The Central Theme: Agency​

 

I want to say something about why I think all of this matters. About where we are, and what ASPA believes, and what I genuinely hope we can do together. The theme of this summit is Agency for Equity and Excellence: Shaping Policy through Partnership.

Every word of that is deliberate.

 

Agency. Not just consultation. Not being heard after the decision has already been made. Genuine agency. The capacity to be present and constructively influential when the decisions that shape our schools and our students are actually being designed. That is what we are here for. And it starts from a simple premise.

 

The school leaders in this room are not spectators in the national education conversation. You are its most experienced practitioners. You lead schools doing remarkable things, often under significant pressure, in communities of every kind across this country. You understand, from the inside, what it takes to create the conditions in which young people genuinely flourish. That expertise needs to be in the room when policy is made. In the room, from the beginning.

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None of this is a criticism of those who work in policy and government. The professionals in those roles bring deep expertise, hard-won experience, and formal preparation for work that is genuinely complex. Navigating intergovernmental architecture, managing competing priorities across complex systems, and designing policy that must hold across vastly different contexts is demanding and skilled work. We respect that, and we acknowledge the genuine efforts that are being made to create space for the profession at the table.

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What we are proposing is not that school leaders replace that expertise, but that we develop our own complementary capabilities more deliberately. The policy arena, like the school, is a system that must be designed amidst complexity, and the profession that understands complexity from the inside has something distinct to contribute to that design. Our task is to build the knowledge, the language, and the structures that allow us to do so effectively and consistently, not just when we are invited in, but as a matter of standing professional practice.

 

What the Evidence Tells Us About Students

 

Australia has a clear aspiration for its young people. The Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration, now embedded in the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement 2025–2034, commits us to two goals: that our education system promotes equity and excellence, and that every young Australian becomes a confident, creative, and successful lifelong learner. Those are fine goals. They are also goals we have not yet met.

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Across national measures, the achievement gap between students from well-resourced communities and those from disadvantaged backgrounds continues to widen. Students from low-SES families, from regional and remote communities, and First Nations students are not achieving at the levels they deserve. Not because of any deficit in their capacity. Because the system has not yet built the conditions they are entitled to. These are not abstract trends. They are young people. They are in the schools represented in this room. They deserve better from us.

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Then there is the question of attendance and engagement. We know that too many students are not attending school regularly. But let us be honest with ourselves: attendance is not the same as engagement. A student can be in a seat and be entirely absent from learning. What we are ultimately seeking is not compliance. It is genuine participation by young people who understand that their education is theirs, and who are active partners in designing it. ​That means we have to ask harder questions. Not just how do we get young people through the gate, but how do we build schools and systems in which they genuinely want to be. Schools in which they have a voice in their own learning, in which their aspirations are known and taken seriously, and in which they see themselves as agents of their own futures, not just recipients of ours.​ At the same time, our understanding of what it means to flourish at school is broadening. Academic achievement matters deeply. Nobody here is suggesting otherwise. But wellbeing, a genuine sense of belonging, mental health, and the development of real agency are increasingly understood both as outcomes in their own right and as preconditions for learning.

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The work being done through Big Picture Learning, the Melbourne Metrics, the SACE Board’s We Are More project, and our own Next Generation Learning and Entrepreneurial Schools project reflects a growing recognition across the sector that the full range of what young people develop at school needs to be acknowledged and valued.​ Our secondary schools are already doing much of this work. This summit is an opportunity to ask how we support it at scale, and what that requires from systems as well as from schools.

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And then there is artificial intelligence. Atlassian, the Australian software company that has become one of the most recognised technology firms in the world, cut around 1,600 roles this month, roughly 10 per cent of its global workforce, including 600 jobs here at home. The stated reason: adapting to an AI era that is reshaping the skills industries need and the number of people required to do certain kinds of work. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes was direct. It would be, he said, disingenuous to pretend that AI does not change the mix of skills required or the number of roles needed in certain areas. 

 

Atlassian is not an isolated case. The restructuring of industries in response to AI is already well underway, and it might be accelerating. The question for us is not whether this is happening. It is whether our curriculum, our pedagogy, our assessment frameworks, our administrative systems, our accreditation structures, and our schooling models themselves are responding with sufficient urgency to prepare young people for the world that is being built around them right now.

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AI tools are already in our classrooms. The questions they raise, about academic integrity, about what knowledge and capability will genuinely matter, about equitable access across every kind of school and community, are not questions we can leave to technologists or to policy processes disconnected from practice. They are educational questions. They require educational answers. And school leaders need to be central to shaping them.

 

What We Know About the Workforce​​

 

Teachers and school leaders are the single greatest in-school influence on student outcomes. That is not a platitude. It is what the evidence consistently shows. And the same evidence shows us, with clarity and consistency now, that we are not caring adequately for that workforce. School leaders are working hours that substantially exceed the OECD average. Significant proportions are seriously considering leaving their current role. Rates of anxiety and depression among school leaders substantially exceed those in the general population. Far too many report exposure to offensive behaviour in the course of their work.

