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Hello and welcome to the Teacher podcast – I’m Jo Earp. Thanks for joining me for Episode 96 of The Research Files. How do we lift education outcomes for students in regional, rural and remote schools? According to my guest it’s one of those ‘wicked’ challenges in education. Dr Phil Roberts is Professor of Curriculum Inquiry & Rural Education, and research leader for the Rural Education and Communities research group at the University of Canberra. He’s also one of the researchers involved in the Rural and Regional Education Project, which has been looking at how to lift outcomes for these students. Alongside publishing a final research report, earlier this year the project group held a big roundtable event to discuss the challenges and possible solutions, and that brought together various stakeholders, including the important voices of principals and teachers. So, we’ll be talking about some of the research findings to do with the connection between schools and communities, and staffing, and also some of the curriculum delivery, and the discussions and input from educators. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Jo Earp: Professor Phil Roberts, it's really good to have you on this episode of The Research Files. Now, we're going to be discussing K-12 rural, remote and regional education today, and specifically lifting outcomes for students in those settings. So, I thought it might be good to start off by sort of finding out a bit more about the current state of play – is this a topic that’s garnered much attention in the education research community?
Phil Roberts: Thanks, Jo, lovely to be with you. It's a topic that's been involved in a lot of educational research for the last 30 years. It's been really topical especially since the Schools in Australia report as part of the Schools Commission back in 1988, and the Human Rights Commission report in 2000. Little bit of a lull since then, and then the Halsey Review (or the Independent Review into Rural, Regional and Remote Education) in 2016/17 put it back on the agenda, and it's sort of been going back and forth for quite a while.
The focus has changed a lot over that time, though; there was a lot of focus in the early days on student performance and general poor performance in terms of school completion, retention and results back in the end of the last century, I guess you'd say, beginning of this one. Then the shift moved a lot to how do we prepare teachers and staffing. Staffing became a really huge issue – as it remains, and it has become even worse – and a little bit back now to the general issue around student levels of achievement, but a bit more of a nuanced approach nowadays.
And, of course, we recently had a few years ago the Regional Education Commissioner appointed as a result of the Napthine Review that came after the Halsey Review.
JE: I guess the next question then is: Why should we still be looking at this as a research topic of importance? Why do we need to be exploring it further? Why do we perhaps need to have a think about some of the things that are in place and maybe come up with something different in terms of thinking or some different strategies all together?
PR: Yeah, great question. I think the need is that we haven't actually overcome the challenges that exist for students in rural communities. Some of the earlier references we can find go back to the 1910s and 1912s talking about ‘the rural school challenge’ and that's largely remained the same since. You know, we haven't got to a situation where students are getting schools staffed consistently in parity to other parts of the state; we're getting a situation where results are still falling behind other parts of the state; and we're also getting lower retention rates – and that hasn't shifted over nearly 100-odd years.
It's one of those ‘wicked’ problems, I guess that you would say. But it does come down to a lot of notions that, ‘well, how is this schooling relevant and meaningful for kids in Country communities?’ Some of the key quotes that sort of identify the shift for me, if I go back to those things like the Schools Commission Report in the 80s and the Human Rights Commission inquiry in 2000 into Rural and Remote Education, they were using language like, you know, ‘is the curriculum relevant and acceptable for rural communities?’, ‘is what we offer them in school, what the communities desire for their futures?’ That's shifted as time's gone on, and the Halsey Review kind of rejected that type of thinking, calling it relativistic, but it remains pertinent.
So, in the research that we did for the New South Wales Department, the Regional Education project, one of the key themes that came through there (and again is reflected in a lot of rural education scholarship) is people asking the question of ‘well, what knowledge do I need to live in a regional community and to grow and thrive in this community?’ – especially when we think that a lot of the curriculum, particularly in some of the more centralised jurisdictions, often reflects this metrocentric norm. You know, literature in English doesn't often reflect rural worlds, the examples in curriculum materials are often based on urban examples; so, the students have trouble connecting. You know, we've used the old adage in the past of how do you write, say, an exposition in NAPLAN when it's about a day at the beach and you’ve never been to one? And we've done a randomised control trial in that space with our colleagues at the University of New South Wales where we changed some test questions and reduced the rural-urban gap by a third, and the rural-Indigenous gap by 50%, nearly, by modifying the contextual context of some questions.
