Introduction

School leaders play a vital role in providing every student in New South Wales public schools with a great education and the best start in life. They have a positive impact in classrooms and on their staff. They guide teacher development and engage their communities here at the NSW Department of Education's School Leadership Institute, our mission is to support all NSW public school leaders by providing world-class, evidence-informed leadership development programs and resources.

Our podcast will explore the key issues and challenges of school leadership. Hosted by Joanne Jarvis, the director of the School Leadership Institute, tune in and listen to our guests and colleagues share their expertise, insights and wisdom on leading with purpose and impact. Welcome to our leadership In Focus series.

Joanne Jarvis

Hello and welcome to episode 15 of the Leadership in Focus podcast series. I'm Joanne Jarvis and I’m the director of the NSW Department of Education's School Leadership Institute.

With me today is Doctor Leticia Anderson. Leticia is the School Leadership Institute's research specialist. Before joining the School Leadership Institute in 2023. Leticia dedicated 15 years to academia, including as a senior lecturer at Southern Cross University and a lecturer at Sydney University. Leticia’s research and teaching were firmly anchored in fostering diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, particularly in initial teacher education and through community engagement work.

Join us as we explore Leticia’s perspective on how insights from research can support leaders to foster inclusive and equitable schooling. Thank you for joining us today, Leticia.

Leticia Anderson

Thank you for the kind introduction, Joanne. I'm delighted to be here today and really eager to talk about these topics that are of great interest to myself and to you.

Joanne

Yes, absolutely. So your work as an academic has centred around diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. How did you become passionate about these areas?

Leticia

I think a lot of my personal background and experiences influenced the things that I was interested in studying and teaching about as well. So I come from a low SES and low socio-educational background in a rural part of NSW. So that experience and also then, with my current family, we have a very diverse in many different aspects of diversity family, and I have an acquired disability as well. So those are all parts of my lived and living experience that have influenced the research that I've been interested in and the work that I'm doing now with the department.

So I think there's also background influences there, because there were some barriers, I guess, to me, achieving the potential that I had. And it was public school advocates, including my teaching principal at my rural primary school and family friend who was a high school teacher, who really sort of supported and paved the way for me to make it to university, to be the first in family, for my family, at university, and then to go on, not without some hiccups along the way.

but to go on to complete a PhD and then to focus my research and my teaching around these principles of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. So there's an unshakable belief, I think, that I have in the transformative power of education that comes from that background and those experiences and that sort of influences the interest that I have in research and in teaching.

Joanne

And we're so fortunate to have you on our team now. So thank you for giving us a little bit of the insights around how you've come to be so interested in this work. Can you explain what leadership for equity means in a public school setting? And why it's so vital?

Leticia

I think it's good to start with an understanding of equity being a bit different from equality. It means there might need to be particular resources and attention directed to people from particular backgrounds or with particular special needs. So it's not about everyone having exactly the same opportunities or reaching the same thresholds. It's about having that differentiation of support and enabling people to really achieve their potential, whatever differences there are in that original potential and what supports are needed.

The other really important thing to remember in thinking about equity in a public education setting is that public education is for everyone. So it means that we have very, very highly diverse student and teacher cohorts. So we need to be able to ensure, and we have an obligation to ensure, that everyone within that schooling system is having that equitable experience and access and outcomes

In public education equity is also relevant to everyone. So some schools may consider that they don't have significant numbers of students in equity cohorts. Yet society is changing very rapidly, especially as we've seen through Covid. So the composition of student communities is rapidly diversifying. So it can't be assumed, I guess, that a school is going to continue to remain exactly as it is now or has in the past.

It could be one family moving into the area. It could be a student who's diagnosed with a disability. It could be large scale change within the community, or it could be diversity within the workforce, within the school that needs to be recognised and accounted for. So that's why it's sort of important for everyone to think about that system perspective.

We're not just thinking about the individual school and the moral imperative to ensure that we deliver on our promise for equitable outcomes, access and participation. But it's also about ensuring that we build that system capability, because there are going to be people moving into different school contexts and ensuring that everyone has that orientation, permanent orientation, and sustained orientation towards equity is going to build that capability that we need.

Joanne

Thank you for that explanation. I really enjoyed listening to the way you position the sense of equity orientation in that response as well. You mentioned that equity should be a fundamental orientation for school leaders. Can you delve into this concept and discuss why it's important in public education?

Leticia

Yeah, I think there's really consistent research evidence that centring students at the heart of decisions drives the best outcomes for students, for the staff in the school and for the communities that they serve. So this is the guiding principle that has to underpin all of the leadership for equity work, as with all work in schools. It's what you can call a magnetic north.

So the leadership for equity work may seem challenging and complex, and it is. And yet that magnetic north is always there. You can always find or rediscover your way or your purpose and your path for achieving the goals that you're setting as a school and as a teacher or school leader. By squaring your shoulders to that work and approaching it from a grounded way, by recalling that the heart of the work is that it is student centred.

