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The teacher shortage crisis is big news in education, with schools around Australia struggling to find qualified teachers. Fleur Johnston has extensive experience advising governments and not-for-profit organisations, including education, on workforce management and provides her unique insights into some of the issues contributing to, and trying to address, teacher workforce issues.
Kolber’s Corner – Steven Kolber talks about creating yoru own personal reconcilliation plant.
Ideology in Education – Tom Mahoney prepares for the ‘three minute thesis’ competition.
Education in the News – Cameron discusses recent news stories about independent school funding, and a study that shows students do homework more willingly for attractive teachers!
- Private school principal pay tops $1m, big bonuses collected
- Students are more willing to do homework when they view their teacher as attractive
Timecodes:
00:00 Opening Credits
01:31 Intro
03:06 Kolber’s Corner
09:12 Ideology in Education
15:14 Education in the News
30:30 Feature Introduction
33:15 Interview – Fleur Johnston
01:31:29 Patron Shout-Outs
Read More for transcripts.
Feature Interview Transcript (unedited, prepared by Otter.Ai)
Click here for interactive transcript.
Cameron Malcher
Joining me now is Fleur Johnson, the founder and CEO of people bench Flo, welcome to the podcast.
Fleur Johnston
Thanks, Cameron. Great to be here.
Cameron Malcher
Before we get into some of the work you’ve been doing in the field of education, can we start with a little bit about your background and how you came to found people bench and indeed what people bench is?
Fleur Johnston
Sure. Well, how I came to found people bench really came from that professional background. So my backgrounds in organizational and workplace psych, I spent the best part of the first two decades of my career not quite two decades in public administration, I started in central government and Queensland and department premium cabinet. And that was just such an amazing opportunity in terms of a place to start a career for someone who ultimately ended up being really interested in how we make policy decisions and governance decisions around how we impact the community. So yeah, I started in that kind of a landscape and had the privilege in the early 2000s, then of taking the workload done inside of government on large HR and workforce transformation agendas. That led me to do some work in the UK, early 2000s, global nursing supply crisis was an issue of real challenge at the time, and found myself working on some really interesting projects out of big hospitals in the UK, where, you know, solving the problems actually took a global perspective. So in that case, we were working with international marketing agencies out of the US like TMP, and we were trying to deal with local issues to do with nursing in the UK. And some of the solution involved are the expat nurses who had backpacks on them had different attitudes to the work that they were bringing in, in Dublin of all places. So that was a really interesting time, and led me back to Australia and 11 years ago, I co founded an advisory practice, and that business exclusively serve not for profits and government agencies. I guess it continued that thread in my career, or I’ve always been interested in how we look at the adults who work in these amazing industries, that impact in the community. And so that business very early on, started doing lots of work with K 12 schools. And I think in my public sector career, I’d worked with most agencies, but not with K 12. Education, worked with tertiary but not K 12. And at the same time, Cameron, my mom was a teacher. She initially was a secondary school teacher and did post grad qualifications in early childhood, she had a little moment for a few years experimenting with entrepreneurialism and got involved in early childhood environments and jump straight out of that back into public education. Right. And I, I’ve watched mom leave the sector fried and too early. And I don’t think that I really, at that time, I still didn’t have insight into just how different the K to 12 sector and the education sector was to some of those other high emotional labor, high complexity, human centered industries that I did have a lot of experience in. So you know, that kind of what’s going on. And then as the practice started to evolve, and we’re doing more work with K 12, schools, we really started to have an opportunity, as we were asked to get involved in Workforce Strategy conversations, driven by the pain systems of schools were feeling around difficult to attract difficult to retain real challenges in psychological well being. And we can see that reflected in organizational data around things like psychological injury claims. And so through that HR and workforce lens, again, I was fascinated to start to find some of the key differences in education and, and they really centered around the third tools, resources, research that facts and education didn’t have, compared to the things that folks in other sectors who are in positions of leadership and policy decision making do. And so it was really a process of discovering, like, ultimately, from my perspective, is something of a gross inequity. You know, we’re doing big expensive consulting projects. And in fact, schools of all sizes, and of all resource levels, really deserve to have their eyes on data, access to tools, and professional learning for leaders at all levels, to be able to do evidence, informed workforce thinking long range thinking about how we make schools, great places to work. So yeah, that’s a long rambling intro, Cameron, but it’s been quite a journey.
Cameron Malcher
It sounds like it. But it sounds like we’re having a conversation with you now at about Workforce Strategy at a time when we’re facing a, you know, national teacher shortage crisis and looking at the levers that have led to that both in policy and other areas of society. I think that’s one of things I’m excited To touch on in the course of this conversation, but before we do, you mentioned that you came to this from a background in Organizational Psychology. And I’m curious to know how you actually would define Organizational Psychology and explained it to somebody who’s never really heard of it or familiar with the field.