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Three independent evidence sources have now reached the same conclusion: TALIS 2024, the AITSL Australian Teacher Workforce Data, and fifteen consecutive years of the ACU Principal Health and Wellbeing Survey. Three organisations, different methodologies, different populations. The same picture. The question that concerns me most is not whether we know this. We do. The question is whether we absorb this data into our annual reporting cycle and gradually, without ever quite deciding to, begin to accept these conditions as the new normal. We cannot allow that to happen.

 

This is not only a wellbeing issue, as serious as that is. It is a system sustainability issue. We are asking more of people, with less support, against a backdrop of expectations that keep expanding. The pipeline of future leaders reflects that reality. And the young people in our schools deserve leaders who have the capacity, and the conditions, to lead well. There are genuine reasons for resolve rather than resignation.

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South Australia has enacted landmark legislation establishing a new national benchmark for school community safety. The Australian Professional Standard for Principals is now due for its first comprehensive review since 2011. And the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement makes workforce wellbeing and sustainability an explicit national commitment. These are real opportunities. But they will only translate into meaningful change if the profession is actively shaping their design and implementation, not simply receiving the results.

 

The Architecture of the System​

 

The Better and Fairer Schools Agreement is the most significant national education funding and reform commitment in a generation. The test is not the Agreement itself. The test is what it delivers in practice, in schools. I want to offer one example of what getting the design right can look like.

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The Thriving Kids initiative is a joint Commonwealth-state commitment, backed by $4 billion, to support children aged eight and under with developmental delay and autism with low to moderate support needs. It is a health and disability initiative, sitting outside the NDIS. But what it demonstrates is instructive. It was co-designed through a genuine partnership process, led by an expert advisory group that brought together paediatricians, disability specialists, researchers, educators, practitioners, and First Nations voices, and some contributors from our sector are in this room. The result is a model that promises to be locally flexible, evidence-informed, and built around the settings where children actually live, learn, and play.​ That quality of cross-portfolio, practitioner-informed co-design is not the standard experience in secondary education. It should be.

 

The question worth asking is: what would it take to bring that same approach to the complex challenges facing secondary schooling? Genuine design partnership at the beginning. At the same time, the national education architecture itself is in active motion. The design of the proposed National Teaching and Learning Commission, which would bring together ACARA, AITSL, AERO, and Education Services Australia into a single structure, is underway. The working group presented its proposal to Ministers in February this year. If Ministers act, the architecture will be largely set for a decade or more.

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These are not abstract questions of the machinery of government. They will determine what the real priorities are and whether the voices of people in this room are genuinely present when the decisions that follow are made.

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The National Principals’ Reference Group now has representation on the working group shaping the Commission’s design. Our ANU research partnership is examining what genuine system leadership looks like for school leaders in practice. That is constructive agency in action. And it is the model we want to extend.

 

A Call to Work Together​

 

Everyone in this room is here because they care about young people. Genuinely. That is the common ground. But we do not always agree on how best to serve them. We bring different experiences and contexts, different histories and traditions, different systems and cultures, and sometimes genuinely different views about what the evidence demands. That is something we should acknowledge openly rather than smooth over.

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In schools, we tell young people there are no stupid questions. We tell them that asking, even when you are unsure, is how you learn. We tell them that making mistakes, and being honest about them, is part of how we get better. It is not a sign of weakness. It is the thing that actually moves us forward. I believe those principles apply to us just as much as they apply to our students. We do not always get it right. The history of education reform in Australia includes much that has not worked as intended, investments that have not landed as planned, and consultations that have fallen well short of genuine partnership. There is no benefit in pretending otherwise. But there is enormous benefit in bringing our differences into the open. In working through the difficult questions together, honestly, without retreating to entrenched positions. In genuinely asking what the evidence demands, and what our young people deserve, and being willing to be changed by the conversation.

 

That is the spirit in which ASPA convenes this summit. Not with a fixed position to defend. Not with all the answers. But with a genuine conviction that the best outcomes are reached together, and that the profession has a necessary, earned, and essential role in the work of shaping them.

 

Closing: The Mparntwe Aspiration​

 

The Mparntwe Education Declaration asks that Australian schooling promote equity and excellence, and that every young Australian become a confident, creative, and successful lifelong learner. I believe we can get there. Not because the challenges are not real. They are. The data we will work through over the next two days is honest rather than comfortable. But because the people in this room represent something of genuine substance. You lead schools, organisations and systems that are changing the lives of young people, every day. You carry essential knowledge, experience, and commitment.

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The Mparntwe goals are not a distant aspiration. They are the measure against which we should hold ourselves accountable. And this summit is our contribution to the work of meeting them.

 

I hope you find the next two days challenging, generative, and genuinely worthwhile. I hope the conversations at your tables are honest ones. And I hope you leave here not just with ideas, but with a renewed sense of what becomes possible when we commit to doing this together.

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