That's why I like the framing of equity orientation, which we see in some of the research literature. It really taps into that student centred moral purpose that's evidence informed, and it's shared by teachers and educational leaders at all stages of their careers. That supports a really strong strengths-based and proactive approach, I think, rather than a problem-based or deficit approach and a reactive kind of orientation to the work.

Joanne

You've discussed the diversity among students and staff, and you've introduced the concept of intersectionality in some of the earlier comments you've made today. Can you elaborate on what intersectionality is and its significance?

Leticia

Well the international research again is pretty consistent in showing that there's specific, often overlapping, demographic groups that consistently bear the brunt of educational inequity and that, facilitated by interconnected and discriminatory social forces such as race, socioeconomic background, and gender. We all have a multiplicity of identities, and intersectionality recognises this. But it also emphasises that some individuals and some groups, because of different aspects of their identity, their personal characteristics or their background, they can find that those aspects combine to compound disadvantage.

And students may therefore require different support as a result of those intersectional impacts, to ensure that the most vulnerable to inequity are supported appropriately. So an intersectional approach also means that leadership for equity can incorporate lots of other different approaches for example, culturally responsive leadership, anti-racist leadership, social justice leadership. Because by taking a sectional approach to equity, we can bring together all of those different elements in the strategies that schools enact.

So these barriers, I think it's really important to point out, aren't the fault of individuals. So we do need to take care not to take a deficit view that sees those barriers that they might experience as inherent faults or flaws. There’s social factors at work that drive disadvantage and intersectional approaches can really help us to identify those barriers and then address them.

Joanne

It's certainly complex work isn't it, for school leaders and for teachers, anybody who serves in public education needs to recognise the points that you've made around intersectionality don't you think?

Leticia

I do think it's really, really important. I think it is complex and I wouldn't underplay that aspect. But I think it's the work that we have to do. And I think that's why connecting it back up to moral purpose and the reason for why we're all here and we're all involved in this system, is a really helpful starting point and point to keep returning back to.

Joanne

I love the way you describe that as squaring your shoulders to magnetic north. Wonderful concept and imagery that conjures up for me. You've reviewed extensive international and Australian research on effective educational leadership for equity. What are some key findings from this research?

Leticia

I think it's really good to point out that from the international research, we see a lot of commonality in the findings, especially in big research syntheses that have been done by leading educational scholars like Kenneth Leithwood, and Ishimaru and Galloway from the US. So a really great Australian example that exemplifies these principles that we can find in international research is in work that was led by Kevin Lowe from the University of NSW.

He and his colleagues undertook an extensive literature review of how to best support Aboriginal students in Australian schools. This is the Aboriginal Voices literature review project, and now they are undertaking pilot work in NSW schools through the Culturally Nourishing Schooling Project. So the SLI actually has a recent video that looked with Kevin at some of the impact of this work within our schools, in our system at the moment. So that international and Australian research, what they really pull out is that there are a few things we see that are common in successful leadership for equity in education.

So dispositions and mindsets are really important. So having the orientation to equity, being sure that you're going to be able to make the difference, so having that sense of efficacy, having the critical reflection skills to be able to correct course and undertake feedback and accept that directions and different things might have to be done, as well as the best practices, the evidence informed practices. So that’s particularly around inclusive pedagogy and inclusive and culturally responsive instruction.

So the commonalities that the international and the Australian evidence really pull out is that it's important to have the right dispositions and mindsets for leaders as well as evidence-informed best practices. So by dispositions and mindsets that might include the sense of efficacy, that we can make the difference that we're seeking to achieve, the ability to be reflective and to implement that into changes in processes. And in terms of best practices, that's really around the pedagogy and the curriculum. So ensuring that they're culturally responsive and inclusive.

So the other things that the research tells us are really critical for leadership for equity is the importance of collaboration and partnerships. So they really need to drive the work. And underpinning that work needs to be an ongoing, holistic inquiry cycle that supports the development and then the enactment of a shared vision.

So inquiry processes within schools can be supported in lots of different ways. The SLI, for example, has an inquiry model that we use in our programs and resources. And that is one thing that could be used as a tool to guide and drive this type of work. The other really critical element needs to be reflection and growth for individuals and institutions as part of this process.

Sometimes really looking deeply into the barriers that are preventing students from achieving their full potential can require some quite deep processes of critical reflection and looking back and thinking about how things can be done differently.

Joanne

And for our listeners in public education, that inquiry framework is on our, inside the portal where they can get access to some terrific videos and the paper on it and the questions that underpin it as well. So, Leticia, what does effective leadership for equity look like in practice?