So, this comes through [in] the rural education research, and that notion that our system is designed by the city and represents the city, and the knowledge that we put forward values the city. To put another example forward, we did some work in the STEM space, for instance (a national bit of work) and the kids were saying things like, ‘well, I'm not going to study Mathematics, Physics or Chemistry because I want to live and work in this community and contribute to its future’ – the ones that we're going off to university, well you know, they were going off – but they were saying they can't see the connection and meaning of their subjects and why study them. Which, you know, is a bit of a misnomer because the regional economic sector is one of the most high-tech global sectors around: we're talking, you know, GPS-driven satellites; infrared scanning of crops and soil conditions, et cetera, et cetera; drones and all that sort of stuff. But the kids couldn't see that.
… A lot of the teachers – who have themselves come from metropolitan environments and they've studied subjects in that abstract way (or Physics and Chemistry or Mathematics) and then don't actually understand or have that grounded knowledge in some of the rural industries – couldn't make those connections clear, you know, because they're used to teaching it and connecting it in a more slightly removed fashion.
JE: It's interesting to hear about some of those curriculum and test examples. I mentioned you're one of the researchers involved in the Rural and Regional Education Project. Just as a bit of background for listeners, that was commissioned, as you say, by the New South Wales Department of Education and carried out by the Gonski Institute for Education, the School of Education at UNSW Sydney, University of Canberra (where you're based) and Social Ventures Australia. What were the aims of that project?
PR: That project was commissioned to look at the strategies that would enhance the outcomes of rural schools. So, the Department was concerned around the ongoing lack of outcomes, in some respects, for some rural schools – that they weren't meeting the statewide benchmarks – and wanted to come up with some strategies to improve that. And they commissioned the research to achieve that end.
JE: Okay, you’ve said that if we want to know what works in rural schools, we should look at what's worked in rural schools. But, looking at the research in this area you’ve actually found there’s a mismatch between how rural people define themselves (you know, the lifestyles and water economies, and so on, that are linked to the land – what it means to be ‘rural’) and what the research takes as being ‘rural’ (if in fact it does define that, even, as a research term). So, the research isn’t actually hitting the spot to start with. I don’t want to delve deeper into that today, but it’s an important point and for listeners who want to do more reading on that I’ll pop links into all the research and related reading mentioned in the transcript of this episode at teachermagazine.com. So, one thing to come out of the project we’re discussing is a big roundtable event, a symposium, with various stakeholders who are actively involved in this space – so that includes the principals’ groups, department representatives and philanthropic sector, along with the researchers of course. And really you were seeking their input on the study findings, weren’t you?
PR: The report was finished a year or so ago and we wanted to keep the momentum of that report rolling. So, a number of those groups were involved in the project in the first instance, but the whole point of the symposium was to keep these issues on the agenda and to not just let the report do what reports can sometimes do. So, we wanted to grasp the nettle, so to speak, and getting people together was a great opportunity to do that. The provocations were: How do we think differently about rural education? And what is it that we need to do?
I think if we start with the report itself – it was very much a grounded report that involved a lot of focus groups and interviews with teachers, principals, students and community members; and also some survey work with students, and teachers, and principals as well; and some analysis of departmental data in terms of achievement and engagement and so forth, and bringing that together; and a process of going back to the students, the principals, the teachers, and the community with some of the recommendations that were emerging in the data… And it was really rewarding to see that the feedback we were getting from those people was really positive, from what we had heard and what we had synthesised.
I think, to put it in context, it was a great opportunity to really show that rural communities are distinct and different, and that we need to think about them as distinct settings, because that's what came through really, really strongly. There was a lot of dissatisfaction with the, I guess what can be perceived as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach and that we bring a model or approach to education to the Country. And they were going ‘well, you know, we do things differently – not only are our school sizes different, and it would mean different organisational structures, but the school-community relationships are different’. And that's one of the historic tropes in rural schooling, the school-community connection, and that really came through. So, we were able to ground the report in that notion of, you know, the school and community, rather than [say] a transactional approach to schooling, or one based on achievement outcomes. … When we asked people, for instance, around, what is they want from schooling and what are indicators of success in schooling, things like, you know, NAPLAN results, ATAR results, exam results weren't in the top 7 or 8 things. There were things like, you know, ‘contributing to our community’, ‘being an active member of our community’, you know, ‘being a good person’, and all [those sort] of things were very strong, ‘having a productive employment potential’, were all very dominant themes.