Fleur Johnston
Yeah, I thought you might ask me something. Maybe I should go back to my undergrad textbooks and go and find some kind of definition. So, you know, there are a number of branches in psychology. And I feel like many professors might be listening to me now, they might want to switch their ears off for a second. But very simply, when we’re talking about workplace psychology, or organizational psychology, we’re interested in how groups of adults come together, and do the work that they have defined as necessary or important. And in my career, and my interest, I’ve always been interested in those industries or organizations that have community impact. So Organizational Psychology draws on lots of different branches of research. But primarily, we’re interested in how adults come together, and work on the process of work together to achieve an outcome. So if you layer that in with then the practice around HR, and HR, in itself is an interesting thing to ask me about definitions on there. I often recall the story of an amazing leader who was in TAFE, colleges across Queensland was spent a lot of time in small aircrafts doing big transformation projects together. I remember having a conversation with her around HR, and how it is that HR in the K 12 sector and in tertiary at that time, very often seem very tactical and operational, very heavily industrial, were already sort of 20 plus years ago, the evolution in the discussion around HR was really starting to become much more strategic. It was starting to be much more centered on how do we influence the experience of work, so that our workplaces become desirable places to show up every day and put all their effort and energy into. And so I think, you know, when we think about organizational psychology, we think about strategic HR. So not that keep me out of jail, keep me off the front page HR. But how do I create a sustainable organization where adults show up and contribute their best for the outcomes of this business, or this enterprise, or in the case of a school, this community, that kind of distinction was really emerging, you know, well, more than a decade ago and other community impact sectors and, and I think that’s the area that education has been slow to move forward on. And if that’s the area, that is an exciting time now COVID has exacerbated a number of things that existed pre COVID in the sector. And so we now have this wonderful rallying of lots of different thoughts and ideas and people pulling in the direction to try and improve what it’s like to work in schools.
Cameron Malcher
Well, as you said, you know, you said that you discovered the K to 12 had a bit of a different approach or culture of HR management. And you know, having spent nearly 20 years myself working in and around, primarily state education systems, it feels like the employee management is a very, I don’t want to say fractured, but maybe a very dissociated thing where there’s there’s not a clear line of sight from the teacher in the classroom all the way through to the state of US policy makers regarding employment. How does How do you perceive particularly large state systems from that perspective, compared to other large, particularly nonprofit organizations?
Fleur Johnston
Yeah. Well, you asked me earlier, you know, how it is the people bench came to be we actually started as a pro bono research project, working with about 60 schools in rural regional and remote Queensland. And we were interested in curious in the question around what makes a high impact teaching workforce, because we’ve been doing classic Workforce Strategy conversations. And you know, we’d go and pull all the data out of their HR system, and we could tell them that at 8% teacher turnover, but then we went to do the literature reviews, we actually really found there was quite an absence of large scale quantitative research into the impact of something as simple but complex as turnover. Being able to find the significant researcher and how that impacts outcomes in schools was alarming to us. And so really, what we determined with those 60 schools was, you know, if not us, then who and if not now, then when, and since that time, have then looked to amazing academics as well as practitioners in the field to keep working with us to build some of the benchmarks that are missing. The link back to your question about Paula See and large scale in government, you know, the idea for people bench and Senate to build out these benchmarks. And that’s where part of the name comes from, so that we can improve our decision making really came off the back again, I’ve 20 years of evolution in public administration here in Queensland. I remember again, that long ago, particular premier walking into a room of directors general and secretaries, Director generals and secretaries. And asking the questions, you know, I just want to know how many public servants I’ve got working for me, and what impact they’re having in the community. And so the answer around the table was really telling you Premier, because we’re all in different payroll systems. And we’re all you know, that the leftist systemic reasons why we couldn’t. And there were amazing leaders in the sector at the time as well. And with that question, then started this real process of kind of knocking away some of the excuses and starting to pull that data together. And, you know, having worked in public administration for some time, and then out of it for some time, my experience is that there’s enormous intent to try and get this stuff, right. But there are some structural barriers, including things like legislation around information sharing. And I think we’re reaching this time where being much more discerning about when information serving is critical to serve our communities and the policies that we need to make take direction on. And when in fact, it’s appropriate for us to be exercising caution around aggregation and sharing of data as has become really relevant. So the teacher workforce data, progress that’s being made, there are some strengths to it, there’s always challenges in data that has lag effects. So some that data takes a long time to collect and a long time to pull through. What matters more to me, and to us as a practice is what do we do with the data? So how do we take the data about our workforce, and whether that’s things like, you know, teacher profile, how big the workforce is, what types of flexible arrangements we might have, whether or not the workforce is diverse and inclusive and reflects the communities we serve all of those sorts of questions. And building on that with data around the health and well being of our workforce, the culture and climate of our schools, being able to see that stuff is a first step. But actually knowing what to do with it to inform policy or practice in our schools is the next missing piece. And that really, is the work that we’ve ended up doing with the technology that we’ve built.
