DONNA CROSS

Donna Cross is a Professor with the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Western Australia, and Program Head of the Education and Development Team and Director of the Early Childhood Development and Learning Collaboration at the Telethon Kids Institute. Since 1999 Donna has been awarded over $84m in research funding to conduct research to improve child and adolescent, and their parents’ and teachers’ health and wellbeing. She has led 80+ applied school and community-based research projects investigating ways to enhance pre-school children and school-age students’ wellbeing and social and emotional development and reduce anti-social behaviour.

William Walker Oration:
"Rebooting approaches to school equity, through leadership and wellbeing: What can we control, alt and delete?“

While we like to think we live in a country of the fair go, the opportunities for Australian children to succeed are unequally distributed. Of the 38% of children who are developmentally disadvantaged when they start school, 25% experience sociodemographic risk such as family income, and school area disadvantage, and 11% experience child development risk such as attention, attendance, and behavioural problems. The gap in educational achievement between advantaged and disadvantaged students is estimated by the OECD to be approximately three school years, with COVID-19 likely to have increased this gap.

While schools alone can’t compensate for disadvantage – they can make a significant difference. This oration will consider how equity-focussed leadership, particularly addressing school climate, can reboot policies and practices to better support all students, but particularly students experiencing disadvantage. When it’s working well the school climate can have a profound impact on students’ achievement, behaviour, engagement, attendance and wellbeing. It can also mitigate the impact of low student socio-economic status on academic achievement. This oration will also review evidence-based leadership practices, processes and systems through seven school specific components of school climate (in addition to curriculum) found to be the most closely associated with student academic achievement, behaviour and wellbeing.