This course is designed for teachers who are interested in building practical skills around differentiation and inclusive planning for a mainstream context K-12. Participants will look at the timeline of disability within the school context and see how overtime changes have taken place (or not). Teachers will expand their strategies and skills in meeting the needs of students with disabilities in various settings to support positive and successful learning and engagement.
K-12 teachers who are interested in unpacking their understanding of inclusion and increase their strategies and skills in supporting a wide range of students with disability in their classroom.
30 October 2025 at NSW Teachers Federation, Surry Hills
$220
John Skene was elected as the NSW Teachers Federation Disability Officer in November 2024. As part of this role, he is responsible for supporting students, staff and schools in disability. He is working closely with the other areas in Federation (Organisers, Professional Support, Trade Union Training) to support Federation members.
With over fifteen years of experience as a teacher in special education, John has worked at Schools for Specific Purposes (SSPs) and Support Units (SUs). He has held roles such as Federation Representative and Assistant Principal Special Education. John was a Councillor and the Special Education Contact of Sutherland and Inner-City Teachers Association (across his time in school).
Bianca Bertalli considers the ‘media minefield’ and the benefits of collaborative teaching to facilitate students’ media literacy. . .
The internet has revolutionised the way people seek and use information. It has enabled faster and easier communication, facilitated the global trading of goods and ideas, and integrated access to information with everyday life. These rapid changes are reflected in classroom practice, where technology has transformed the tools available to teachers and students (Haleem et al., 2022). However, as access to information has grown, so has the proportion of misinformation available to consumers. Fake news, algorithm powered bots and organised troll groups are some of the common channels of misinformation likely to be encountered by today’s students.
Classroom teachers and teacher librarians play a key role in teaching students how to critically evaluate information. By developing collaborative practices in inquiry learning, teacher librarians can align learning with this need and support colleagues through an unprecedented era of online content creation and consumption (Australian School Library Association [ASLA], 2019; NSW Department of Education, 2022).
Misinformation vs disinformation
The term ‘misinformation’ infers an overarching invalidity of information, however other fundamental components are also at play in online content. Misinformation can be shared or spread unwittingly, or it can be categorised as ‘disinformation’ and deliberately circulated for financial gain or political advantage (Australian Communications and Media Authority, 2023; Harrison and Leopold, 2021). Ranked by severity, in terms of the negative social, economic, and environmental impact, mis/disinformation ranked 16th out of 32 imminent global risks identified by the World Economic Forum (2023). Worryingly, when considered in a long-term 10-year projection, mis/disinformation advances to 11th position. While the impact on young people has not yet been widely examined, the prospect of mis/disinformation as a global threat is particularly concerning, given that it ranks well ahead of dangers such as terrorist attacks or the use of weapons of mass destruction (World Economic Forum, 2023, p 11).
The media: fusion of fact and opinion
The emergence of ‘alternative facts’ and the recurrent sharing of unchecked information throughout the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the prevalence of misinformation in the media. It also increased concern globally on the cause and effect this may have on young people (Howard, Neudert and Prakesh, 2021). False news and media bias have the potential to undermine confidence in political personalities and influence democratic processes (Hobbs and McKnight, 2014; Nettlefold and Williams, 2018). The way news media is framed can underrepresent, misrepresent or purposefully exclude specific groups of people (Meehan et al., 2015; Moyer, 2022).
Mis/disinformation can also ignite and spread polarising ideas and threaten ‘social cohesion’ (World Economic Forum, 2023, p 24). Harrison and Leopold (2021) acknowledge that while political agendas are often the driving force behind media, financially incentivised click-bait headlines also make it tempting for media to give precedence to content that will draw readers in, rather than present accuracy.
The often-imperceptible fusion of fact and opinion across news media, combined with the reach and saturation of a small number of news corporations, places Australian school students at risk of information overload without a way to critically evaluate their way out (Nettlefold and Williams, 2018).
In a study of 1,000 Australians aged 8-16 years, Notley and Dezuanni (2020) found that despite an 8% increase in news consumption since 2017, there was only a 2% increase in the number of students who felt they could distinguish fake news from real news. Even though the broad consensus of teachers agreed that engaging with news in a critical way is important for students, only 1 out of 5 Australian students said that they had been taught how to decide whether a news story was credible (Nettlefold and Williams, 2018; Notley and Dezuanni, 2020).
Beware the bots
Through carefully created algorithms, internet ‘bots’ (originating from the word ‘robot’) have changed the way information is curated for search engines and can deliberately alter the way in which information is prioritised for viewing (Head et al., 2020; Nettlefold and Williams, 2018; Rogers-Whitehead et al., 2022). Bots and algorithms are neither good nor evil, as their function and impact are determined by those who designed them (Head et al., 2020; Lutkevich and Gillis, 2022). They do, however, have the power to alter the flow of data and influence an internet user’s experience (Alemanno, 2018; Rogers-Whitehead et al., 2022).
It has been estimated that bots make up more than two-thirds of internet traffic (Barracuda, 2021; Rogers-Whitehead et al., 2022). For example, over a 6-month period in 2020, COVID-19 related tweets were collected and analysed. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers found that 82% of the 50 most influential retweeters were in fact bots (CMU, 2020). This inundation of mis/disinformation and polarising messaging spread by bots can have alarming consequences, including risks to public debate and democracy or increased hostility, violence or crime (CMU, 2020; Howard et al., 2021).