So, the things that then came through were we need to think differently because the way we're being asked to do school and report on school success was being seen as being an impediment. So, they were some of the provocations then that formed provocations for the symposium. And there was a lot of responses. It's like, well, you know, we need to think about: How do we actually ensure we can make to transition into rural communities for teachers a positive one, and really get them to learn and understand that this community and the way it operates is different to maybe where they've come from? How can we help them do that to then bring those experiences that rural students have (which are distinct and different to what their urbanist counterparts have often come from in their environments), into the classroom in a way that’s meaningful? How can we make the curriculum more relevant, was a key concern – particularly nowadays, when we're heading down more of a, I guess, a slightly more centralised curriculum direction at the moment, there was a lot of push back against that going ‘well, but we need kids to be able to see themselves and their world in it because otherwise it makes our job as teachers harder’. So, how can we have structures to do that?
These are the sort of things that we're coming through really, really strongly particularly that notion of then school success. I notice there's been some changes there with schools setting their own reporting outcomes in some respect, rather than having statewide benchmarks imposed on them. Because that was one of the problems that, you know, we're small, these benchmarks aren't really achievable and it's only really setting us up for failure. Because things like growth weren't being mentioned because, you know, these schools may not meet some of the benchmarks, but if you look at the growth they're achieving based on student background they're actually outperforming a lot of their urban counterparts, but that's not the measure that's used; or employment outcomes, or post-school destinations used in one way, but students going into something like the local Land Services, which is a career for life, is a brilliant outcome for the community and that student potentially, but it's not something that really was counting in the benchmarks that apparently matter. So, those sorts of narratives have been really important to try to engage with.
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JE: I thought it might be useful to look at the findings of the research in conjunction with some of the feedback and discussion from the roundtable. And, although we are focusing in this episode on the schools and their role, there's an awful lot more to it in terms of the findings and discussions from the systems and wider community side of things. Again, just head over to the links in the transcript of this podcast at teachermagazine.com to read more. Okay then, let's go through a selection of some of the key findings from the research. The first one, and I’ll read it out: ‘The school can be the last government institution left when a community is in decline. This exacerbates difficulties in attracting staff.’ What was the school leader discussion on that point at the roundtable?
PR: Look, there was a great recognition that their job goes beyond leading the school, they're often leading the community. So, they're dealing with basically community capacity building, community opportunity building, and helping connect community members to different agencies, different funding opportunities, different grant opportunities that's beyond their work in managing that school site.
And, you know, in these spaces when there's, you know, medical needs, they're trying to work out how to get students access to various supports that they need – because you know you can't get support funding for a student with additional needs if you don't have the medical diagnosis in the first place, which can take a long period of time. But even things like dealing with communities that might have low literacy levels. So, someone might have died and there's a whole lot of paperwork that goes with wills and estates, and in dealing with the sort of government services when someone has been deceased that principals often find themselves helping community members with, as an example.
So, it's a job that is basically working as the representative of government to help keep the community functioning and help find opportunities for economic development. And you will have in some instances, you know, community fractures as well. So, they're often negotiating some of those community fractures, which will find their way into school. So, it's a real social service that the principals are performing, which is way beyond just the sort of managing the school site that they're doing. And there was a strong recognition of that, and they talked really passionately about, you know, they're building the community and sustaining the community for the future.
JE: Yeah, fascinating examples there. Second finding: Principals and teachers are expected to integrate into the community, which is seen as evidence of respect. Teachers without experiencing rural and regional communities may struggle with this. What was the discussion on that one?
PR: Yeah, so this is actually really critical, and this goes to the need for us to think about how we induct and mentor and support teachers in communities. Not just, you know, ‘here's your first week, and here's your introduction’, it needs to be a structured, ongoing connection.
