“Why school leaders should think and act more like gardeners”

The past two decades of schooling reform have positioned educators as ‘technicians’ who should adopt clinical and standardised practices based on common bodies of evidence that claim to tell us “what works” to improve schools. In this keynote address, Glenn Savage will argue that this reform script has not only failed to drive improvement, but it fundamentally misunderstands human creativity, diversity and the conditions needed to produce flourishing education systems. Drawing on insights from complexity theory, design sciences and educational research, Savage will argue that a fundamental rethink of how we approach the big questions of education reform is needed. Rather than approaching schools as engineers seeking to make “the machine” work better, he argues that school leaders should think and act more like gardeners, seeking to build the ecosystems needed for diverse things to grow and flourish. This organic and bottom-up approach puts faith in the profession to experiment, solve problems and collaborate to create solutions in context. To do this, we need to move beyond debilitating myths and assumptions that pervade debates about school improvement and think in profoundly different ways about what education is for and what schools can be in the future.

GLENN SAVAGE

Glenn Savage is an Associate Professor at the University of Western Australia, where he is Director of the Education, Policy and Leadership Research Group. Glenn is a leading researcher and public commentator on education policy. His recent book, ‘The Quest for Revolution in Australian Schooling Policy’ (Routledge 2021), provides a detailed history of schooling reform in the Australian federation and offers a strong critique of standards-based reform. His book argues that system leaders need to move beyond technocratic approaches that seek to align schooling practices to common bodies of evidence based on claims about “what works”. Instead, energy should be focused on building organic and local networks of evidence creation and knowledge sharing.

Glenn began his career as a music journalist, after which he became a secondary English teacher and worked in diverse school settings in Australia and England. Motivated by a desire to examine the politics of educational inequality, he pursued an academic pathway, which led him to develop a critical interest in how knowledge and evidence are used in wide-scale system reform. He currently leads an Australian Research Council project that is examining the role of parents and community members in school decision-making. In late 2022, Glenn will serve as a visiting fellow at Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study, where his research will critically examine reforms that seek to revolutionise education through the introduction of “21st Century models” of schooling.