While students prefer search engines, such as Google, as their primary source of research information, they often have a misplaced trust in it, believing that search results are provided, or fact checked, by a human employee (Dring, 2014; Lane and Van Bergan, 2018; The Office of Communications [OFCOM], 2017). Instead, web-crawler bots provide a curated list of website suggestions in response to search queries and, although students may believe sources are listed in order of validity, bots order results based on other factors, such as the frequency of visits to a site or the quantity of pages that link to a site (Cloudflare, n.d.). Google also lists paid search results that can be difficult for students to distinguish (OFCOM, 2017).
Complex algorithms further construct an individual’s online experience from data harvested through each engagement. The way in which algorithms present increasingly extreme viewpoints through ‘Watch Next’ suggestions on YouTube (Moyer, 2022) or other algorithm-driven content, such as personalised news feeds, advertisements or friend suggestions, makes it difficult for students to separate fact and fiction online (UNICEF, 2021). Rogers-Whitehead et al. (2022) warn that, as children grow and more seamlessly engage with technology, they will become ‘even more accustomed to outsourcing their information seeking and “truth” to devices’ (p 7).
Crossing the troll bridge
The internet dominates the channels that humans use to communicate and share information, and while propaganda is not a new concept, content specifically created to propagate ideologically-driven conflict has grown exponentially. When a student views an idea or message frequently, they often misinterpret this as an indicator of truthfulness (Moyer, 2022; Howard et al., 2021). At times, these messages are created by trolls, people who intentionally initiate hostility and conflict, often using mis/disinformation as their chosen weapon (Bradshaw and Howard, 2017; Howard et al., 2012).
The efficacy of organised troll groups in gaining political influence was investigated in an Oxford University study by Bradshaw and Howard (2017), who coined the phrase ‘cyber troops’ to describe ‘government, military or political party teams committed to manipulating public opinion over social media’ (p 3). They found that, across at least 28 countries, coordinated efforts were made to engage in social media platforms to sway or stifle discussions or consciously spread disinformation.
Practical solutions: a collaborative approach
Inquiry learning, including media literacy, is fundamental to the Australian Curriculum (ACARA, n.d). The rationale in the Media Arts learning area, for example, states that: ‘students learn to be critically aware of ways that the media are culturally used and negotiated, and are dynamic and central to the way they make sense of the world and of themselves’ (para. 3). More specifically, subject content descriptions provide scaffolds to assist students’ deep learning. For example, the content for Year 4 HASS (Humanities and Social Sciences) is driven by a number of ‘inquiry questions’ and divided into two strands: ‘knowledge and understanding’, and ‘inquiry and skills’. In particular, the ‘researching’ and ‘analysing’ skills require students to ‘locate and collect information and data from different sources,’ and ‘identify different points of view and distinguish facts from opinions.’ In various iterations that differ in complexity, the same questions and skills drive student learning in HASS from Foundation to Year 7.
In NSW, across the range of syllabuses, and at all stages, students are required to independently research and analyse information in various online and offline contexts, making it crucial that they are given the opportunity to develop skills that enable them to critically engage with information. The Stage Statements for Geography K–10 (NESA, n.d.), for example, provide a continuum of learning focused on inquiry and students’ ability to effectively consume and produce information. Lane and Van Bergen (2018) note that, as students compare, contrast and critically evaluate sources through the inquiry process, they become more adept at identifying mis/disinformation.
Despite universal recognition of the importance of media literacy, the current combined responsive efforts of media policy, regulation and educational practices to facilitate media literacy are predicted to fall short in addressing the projected global threat of mis/disinformation (World Economic Forum, 2023). However, with information technology acting as the ‘primary driving force behind education reform’ (Haleem et al., 2022, p 1), the need to increasingly assess the validity of information presents teachers and teacher librarians with a powerful, collaborative opportunity.
Teacher librarians can support classroom teachers and help bridge the knowledge gap to teach students media literacy skills (Nettlefold and Williams, 2018) by providing both in-context instruction shaped around the Information Fluency Framework (NSW Department of Education, n.d., PDF 900 KB) and curriculum-aligned resources. Britannica Education (2024), for example, offers a freely available online Media Literacy Guide, which unpacks media literacy metalanguage and provides helpful activities to encourage students to develop their critical information literacy across various platforms. Similarly, the ABC Education’s (2024) Media Literacy online hub of videos and interactive activities covers a broad range of topics, including social media, news bias, media ethics and fact checking.
Misinformation presents a ubiquitous threat for our young people. It is essential that classrooms and school libraries operate as spaces where information, innovation, and inclusion are deeply valued and fabrications, alternative facts and fake news are widely challenged. Working together, teachers and teacher librarians have a responsibility to cultivate students’ media literacy skills, develop inquiry-based models of learning, and foster practices that continuously build the information fluency of students.
Abu Kausar, M., Dhaka, V. & Singh, S. (2013). Web crawler: a review. International Journal of Computer Applications, 63, 31–36. https://doi.org/10.5120/10440-5125
Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority. (n.d.). Structure.
Alemanno, A. (2018). how to counter fake news? A taxonomy of anti-fake news approaches. European Journal of Risk Regulation, 9(1), 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1017/err.2018.12
Australian Communications and Media Authority. (2023, March 29). Online misinformation.
Bauer, A. J., Nadler, A. & Nelson, J. L. (2022). What is Fox News? Partisan journalism, misinformation, and the problem of classification. Electronic News, 16(1), 18–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/19312431211060426
Haleem, A., Javaid, M., Qadri, M. A. & Suman, R. (2022). Understanding the role of digital technologies in education: a review. Sustainable Operations and Computers, 3, 275–285. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.susoc.2022.05.004
Hobbs, M. & Mcknight, D. (2014). “Kick this mob out”: the Murdoch media and the Australian Labor government (2007 to 2013). Global Media Journal: Australian Edition, 8, 1–13.