A lot of rural communities they take time to get to know, you know; these are communities that are built on relationships … you know we can't teach a child if we don't understand their community and the world they come from; we can't make those connections and draw those examples if we don't have that knowledge, so it makes the teaching work harder.
So, the whole need to think about, you know, again in the preparation of teachers and those times when they arrive, you know, how do we actually get them to understand? And we can do structured things, like help them with some scaffolds around understanding where you can find information about the history of the community, the major industries that people are likely to be involved in and help make those connections in their curriculum work that they do. But also, there's interpersonal skills here too. You know, how do you put yourself out there – because you will feel uncomfortable. It's like you're going into a different social space than the one that you have likely grown up in, people will have different interests, hobbies, maybe they'll have different social and political views that you might have had if you look at the sort of politics of the regional areas versus urban in some instances. And, you know, our job is not to necessarily make judgments there, but we need to be able to connect and understand people's worlds differently, and that's not something that everyone naturally has a disposition to, but it is the difference maker in terms of the work of teachers in rural communities.
JE: Yeah, interesting. Another point coming out of the research in terms of feedback from the communities and principals (on connection and teacher preparation) is, yes, it's really got to be this ongoing learning relationship, hasn't it?
PR: Absolutely. And the thinking there, and even the message coming back from communities there, was look it needs to be something like you’re given a mentor (probably a bad word), but someone in the community that is prepared to sort of be your connection and help you identify groups and peoples and the history of the place, you connect with over a year or so, not just that first introductory meeting. The difficulty there is you also need to make sure that you know those people are across the diversity of the community as well; we don't want to reinforce stereotypes, either. But it needs to be that sort of structured, ongoing thing. And interesting that, you know, principals talked about that, but also community members talked about the need to do that.
And you mentioned teacher preparation as well because you know we don't actually have any pre-service preparation programs that really focus on preparing teachers for rural schools. It’s not seen as a context of difference that we actually prepare people for – we do in medicine, there's rural health schools and rural health courses, but it’s not something we do in education, which is something we need to revisit as well.
JE: OK then, next up you found that some parents and community members were concerned about teachers maybe not having sufficiently high expectations of students.
PR: Yeah, and that’s a difficult one. It's that whole tyranny of low expectations, I guess. It's a difficult one because I wouldn't say teachers actively do that necessarily, and everyone wants to do the best for their communities, but it can become a bit of relativistic thing – you know, ‘well, that that will do here’ or ‘that's good enough’ and we need to make sure that we don't succumb to those stereotypes. But you do hear discourses within the communities, and we would hear it from community members about, you know, referring to other people's expectations that ‘well, that's just not what we do [here]’ or ‘people don't go off to that sort of work’ or ‘people don’t achieve in those subjects’, which, you know, has been built over generations, but it's also socially produced by the way we position rural communities. … So, we really need to be challenging that because these are diverse contexts with particular skills, but also huge opportunities and hugely successful, innovative, large businesses and opportunities as well.
JE: The final one I want to look at, just from a community aspect – some of the other feedback was that schools could be making much better use of the community expertise and resources that they've got at hand there in terms of curriculum delivery.
PR: Absolutely. Look, I can use an example of a school from some related research that I've been doing where you know they've turned the curriculum in Science, for instance, upside down and built it around the careers of the local area.
So, we have this notion that there’s not a lot of skilled people in rural communities, but that's clearly untrue. We look at the ABS [Australian Bureau of Statistics] stats and things, there’s people in rural communities that have a whole range of qualifications and skills, there just might not be the concentrations of them as you might have in urban areas. So, in some instances (in this example that I might refer to) they have turned the Science curriculum upside down and looked at all the careers that involve certain parts of Science – be it radiography, be it biochemistry, be it environmental science. Because, you know, there's people that work in the medical imaging that might come to town once or twice a week who’s done that sort of work. Someone who works in soil science, someone who works in genetics in cattle or sheep, I could go on... But these are all high-level scientific skills that exist in the community.
Now, we can't expect the teachers to have those connections – we talked about teachers generally trained in abstract knowledge forms in the curriculum – but people in the community are doing these things in those areas and they're both the people that children know, which goes to that community trope that we have in rural education, that community connection. Well, let's use that. So, the teacher doesn't need to learn how their Science, for instance, operates in genetics, in agriculture, to the extent that the person who's working in that space already has. So, we can bring that person into the classroom to make that connection, because the child who is familiar with that person: a) knows them as a human being, so the connection is there, which is really important in rural communities that they know people; but [b] they have the expertise to then bring into the classroom that the teacher can unpack in the context of the Science curriculum.