Cameron Malcher
Well, that sort of two questions come to mind in response to that. The first one regarding the notion of that lack of clear data and that lack of quantitative information. You know, when we talk about the teaching workforce, one figure that often gets thrown around is that, you know, 50% of teachers quit the profession in the first five years. But then data sources or actual, the actual ability to demonstrate that turnover is a bit harder to prove, in your work with systems and large data sets. What have you seen either in support of that often accepted claim or potentially in dispute? Other?
Fleur Johnston
Yeah. Well, my answer to that one usually is it depends whose paper you read. Yes. And it also depends on the question, right, so the data we look at is only relevant insofar as it is specific to the question that I’ve asked. And it’s also, I think, important to look at that data in context of broader trends outside of sector. So you know, I was on calls this morning with folks that sit in professional services organizations outside of education, they serve education, but their lawyers and their accountants and their, and they currently have their heads in their hands on the same issue. Most of our early grads are gone in the first five years. So you know, they’re phenomenon around changing generational attitudes to the tenure or time that we would stay in a job or in a career that occur around some of this data as well. So teasing out how much of the turnover has to do with factors, negative factors factors, where folks are leaving the sector, although they would like to stay, and how much of it in actual fact, is just contemporary patterns of work. So I think trying to get underneath those sorts of questions actually are more useful than just the gross number around teacher turnover. And again, in practice, what does that mean for this particular school in this particular community? You know, again, if we go into clinical environments in healthcare settings, for example, we might watch no As in turnover, and know that in an ER department, we start to really have our flags up when it gets to a certain number. But in a different environment might not matter at all to clinical. So for the research to continue to progress, and for the data sets to be used large enough to do sensitive analysis and used to answer more sophisticated questions, I think that’s the next stage of maturity for us all as a sector to get to. And so yeah, the continuing work of researchers around whether or not these things have an impact is first important. And then secondly, how do we take the data and the benchmarks and include it in our strategic planning, and our school improvement processes, so that the wise humans living in a unique community can take that information and take that research and combine it with their local wisdom, and then make better decisions about what they need to do with their workforce in their school?
Cameron Malcher
It’s funny, you know, just what you’re saying about how potentially widespread that high turnover issue is, you know, in education, especially in my work in high school, almost exclusively now. And a couple of things that we often hear coming down the line about preparing students for life outside of school is the idea that, you know, the concept of a lifelong career is is disappearing, that people will have, you know, a dozen or more jobs for extended periods during their life. And I suppose the unintended consequence of that, of course, is that there’ll be a lot of turnover in a lot of industries as people are jumping from job to job. So that idea that that’s just part of the normal nature of work. But then I suppose the other the other question that I had arising out of your observation about the lack of large data sets or quantitative research in public sector, particularly, is when I when I think about other organizations I’ve worked for, and when I think about other HR practices that might help inform some of that meaningful data, things like for example, you know, exit interviews, when a staff member leaves, particularly a long term employee, or even having a direct relationship with somebody in a sort of HR or policy position, which in schools, you know, there’s a bit of an odd relationship between a teacher in a school and their employer of particularly the state system, whether the principle is kind of the main vehicle of communication. So, you know, whether it’s a case that principals are expected to do more than they are doing, or, as he’s probably my observation, that these processes just don’t exist. Like, I’ve never, I’ve never heard of a teacher at any school actually having an exit interview after even after a 30 year career in education. And so the question that I have to put you is, do you have a sense of why education or why the public sector is so different in that regard? You know, I mean, if I was to be, you know, forgive me if I sound a little bit cynical, but it would often suggest that it’s primarily a budgetary issue. You know, it’s a large cost to actually have people doing that work. But are there assumptions about the operation of education that are just different to other organizations? Like, why don’t we have a history of gathering that data and doing that research?
