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Responsibility
and accountability
One of the actions called for by the
Bound for Success strategy document (p. 23) was: Action 11:
Education Queensland will create clusters of schools connected
to four proposed state colleges in the Cape and Torres Strait
region. But it was also noted that further consultation
with the community needed to occur about establishing a state
college on Thursday Island.
Don Anderson is Executive Principal of the new Tagai
College established as a result of this process. Tagai
comprises all the 17 previously separate schools in the
Torres Strait. Here Don discusses what happened and introduces
the reasoning behind the new structure.
 A
key element of the strategy was to establish all the
state schools in the Torres Strait under one college
umbrella. That means we can establish clear lines of
authority and accountability. I keep saying that to
build a house you don't have to know how to drive
a nail; you get people who know how to do it. Which
means I don't have to have the expertise but
I do have to have a team of people with expertise in
their areas that I don't have. I have very strong
beliefs about college structure and it's about
leadership by executive. Authority and accountability
have to be defined within the structure.
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So we've moved from having 17 points
of accountability [the 17 principals of the individual
schools that make up the college] to a structure which
has authority and accountability based on a defined operational
structure. Some Principals were somewhat concerned at the
outset that in a more focused role they would be deskilled
as 'proper'
principals.
Our
Heads of Campus are accountable for the educational programs — how
they're taught, how they're measured and how
they're reported on. That's their job. They
have a lot of authority within that, but they have specific
accountabilities. We've put in other structures to
make sure they don't have to be accountable for all
the other little things principals usually have to worry
about. At the same time, they are supported in the roles
they do have.
Read
on...
More about the establishment
of Tagai State College...
Look at the leadership
structure...
Visit the Tagai College
website...
Steve Foster, a Torres Strait Islander, is Tagai's Associate Principal, Outer
Island Campuses and is also responsible for the HR portfolio in the College. He is based at Badu Island, where he has been Principal for some time. An earlier account of work at Badu is available on the What Works website.
Read about working with
the community on Badu Island...
Here Steve discusses why the establishment of Tagai
College has promoted consistency and accountability.
If you look at systemic data from the past across our schools and the Torres Strait District, the outcomes can easily be read as unsatisfactory and unacceptable for most of the students. I believe that a number of things contributed to this. One major reason was that there were 17 individual schools operating within the district with 17 different leaders. These were leaders who came with all good intentions and wanting to do the right thing, but often because of their inexperience found it hard to contextualise things. They would therefore implement strategies they had used or seen elsewhere and this did not work in the Torres Strait. There was no consistency in curriculum delivery across the 17 schools.
Now the Tagai College structure is all about how we can be more consistent and more accountable. When we spoke to communities they were saying, yes, give us that. Don't talk about it, do it.
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Another issue that had a huge impact on student learning outcomes was the high turnover of leadership in the schools. Data on leadership within the Torres Strait showed that if you averaged the term of leadership across the 17 schools, every school would have a new principal every 10 months. And this data is skewed by the fact that two principals had been in two of the schools for over 10 years. Some schools had three or four principals each year and this had a huge impact on student outcomes. With each new principal, school priorities would change and this was confusing, not just for the teachers in the school, but for the students and the community as well. So people were meaning well but the consistency wasn't there. There was a high turnover of teachers as well and this added to the complexities of delivering quality educational programs.
The Tagai State College structure is all about having more consistency, with strong leadership at the executive level. The College now has experienced and recognised school leaders making up the college executive with a major focus on accountability for student learning outcomes and quality PD support for staff and community. When we spoke to communities during the community consultation phase they were saying, yes, give us that model. One Elder said "Don't talk about it, do it, if this is going to help our children with their learning." It was obvious that if we kept doing the same things we were only going to continue attracting the same results and this wasn't good enough. Change had to happen.
The formation of the college has now allowed our Heads of Campus to focus on being strong curriculum leaders. The College executives have focused on developing systems and implementing these so as to eliminate a lot of the distractions that school principals were dealing with on a daily basis. That has now allowed Heads of Campus to concentrate on their core business — Teaching and Learning.
Read on... | 
