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Innovative Learning Environments Expo 1
Sandown Racecourse Springvale, Tuesday 20 July 2010
Presentation transcript
Personalising learning - Leading practice: age and stage
Doveton Learning Centre
Introduction: This podcast is brought to you by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, Victoria.
Bretton New: Can everyone hear okay? I usually hate wearing one of these things and I hate being behind a lectern. As
a teacher I used to walk, and walk, and walk the classrooms but apparently I need this for recording
sessions. Probably a couple of weeks ago, doing three things at once. I answered the phone and Lyn
Kemp from the regional office was on the phone and said, “Can you come in and do just a small workshop
about the Doveton Learning Centre. And I said sure, a couple of weeks after that I got all of this information
and the template for the slideshow and stuff like that and then I looked at the program. And it was talking
about personalising learning, birth to year 8, and that threw me a bit. The Doveton Learning Project or
regeneration projects have only been operational for five months. We haven’t got any buildings, we’ve got
no kids, we’ve got no teachers. I admit it, at the moment but we’re going to do the little journey and go
through it.
Just so I’ve got a sense of who’s here. Any preschool teachers? Early years? Primary? Secondary?
Secondaries are really worried, aren’t they? I’m allowed to say that. I’m a secondary teacher and I used to
be a secondary principal, you’re not terribly interested in this. I’ve got a fair bit that I’m going to try and get
through with you in the half hour but please interrupt if there’s a point that you want to make. Look, just a
little bit of background on the Doveton Learning Centre. It came together, signed off by the two ministers in
the Colman Foundation in October last year. Effectively, it only started in February this year when I came
onto the job although it have start happening adding Doveton schools, the four schools out there: Doveton
North Heights, Eumemmerring Primary, and Endeavour Hills Secondary.
I’ve been working probably since the end of about 2006 on coming together in a merger. Julius and Pam
Colman from the Colman Foundation had approached Premier Brumby probably 18 months ago to say that
they were interested in putting a large, many millions and millions of dollars into a sustained educational
program in a disadvantaged area in Victoria and the two came together.
So what we’re on about doing is looking at those three stages of schooling. It’s going to be a birth through
to Year 9 school under a single governance model. So a school council but a school council not so much
as we know it outlined in the Memorandum of Understanding between–with the foundation and with the
government. Early childhood learning centre, those of you who can remember, that second maternal child
health visit, that will begin at the Doveton Learning Centre and the kids will be with us right through to the
end of Year 9.
Some of the key messages about the Doveton Learning Centre, they were trying to get across there, look it
really is a very unique project within the state of Victoria. You could probably go as far as saying within the
state of Australia. The early Childhood Learning Centre and the P-6 component opens in January 2012
with the 7 to 9s coming on board in January 2013. We’ve heard about public-private partnerships, this is
the first social government partnership of its type undertake in the state hence the – that’s with the Colman
Foundation and what they want to do.
We have $32 million in the bank for the build and that money is coming from both the Federal and state
governments and the Colman Foundation. It’s going to be a total build for 900 youngsters. But the key
premise of it is early intervention and the development of integrated early childhood with what we currently
know as primary and secondary education and the child and the family are at the centre. And if we wanted
to look at three components of it that way, you’re talking about those integrated services when you’re talking
about a structure and that’s a lot of the stuff that I’ve been working on over the last five months, is how do
you have a school being responsible for integrated early childhood services? And the legal advice we’ve
got, that we can be responsible for all of those services and the provision of them and the accountability
and the responsibility that goes with it from age one-up. Under the Acts, the Child Services Act, we can't be
responsible for and provide services for youngsters under the age of one.