Kammer, J., Donahay, A., King, M. & Koeberl, H. (2021). Understanding what makes school librarian-teacher collaboration successful. Knowledge Quest, 50(1), 50-52.
Rogers-Whitehead, C., Milstead, A. O. & Farris-Hill, L. (2022). Advocating digital citizenship: resources for the library and classroom. Libraries Unlimited.
Bianca Bertalli is currently a NSW Department of Education Specialist Teacher Scholarship recipient, completing her post-graduate Masters of Education (Teacher Librarianship), and working as Teacher Librarian K-6, at Gol Gol Public School in the Rural Far West. Bianca began teaching in 2010, as a classroom teacher in the inner city of Sydney, where she previously served as an elected government school representative on the Quality Teaching Council. Bianca has presented at courses and conferences to support early career teachers to develop skills in classroom management, planning/ programming and the accreditation process. She has been an active member of the NSW Teachers Federation for the past 16 years.
Fiona Beasley shares her research into trauma informed practice…
More and more, schools are recognising the need to support both students who have experienced trauma as well as the teachers who work with them every day. Research shows that children who go through tough experiences like abuse, neglect, or family struggles often face challenges in learning, behaviour, and relationships. They may struggle with focus, managing emotions, or getting along with others, and some may develop anxiety, depression, or other mental health concerns. Without the right support, these difficulties can lead to school suspensions or even expulsions.
Being trauma-informed means understanding how these experiences affect students and learning how to create a supportive, safe environment where they can thrive. This article covers ten important things teachers should know about trauma-informed practices to help every student feel understood, valued, and ready to learn.
1. What is trauma?
The most commonly used definition of trauma is that from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (Trauma and Violence – What Is Trauma and Its Effects?, n.d.) SAMHSA recognises trauma as an event, or set of circumstances, that is experienced by an individual, resulting in physical, emotional and/or life-threatening harm. The event may be an accident, long term illness or natural disaster that results in someone feeling unsafe and unstable. It could be a one-time event, such as a car accident, on an ongoing event, such as prolonged neglect. Ongoing trauma, over a long period of time, creates toxic stress. Chronic or toxic stress, brought on by trauma, is the long term-activation of the body’s stress response.
2. How prevalent is trauma?
Australian Child Maltreatment Study (Haslam et al., 2023) found more than 2 in five Australians (39.4%) have experienced childhood maltreatment, including physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, neglect, and exposure to domestic and family violence. The NSW Governments DCJ Quarterly Statistical Report on Services for Children and Young People – July – September 2024 (NSW Department of Communities and Justice, n.d.) identified:
A total of 104 687 child and young person concern reports were received. Of these 58.1% met the risk of significant harm (ROSH) threshold.
A total of 527 children and young people entered Out of Home Care (OOHC). This is an increase of 8.2%.
As of 30 September 2024, a total of 13 889 children and young people were in OOHC in NSW.
There were 351 children and young people in High Cost Emergency Arrangements (HCEA) at the end of September 2024.
It is important to note that this data relates to circumstances of harm that have been reported. It does not take into account other events identified as contributing to trauma. We can also make assumptions that these statistics are lower than the real number of children who may be experiencing maltreatment or abuse as a result of under-reporting.
3. What does trauma look like in schools
Our brains are developed to help us respond to threat. Children who have experienced trauma, perceive the world as a dangerous place. Their brains are on high alert and may appear to overreact to what may seem to those around them, as unthreatening stimuli, resulting in behaviours that can be characterised as fight, flight, freeze or fawn. These automatic responses can be defined as reacting to a perceived threat through:
Fight – responding aggressively
Flight – trying to flee
Freeze – an inability to move or act
Fawn – trying to please in order to avoid the threat.
Children who have been exposed to traumatic events resulting in experiencing toxic stress are at far greater risk of difficulties in school. Notably, the impact that trauma can have on brain development, particularly that resulting in toxic stress, leads to cognitive and social-emotional difficulties.
Downey et al. (2013), in the resource developed for the Victorian Child Safety Commissioner identified the most recognisable impacts on education under two intertwining categories.
Impacts on academic performance
Impacts on social relationships
Reduced cognitive capacity
Need for control
Sleep disturbance
Attachment difficulties
Difficulties with memory
Poor peer relationships
Language delays
Unstable living situation
4. Self-regulation can be challenging for students who have experienced trauma
For students who have been through trauma, self-regulation can be especially tough. Their struggles with schoolwork and social interactions are often made worse by difficulties managing their emotions and deep feelings of shame.
Emotional Dysregulation: Hyperarousal vs. Dissociation
Kids dealing with trauma often show emotional dysregulation in one of two ways—hyperarousal or dissociation.
· Hyperarousal means being on high alert all the time. These kids may see neutral situations as dangerous, reacting with fear or defensiveness. Even though their bodies are geared up for danger, they’re not always good at recognizing real threats, which can lead to risky behaviours. Plus, being in this constant state of alertness makes it incredibly hard to focus or pay attention in class.
· Dissociation is the opposite—these kids may seem zoned out, distant, or emotionally unreachable. Sometimes, they might even appear defiant or oppositional when, in reality, they’re just mentally shutting down as a coping mechanism.
The Weight of Shame
For children who have experienced trauma, feelings of shame can be overwhelming. A small mistake or a simple disciplinary action can make them feel like failures or even like they’re inherently “bad.” This shame can fuel emotional outbursts and make it even harder for them to regulate their emotions, sometimes leading to aggression as a way to cope.