It means a teacher has to recognise and that work they have as a curriculum worker to go ‘it's not here to transmit knowledge about Science for (say) an examination, it's to here transmit knowledge of Science that is meaningful that will then, because it's connected to the students’ context and their experience, will obviously then help in the examination outcome’. So, it's a win-win. But naturally, teachers get a bit focused on the outcome they're being measured by sometimes. So, the opportunity to do some of that creative work maybe gets sidelined about the concern for the overall benchmark. We want to sort of push against that.
JE: Those discussion points and ideas we've just covered are about connections between schools and communities. I want to finish off the episode by stepping more inside the school. Subject expertise, first of all. The research finding is: Having teachers with expertise relevant to the subjects they teach was seen as an unrealistic aspiration for rural and regional schools. Can you explain a bit more about what that was and what the feedback from the symposium was?
PR: Yeah, look, this is a really, really challenging one, Jo. I guess there's a degree of pragmatics of the way that schools are staffed and will be staffed. We know we have a staffing shortage; we know that it's worse in rural schools, and we know that it's worse in specialist subject areas. And you know, while it's gained a lot of attention of late, long-term rural teachers and leaders will basically retort ‘we've had that problem for 30 or 40 years and no one's listened to us. Just because you're experiencing it now in the city, everyone's paying attention.’
So, the aspiration should probably always be to have a fully trained Maths, English and Science teacher, for instance (not to emphasise secondary, of course) in a rural school, but the reality is that's probably not going to happen because it hasn't been the case for a long, long time. So that then raises the question of: How do we think about rural schooling in a way that gives students access to expertise in a way that can be consistently staffed and helps them learn? And that's something as a team we grappled with greatly. We're raising the issue there in that recommendation and we probably need to have a really deep and engaged discussion around: What is the model of schooling that we want to provide here? We aspirationally wouldn't want to go away from that provision but the pragmatics of it is that when we have schools that can't get those teachers, then we're stop-gapping, we're teaching out of area, and we've got no sort of sustainable solution to the problem.
JE: Another point which links back to the high expectations that we mentioned earlier – some of the parents, families and community members had a concern that there’s a feeling that vocational pathways are seen as more achievable for students in regional, remote and rural schools, whereas those in urban areas are encouraged more down an academic pathway perhaps.
PR: Yeah, look, this is a real challenge. So, in separate research, we've looked at the subject offerings and we can see that there's a pattern of offering that the academic challenge and the academic pathways are offered less in rural schools and offered less in again low-SES urban schools as well, and vocational was being seen as being opportunity to provide meaningful credentials. And look, there's nothing wrong with that in and of itself because, you know, by no means should we be implying that ATAR or university pathways are the only meaningful pathways. But when there is such a disparity, it raises questions around what our assumptions are. Are we basically saying if you go to a rural school, then you're going to work in a vocational industry of a few in the future?
It also raises problems because there's a bit of a false economy here. There's quite a lot of rural kids who might have done the vocational subjects at school because they seem to have that connection, you know, and that sort of practicality, which is again one of the stereotypes of rural learners. All subjects can have that to some extent, it's not just a vocational thing. So, it comes down again to, how we imagine those subjects in the current curriculum structure, because you know, everything has a practical application if we're able to make that connection. But one of the problems that we have with the vocational side is there's not a lot of industries in the rural areas now, particularly with larger, corporate-owned farms. So, there's a lot of people who have done the technical hours in some vocational subjects but haven't done the hours on the job that they need to do to get the qualification. So, it's a bit of a false premise as well that we do.
But the other side of it is the accessibility to the TAFE sites in some instances, or the training sites in addition to the school site to do this are further away. So, there were countless examples of you know students in years 10/11/12 piling into a car early in the morning and driving 200 kilometres to another town to attend these classes and then driving back in the afternoon. Now, people with rural experience will just, you know, will know that happens every day. But you know there's a whole range of problems with that, you know, let alone the kangaroos. But that's what's happening across the board … and it also then has a degree of gender stereotyping to it as well, that underpins it.