This is new work and so when I was talking you before about personalising learning, birth to age eight, it’s
important that we develop an understanding of the context and I don’t know to what extent this has come
down into primary schools yet. Almost since the – the Bracks Government came into play, what is it, 9, 10,
11 years ago. There was that notion that it was really important for us to integrate early childhood
education, family support and care. And probably, one of the first indicators of that was when we went from
the Department of Education and Training to the Department of Education and Early Childhood. We
subsequently had in 2008 Blueprint phase 2, incorporating early childhood development, setting out that
five-year agenda that the Department had on behalf of the government for birth through to 18-year-olds.
The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia came out in 2009. How many of you are familiar with
that? Some of you have – many of you have seen it. And along with that, the National Quality Standards
which is going to register and accredit, all early childhood services came out following that and it’s
implemented fully in 2013. Anyone familiar with the National Quality Standard? What’s the major
component of it? Compulsory 15 hours, kindergarten for all four-year-olds, which is going to have a
fundamental shift in how we can see preschool education and I would suggest long day care as well. The
Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework followed, that was tied into what we know as
VELS and the Growing, Learning, Thriving document which is a progress report from the government on
early childhood provision, only came out in November last year.
I think with what we’re trying to do at the Doveton Learning Centre, both with early childhood provision and
with the teachers in the primary schools, in the newly formed primary school in Eumemmerring. Is make
that link between what is in the national reform agenda from COAG and what the Victorian Government are
now beginning to expect from us in the school sector. And if you look at the practice principles for learning
and development which are contained in the Victorian Early Learning and Development, three main points:
collaboration, high quality teaching and learning, and continuous provisional improvement with domains
outlined beneath that and that’s for years – well, from birth through to Year 8. And if you look through
those, there is a very – I think a very – almost the same as PoLT, aren’t they? It’s an attempt to look at the
national framework and put it in the context of the principles of teaching and learning that we’re all familiar
with.
On the other side of that you’ve got, within the Victorian framework, the five outcomes for early childhood.
And if we’re going to be doing that properly, when the youngsters make their transition from four-year-old
kinder into preschool, there’s going to be a set of standards and outcomes around identity, what they can
contribute to the world and how well-connected they are. Their sense of well being, how involved they are
as learners on that continuum and communication. And so, when we’re talking about the Doveton Learning
Centre and what we’ll be talking about in the years to come about that interface between early childhood
and into the early – what we traditionally call the early years of schooling, it’s important that we all want to
give youngsters the best start we possibly can in life but if you read Growing – the Growing, Thriving
document. What the government are now on and what they’re starting to recognise is that there is a
massive gap between those who have it all and could progress through that and subsequently through life,
compared to what the most vulnerable families and youngsters in the state have. I think the other very
significant thing is that, as professionals in the traditional education system, we’re starting to develop or
have a very good understanding of the research and the evidential basis coming out of what happens to
youngsters before they start school and that’s tremendously important for us.
If I’m talking about the Doveton Regeneration Project with the Doveton Learning Centre emerging from it,
we’re talking about the third most disadvantaged postcode in Australia. Are people familiar with the
Doveton area at all? And when we’re talking about that disadvantage, we’re not telling you anything new in
saying that children born into extreme poverty, where there’s been unemployment for generations, in all
likelihood are going to continue that through into their own lifetime. So if we’re talking about community and
community safety and you only have to look at the surveys that are coming out of neighborhood renewal in
Eumemmerring and Doveton, to note that the biggest concern that the community has there is about their –
the community’s safety and staying safe. And if you look at the things that contribute to that, it’s about
crime, it’s about alcohol, it’s about poor housing and it’s homelessness. If we’re talking about economic
wellbeing, it’s talking about access to poverty. Only 14% of people in the Eumemmerring, Doveton area
have full-time employment. If we’re talking about health and family structure, we’re talking about family
violence, relationships and mental and physical health issues – widespread across those communities.
