When The Scots College was founded in 1893, the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in New South Wales, the Right Reverend James Smith White, said that its teachers would be those who had ‘won the highest honours in the university’, were well-acquainted with teaching boys, and viewed teaching as ‘a work of faith, a labour of love, and a patience of hope’. That calling to ‘higher learning continues to be seen every day in the inspiring work of staff across the College who show up every day to give boys the finest preparation for life.

​This week we honour the achievement of one of our long-serving staff, Preparatory School Learning Enrichment Teacher Dr Caroline Basckin, who has just won ‘the highest honour’ in the university by being awarded her PhD from the University of New South Wales. 

Dr Basckin’s doctoral dissertation was entitled ‘Literacy instruction for students with disability: An analysis of teachers’ knowledge, beliefs, and use of evidence-based practices’. In her research with Year 3 teachers across 8 Sydney independent schools, Caroline explored what teachers did to teach literacy to students with disabilities and how they described the basis for their practice. She was struck by the amount of evidence-based practice she observed, matched with a low level of knowledge about that evidence base. Teachers also felt ill-equipped to understand the complex needs of students, and lacking in time to collaboratively plan for well-differentiated teaching. 

She provided three recommendations to school leaders:

• Ongoing high-quality professional development grounded in the current academic research
• Develop an online database or library of EBP resources
• Training and support for teachers and learning support staff to develop and deliver effective co-teaching models in literacy instruction

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Dr Basckin has published several articles from her research, including as lead author on a systematic review of teacher beliefs about evidence-based practice in the prestigious International Journal of Educational Research.

Please feel free to contact Dr Basckin to find out more about her research findings.

We look forward to drawing on Dr Basckin’s experience and research as we continue to prepare for the John Cunningham Student Centre, bringing together all the support boys need to develop into fine young men. 

Congratulations again to Dr Basckin on this significant achievement!

Dr Hugh Chilton
Director of Research and Professional Learning

The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the importance of technology in all our lives, not least in how we learn. While online classes still continue for some boys in isolation, it’s easy to forget just how important Zoom, Stile and Schoolbox were for all boys, teachers and families for much of the past two years. The question we must now ask ourselves is how we can best use technology to support boys’ learning, how it can be an aid rather than a hindrance in fostering great relationships with their peers and teachers.

This week all parents and carers of boys in Years 5 to 12 received an invitation to participate in a research study we are conducting with the International Boys’ Schools Coalition (IBSC). This major study aims to help boys' schools including Scots better understand the impact of technology choices on boys' learning and the quality of relationships in classes. ​

We have been closely involved in the development of the study since its inception in 2019 through the IBSC Research Committee, which our Principal Dr Ian PM Lambert chairs and on which Dr Caitlin Munday and Dr Hugh Chilton serve. The project commenced with a literature review by University College London’s Knowledge Lab in 2020-21 (see a podcast and webinar discussing the findings). 

This study connects to research conducted by our own staff. Mr Nicholas Tester, Director of Strings, has been part of the IBSC’s rigorous action practitioner research program across 2020 and 2021, supported by Mr Jeff Mann, Coordinator of Student Experience. Mr Tester’s project is entitled 'Sir, not another piece of technology!' An examination of whether the use of e-portfolios in classroom music facilitates Year 8 boys to construct their own learning pathways'. He will present his findings at the IBSC Annual Conference in Dallas in June. 

In 2021 Mrs Penny Ryder, Preparatory School Master Teacher, and I worked with a group of Year 5 boys to explore how their peers use technology. The boys developed a survey in conjunction with boys in the United States and Canada, and presented their findings to one another — by Zoom, of course! Read more about that project here.

At The Scots College, we want to give boys ‘the finest preparation for life’. The big question we need to ask ourselves is ‘just what will life look like for them’? Our concern has been to make sure that boys are prepared not for the world into which their teachers and parents emerged after school, but the world as it is and will be in this century and the next. In this article, we sketch out some of the challenges facing the education system by the changing nature of work. The following short video from the team behind the award-winning book and documentary Most Likely to Succeed, puts into relief some of the significant changes underway that will affect all of us, and especially our boys.

Education has been the domain of a wealthy minority through most of history. However mass education was first instituted in the early 19th century. New South Wales opened its first public school in 1848, and introduced compulsory primary education in 1880. The industrial revolution was in full swing by then, and employment for many people involved repetitive tasks in a large scale organisation. Educating ‘work-ready’ citizens, in that context, included skills and values such as: compliance with authority, accuracy and efficiency, following instructions, dependability, and knowing your place in the larger collective. 