Leticia

Joanne I think if you were seeing effective leadership for equity in practice, what you would see is a school community where there's a really, really deep knowledge and understanding of who the students are, in all of their intersectional diversity, and who their communities and their families are, and what the aspirations within those individuals, their families and their communities are for their learning.

So in one of your previous podcasts, when you talked with our secretary Murat Dizdar on this same topic, you were, he was explaining that the best leadership that he sees really recognises who the school serves and really invests in knowing who they serve. So that's where an inquiry process can play a really important role in starting to develop that really deep understanding of who is being served by a particular school. Understand the context and what nuances might need to be appreciated for applying leadership for equity in that context.

So we do need to acknowledge that excellence looks different for different individuals and groups, and that can be part of that inquiry process. And we need to uncover and test assumptions and proactively build that inclusive and belonging culture. So that's when you're going to see that leadership for equity has been successful.

When there's a school community that is joined together and solidly behind the vision that they've co-created, and then they're starting to see results from that. They're starting to see closing achievement gaps that they may have identified as part of their inquiry process. And they're starting to see an increase in the sense of belonging and inclusion within the school, and also that deeper connection with community and with families that's going to really enable students to achieve their full potential.

Joanne

What actions should system and school leaders take to enhance their commitment to equity in your view?

Leticia

I think that's a really great question. Speaking as a researcher, I can really only speak from what the research would tell us and also from my experience as a tertiary educator. I think the really key part is to build the equity orientation into everything. I like to think about it as habit stacking. So look at all the things that you're already doing.

And I think leading learning is a really, really great place to start with that. How is the curriculum being implemented and developed in your school at the moment? Is it really inclusive? How can we increase the representation of diversity within the way the curriculum is being implemented? Then thinking about the pedagogy. Have we got really responsive, culturally appropriate pedagogies in place to deliver that inclusive curriculum?

So explicit teaching implementation is going to be a fantastic opportunity to really delve into that and ask those questions through that process. Are we doing this in a way that is going to help us to achieve our equity goals? So the work is already underway. That's why I like to think about it as the habit stacking. So look at what processes you already have going on.

And I think that's going to be a really great way as well to uncover some of those potential challenges that might require, for example, directed professional learning within the workforce, or to look at ways to support staff and enable them to deliver that work more effectively. So that lead learner role, I think, is really critical, and that connects us back to that moral imperative of what we're doing here.

We may see my guess in public education to be adjacent to community services, but the primary purpose is there around the leading in learning and teaching to enable those educational outcomes. So even the work around community engagement, which we've sort of talked about previously, has been a really core part of leading for equity. That should also be being built out around those learning goals and the learning and teaching that is already happening within the school.

So connecting up the community and families to why their curriculum and why their pedagogy is being done in the way that it is, and how that's going to support that realisation of the equity goals.

Joanne

Implicit in what you've just said is the need for professional development, professional learning around how you achieve the explicit teaching, for example, the varied pedagogy that enables equity outcomes to be achieved. What is your sense around what schools can do to improve that area?

Leticia

We've already talked, I think, about the importance of knowing who we serve, but I think there's a really important element there as well in knowing who we have within the workforce. So the diversity of the school workforce can be a really positive enabling factor in supporting the equity goals for students. So really understanding who has expertise within the school community, for example, in cultural knowledge, in cultural engagement, in culturally inclusive pedagogy, who's doing that work really well?

And we can also think out beyond the school, to the network and to the system as a whole. What can we learn from what's been done in other parts of the school or in the broader system? So understanding then where professional learning can support that experience of learning from others collaboratively or learning from research or learning in other ways, to really try and build that culture of inclusivity into all of the ways that the work of the school is being done, is going to be really important.

So that might be specifically professional learning around, for example, leading culturally responsive, explicit teaching. But it could also be professional leadership learning. So as we've seen with the research around dispositions and mindsets, having the effective leadership mindsets is a really critical part of that process. So Kenneth Leithwood, one of those researchers we've mentioned previously, in his research on leadership for equity, he also looked at how did the practices and the mindsets that are effective for leading equity line up with what we already know in educational leadership about the most effective practices that are going to drive the best outcomes for students. And there's a lot of overlap and consistency there. So we know that professional leadership learning is going to be a really important piece of the puzzle as well.

So I think that leadership, leadership for equity and being the lead learner in driving that work through the teaching and learning mission can provide the kind of keystone that holds together those foundations into something beautiful.

Joanne

Thank you. Leticia. That's a good place to end what's been a really impactful, powerful, podcast with you to talk about equity. Thank you for sharing your insights and perspectives on leading for equity in education. And given this central place of equity in the Plan for Public Education, I'm sure all of our listeners, and I certainly do, appreciate the valuable knowledge that you've brought to our conversation today.

For our listeners, please follow the School Leadership Institute on X. Our handle is @NSWSLI. For NSW Department of Education staff, you can access our leadership resources on the department's website. Thank you for listening.