Understanding these challenges is key to helping trauma-affected students navigate school and social situations with the support they need.
5. Kids who have experienced trauma are not going out of their way to push your buttons.
Children who have experienced trauma can develop maladaptive strategies as a means of maintaining personal safety. Dr Ross Greene puts it very simply as, “Kids do well if they can.” (2008) He identifies that rather than taking the view that kids do well if they want to, suggesting a lack of motivation, we should take the view that if a kid could do well, they would. Kids who struggle, who are challenging, are lacking the skills required to do so. Dr Greene goes on to say that challenging behaviour is most likely to occur when the expectations being placed on them outweigh the skills they have to respond adaptively.
6. We don’t always know what is happening when kids are not at school.
We don’t always know what experiences children bring to school. A child who runs late to school may be met with a reprimand and questions for why they are late. What about the child who rarely seems organised and never has the right equipment or fails to bring back excursion notes on time. Consider the iceberg analogy. We can see the tip of the iceberg, but what is hiding beneath the surface? The child who is reprimanded for being late spent the morning getting siblings ready for school and trying to scrounge together food for their breakfasts and lunches while their parent remained in bed, unable to get up due to the debilitating depression they are experiencing. Rather than reprimanding the student for being late, consider responding with compassion and empathy. This child has managed to get themselves to school despite the challenges they may be facing.
7. Build relationships
Understanding the impact that traumatic events can have on the developing brain helps us to understand what children need to heal. Although negative early experiences such as poor attachment have a negative impact on the brain, conversely, relationships can have a protective and reparative impact. The importance of relationships in healing cannot be understated. Whilst therapeutic interventions may be essential, genuine relationships resulting in micro moments of positive regard can be transformational for a child’s healing. It is the countless relational experiences that kids experience at school on a daily basis, both intentional and unintentional that have the greatest impact. (Australian Childhood Foundation, 2018; Ludy-Dobson & Perry, 2010)
“The more healthy relationships a child has, the more likely he will be to recover from trauma and thrive. Relationships are the agents of change, and the most powerful therapy is human love.” (Perry, 2007)
8. Use restorative practices rather than punitive discipline
Punitive discipline results in kids feeling shame and isolation for making mistakes as well as perpetuating the idea that they are bad. For students who have experienced trauma this can be particularly damaging and potentially re-traumatising. This type of discipline relies on control over care with an over-reliance on compliance, rather than understanding.
Restorative practice promotes a safe school culture and environment by helping to build positive relationships. Restorative practices are not about giving kids a free pass. “It recognises that a variety of factors influence behaviour and seeks to address the underlying influences through empathy, relationship-building, communication, social and emotional learning and finding ways to respectfully hold one another accountable”. (NSW Department of Education Wellbeing, 2025)
A new professional learning course developed in collaboration with leading experts in the field is now available on-demand from the NSW Department of Education. (Wellbeing, 2024)
9. Take care of your own wellbeing first.
The most important point to remember when working with children who have experienced trauma is the demands of this work. This can take its toll on the wellbeing of teachers in the form of compassion fatigue as a result of working day after day with children who may be aggressive or withdrawn and do not respond as quickly to the usual positive regard shown by teachers. They cannot continue to support the wellbeing of others unless individually and collectively we consider the wellbeing of the teachers themselves.
Downey et al. (2013) suggests three strategies for self-care, being reminded by the three R’s: Reflection, Regulation and Relaxation
Reflection – be realistic about working with students who have experienced trauma as it can be very difficult to like and relate to them. Consider reflecting on their behaviour in light of what you know about trauma and try to understand the behaviour from the perspective of what has happened to them rather than what is wrong with them. Think about what you may need to continue to work and connect with the student. Ensure you have a trusted colleague you can debrief with.
Regulation – Be mindful of how this work may trigger your own dysregulation. Reflect on what it is you need to self-regulate. You cannot support the regulation of students if you are dysregulated. Be aware of your own triggers and the reactions and emotions they may invoke. You have probably heard the quote by L. R. Knost “When little people are overwhelmed by big emotions, it’s our job to share our calm, not join their chaos.” We cannot help children learn to self-regulate if we add our emotions to the mix.” (Kansas, 2023).
It is important that there is a culture of safety within your school that means you can tap out when needed, no questions asked. You need to be able to ask for help without judgement. It is not a reflection on your abilities as a teacher, but more how hard this work really is.
Relaxation – just as important as reflection and regulation is being able to relax. Having the time and space to engage in activities or past times that refresh and renew your energy. Ensure that you are engaging with things that are of interest to you, the things that bring you joy. Engage in Yoga, mindfulness, read a book, go for a hike, binge watch a favourite show, get a massage. Whatever you do, it is what brings you peace and joy.
Most importantly, remember to be patient and forgiving of yourself. Children who have experienced trauma and have disrupted attachment require time to change and being kind to yourself is necessary within a culture of safety and social support in your school.
End note
This JPL article is based upon Fiona’s 2024 Eric Pearson report entitled Trauma Informed Practice: An Observation of the Elements Required to Sustain Practice.
Federation members can access this document through the Member Portal :
Greene, R. W. (2008). Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them. https://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BB18318146
Kansas, C. C. a. O. (2023, August 21). When Little People are Overwhelmed by Big Emotions. Child Care Aware. https://ks.childcareaware.org/when-little-people-are-overwhelmed-by-big-emotions/
Perry, B. D. (2007). The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL17210964M/The_boy_who_was_raised_as_a_dog
Fiona Beasley began teaching as an Itinerant Support Teacher (Hearing) in 1996 in Mudgee. Since then, she has worked in both mainstream and special education settings in primary schools in rural and remote areas from Broken Hill to the far south coast as a teacher, Assistant Principal and relieving Principal.