Since the nineteenth century, social, technological and workplace dynamics have changed beyond recognition. And as trite as it is to say, things are accelerating at an unprecedented pace. However, the general ‘operating system’ of schooling, built on an industrial era paradigm, has not changed to keep pace. The industrial model of education is no longer fit for purpose. Recent Australian research analysing 4 million job advertisements confirms that contemporary organisations are just as interested in social and emotional ‘soft’ skills for their prospective employees. These enterprise skills are said to be transferable between careers, and include: problem solving, communications, financial literacy, critical thinking, creativity, teamwork, digital literacy and presentation skills. While the General Capabilities in syllabi do prescribe many of these outcomes, they are generally applied in schools as an after-thought, a box-ticking exercise. Learning is not designed to achieve these outcomes, and thus it’s no surprise that these outcomes aren’t met. 

This past week has seen the release of the Commonwealth’s ‘National Microcredentials Framework’, the long-awaited guide to defining microcredentials across higher education, vocational education and industry. Developed by a panel of university, industry and vocational education leaders around Australia in partnership with PWC, it maps out a common definition of these new ways of accrediting small chunks of learning — as small as one hour. Skill acquisition is a lifelong process, and requires a much more agile model than the current system affords.

The World Economic Forum’s 2020 report, ‘Schools of the Future: Defining New Models of Education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution’, summarised the need for change thus:

“As globalization and rapid advancements in technology continue to transform civic space and the world of work, education systems have grown increasingly disconnected from the realities and needs of global economies and societies. Education models must adapt to equip children with the skills to create a more inclusive, cohesive and productive world.”

In a 2018 address, Andreas Schleicher, OECD Special Advisor on Education, put it more starkly: 

“when we could still assume that what we learn in school will last for a lifetime, teaching content knowledge and routine cognitive skills was rightly at the centre of education. Today, the world no longer rewards us just for what we know –’ Google knows everything’ – but for what we can do with what we know”. 

For boys, there is an added impetus to make learning more ‘real-world’. After concerns in the late 20th century of declining boys’ motivation for school in Australia, a government-funded review recommended that state and federal education systems should lead the international education community to develop ‘real world’ curriculum policies which value extra-curricula knowledge and learning experiences that will better engage boys.

There have, of course, been significant steps in recent years to make schooling more engaging and more personalised. Schools now focus on student wellbeing not just academic achievement, offer a dizzying array of extra-curricular activities and enrichment opportunities, and have a much stronger sense of how individual students are performing thanks to richer data and common standards. All of that is good and reflective of a noble desire to improve education for every student. Teachers and school leaders are working harder than ever to meet the learning needs (and many other needs!) of young people. And governments and parents are pouring more money into Australian schooling than ever before.

But unfortunately it’s not making enough of a difference. Policymakers concede that we are not making good progress on measures such as PISA, NAPLAN, and rates of student engagement and multi-dimensional wellbeing. International experts agree that our model of education has been slow to change. Much of the significant innovation in learning is taking place on the edges of or beyond the system, in alternative and micro-schools, online providers and platforms, and — most interestingly — as students ‘hack’ the system and design their own learning pathways.

The question all this raises is, ‘Will our children be ready for the world of work and life into which they are moving?’ Looking at the current educational pathway almost all children walk, the answer is not looking good.

If education in the 21st century needs to incorporate knowledge, skills and character development in order to prepare young people to be successful workers and flourishing citizens, what styles of teaching and learning will best achieve these aims? The dominant model of knowledge transmission by the teacher (as the ‘sage on the stage’) is argued to be less useful for future education than the role of facilitator (as the ‘guide on the side’) or even as strategic disruptor (as the ‘meddler in the middle’).

Various methods of student-centred pedagogy have been suggested, including: co-created learning, project based learning, personalisable education, inquiry learning, experiential education, product-oriented learning. Whilst each of these approaches are easily charicatured (think bean bags and chaos!), there is a strong and growing body of rigorous research and design around these pedagogical approaches. Some common factors amongst them:

• Students are given some choice in the shape, content or timing of their learning.
• Students need to work together collaboratively.
• Learning has an open-ended design, requiring students to solve a problem or create an idea or product. 