Fleur Johnston
Yeah, it’s a question I constantly ask even doing this work for a long time. Now. You know, why, why doesn’t this exist? How I How have we found ourselves in this really interesting place? To sort of complete that story about being on the light aircrafts? You know, the types of HR people, I guess, particularly in public education, if we ask that question, you know, why is it that it really is the keep me out of jail and off the front page of the paper HR that has persisted in education, and no real growth in the how do I sustain nourish and contemporize these organizations as workplaces? I mean, the simple answer is because when my resources are scarce, which 1am I going to pick, if I can only have one, which 1am I going to pick? And so, you know, operating from a perspective of compliance and regulation, and safety and security, transparency on public funds, absolutely. The first place we have to go to is out of out of jail, you know, making sure we’re compliant logically is where we go. I think the the other feature in particular in public education with centralization of corporate resources, and obviously, that’s about efficiency again, and being able to use scale to be able to the theory is to be able to deploy as much of our resourcing close to the student where we would want it. It’s almost though that we have found ourselves at this point now where by taking that position, the job design for senior leaders in schools and we hear this narrative and we say this in the qualitative research through the 80s, the role of principle becomes almost impossible to do. So if we see this through an organization on a job design lens, the organization at a school in public sector particularly exists without most of the corporate functions that other organizations have. And therefore, by necessity, although senior leader in public school has some support from head office, around core corporate functions, really, they are expected to be across a very broad range of corporate functions. Now, if if we accept the proposal that the principal and the school and I know this is contentious proposal, but that the letter and a school is actually the leader of learning, and is the leader of that community, week kind of have this void, then imagining that the folks in head office even with Best of intention, and most resourcing we can give them could possibly do the things which are much closer in other organizations to the frontline. So the investment in folks who have HR and strategic HR, knowledge about organizational redesign, Job redesign, all of those sorts of capabilities, we have kind of created this void, where it’s, it’s certainly the job of many people and state governments across the country are investing heavily in trying to redesign the model of schooling clearly vary and redesign the job families and role types that exist in schools. But as we know, the change actually has to be led by and in the school. So I think over the next decade or so, we’ll see this progress in bringing the policy and intent out of central functions. I’ll be curious to watch how we then actually create capability and capacity uplift at the school level for these more complex workforce changes that other sectors have needed to go through over the last 10 or 20 years. And at its simplest, it looks like some of those higher to retire, HR type steps, you know. And we’ve seen that in different experiments around independent state schools in the country, and what does it mean for the way we do recruitment? How do we onboard? And if we’re out of a CBD, what does onboarding look like for the whole family, not just for the person that we recruited to the school, because we know how the whole family is traveling is material to whether an employee can in fact, stay with an organization for very long? The whole way through to how does someone leave? And do we have an exit discussion with them? Or not? Can we learn from that, and have we built those learning loops into our organization?
Cameron Malcher
I mean, that idea of onboarding, whether you call it orientation, or there’s many different names that it goes by, but that’s another one of those things that’s very much left to individual schools, even when they’re part of a large system. And, and I don’t think I’ve ever worked in a school, where the teacher induction program wasn’t an ongoing work in progress, waiting to be deployed. I don’t think I’ve ever worked in a school where it was at a stage of deployment even after years. And I’m wondering, have you have you encountered systems or schools that actually had a handle on that? Effectively, you talked at the beginning about how your work focuses very much on organizational psychology. So we focused very much on making workplaces, a place that people want to turn up and do their best. And it feels like those induction processes are very important to helping establish that culture. Have you ever seen a school or system that has that really down pat, and working effectively to the benefit of both staff and students? And what did it look like? And I suppose perhaps even more importantly, how did they get there?
Fleur Johnston
Yeah, so multiple paths to that question. I think my answer is yes, I have absolutely seen systems or schools make progress on this, and probably unsurprising that I think that progress is, you know, tackling these issues kind of springs up where the pain is greatest. So rural and regional Australia for some time, well before the pandemic, have been looking at all the ways they can possibly attract, retain, and and be more successful than perhaps they have been in the past. Welcoming folks into the school and having them really be able to be most impactful in their roles and to do that over a sustained period of time. How did they get there? It was systemic intention. So it was taking things like strategic planning processes, and recognizing that we can’t just drop from strategic planning to tactic and operations. What we tend to do in K 12 is go from our big ambition. So good strategic pillars to resource planning, get me a maths teacher tomorrow quick, or just get me a warm body to be with this group of kids. Increasingly, yeah, yeah. And you know, in Australia, we comparatively internationally are still very fortunate we did do work in the US. And you know, there are parts of the US that have had to call the military in to supervise, because it’s that hard to find adults to show up. Now, that’s a whole other world on the other side of the world, but much closer to home, the pressure and the pressure to ask different questions. We’ve seen a trend in the resource in types in schools over the last number of years, where in fact, we have fewer teachers and more of the different types of roles that might sit around teaching roles in a school. So I think, you know, even the programs of work that are occurring nationally on workforce data, still are very, very teacher data heavy, when we actually look at all of the jobs that make up a school, and then all of the things which make that school operate. Well, I think one of the things we will continue to see over the next number of years is a deeper questioning of well, what are those new and emerging jobs in schools? And then how do we support the amazing adults who come into them? Firstly, to recruit them honestly, about what the job really is when they come in? And then secondly, to support them with the right professional learning around both technical as well as personal professional skills, so that they can thrive in those jobs. And yeah, so I think that, you know, continued transformation of the sector, where it’s been pretty stable in terms of the types of jobs that exist in a school. I think that, you know, continuing evolution of technology, the shifting expectations of communities, and students of what, in fact, does get done in the school. And then the creativity of the awesome educators who are in schools reimagining what this might look like, so that the jobs are not just doable, but exciting, and much, you know, really enable us to have work in schools, which is aligned to the purpose and values of those humans that self select into this industry. You know, really being able to address those sorts of questions and do that new kind of transformation work, which is in itself a whole skill set. I think that’s this thing that we’re seeing emerging organically at the moment in which we’ll see become much more structured as we go forward and borrow ideas from other sectors that have already had to transform themselves.