So … I would see it as a general curriculum challenge. If our curriculum that we're offering isn’t engaging students because they don't see it as being something they can find a utility for in their future life and work in regional communities and are opting out or taking the vocational pathway along often gendered lines, then I think we've got a curriculum challenge here that we need to be talking about.
JE: And just to expand further on the issue of high expectations, your research from this project showed that teachers and school leaders need: a deep local knowledge, firm belief in the capacity of their students, and the confidence in school to adapt curriculum without lowering its intellectual demand to support higher achievement.
PR: So, what we’re getting at there is the curriculum work the teachers do isn't just making it simpler, it's actually making it more meaningful and harder. And I think we've lost some of the skills in that space as we’ve become more focused on often exam outcomes; we're really focused on achieving those exam outcomes and the content repetition that goes with sort of external exams in the 2 major jurisdictions in Australia. The way that we then can apply that knowledge in practice has been lost, and the way we can bring in creative examples has been lost.
We used to have the Country Areas Program that was sort of removed in the Rudd years when we went towards Literacy and Numeracy, and that was a program where it supported teachers to do that curriculum work of making resources and bringing in examples to make the curriculum meaningful to students in rural areas; what was of a high standard, and equal academic rigour. We’ve sort of dropped more to ‘if we can keep them in class and engaged and they complete, then that's a good thing’ – but no, they need to complete at the same standard and same grade as students in other areas.
But in an exam-based system that becomes hard because the assumptions on tests can often be removed from those experiences of children. So, the teachers have to go through those sort of … bringing in students where they're from in the first stage of the learning process, recontextualizing the concepts and ideas that they're expressing, and then mastering those for assessment. They’ve sort of got to do a whole another cycle there of doing it from the students’ experiences, but then doing it from the notion of the abstract curriculum that’s then going to be examined. So, they actually have to do a whole another sequence of learning within the same time period where everyone else is mastering the exams.
And that idea that, ‘well, this this is good enough, we're achieving’ is the problem there. It's a challenge. But I think we have the expertise and knowledge to do it. I don't think our curriculum structures make it easy to do.
JE: Let's move to the issue of staffing – specifically, attracting and retaining staff. The research found the work of teachers and principals in these settings is seen as more complex and constant. (Yeah, I mean, you mentioned a few examples earlier and this could be a contributing factor to the difficulties). What were the principals saying about this and what were some of the ideas flowing at the roundtable in terms of potential ways to combat it?
PR: Look, that's certainly one of the ongoing challenges and it has been a big issue for a long time. They see the fact that the teachers, you know, on one level are ‘on 24/7’, so they're obviously public in the community, which comes with its own negatives and benefits; so, it can be a bit stressful. But they're often dealing with often smaller classes, but a greater diversity of need because you, because everyone's in the same room as well.
So, they're dealing with students that will have varying degrees of literacy needs, we have more health issues per capita in a number of our rural schools as well, so the diversity within the classroom is often much more extreme, and the external challenges they're bringing in terms of expectations, because they might often have high levels of parents who may not have completed school, or gone on to further education or those sort of areas. So, it can make the need to differentiate the curriculum greater and more demanding.
There's a number of, you know, a lot of social issues that can come through in rural schools, which can then make the environment more challenging as well… economic downturn in a number of regional areas; you throw in drought, it makes it even more complex, you throw in bushfires, it makes it more complex (and the traumas that go with those things). And then often that work they're doing, that sort of social service type work outside the classroom … being mentors or examples to students in the community of other ways of being and other ways of conducting oneself and other opportunities for careers and so forth.
So, it would be a very demanding space. Then you throw in that they often might be the only teacher in their stage or subject. They might be in a small primary school or a small high school, so they don't have many colleagues to help break the work; so, they're doing all that planning and preparation in a subject area themselves often, while also doing the other things we do in schools, planning the excursion and running a sports carnival and taking the sports team somewhere and managing the bus. So, there's just more things that have to be done. The number of jobs doesn't necessarily change because the school is small. And often it can be somewhat inverse because the school is small, we want to give the students more opportunities, so we try to do more to give them exposure to a range of experiences and that just then adds to the fact that they're doing more in the curriculum space anyway.
