Much has been written and debated about evidence-based practice in education in the last decade or so, particularly as this pertains to reading instruction. It is pleasing that we are now shifting our lens to practice-based evidence - accounts of major transformation as a result of a school leader's re-orientation of pedagogy in a school. Regular readers will recall Sue Knight's immensely popular 2021 Snow Report guest post about how leaders can motivate, drive, and sustain change.
In this post, we hear from Paul McDermott, who has been a Primary School Principal for 25 years and a teacher for 33 years. He has worked across sectors and has been recognised for leading significant school improvement in multiple settings. He is currently a Chief Education Officer with the School Excellence team in the New South Wales Department of Education and a Director on the Board of Ochre Education.
Paul was most recently the Principal at Blue Haven Public School which was the Australian Government Primary School of the Year in 2019. Paul was also awarded Government Primary School Principal of the year in 2019.
Paul is passionate about school improvement and collaboration and currently supports a number of schools across New South Wales. He shares the Blue Haven transformation story below.
Ground zero
I walked through the school gates as the Principal of Blue Haven Public School on the New South Wales (NSW) central coast, for the first time in August 2016. It was the day that NAPLAN[1] results came out. Staff from my previous school were euphoric as they sent messages celebrating the NAPLAN improvement that our students had shown. I looked at ours. We were below similar schools and the entire state in everything, and our value-added results (an internal NSW Department of Education [DOE] measure) placed us in the bottom 5% of schools across NSW. So many questions ran through my head.
Over the next few weeks, after meeting with students, staff and parents of my new school, I realised the enormity of the task at hand. The term “whole school improvement” had never meant more. Where do I start? Had I made the right decision to move to a new school? Were they ready for change?
I quickly realised that the staff were ready for a common direction and consistency. They had program fatigue from approaches coming and going, wellbeing was weighing them down. Everyone was happy to tell them that results were poor, but no-one had told them how to fix them. They were a great group of people who desperately sought a direction.
The staff had entrenched views and a commitment to an approach to instruction that was not evidence-based. There was a “choose your own adventure” approach to everything, with 24 Silos in operation. We called it the “egg carton” effect. We were all part of the same school, yet there was no authentic collaboration or sharing. We needed to build a deeper understanding of the evidence about teaching and learning, across the school.
I decided to make professional reading at the beginning of every leadership meeting a priority. References to the work of Dr. Jennifer Buckingham, Dr Ben Jensen’s Grattan institute report on “turnaround schools” and the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation (CESE) articles became the centrepiece of our discussions. These were accompanied by classroom walk-throughs to reveal what was actually happening in the classrooms, followed by reflection on this.
The worm started to turn as it was clear our practices did not align to the evidence. Leaders and teachers were questioning the approaches and their efficacy. It didn’t take long for staff to realise there were more effective ways to teach our students. We completed an audit of current approaches and our staffing structures including approaches to intervention. Linking with the evidence, we explored options that would best meet the needs of our students and our context. Our students (as do all) needed an explicit and systematic approach to teaching and learning. They also needed strong alignment between our core programs and modes of intervention.
No-one could articulate our vision as a school
One of my early questions as a leader was how many staff could articulate the school’s vision? The answer was zero. This was a problem. Staff needed to know their moral purpose and their “why”. We set about creating a vision that reflected the aspirations of the community. Collaboratively we sought three words from all community members about their aspirations for our school. Terms like high performing, positive, inclusive, wellbeing, school culture and success became the centrepiece of our vision. Our vision was everywhere, we discussed it regularly and it was a living, breathing part of school life. Eighteen months later I asked the same question. This time all staff were able to articulate the key words from our vision. They even started debating the order they should be placed in to reflect our needs. This was a goosebump moment for me as it was a sure sign that our staff were “on the bus”.
Our staff worked hard, but they didn’t work smart, and they didn’t share the load and collaborate. We set about implementing strong processes for collaboration. Staff shared the programming load, regular collaboration sessions supported the sharing of best practice, data reflections and using this to inform our teaching.
We set about raising our expectations across the board. No more making excuses for our students. They were capable. “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept” became one of our mantras. So too did “Every child matters, every day”.
Teaching and learning
We adopted a signature pedagogy – explicit teaching. Why? Because the research was clear. It is the only pedagogy that is beneficial to all, harmful to none and essential to many. A consistent pedagogical framework was established in literacy and numeracy that was followed by all staff. Having consistency across the school promoted collaboration and the sharing of the workload and resources. All staff received significant professional learning and instructional coaching to support best practice. Collaboration was a key element of our work. Teachers met every five weeks to analyse data, share best practice and plan for the next steps in our journey. These days were also great for our school culture. I would often walk in to see a room that looked like a sizzler salad bar of nibblies and lots of laughter. Much was achieved this way, in moving our school forward and building a positive school culture.