I think the other really important thing that’s coming out of the evidence for us, and this is the latest data
that’s coming out of Oxford University, it is by a woman named Naomi Eisenstadt, who was the director of
the Social Action Unit in the Blair Government, but more importantly, was the director of Sure Start. The
Every Child Matters agenda in Britain, Naomi was the person that rolled it out. And what this started to look
at and there’s been some work like this in Australia, is the relationship between what happens with a
youngster in the early years of school, from that age birth to four progressing into school and subsequent is,
if they have high quality care at home and/or in, long daycare and/or occasional care, what’s value-added to
their literacy ability and potential to grow as a literate child, five months. If you look at preschool and
childcare in a good home environment in that age group two to three, what value added is almost eight
months when they hit that formal learning process that we undertake from prep on.
As significant with that is if we look at the early childhood years, those first years before school and we look
about the effects on literacy, I think this is very interesting. The figures one to six equate to months. The
home environment and we’ve all known that, is something that we don’t have control over but it has the
biggest effect on how youngsters are going to perform once they hit the formal school system. Significantly,
the next one is the duration of time they spend in preschool and interestingly, it’s the time they spend in
preschool, it’s not the quality of the preschool program and/or experience. And the research is telling us
that if we want to make optimal use of our time in prep to Year 1, that the preschool experience needs to be
for two years, in other words three and four-year-old kinder. It needs to be five days a week and it needs to
be in short sharp blasts of it. So that moving from preschool, what we’ve got at the moment into 2012, 2013
when we’re moving towards 15 hours of kinder and there’s a great deal of angst about how you actually
structure that within a preschool environment and in a school preschool environment. We need to take that
research on hand.
The other thing that we’re on about with the Doveton Learning project is that – and it’s coming through in a
whole lot of data. A whole lot of community data and a whole lot of school based data. Disadvantage isn’t a
destination. I think for too long there’s been that feeling. If you go out to Doveton, if you look at the
infrastructure, the social infrastructure that’s been taken away, if you look at the schools that have been
taken away, the banks that have gone out of it, the police stations that have gone out, all of those sorts of
things, Doveton has been left for basically decades. And there’s an expectation around it, because there’s
not much you can do in Doveton.
But if we look, and this is a real school and you won’t be able to see it very well. The dotted line down here,
if we’re looking at data over a five-year period, this is a school from a very well off area. Down here, if we’re
looking at school A, along here with maths and reading where there’s teachers and school leadership teams
who have really known what to do with their youngsters over a period of time. You can see that the very
well off school, there hasn’t really been much improvement in what youngsters are achieving over a five-
year period, as the kids are tracked through but knowing what to do and understanding your community and
intervening has had tremendous results in that other school.
What’s the community data telling us about Doveton? What are the barriers to learning in Doveton? And if
you got sense of where the suburb is and what’s happening there or you’ve heard some of the things I’ve
just said to you today. It’s a postcode 3177 that’s really behind the 8-ball and I stress behind the 8-ball, but
through no fault of its own. If you’re in one of the two kindergartens in Doveton at the moment, and there’s
only – there’s under 50 licensed places, but literally hundreds of youngsters are there. If you’re a teacher in
prep, in Doveton Primary or Eumemmerring Primary, when the youngsters come through the school gate
and into your classroom, this is the baggage that they bring in with them. And another thing I think is
teachers in primary and secondary schools that we need to get our head around to important sources of
data that we have access to and that are telling us a bigger picture about the youngsters that are in our care
and on that educational journey that we’ve once had.
Are people familiar with the Australian Early Development Index? Okay. Particularly those people in
primary school would be involved in the collection of data. The Victorian Child and Adolescent Monitoring
System, how many of you are familiar with that? It’s a work-in-progress. It’s going to give us an overview
of indicators that the kids have travelled – it’s an extension of the AEDI where the kids are travelling well.
The thing with VCAMS is that it goes right into adolescence but also gives us indicators for family, for
community and for services.
I hope you can see where this is going. I haven’t started mentioning personalised learning yet but if we’re
talking about meeting the needs and addressing the needs in the most effective and sustainable way,
there’s a body of information that I don’t think we’ve necessarily been using in the school system that we
need to, particularly, if you’re going to be working in a community like Doveton.