She has also worked in and out of corporate roles as a Non-School Based Teacher since 2007. Prior to her current role, as Wellbeing Systems Support Advisor, she worked in the Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on Students with Disabilities in Schools (NCCD) team and substantively holds the position of Assistant Principal Learning and Support for the Batemans Bay Network of schools.
Fiona is an experienced presenter of the Department of Education’s Trauma Informed Practice for improved learning and wellbeing professional learning.
She completed an Eric Pearson Study Grant report on Trauma-Informed Practice: An Observation of the Elements Required to Sustain Practice in 2024.
In addition, she presented her work at the Trauma Aware Education Conference in Brisbane Queensland in 2024 and will undertake QUT’s new Microcredential in Trauma Aware Education as part of the first intake in July.
Denis Fitzgerald reflects on why it is wonderful to be a public school teacher . . .
Being a public school teacher today is more demanding that at any time in history. The workload is intense. The needs of our students are more complex than ever. Parental expectations are sometimes unreasonable and contradictory. Media commentary is oftentimes loud, derogatory, and ill-informed. Change is a constant. Praise is not.
Yes indeed, what is so great about being a public school teacher?!
We might step back into the past to begin to examine this question.
In the western tradition formal learning is understood to have begun with the Ancient Greeks. Teachers such as Isocrates and Plato launched their private academies with exceedingly small and selective intakes. Education was to be predominantly for males and non-slaves. Peasants commonly had an extremely limited education. Girls stayed in the home to prepare themselves for a lifetime of subordination. The curriculum in the academies was narrow and tended to emphasise what were regarded as the masculine virtues and attributes along with a smattering of Mathematics.
The Athenian school had tinges of what we might describe as liberalism in their guiding thought and practice. The purpose of such education was to prepare sons of the elites to take their place as leaders in society – to create a stratum of philosopher princes. Or warrior princes. The Romans tended to follow in this Greek tradition relying heavily on Greeks as teachers and exemplars.
Formal western education was even more limited in the medieval period. Learning was largely dominated by the church and the monastic systems. Any spirit of open, intellectual enquiry or critical method was frowned upon or suppressed. The fields of learning were focussed on sacred texts, “great” religious thinkers, theology, the establishment and reinforcement of spiritual orthodoxy, the perpetuation of social hierarchies, and the reinforcement of the unquestionable authority of the Church and its leaders. Latin was the language of intellectual discourse, and this had the additional benefit of excluding the huge bulk of the population who were illiterate in both Latin and their native tongues. Education was still overwhelminglyfor male, self-perpetuating, intersecting elites of a religious or worldly nature.
Very little of this was to change until the coming of the printing press. This revolutionary development began the slow process of breaking the Church’s monopoly on learning. It led to a wider range of sources of thought and fields of study. It also led to the eventually irresistible urge for printed texts to be in the language of the common people and, hence, for the first time in history, opened up the opportunity for the mass of the population to become literate. This process however was to take centuries to achieve,
Church and State were to fiercely resist these developments and schooling for the many simply did not exist. Scientific investigation became more possible however, but the various Church Inquisitions were highly effective in quashing the inculcation of scientific understandings of how the world truly operated. Most famously Galileo was forced to formally recant his teaching that the Earth was not the Centre of the Universe. The Church militantly opposed this teaching as clerics saw quite clearly what the spiritual and intellectual implications this had in store for them. Most people continued to live in ignorance, illiteracy, with brief lifespans, governed by superstition and fear.
Slowly however, the new technologies and trading networks spread and with them a broadening of intellectual and human possibility became manifest.
By the eighteenth century doubt, pluralism, heterodoxy, evidence and reason became more prominent elements of human thought and exchange. The philosophical movements associated with The Enlightenment spread widely and rapidly. The historian, Eric Hobsbawm, in The Age of Revolution, describes its impact most tellingly:
“A secular, rationalist and progressive individualism dominated ‘enlightened’ thought. To set the individual free from the shackles which fettered [them] was its chief object: from the ignorant traditionalism of the Middle Ages, which still threw their shadow across the world, from the superstition of the churches, from the irrationality which divided [humans] into a hierarchy of higher and lower ranks according to birth or some other irrelevant criterion.” (Hobsbawm, 1962 pp34 – 35)
Inevitably, such thinking found its way into the practice and organisation of schooling. By the nineteenth century governments increasingly recognised that they had responsibilities for the provision of schooling based on an assumption that this was a human right for all young people.
In the Australian colonial period, as Manning Clark (1968 pp212-242) chronicles, this was acknowledged by Governor Bourke who set aside three thousand pounds in 1833 to establish a network of schools, “for the general education of colonial youth” similar to the Irish system of education then developing. The students in these schools, “would have their religion in textbooks which were Christian in context but free of dogma”.
Such an initiative was fiercely opposed by the forces of the old order. As Clark describes this backlash:
“The children of the respectable, they thundered, should not have to associate at school with those who would corrupt and destroy their morals.” (Clark, 1968)
Bourke had been long convinced that education should be based on the principle of equality of opportunity. Bourke wondered why government should be subsidising elite schools while neglecting the great bulk of the young population.
