CATALYSING CHANGE
Learning Creates is not designed to exist forever
Instead, we seek to play a catalytic role during a critical phase of transition in the learning recognition system. Our purpose is to accelerate the pace of change towards a new learning recognition system and ensure it will work for all young people - especially those experiencing disadvantage.
We’ve come a long way in the first two years, but when it comes to the slow, patient and persistent work of systems change, we’re only just getting started.
CURRENT CONTEXT
Systemic change is hard, a new approach is needed
In any given year there are around 500,000 (ACARA, 2020) young people in senior secondary education in Australia. Too many of these young Australians still complete their formal school education each year without the knowledge, skills, attitudes and dispositions they need to navigate the transition from school to further education, training, or employment.
The future of work is rapidly changing and young people are leaving school underprepared. The World Bank recently warned of a “learning crisis” in global education with millions of students facing the prospect of lost opportunity and lower wages in later life because their schools are failing to educate them to develop the skills and capabilities needed to succeed.
The scale and scope of the work is national and ongoing. It impacts on all young people, but has the potential to significantly transform the life trajectories of those who experience disadvantage.
Yet despite many reviews and reports over at least a decade, agreement on the need for change and the will for change from those closest to learning and young people, it has proven difficult to shift the senior secondary recognition system and make a significant impact for disadvantaged young people.
This is because Australia has a particularly complex set of arrangements that make up its education system, particularly at senior secondary. These have evolved over time rather than been designed with intent.
Senior secondary school policy represents the confluence of many interests:
- two levels of government,
- thousands of schools,
- dozens of school systems,
- seven school jurisdictions, each with their own curriculum and assessment authorities,
- as well as interests in vocational education, higher education, and employment.
There’s no singular authority or governing structure that regulates the system.
“Every young Australian is worthy of the greatest respect and should have equal opportunity to succeed. Being ‘disadvantaged’ is not a quality of people, it is a feature or an outcome of what happens to some young people by virtue of their experiences in some of our institutions.”
(The Shergold Report p.20)
OUR FUNCTIONS
Filling the need for an independent intermediary
In the midst of this complexity, Learning Creates Australia will play a significant role; bringing together people and organisations to work together in a new way. We do this by performing the following intermediary functions:
- Producing innovative evidence that provokes action
- Amplifying the impact of first movers
- Connecting up and activate a fragmented landscape
- Co-designing new solutions where there are emerging gaps or opportunities
- Backing First Nations self-determination at all levels of the system