We’ve already said that it’s a community with complex and high needs and I think many of you working out
this way, may be in similar communities. The demand for support and care and intervention exceeds what
we can give. There’s very little service coordination and there’s poor linkages. So, for too long with
community-based services, they’ve all sort of sat out there pretty much by themselves, and that’s okay if
you’re in a community that has the resourcing and the money, to where with all to look after issues that
arise. The community that I and my colleagues are working in, are not in that sort of situation and we’ve got
too many kids who come to us with high risk factors. We have our service provision and what happens is
that we hide them off or try to hide them off to other areas. And what I think – to give people and
organisations and agencies credit, it’s challenging work, it’s complex work, it’s incredibly difficult and there
are attempts to link those services up.
But if you look at the data and one of the exercises we’re doing in Doveton at the moment is actually
mapping all of the service providers and mapping the experience of families. If you look at some of the
maps that have been done, what it’s telling us at the moment, is that a family at risk and they might have a
little in school, that’s developmental health problems or serious behavioral problems, need to tell their story
four times. Because it might be picked up at the school and the school might help for referral. But to get
that referral, you’ve got to go to another place to tell you a story, to get the referral through to the specialist
that will diagnose the issue and give you the program or whatever might be needed to progress the
youngster and start addressing the need. But as I said, it’s three referrals to address. On average, it’s the
two to three month waiting list for each specialist referral to get in and if you put all of those together,
something that you might have diagnosed at the beginning of the school year, you’re going to be lucky
before the end of the year if the youngster in the family have got to the first referral. I think that’s something
that we’re familiar with.
What we aim to do, big aspiration with the Doveton Learning Centre, is mobilise the community so that we
have a fully integrated service that’s going to look something like this, and you’ll notice that the school is at
the centre. Fully integrated early childhood is sitting around and there is referrals, whether it’s outreach or
whatever that is going to be linked in to that. So we’re not going to be all about tertiary services. We’re not
going to be on about those families that have extreme mental health problems, domestic violence, those
sorts of issues. They’re not going to the counselling and the counsellors and the other service providers.
They’re not going to be with us but we’re going to be linked up with them.
And people have said to me over the five months, well that job is too big for a school. If you’re talking about
taking on individual children, individual families with complex needs, that’s got nothing to do with the school
and what a school can provide. But if you go back and if you look at what the data is telling us about the
experience of early childhood and the effect not only on the early years of schooling but on life’s journey. If
you’re talking about agency support that’s going to support you and your job both as a classroom teacher
and as a member of staff, if you look at what the Australian Early – of the AEDI is telling us, if you look at
what VCAMS is saying that we need to be doing, where can that take place? If you think about the
definition that we now – and the understanding and the common language we have about school. School is
perhaps the one place that families and youngsters like this have to come together because what we’re
there for is to help youngsters navigate their journey through the early stages of life, where there’s primary
school, then into secondary school, then post-secondary school. We’ve been on about it for a long time,
that schools shouldn’t be isolated from community; that schools are part of the community and we need to
do everything to bring community in and be a partner with this. And it’s been interesting listening to the
other workshops today about personalising learning and not one of them has ignored community, in fact,
they’ve said the strength for developing personalised learning in an educational setting is in fact bringing the
community in. And if you’re talking about a place within any community, school is the place where
community congregates. Perhaps we don’t see it as much in metropolitan Melbourne as we do in rural
areas or country regional areas but school is tremendously important.
Let’s get onto personalising learning, what does it mean? How many of you work in schools where
personalised learning is the norm, already implemented. Not many of us. I looked after a school in the
northern region, Macleod College as acting prin. Initially, I only went in for a term but they had some issues
selecting the person they wanted to get, so I ended up staying there 12 months. And we had a 12-month
conversation on what personalising learning is. They made some headway and they’re starting to introduce
it at the moment.