Manning Clark (1968) describes the way in which Governor Bourke saw the inconsistencies:
“One was the privileged position of The King’s School at Parramatta, conceived … as a school where the sons of landholders, professional people and merchants would be steeped in Christian apologetics, and in a study of those classical texts which had been found in the mother country to be an excellent schooling for a governing class. Why, Bourke asked, should government subsidise a school for the sons of wealthy colonists and civil servants of the government when the children of the poor were being educated in mere hovels under convict schoolmasters?”
However, the voice and power of the privileged remained dominant and by 1848 there was only one public school in the colony of NSW teaching a grand total of 50 students. It was not until the latter stages of the nineteenth century as the spirit of The Enlightenment eventually prevailed that broad systems of public schooling were established and funded under the various Public Instruction Acts.
The guiding principles of these Acts were that education provided by the state was to be, “Free, Secular and Compulsory.” This was the historic breakthrough aimed to reset the course of education. For thousands of years schooling had been a privilege and sole birthright of elites. The establishment of public systems of education sought to change that.
The principle of free education was a recognition that it was the role of government to provide educational opportunity for all youngsters. The secular provision sought to establish the basis for freedom of personal belief so that no one belief system was given privileged access to the minds of school children. It was recognised that freedom of religion and personal belief was based on freedom from a particular religion. The compulsory provision identified the necessity for all children to have an education to achieve all that life might offer.
The architect of the NSW Public Instruction Act, Sir Henry Parkes, drove the formulation of this legislation and added the underlying goal of ensuring that all children from all backgrounds would learn and grow together, “side by side” as he put it. All state aid to private schools was withdrawn via this legislation as the newly created public system was open to all.
By the time of Federationin 1901, there were over 2,700 public schools in NSW serving almost every community in the state with over 280,000 students. (NSW Department of School Education, 1993)
***
So given this historical and ethical backdrop we can begin to reflect on what is so great about being a public school teacher. (Yet none of this is to disregard the huge and daunting difficulties under which we as public educators carry out our daily responsibilities).
We might however consider the following:
1.The ethical and moral basis of public education is of the highest order. It stems from a recognition of the equality of humankind and the consequent right of all young people, regardless of background, means, personal belief, gender, personal orientation or geographical location to have an excellent, intellectually profound, nurturing and broad education. It is inconceivable that our public schools would ever seek any exemption from anti-discrimination provisions
2. The NSW public education system has endured and flourished despite decades of criticism, ignorant media commentary, occasionally unwise policy emphases and insufficient resourcing. NSW public education is one of the largest systems of schooling in the world. It reaches into just about every community in the state from large secondary schools to remote specks on the map wherein the local public schools might have fewer than a dozen kids. Despite generations of ignorant critique, public schools still educate a significant majority of the NSW student population. The Catholic share of enrolments is similar to what they were a century ago as is the enrolment share of elite, private schools. The growth in private schooling has been almost entirely in the “low-fee” schools that have attracted huge taxpayer subsidies.
3.This sturdiness can be viewed after over three decades of official bipartisan policies of privatisation which has deliberately attempted to remove the role of the state in public provision. Other social supports have also been wound back as governments have used multiple forms of privatisation – including outsourcing, divestment, withdrawal and public-private partnerships – to remove themselves from public responsibilities. This has included the fields of banking, transport, telecommunications, health, aviation, insurance, employment services, energy generation and distribution along with scores of local community support services. The one glaring exception in this sad litany is public education which was certainly in the gunsights of policy “leaders” of the recent past. But public education’s deep community support prevented this from unfolding. One can walk through a small country town or village today and see the consequences. So many of the public services and institutions that existed throughout these communities are gone, never to return. The only certainties to be still standing there now are the Digger at the end of the road and the local public school.
4.The profound ethical and moral principles of public education that have existed since its foundation are vindicated by modern developments in science. Some decades ago, the Harvard biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, was able to observe from his own work on genetics that human equality is a scientific fact. Gould was able to conclude that:
5.“Human equality is a contingent fact of history … human races are not separate species or ancient divisions …” and attempts to have assumed or declared natural hierarchies are scientifically false, “an account of barriers and ranks erected to maintain the power and hegemony of those at the top”. (Gould, 1985 p186)
More recently, the global Human Genome Project (1990 -2003) (has provided incontrovertible proof of the equality of all peoples regardless of background. The findings of this massive enterprise established that all humans are 99.9% genetically identical. And that the human genome is the common heritage of humanity. As the project was able to conclude – there is one race, the human race.
The great comfort in this for public educators is the fundamental ethical basis for our system – the right of all children to have equal access to high quality education – is matched by the scientific reality of the equality of humankind and the capacity of all youngsters to flourish given the right opportunities.
6.It also gives us pause to reflect that if one were to invent a system of education today where, in a globalised world, youngsters must be best prepared to flourish in the changing reality – to meet, understand, respect and cherish other peoples and cultures, to travel, to adapt to change, to pursue careers, relationships and possibilities across the land and across the planet, to explore all of the possibilities that globalisation provides – then one would establish a warmly inclusive public education system quite like the one that public school teachers work in right now.
7.Public schools are highly effective intellectually. During the school years and after, the deeply positive effects of public education have been proven in a succession of academic studies. The view that private schools outperform public schools is simply a myth. Numerous academic studies comparing similar socioeconomic backgrounds across systems during the school years are quite clear. The most recent, published in 2022 in the Australian Educational Researcher [Volume 50, January 3, 2022] found that there is:
“No significant difference between the academic performance of private and public school students”.