Cameron Malcher
Well, you know, on that topic, you know, when you say that these success stories were systemic in nature, like what? Where was the? I don’t know how to describe it, I suppose. Where was the point of responsibility? Or point? Where was the originating point for the action within the system? Because when you say systemic, we could start with classroom teacher all the way up to Secretary or, you know, whatever external person is in charge of policy. So when you say it was systemic, where exactly was the locus of responsibility for making that change? Was it something that came in from outside the school? Or was it a school that found the resources to do it internally? Primarily?
Fleur Johnston
No. So when I say systemic, I mean, multiple schools. So in a regional context, a region that’s really feeling the pain of not being able to attract and retain, then taking what they were doing in strategic planning, and saying, Okay, if we are to realize this vision for holistic education, and you know, optimal outcomes for our kids and communities, then actually the adults are going to be important and having subordinate strategy, so not strategic plan, and then tactics and operations. But a middle layer of strategy, which is exclusively about workforce. 80% of the cost of running a school is the adults who show up every day. So what is our long range plan for making this a sustainable model of resourcing? And so at first, that starts as a convert started as a conversation about attraction and retention. And then once we were looking at benchmarks, we could see that, in fact, some of those schools that felt like they had a really, really horrendous problem with retention. You know, it wasn’t super awesome, but it was no worse than other schools who are like them. And I think that that’s been tricky in education. It’s hard when we are just working with a national data set, for example, to mean much in my local context, if I can’t put some more nuance to that. So when those schools started to benchmark themselves to other rural and regional schools that serve communities of similar socio economic demographic, and were similar size to them, they really do then could discern which schools are really struggling, and which ones are actually pretty bang average for school of this size and type serving a community of this type. And from there, they then knew whether to invest their energy, so much in the angst around retention, or whether they actually needed to. Well, in that case, they were actually spending a lot of money on recruitment consultants, and campaigning for their region. And in doing that, they were sinking a whole heap of money on something they weren’t going to be able to shift. So, you know, the supply crisis, for example, it’s one of the things which then starts to really shift what we need to have in our workforce strategy. We can’t magic up more teachers, we can over the long horizon try to boost the numbers of folks going into undergraduate qualifications. But we all know that the organic enrollments into those have been declining for some time. We can try to produce more graduates. But if we look then at our ability to retain them, and we can see honestly, that we are only going to retain them for a certain period of time, then our efforts starts to become better invested in looking at some of the redesign work. So the short version of this is they started out thinking it was about attraction and retention. And they have maintained their focus on those things. But they’ve now moved to another level of maturity, rethinking about the model of how schooling gets delivered, and the types of jobs that will be in those schools moving forward. And where they might find the adults that could be skilled to do those jobs. So really starting to think a little bit more creatively about what the resourcing strategy looks like over over the longer term.
Cameron Malcher
So when we think about, you know, the the broader issues of the issue, the teacher recruitment retention problem, you know, the media call it the teacher workforce crisis, I don’t know how genuine that is verse house at a hyperbolic and click Beatty a term that is, but when we talk about the major issues facing education workforce, what do you see, as I suppose the greatest challenges to overcoming the problems that we’re facing? And where are the places of greatest effect to address those?
Fleur Johnston
So there are a couple of areas from, from my perspective, and certainly through the bias of the work that I do and that our practice does. And you’ve heard me touch a number of times on the topic of organizational design, like I think, if we look at the sector right now, think about that crisis, from my perspective, we can kind of define the current crisis in two parts. The first is that things have got super tough. And we know from asking folks that work in schools, how it’s going, that it’s exceptionally difficult. And we can see that in the longitudinal research, we can see it and things like the principles health and well being survey we see even in, you know, the AITSL workforce data. So there’s no question about that piece. If we approach that through the lens of overall staff well being and as behavioral scientists, we’re interested in concepts that are valid and reliable. So we are particularly interested, for example, that people mentioned the concept of resilience. can talk more about that if you’d like to head in that path, Cameron, but so the well being of the adult brains, who are involved in education, whether that’s in a classroom, in school leadership in systemic leadership, at reception in a school, all of the adults that may have a school community, how well they’re traveling, we know does have a material impact on outcomes for kids and communities. So we have and I don’t think crisis is too strong a word in that space, when we couple that with things like the declining interest to work in the sector, and the rate of turnover. So we have this leaky bucket at the moment that we’re not pouring enough into fast enough. So I don’t want to be click Beatty about it. But I don’t think it’s too dramatic to say that this is a crisis. We know that you know, the pathway to economic prosperity and all social outcomes is in fact education. And we know that all industries are dependent on education being sustainably resourced and delivering what we want for it to with our our students and communities. So that being the case, we can’t unsee this we absolutely have to take action. And in looking at the things that will make a difference, I don’t think we can be Pollyanna that wellbeing programs are the silver bullet solution and So, yes, that is absolutely a first responder crisis place we need to
Cameron Malcher
go. But we need to use a five minute massage in a meditation session.