But for the purpose of what we’re doing today and for the purpose of where the Doveton Learning Centre
currently is, I’m going to run out of time. I’ve just used the definition for personalising learning that was in
that education research publication from the Department in 2007. What I want to talk about and finish up
with is a process that we’re going through. We haven’t got a school, we haven’t got any kids, we haven’t
got any staff. We know the youngsters that we’re going to get. The Doveton Learning Centre is in its
design stage. We start building in October, hopefully not in January 2012. The other unique feature about
the place or about this project is that Doveton School is going to close and a new one will open. We
normally merge the schools and take the staff with us. We’re not doing it this time. But if we take on board
all of that stuff that I was talking about, all of the data that we have, all of the research, the evidential-based,
we need to go through a process of how do we bring that on board within an early childhood context and
then into the school.
What we’ve decided to use, is I don’t know how many of you are familiar with it, is the project, Program
Logic approach. And the reason we’ve taken that on board, I think in schools, we’re used to getting data
about youngsters deciding what needs to happen in a literacy class, what needs to happen in a numeracy
class and so on. When we’re talking about early childhood and we’re talking about it in an integrated way,
when we’re talking about how can we say, as a school, as a learning centre be responsible for a youngster
from the age of one up. There is a whole lot more information that we have and there other agencies and
people who have a bigger influence on it. So, what we’re saying is that, if we get it right, if we understand
the children and their families and the community that they work in, then we can undertake planning that’s
going to address their needs. If we understand that we’re going to be able to put the resources in place, the
interventions are going to be effective and successful. And if you take those through each of the steps of
your planning stage, we believe that the program will be much better and outcomes framework, I think many
of you are familiar with that, beginning with the end in mind.
If we really know what we’re on about and what those youngsters need, we’re going to put the resources
out there, we’re going to have the right methodology and the right approach. We’re going to have the right
intervention. We’re going to be able to develop the right programs. And if we do that, we’re not going to be
in a situation where we have resources available, a vague idea of what we think that youngsters need
without much evidential base or data and let’s go for it.
The other thing is that you can’t do this sort of work alone. You don’t have to be in a school like Doveton to
realise that you don’t – that you can’t do it alone. Your school can be running very, very well in an affluent
community and so on but you need people to come in. When we’re talking about developing an early
childhood framework, it’s going to be based on personalised learning for youngsters and with families.
What we did very early on in the piece or what I did very early on in the piece, is bring together the eight or
nine key stakeholders who provide services to families in Doveton and we worked together. And what
we’ve done is develop an early childhood outcomes framework from birth through to age 8 and we’ve got it
in those five broad areas. Relates very closely to VCAM, it relates very closely to what the research is
telling us, but this is what the Doveton community has come up with in those areas, for children, for families,
for the services and the staff that we’re going to have there.
And taking that further, if we just look at the outcome focus for children and let’s unpack it. There are a
number of objectives there and there are a number of outcome indicators. That’s where we want to end up.
Each of those outcome indicators are related to the Victorian Child and Adolescent Monitoring indicators.
And if you start looking through them, a lot of them are traditionally what we’re not responsible for in
schools. So for example, if we’re going to serve the needs of youngsters in Doveton over an extended
period of time, if we’re going to have individual learning plans for them, it’s just not about literacy and
numeracy. We have to be able to look after their nutrition, their physical health, their mental health, their
social health, their dental health. And again, a lot of people are saying that shouldn’t be the responsibility of
schools. The research is telling us that as professionals in an educational system, learning doesn’t begin at
prep. And in fact, if we don’t look after the learning, pre-prep, all of the issues and problems that we have
with youngsters and their inability through no fault of their own to reach their potential, doesn’t occur. And
that something we’ve been on and on about for as long as I’ve been in education and longer.
