lower than the 89% in 2021. The dip from 89% to 71% represents the lifted expectations that all staff now hold for their classrooms. The expectations for calm, orderly and focussed classrooms are now much higher.

The challenge at Brighton Secondary College is vastly different to the challenge at Monterey Secondary College, but the underpinning theory of change is similar and whilst students and families may not feel the change immediately, that is to be expected, but the change will be felt, it will be positive and it will be sustained.

Peter Langham

Principal

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