Fleur Johnston
Yeah, please don’t give me another fruit basket. We were doing work with, again, big System schools in New South Wales in 2013 started working with the all of their principals and deputies on the issues of of so they were studying and well being program. And we started doing professional learning on this concept of resilience using our seven factor framework, developed by a psychologist out of Adelaide, by the name of Katherine McEwan, and Katherine has done beautiful work. She really did a meta analysis of all of the behavioral science research into the factors which make a difference to adults in high emotional labor, high intensity, and high discretionary effort. So we’re not talking factory workers and widgets here. We’re talking incredibly skilled adults that work in complex environments with unpredictable messy humans. So that’s health education, community services, aged care, education. So the scale is specifically developed for roles in those industries. And it looks at how we can focus for ourselves and with our colleagues in groups on the factors which can make a difference to our ability to continue to do our jobs and be impactful. In spite of the change and challenge, we want to be able to bounce back in spite of the inevitable change and challenging and work. And so that framework is fabulous. And we’ve been working with it since 2013, with executive and senior leadership and school systems. The challenge when you start to take those ideas and scale them, again, is that there’s not enough money, there’s just not enough money, and there’s not enough time to put all the adults through the kind of professional learning that we would like to. And so even then we’re cracking man, this online learning things really got to happen. And so we made some early foray into that. But it also became evident that when we were making decisions about workforce strategy, we needed to have data at scale. So not about an individual teacher, not about someone’s performance or quality, at scale, across a whole school or across a whole system of schools, which groups of staff in which types of jobs, which stage in their career need, which types of help against a valid framework. And so that’s why we ended up building a product that does that and measures that and gives enterprise wide data on that, which is a bit different to lots of the tools that we’ve been aware of to that point, which were qualitative. And the qualitative tools do a lovely job at asking the question, what do you think stinks around here? And what would you like to see change. And it’s important to get that feedback back. But often when we’re in positions of leadership, and that can be of a very small group in a school or a whole school or a system of schools, getting big, long quantitative lists of data that makes it very hard to take action. So I think one of the things we hear a lot is we kind of we know what the issues are. teachers and other staff have told us that told us over and over and over again, the work that must be done now is the second part of the problem. So the first part of the problem is the I’m reluctantly use the term well being the fundamental underlying pieces that schools haven’t kept pace as contemporary places to work. And you asked me what I think the important pieces are that are missing. I think that they are the pieces around schooling, model redesign, and then the organizational and job redesign that goes with that. And then the ability to take the amazing humans that we have right now to involve them in the redesign of the work such that we can do it differently in the future and have a sustainable way for schooling to be delivered. And for adults to show up every day and be part of making that happen.
Cameron Malcher
Again, a slightly cynical thought in my head, but that sounds like a project much longer than a single election cycle. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and some real long term commitment and budgeting to make that happen.
Fleur Johnston
Yeah, and again, you know, without sort of being Pollyanna Cameron, other sectors that are also politically subject to the cycles of different policy. Maintain Australia, so dish line, I don’t know, I’m gonna take that back. It’s not a straight line. It’s a wiggly line, but it’s a wiggly line of progress in this space, using mechanisms which are central to the way organizations improve themselves. So the systemic improvement that gets achieved through strategy, planning, data and reporting, and not on students, so we want the connection, student data. But that avalanche of data and testing on the student side, which is the output side, we kind of have done that almost solely with not the effort that clearly has been needed and is needed going forward, on the input side, and the input, again, is those amazing adults who turn up every day to do this work. So really understanding what that adult profile looks like. And then how we can support it to be at its best is is the work to be done. And reimagining the experience of working in schools. We don’t have to start from scratch, there are processes that have been used in other messy human centered, certainly not perfect, but achieving that wiggly line forward of improvement and transformation. And, yeah, this many years. And I’m still optimistic because I can see systems making progress. And I actually think it’s a really exciting time to be part of this agenda.
Cameron Malcher
Well, I just like to really put the focus on, you know, what you said before about the importance of understanding the well being of the people on the ground doing the work, because you brought up a couple of key factors that are talked about by teachers being major contributors to workforce attrition, or, you know, intention to leave, being lack of time and simple workload for the hours available. But then also the fact that it is involving messy work involving other humans who bring a whole raft of other issues with them. And you know, those two together, the question I want to ask is, from your perspective, what do you see and what has come out of your research, as some of the major factors that we need to be aware of, or even protect against to look after the well being of teachable or to maybe frame it a slightly more negative way? What are the elements causing teachers the greatest problems in their day to day work?