These conclusions have been further reinforced by studies of PISA results (conducted by the Gonski Institute at the University of NSW in 2019) and analysis of NAPLAN results across systems. (Baker, January 2 2022)
Once students get to university there are indeed differences. Public school students outperform private school students. Trevor Cobbold (2015) in his comprehensive review of the academic research concluded that:
“Six studies have analysed the impact of school sector attendance on first year university grades in the last ten years and all found that students from public schools achieved higher grades than Catholic and Independent schools”.
8.The public school system, since its inception, is inclusive of every child – from the academically gifted to those needing extra support and guidance.
9.The facts are that despite the pressures that public school teachers work under we produce outstanding results during the years of schooling, and we equip our students with superior capacities to succeed in their years beyond the school gates.
10.Over the course of a career a public school teacher will impact and improve the lives of countless students and will have the opportunity to teach in a range of communities and schools settings. The teacher will be remembered fondly for decades by their former students though this respect and appreciation might remain unrevealed to the teachers themselves. Such is a teaching life.
11.Public school teachers welcome every child regardless of their background or life story. In a time of uncertainty, conflict and change we seek to bring their worlds together and equip each child with the intellectual and personal capacities they will need to thrive across this century. We seek to build a better world, one child at a time.
References
Baker, Jordan (2022) “NAPLAN analysis shows no difference between public, private schools” Sydney Morning Herald
Clark , M A (1968) History of Australia Volume 2, Melbourne University Press
Cobbold, T., (2015) SOS Education Research Brief “A Review of Academic Studies of Public and Private School Outcomes in Australia”
Denis Fitzgerald holds a 20 Year Teaching Certificate from the NSW Department of Education having taught in a range of government high schools across the state. Denis has taught extensively in Western Sydney including in several senior positions. His most recent role was as Deputy Principal (National Partnerships).
Denis has served on every statutory board in NSW since the late 1980’s encompassing:
NSW Board of Secondary Education
Board of Studies
Board of Studies Teaching and Education Standards
NESA
At NESA, in addition to being a senior Board member he has served as the Chair of the Curriculum and Assessment Committee that oversaw and helped lead the implementation of the Curriculum Reform process arising from Professor Masters’ review of curriculum in NSW. He also served on the NESA Covid Committee for its duration and has chaired the Board committees that have developed the History and Geography syllabuses.
Denis has also been:
Director, Aboriginal Education and Equity, NSW Department of Education
Member, McGaw Review of the HSC
Member, Board of the Curriculum Corporation of Australia
President, NSW Teachers Federation
Federal President, Australian Education Union
Founding Director, Centre for Professional Learning
Founding Editor, Journal of Professional Learning
Denis has been published widely on educational matters over many decades. His work has appeared in a broad spectrum of academic and popular outlets including the Australian College of Educators, History Today, Sydney Morning Herald, the ABC, Education, The Australian, Education Review, Times Educational Supplement and Parent and Citizen. The University of NSW Press published his history of education in NSW, Teachers and Their Times, in 2011.
Michael Sciffer highlights the issues related to school segregation in Australia and challenges us to commit to the development of an Australian education system in which education exists for the common good, not individual advancement...
In May 2007 Prime Minister John Howard said that public education was a “safety net” for families who could not afford private school fees. The Howard federal government (1996-2007) transformed the structure of the Australian schooling system such that school segregation is increasing at the second-fastest rate in the OECD (O’Brien et al., 2023) to make us the 7th most segregated system (Gutiérrez, 2023). The Howard government’s four policies to shift enrolments from public to private schools were:
Very large increases in federal government funding to private schools
Deregulating the creation of low-fee private schools
Starting a culture war against the values of public education
Targeting parental anxieties to pressure families to believe “school choice” is a requirement of good parenting
The outcome was to accelerate the shift of middle-income families from public to low-fee, government-dependent, private schools. This has changed the enrolment composition of public schools, residualising many traditional neighbourhood public schools.
In the years since the Howard government NSW public schools have shown very little growth, resulting in the public education system shrinking in relative size compared to independent schools. This has undermined the authority and prestige of the public system in educational decision-making.
In recent years, a concerning new trend has emerged of NSW public primary schools losing enrolment numbers as shown in Figure 1. From 2020 public primary schools have lost 27858 students while public secondary schools have only gained 3626 students (ABS, 2025). At the same time, Catholic and independent primary and secondary schools have increased by 16394 and 32605 students respectively.
Figure 1. Enrolment changes in NSW schools 2014-2024.
What is school segregation?
School segregation is the separation of students into different schools based on social characteristics such as socioeconomic status (SES) or class. Segregation is often measured by how unevenly socially disadvantaged students are enrolled across schools within an area or school system. In Australia, school sectors have very different socioeconomic enrolment profiles as shown in Figure 2. The public system over enrols low-SES students, systemic Catholic schools over enrol middle-SES students, independent schools over enrol high SES students, while selective schools enormously over enrol high SES students. As no school sector is representative of the community Australia’s schooling system is educating children with a skewed perception of society.
Figure 2. The 2019 socioeconomic profile of Australian secondary schools
Why does school segregation matter?
School segregation matters because it multiplies social disadvantages. The Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration (Education Council, 2019) sets Australia’s schools the twin goals of educational excellence and equity. But research shows that segregation diminishes the capacity of schools to achieve academic excellence for socially disadvantaged students. The socioeconomic status of a student’s peers, measured as the average SES of a school, is just as important to their learning as the SES of their parents in predicting academic achievement. This is called the school compositional effect.
The school compositional effect is shown in Figure 3 from our research (Sciffer et al., 2022). It shows that both the SES of a student’s family and their school predicts academic achievement. Our research found that a low SES student in a low SES school was two times less likely to achieve minimum NAPLAN benchmarks than the same type of student in a high SES school.