If you have those outcome indicators and you have those objectives, then you need to put in place
strategies that you’re going to use. They’re just some strategies around children. They’re the strategies
that will be implemented in the Doveton Learning Centre, in partnership with eight or 10 other agencies who
will be on site, working with us in an integrated way, developing plans not only for personalised plans, not
only for the child but for the family. The stage we’ve got up to now is the developing of the actions to meet
the strategies, the process indicators, so that we can monitor, sometimes on a monthly basis, sometimes
half-yearly, sometimes annually. If they’re the intended outcomes we’ve got for a group of children and
their families, how are we going? If you go back to the Project Logic, the if-then, beginning with the end in
mind, as it relates to individual kids and families, those process indicators are really important for us. Hold,
stop there.
I think none of you would disagree that what we’re really on about is ensuring that what happens in
classrooms, every week, every day is going to be something that is significant and real and relevant to kids
and that we’re on the improvement journey all of the time. What we’re saying in the Doveton Learning
Centre and this is a project for a decade with Colman Foundation not only interested in helping on an
annual basis, youngsters in a highly disadvantaged area. They’re interested in changing social policy and
the tens of millions of dollars they have committed to the project. They’re putting the money where their
mouth is.
But the other thing that we’re on about with developing personalised learning in that very, very broad
context that we’re working in, is that the challenge for us is to work in very different ways with people that
we’re ultimately responsible to and accountable for. And what we need to be able to do is meet those
needs and meet them successfully. The argument is and the data tells us, that what’s been happening in
schools, again through no real fault of the school, I think it’s the schools – I think and/or the system, it’s
understanding data and research that we haven’t had, that we haven’t been reaching those families at risk.
One of the big debates in Doveton at the moment is that you have such a small number of people/families
assessing those services that are there, we have to look at the service and access points that we give
them. My argument in that discussion is that there are no hard-to-reach families. What we have to be able
to do as professionals, whether in the allied health service, whether we’re in education, is change the way
that we do things, so that those families feel comfortable and have confidence and respect in what we’re
going to do. And until we start changing the way that we think about hard – at risk or hard-to-reach, nothing
much is going to happen. Bruce Armstrong who’s the head of the Bastow Institute for Leadership sent me
this sometime ago and I like to end up the session with that, “Learning never stops.”
I’m going to end it there. It’s a bit over. We need to go to the next session. I don’t know whether that’s met
your needs, you’re not going to go away with a pro forma that you can take into a staff meeting or a team
meeting about what this might be. I think where we’re up to with birth to age 8, that first stage of schooling.
It is very, very new work. What we need to be able to do is challenge ourselves to take it on. We need to
develop common understandings and common language about it. Doveton Learning Centre is not going to
have it right from January 2012, we’re going to be working towards it. We’ve given ourselves two years to
get there and as I’ve said, five months in, that’s where we’re currently sitting.
Is there any general statement/question/point of clarification people want to make now?
Question: Is the design, the actual school design finalised or not?
Bretton New: Yes and it’s quite different from schools, as you would know them. The early childhood centre, which is the
largest building, has actually been designed about relationships. So it’s a design that flows through. There
are a lot of private parent places and collective parent places. The design itself is on learning houses, there
is the prep learning house 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. The interesting thing with the prep learning house, the 1/2
learning house, slap-bang in the middle of them in a very prominent position is the parent space and we will
be encouraging as many parents as we possibly can to stay within the learning house for as long a time as
they want to. As I move through the school, the place of parents and community in the learning house will
become peripheral too. But if we’re going to be true to what we know and understand with the research that
is coming through, it is absolutely essential that our design brings children, parents and community together
in the learning journey. It’s going to be something that staff – no staff rooms, for example. There’s going to
be challenges for the people who are coming in to work within that space that we’re developing. But I
believe strategically there is a great professional learning program that’s going to train up parents, it’s going
to train up community members but importantly it’ll train up staff to be able to operate and operate
effectively there. Thank you for listening.
Close: For more information about the topics discussed in this podcast, please visit the Department of Education
and Early Childhood Development’s website, www.education.vic.gov.au