Fleur Johnston
Yeah, well, again, I think you can point to the really well published reliable data sources on that, and you know, that that issue around workload and coping, you know, 92% of last year’s aides or respondents had that as the top issue, recognition and reward featured in that list, you know, classroom factors, school culture, and regulatory requirements, we’re all on that, at least, there’s some really lovely work out of UQ, Professor Andrew Carroll. And when she kind of runs hairless part of what was lovely about though this research piece, and 22 was the comparison of pre COVID and post COVID. At the top of the list, and that work defines these factors in two different buckets, if you like, one is to deal with the role in schools, where folks would tell you that, again, it’s workload administration, and then student and parent behavior that really stresses them out, and makes their work hard. But at an organizational level, actually, topics like poor management and leadership or toxic cultures. So they were the pre COVID factors. Now, post COVID, you see a bit of a shift in that and the study was 2022. So labor supply is at the top of the list. Persistent illness and absenteeism colleagues is also in that list. And interestingly, and this is my paraphrasing of the work, but all of those topics around changing service delivery models, so for example, like the move to online, and you can see a lot of the discussion in our forums around AI, for example. And as you would expect, educators first position when they approach the topic of AI tends to be how that’s going to affect the processes that happen happen in schools, how students do their work, what that might mean for marking example. We’re kind of nerdily interested in the other lens on this, we’re interested in how does AI or any other technology impact process and role design for the adults in schools? Because if we think about, again, processes like workforce planning, you know, there’s a old kind of rule of thumb framework in workforce planning, which says, when I’m trying to build my organization, I can build by or boost what I’ve already got. So I can build the humans that are already working in my school. I can buy more capability in around them and that might be in the form of supply teachers or additional resources, folks in support or allied health services. Build by and boost, how can I boost what we’re doing with our workforce with other factors? So that is exactly where things like technology, whether it’s systems and processes or whether it’s something like AI? How can that actually simplify and improve the work that we’re doing in schools? So if we think about the wellbeing piece, again, it’s not a simple answer. And the answer is definitely not just run wellbeing programs. Although professional learning and uplifting capability definitely is a piece of this equation. Some of it will be explicit learning around the concepts of resilience, for example, how can I, myself, manage my approach to my work and how I manage and maintain my own health and well being and networks of relationships and connection to my purpose and my values, that self work. And then there’s the organizational work, which sits around how we design jobs that, in fact, are doable, and design processes which recruit the right folks, support them once they’re in, and then ensure that we keep asking the question, how do we make this work more impactful and more doings more doable. So I think that whole area of organizational improvement, which fits in the area of experience design, then you’re seeing increasingly experience of the student and voice of the student in the work that’s being done in schools, bringing the lens out a little and starting to imagine what schools look like when we consider the experience of the student and the experience of staff. If we can really redesign with those two perspectives in mind, then you know, that that kind of is the holy grail. Yeah.
Cameron Malcher
So, I mean, you know, this has been a very extensive conversation about some of these big picture systemic issues, which I think I could keep going on with you for another hour or so easily. But that the question I really want to bring it down to is for the teacher in the classroom, who’s feeling overworked, who’s feeling like they’re not supported or feeling, you know, you mentioned that toxic workplace culture was a major issue identified pre COVID. When when someone’s feeling like they’re in that position, and there’s a thread to this discussion that suggests that there are large state large scale, systemic needs for change to address some of those issues. What can the individual teacher do either to contribute to improving their circumstance or even protecting themselves? That doesn’t come down effectively to just more work on top of the work they’re already doing?
Fleur Johnston
Yeah. Well, I think, first of all, you want to play your strengths, right. And one of the things we know from the data around Resilience in Education workforces? If we look at that, that seven factor scale that I referred to earlier, two of the seven factors relate to purpose, and values alignment. And we know the bodies of research around adults in workplaces, when we feel that we can live authentically and we are in alignment with a deep sense of purpose. And we feel that we can do work and do work with people who share our values, that the protective factor in that is huge. And so that’s already in play. Most people know one of the statistics that hasn’t changed very much pre or post COVID is actually the percentage who leave the profession because they weren’t they say that they weren’t well suited to the sector that sat at around 20% For a long time. So we know that hasn’t really changed. And we can see in the data that alignment with purpose and alignment with values is something which folks recruit themselves into the sector on. When we start to move around the seven factors and look at things like our ability to maintain perspective, our ability to look after our physical health, our ability to maintain our networks, they’re the areas we start to see educators get particularly challenged on. And if we accept that there are some things we can take action on and control in our work environments. And that’s true for any adult working in any industry. There are some things we can control. There are some things that we can influence. And then there are some things we just have to let go. They’re the times that drawing on our strengths and the things we’re very connected to, are actually strengths. They’re the things that can help us sustain us. But we know that if we can teach folks in schools around for example, this framework, if they can understand that there are there’s more than just purpose and values, that actually learning tools and techniques to be able to make Time perspective, be able to manage my workload and keep the size and scale of that workload in perspective, be able to maintain proactive routines around my physical health and well being, and be able to mindfully set up my relationships, whether it’s personal or professional, we know that taking a focused approach to all seven of those factors, and balancing that out when we can feel that we’ve become overly dependent on one or other of those strengths. There’s significant research more than 150 academic research papers into the use of that particular scale. And it assisting people to be able to maintain their levels of resilience. Even when tough stuff happens, their bounce back is much faster if they’re mindfully applying their own personal practice against those seven factors. So so that would be the first thing at an individual level, starting to educate yourself with some kind of a framework for keeping yourself in balance. If you can identify that you love the work and your values aligned, and then you are able to focus in on the other factors, you may in fact find that that’s enough for you to tap back in to that sense of resilience and commitment to being present still, because we actually need people to engage in the redesign conversation, we need folks in schools to acknowledge that there are parts of this that are tough, and then turn up to the discussion about how to transform it. And that obviously links into the leaders and the feedback about management and leadership and culture. We need to continue to invest in our leaders, not just in broad leadership programs, but also in some of the management concepts around strategy and planning and change and transformation. So skill sets for leaders around organizational redesign, service redesign, leading complex transformation in schools, they’re just not skill sets that many leaders have had cause to be exposed to the day to day costs of their jobs.