Intervention had to be targeted
A large percentage of our students were underachieving and unable to access grade level curriculum content. Our intervention strategies had to be on point. We engaged speech-language pathologists and occupational therapists to conduct screening assessments on all Kindergarten students that entered the school. This was then followed up with meetings with our Kindergarten team to identify which students required Tier 1, 2 or 3 support[2]. Ongoing therapy was provided to any students who required it. We employed additional teachers to provide Tier 2 and 3 literacy and numeracy support and upskilled our teacher aides (education support staff) to be more effective in this space as well.
In 2017 we introduced a program called Early Birds. This was a 30-minute session that was run before school. Our instructional leaders co-ordinated these sessions and supported students. In addition, we trained Year 6 students to support students to engage in the activities on offer. This program received amazing support from the staff and the community. All intervention students received a personal invitation to attend. It was not uncommon for us to have 70-plus students in attendance, engaged in activities to support achievement across the full spectrum of literacy and numeracy skills. Many of our students who attended Early Birds also achieved significant uplift in their academic performance. We calculated that approximately 6000 hours of additional learning took place as a result of Early Birds. Our focus with intervention was always to make our Tier 1 (core programs) super strong to reduce the number of students requiring intervention.
Student, staff and community wellbeing
Blue Haven was a tough school in 2016. We had a lot of students and community members with complex needs. Behaviour was a major inhibitor to our academic progress. We employed a Deputy Principal – Wellbeing to support the wellbeing of all. The school was lacking any systems and processes. Our DP Wellbeing did an amazing job of putting processes in place to support students with complex needs and to provide clear boundaries and expectations for behaviour. Initially we encountered resistance to these new measures from the community as they adjusted to a new system, however very quickly, they could see a safer environment with consistent expectations and clear consequences for all.
We more than halved the incidence of negative behaviours. The number of students absconding from class reduced to almost zero. In-class behaviour was similar, as students were experiencing success and were supported to access the curriculum. I distinctly remember one of our office staff coming into my office to say they had just delivered a message to a classroom, and it was the first time they had felt safe.
A key element of our wellbeing strategy was to reward and acknowledge positive behaviour. An example of this was our attendance strategy. We identified chronic lateness to school as an issue, so we introduced a lottery system every day. If the child’s name was identified and they were present in lines, a Wheel of Fortune went off where they could win a variety of awards e.g., computer time, shadow the groundsman, a photo on a Harley-Davidson motorbike. This was extremely popular and resulted in a significant improvement in attendance. The school continues to implement these strategies in order to promote a sense of belonging and fun for the community.
Leadership
We introduced a tiered leadership model across the school. Our senior leadership team’s role was to set the vision, lead strategic directions and provide a filter to what was being asked of staff from external sources and the system. This protected their workload and our direction. There are a lot of fads in education, and we wanted to ensure we were true to our implementation journey. Our middle leaders were brilliant. They led their teams at a stage or team level and supported staff to implement with fidelity. Initially, we made the mistake of not engaging them enough with the teaching and learning, due to having three instructional leaders, however we adjusted this to ensure they were the strong link to the classroom.
Our Aspiring Leaders Program was a hit with staff, with up to 10 teachers nominating for this each year. We supported them to build their leadership capability by engaging as a full member of the executive for at least a term and leading reference groups with the support of an executive member. In 2019, I asked one of our brilliant beginning teachers to sit on the executive to provide a beginner teacher voice to our team without the expectation of other duties. This was a great initiative as this person is now excelling as a leader and benefitted from early identification and mentoring.
Professional learning and instructional coaching
I knew our greatest asset was our staff. We sourced expert professional learning for all of them. Our senior leadership team led the way. We all travelled to Eugene Oregon (self-funded) in 2019 to complete expert training in explicit teaching and direct instruction. As leaders, we wanted to be knowledgeable about the pedagogies we were implementing. We sought expert training from Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI) with Joe Ybarra, and John Fleming coached our staff in explicit teaching and the use of daily reviews.
All of our leadership team engaged in bespoke leadership analysis and coaching with Simon Popley, and our support staff received professional learning from our speech-language pathologist and occupational therapist. We examined case-based scenarios where all staff would unpack the steps in a proposed suspension from the initial incident, through investigation to resolution. Staff meetings focussed on our strategic improvement plan directions and on implementing evidence-informed practices in the classroom.