The response is, from the school principals, that they would love high levels of staffing – you know, there is a staffing multiplier for rural schools that gives them a little bit more staffing, but it's nowhere near what's needed. It needs to be even higher; they want to give students access to a breadth of subjects. It also needs to take into account all those extra experiences that we want students to have.
Now, there have been some moves to reduce some of the reporting that was unnecessary, which will help, which was certainly an issue in the research and the discussion. So, hopefully those announcements will have a positive impact, but I would you know strongly say we actually need to be providing more staff into these schools, which sounds ironic in the staffing shortage, I guess. But, you know, aspirationally, if we could do that, we can really support that. You know, I'm cautious about saying it could be more allied workers in the school because we don't want to de-professionalise the work that teachers do. But we certainly need more hands on deck to let teachers get on with the job or give them more time to focus on that job, because we talked about, you know, the need to make the curriculum meaningful and relevant and that takes time. And without the time to do it, with everything else that's going on it just can't happen, and they just get burnt out because they're so committed and passionate.
JE: And we want some long-term sustainability, where teachers and leaders are staying in these schools rather than maybe going for a couple of years and then, like you say, getting burnt out. So, okay then, it's a big question because it's a difficult challenge: What are the next steps now? What would the project team like to see happen, not just on discussions, but some of those research recommendations?
PR: It is a difficult challenge, but I think now we really want to try to provide some leadership for this space. I think as a research community, we want to try to bring people together and say ‘look, if we can consistently work around these challenges, then we can make an impact and make a difference; so, let's tackle this collectively’. And there was a real strong sense of that in the room – that the philanthropic partners and the academic partners and some of the department people do really want to get together and try to tackle this. So, we need to keep it on the agenda.
The steps moving forward are, we've sort of advocated for a bit of a research agenda here. We've called for groups to come together who were at the day to form some kind of, you know, informal working party to try to promote this, and we're working towards achieving that. So, you know, be a bit of a collective, a bit of an informal collective and led by some committed people that really want to make this happen. And these people are certainly there and certainly are committed. So, you know, doing that work, talking to you today is all part of the that work that we need to be doing together to keep the focus on this topic and not lose sight of the end goal and not lose sight in the busyness of everyday work.
So, groups coming together to try to advocate for these changes, which is starting to happen, and trying to build a collective experience around the research environment to try to support that work so that we can give voice hopefully to what the teachers and community has told us in this project and other projects. So, they see themselves in that work and then we can together work towards a solution.
That’s all for this episode, a reminder that I’ll put all the links to the research papers, that research agenda that Professor Phil Roberts mentioned, and related reading, in the full transcript over at teachermagazine.com. If you want to keep listening now though to more Teacher podcasts, including the other 95 episodes in our Research Files series, all the content is free to access in our archive at teachermagazine.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And while you’re there, please leave a rating and review. Bye!
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References and related reading
Beswick, K. & Roberts, P. (2024). Statement of the outcomes of the Gonski Institute for Education Roundtable on Rural and Regional Education. UNSW Sydney: Gonski Institute for Education. https://www.canberra.edu.au/uc-research/faculty-research-centres/csc/rural-education-and-communities/exploring-rural-knowledges/nsw-rural-and-remote-schools-research-project/RaRE_Statement-of-the-outcomes-final.pdf
Halsey, J. (2018). Independent Review into Regional, Rural and Remote Education – Final Report. Commonwealth of Australia. https://www.education.gov.au/recurrent-funding-schools/resources/independent-review-regional-rural-and-remote-education-final-report
Roberts, P., Downes, N., & Reid, J. (2022). Teacher Education for a Rural-Ready Teaching Force: Swings, Roundabouts, and Slippery Slides? Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 47(3). https://doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2022v47n3.6
Roberts, P., Downes, N., & Reid, J. A. (2024a). Engaging rurality in Australian education research: Addressing the field. The Australian Educational Researcher, 51(1), 123-144. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-022-00587-4
Roberts, P. & Beswick, K. (2024b). A rural and regional community education research program. UNSW Sydney: Gonski Institute for Education. https://www.canberra.edu.au/?a=2270171