Cameron Malcher
I’ve heard more than one principal say that they feel like an MBA would serve them better than their educational qualifications once they reach the job,
Fleur Johnston
increasingly, so yeah. And so then we go back to systemic responsibility to really support our leaders with some of that stuff. And again, this is something we’ve seen in other sectors, we go through big periods of leadership development. And I’m not suggesting for a second that we shouldn’t maintain lots of leadership development, just that sometimes leadership development also needs a hearty management component to it. And we know from early career Principal Research and feedback that often folks get into those roles and think, holy cow, someone needs to give me the textbook on this. We know from our work when we we work with leaders on the topic of strategy and Workforce Strategy, that they’ll often come out of those sessions that are going on, I really wish I knew this stuff a few years ago. But similarly, the work around resilience, we’ve done some amazing I can think of a workshop we ran a couple of years ago, really diverse set of principles, some very early stage, some very mature experienced. And a lot of the value in those conversations comes from the deep wisdom of the principals who are in the room as much as the content that we hope to share. And, you know, the I think the real mic drop moment came when probably the most senior member of the group stood up that 15 minutes before the session actually ended and said, Look, I’ve loved this has been very valuable, but I’m off now to aqua aerobics. It was like, there was no better way she could have illustrated to the early Korean principles in the groove, just how rigid she had to be and discipline she had to be. And so I think a lot of the magic happens in those professional learning sessions, when leaders are actually sharing with one another, how they’ve organically come up with all of these strategies for maintaining a resilient posture in their roles in spite of the change and challenge and, and be able to keep tapping into the joy that comes from that strong purpose and values alignment. without it becoming martyred. And without it becoming actually the thing that depletes them. So really, again, striving for balance around those factors which support us to be able to keep showing up and doing this noble work every day.
Cameron Malcher
So for a while, this has been a very big conversation about states and national education systems and employment strategy. For anybody who wants to know more, either about the big picture or even what they can be doing as a leader in school or even a classroom teacher. Where would you recommend they start reading where’s a good source to get a handle on some of these issues? Or
Fleur Johnston
you’ve commented earlier that you know, principals So to I need an MBA, I kind of feel like that is the space that if we’re in school leadership, they’re the concepts, they’re the things that can give you a different set of perspectives on the challenges that you’re facing in a school through the lens of how do I make my school a contemporary place to work. And there’s no doubt that there’s ideas from other sectors that absolutely will not work in education. But I think the expertise and the creativity of leaders in education and their ability to take ideas from the outside and literally innovate with them, modify, adapt, introduce them into their schooling environment, thinking constantly through the lens of how do I make this an amazing place for the adults who work here in the service of the students who learn here? I think any of the resources through not just leadership, but also management and strategy lens is where I would point folks, I’m obviously going to point them to come and have a chat to us about workforce strategy, Cameron. You know, I think lots of leaders in schools perhaps feel like they don’t have much agency over the data or over the decisions about making this school different to how it is now. And while that might be true on some of the factors we’ve touched on today, ultimately, the way leaders engage with their leadership team and with their whole staff on the conversations about improvement, really does make the difference in what it feels like to work in that school. And they’re the things which influence staff perceptions of the culture and the climate, and whether or not they are supported by management and leadership. And if we want to create environments that people want to stay, then we need to constantly play that role in leadership of engaging staff and looking for the one percenters and the ideas from outside that we can bring in and adapt. They’re the they’re the things I’ve been encouraging leaders to do keep building the things that they do best keep their own learning sharp, keep deliberately exposing themselves to ideas from outside of the sector. And yeah, keep working to innovate into the future so that we can have a sustainable model of schooling.
Cameron Malcher
Okay, well, Fleur, I will make sure there is a link to your profile and the website for people bench for anybody who’d like to get in touch with you or discuss it further. Thank you for a very long and winding conversation through the many issues facing teachers employment in Australia. I hope that we get to carry on this conversation. We can do a six hour special debating the difference between leadership and management at some point in the future. But for now, thank you very much for your time.
Fleur Johnston
Thanks, Cameron. Great to talk to you