All teachers received instructional coaching multiple times a year across our school. We used the analogy of Roger Federer still having a coach despite being an outstanding tennis player, to remove any deficit-thinking about coaching. Coaching was about being the best we could be. A gradual release model was implemented. Walk throughs were commonplace; teachers were able to have demonstration lessons, then team teaching and then coaching if they were unsure about a particular approach, however many teachers accelerated straight to coaching. The coaching was a game-changer for our teachers. It was not attached to teachers’ annual performance development plans but was simply all about support and improvement.
Community engagement
The relationship with the community was extremely poor when I started. Many of our parents had negative experiences when they were at school, so their trust was low. We needed to break down these barriers. The staff had inadvertently “circled their wagons” over the years, to keep the community out. Communication with the community had been harsh and lacking in warmth. The first parent session I ran had five parents in attendance.
We worked with the staff to ensure that communication was positive while maintaining our high expectations. We held a session we called “Bridging Blue Haven” when we were developing our strategic improvement plan. We had about 35 community members from local preschools, secondary schools, local real estate agencies, service providers etc in attendance. The next year we decided to advance on this idea by getting our community groups to hold stalls. We enticed the community with a sausage sizzle and some fun games. Our community engagement team was incredibly nervous that nobody would come. At 3pm, the flood gates opened and over 400 community members entered the school, engaged with stalls, spoke to staff and became informed about the services we offered.
We held open classrooms whenever we had a school event like our annual Book Week Parade. By 2020 it was standing-room-only for these events and hundreds would stay to visit their child’s classroom afterwards and see explicit teaching in action. We developed vignettes on our school website to support the community to engage with new initiatives. The community reputation of the school became extremely positive, and our enrolments reflected this, increasing by over 100 in four years.
School culture
This is a hard one to measure. We focussed on creating a positive school culture and embedding a sense of fun in everything we did. We were at the school drop off every morning opening car doors, high-fiving kids and welcoming them to school. We occasionally dressed in our silly suits and had our dolphin mascot out there as well. The kids loved it. We supported our staff and their wellbeing to do the best job they could. We held fun and engaging staff meetings once a term that focussed on us as a team and as individuals. We redeveloped our staffroom to make it an oasis for staff. We acknowledged great work by staff, students and the community. In the space of only two years, we had transformed from an underperforming school that had declining enrolments and an adversarial relationship with the community to one that was amongst the highest-performing in Australia (compared to similar schools), had reached our enrolment cap (growing from 530 students to almost 650), and had an outstanding reputation and strong relationships with the community.
Measuring change
By 2018, Blue Haven was significantly outperforming similar schools (MySchool). Our Year 3 students were the highest-performing students in Australia when compared to statistically similar schools via MySchool.
Value-added results (via the afore-mentioned internal NSW DOE measure) indicated that student growth across reading and numeracy had shifted from the bottom 5% of NSW schools to well inside the top 10% in under two years. This result was sustained in 2019, and the school continues to perform strongly. NSW DOE public schools assess against a School Excellence Framework. The school was identified as excelling in Student Growth and Performance.
Parent feedback
· As a parent, I valued that Blue Haven provided a warm and welcoming environment where every child truly matters. The visible presence of staff and leadership, along with their commitment to giving every student the opportunity to reach their full potential, makes me confident my child is supported.
· As a parent I experienced my children develop excitement for learning and confidence in their ability. They all experience a level of success that they hadn't experienced before. Communication around student learning between the school and community meant that I was also aware of what and how my children were learning.
Teacher feedback
· When Paul commenced as Principal, I believe I had a certain level of content knowledge, but my delivery was nowhere near impactful (but I didn’t know this at the time). The change was managed in a way that felt exciting rather than nerve wracking from day one. We felt part of the process. As a result of strong structures and consistency, I was able to spend more time teaching and less time managing challenging behaviours.
· As a staff, we were engaging in professional learning that was able to be implemented immediately into the classroom. There was purpose and direction around all of the PL. This was reinforced with wrap around support from Instructional Leaders and the school executive.
· We were collaborating as a whole for the first time. It was the first time in my career I had seen something implemented as a whole school approach effectively. What was happening in one room was happening in all rooms. I had only ever known a choose your own adventure approach prior to this with teachers working independently on one another.
· We also felt a part of the improvement journey. We celebrated small wins, and big ones. It was an exciting time.
Concluding remarks
This post outlines some of the key initiatives that made a difference at Blue Haven and have sustained the uplift over time. It is by no means a complete account, but hopefully it gives some insight into how and why we did the things we did.[1] National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy. See https://www.acara.edu.au/assessment/naplan
[2] Tiers of support are part of the Response to Intervention (RTI) framework. See https://ldaustralia.org/information-resources/response-to-intervention/
(C) Paul McDermott and Pamela Snow (2025)
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