These pedagogies require some upskilling of teachers who are trained in the traditional model, and some ‘unlearning’ of established attitudes and habits on the part of students and parents. Of course, this does not mean that traditional direct instruction is no longer a useful pedagogy. To borrow an analogy from a trades context, teachers need to expand their pedagogical toolbox rather than replacing it with an entirely new one. I recently visited a boys’ school in Western Sydney that has successfully transitioned its whole approach towards a rigorous project-based and applied learning model across Years 7-12, and seen its NAPLAN and HSC results improve such that it is one of the top-performing non-selective schools in the state.

In next week’s newsletter we plan to share the ways in which we have been experimenting and learning with our staff and students about successful approaches to new forms of learning for boys.

Mr Jeff Mann
Coordinator of Student Experience

Dr Hugh Chilton
Director of Research and Professional Learning ​

​In the past week, you may have noticed two long-running education debates resurfacing on the lips of politicians and the pages of the popular press, raising questions about how to best ‘do school’. Their concern involves both what students are taught (the curriculum) and how they are taught (the pedagogy). The first is about teaching history, and specifically the approach teachers should take in addressing western civilisation’s good and bad aspects. Please read a very fine analysis from Dr David Hastie, one of our key lecturers in the Teaching Schools Alliance Sydney here.


The second is about teaching reading, and whether this is best done through phonics (systematically teaching words through their composite sounds and parts) versus whole-language teaching (teaching words in the context of sentences). There are many other debates in education – some new, some very old. Yet what is common to most debates is the subtext that to fix education, we need to be told ‘what works’ by academics and policymakers out there, beyond the school, and be held accountable for implementing it. It is as though teachers are fundamentally technicians, and if we can just refine their technique, then of course good outcomes will follow.


At Scots, we want to challenge this notion that teachers are merely technicians who ‘deliver the curriculum’ and reclaim a regard for their experience and expertise in the noble vocation of human formation. We have outstanding teachers at Scots who do not just deliver the curriculum but debate it; who do not just implement a pedagogy but adapt it to their context. Moreover, we are encouraging teachers to not only consume knowledge produced elsewhere, but to play their part in creating it through original research.


One aspect of this vision for reinventing the professional regard of teachers is encouraging further engagement in research. All our teachers are, to some degree, engaged in research through our Teaching for Character Program. In the program, teams design, implement and evaluate a new approach to teaching that deliberately develops one of our graduate qualities, such as creativity or service. Read more about it here. Over the years we have also seen a small number of staff undertake higher degrees by research (Masters and PhDs) connected to and supported by the College. This is a long and hard journey, but one that transforms the way teachers think about themselves and their roles as leaders in educational thought and practice.


This week our staff ‘PhD coffee club’ met online to share progress on various research projects. We celebrated the newly-minted PhD of Learning Enrichment Teacher, Dr Caroline Basckin, whose thesis explored ‘Evidence-based practices for students with special educational needs’. Coordinator of Student Experience, Mr Jeff Mann, shared his current focus on leading a global team to write a systematic review of research in outdoor education. Visual Arts Teacher, Mr Michael Whittington, reflected on a paper he is writing for his PhD about how COVID-19 has reshaped blended learning in the visual arts. Director of Cricket, Mr Greg Clarence, shared the exciting news of his submission to commence a PhD at The University of Notre Dame Australia, exploring how character can best be formed through sport. And Technology and Applied Studies Teacher, Ms Yogi Sewani, is at the point of inviting parents from the College to participate in her master’s research about cultural influences on parental perspectives of learning support – a project comparing Taiwanese and Australian parents. Read more about their projects and those of other staff here.


In October, we held a gathering of over 25 leaders in such schools around Australia to explore this phenomenon of schools taking ownership of building a research culture. Next week, I will be co-presenting a paper at the Australian Association for Research in Education Conference entitled Accelerating Evolution? The rise of research-invested schools, in concert with my Scots colleague Dr Caitlin Munday (who also serves as Director of the Teaching Schools Alliance Sydney) and our partners at The University of Newcastle, Professors Peter Twining and Professor Allyson Holbrook.


Read more about our approach to research here. We look forward to sharing more, in the coming weeks, about how Scots is leading the way in repositioning schools – and teachers – as research leaders, not just passive consumers.

Dr Hugh Chilton
Director of Research and Professional Learning