Figure 3. Proportion of students achieving all NAPLAN benchmarks by family and school socioeconomic status
School composition influences more than academic achievement. It has negative effects on high school graduation and access to university (Chesters, 2019; Palardy, 2013, 2015) and social cohesion (Molina & Lamb, 2022).
What causes school segregation?
International research has shown a range of factors are associated with school segregation. In the US where most students attend public schools, neighbourhood segregation largely drives school segregation. This is less of a factor in Australia because of lower rates of income segregation and a much higher degree of school competition. Thus in Australia, more relevant factors are parental decision making, school marketisation reforms, and the enrolment practices of schools.
Parental choice is often identified as the cause of school segregation in Australia (Larsen, 2024; Munro, 2018). Blaming parents for school segregation makes sense in a free-market society that views people as consumers free to make decisions in their own self-interest. An alternative explanation is that Australian parents are driven by anxiety to protect their own children from the harms of a hyper-individualistic society. Where once the education of children was part of the common good guaranteed by government, it has been privitised to an artificially limited commodity (Astin, 1992). Many parents who “choose” private schools report they would prefer neighbourhood public schools but feel compelled to purchase private schooling because of the inadequate resourcing of public schools (Campbell et al., 2009).
School marketisation reforms have caused segregation in every country in which they have been implemented (Lubienski et al., 2022; Zancajo & Bonal, 2022). Governments have argued that school competition and choice will raise quality as it does for consumer products like cars and mobile phones. But school markets fail because they are constrained (Astin, 1992). When consumer products are popular, production is expanded to increase sales and profit, allowing more consumers to benefit from the product. Otherwise, a competitor will take market share. But when schools are popular, they cannot substantially increase enrolments because of physical and geographical constraints. Instead, they put up fees or drive up nearby housing prices. Popular schools are thus able to entrench their privilege over generations.
School market reforms increase the power of popular schools to choose their students. Enrolment and exclusion practices allow schools to select high achieving compliant students who are cheap to teach. This enables the marketing of high academic achievement and orderly learning environments without investing resources into teaching quality nor student wellbeing. The outcome is that Australian schools compete based on enrolment profiles, not teaching quality. This is exemplified in the media’s annual reporting of HSC results which predictably follow socioeconomic enrolment profiles. Selective schools come first, followed by high fee private schools, then low fee and comprehensive public schools. The only insight this reporting provides is as a class analysis of metropolitan Sydney.
Where to next?
Substantial reforms to the structure of Australia’s schooling system are required if we are to achieve the goals of academic excellence and equity. While low SES students are excluded from academic excellence, Australia’s schooling system will continue to languish by international standards. To address school segregation requires confronting the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Australian education policy, between equity and competition. Segregation can only be addressed if there is a shared commitment to the education of all children and young people. That is, education for the common good, not individual advancement. Such a commitment would require:
Every school being resourced from all income sources according to need, and
Every school contributing to the learning of all social groups.
In such a system, there would be no need for families to jostle for schools. Families enjoy such a right with schooling systems in countries like Finland and Canada. These countries prioritise the common good in education. It will take a substantial and sustained struggle from public education supporters, in particular from the union movement, to refashion the schooling system to serve the effective functioning of a democratic society.
Astin, A. W. (1992). Educational ‘Choice’: Its Appeal May be Illusory. Sociology of Education, 65(4), 255–260. https://doi.org/10.2307/2112768
Campbell, C., Proctor, H., & Sherington, G. (2009). School Choice: How Parents Negotiate the New School Market in Australia. Allen & Unwin.
Chesters, J. (2019). Alleviating or exacerbating disadvantage: Does school attended mediate the association between family background and educational attainment? Journal of Education Policy, 34(3), 331–350. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2018.1488001
Gutiérrez, G. (2023). Privatisation, School Markets and Socioeconomic Segregation: An International Overview. In V. Dupriez, J. P. Valenzuela, M. Verhoeven, & J. Corvalán (Eds.), Educational Markets and Segregation: Global Trends and Singular Experiences From Belgium and Chile (pp. 103–126). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36147-0_6
Lubienski, C., Perry, L. B., Kim, J., & Canbolat, Y. (2022). Market models and segregation: Examining mechanisms of student sorting. Comparative Education, 58(1), 16–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2021.2013043
Molina, A., & Lamb, S. (2022). School segregation, inequality and trust in institutions: Evidence from Santiago. Comparative Education, 58(1), 72–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2021.1997025
Palardy, G. J. (2013). High School Socioeconomic Segregation and Student Attainment. American Educational Research Journal, 50(4), 714–754. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831213481240
Palardy, G. J. (2015). High school socioeconomic composition and college choice: Multilevel mediation via organizational habitus, school practices, peer and staff attitudes. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 26(3), 329–353. https://doi.org/10.1080/09243453.2014.965182
Sciffer, M. G., Perry, L. B., & McConney, A. (2022). The substantiveness of socioeconomic school compositional effects in Australia: Measurement error and the relationship with academic composition. Large-Scale Assessments in Education, 10(1), 21. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40536-022-00142-8
Zancajo, A., & Bonal, X. (2022). Education markets and school segregation: A mechanism-based explanation. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 52(8), 1241–1258. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2020.1858272
About the author
Michael Sciffer is a school counsellor in Armidale, having taught and counselled across many public schools in the Riverina and Northern Tablelands. He is a PhD candidate of Murdoch University and has published a range of research papers across diverse international journals. His research interests are in school segregation and compositional effects. In particular, the role of public policy settings in determining the social contexts of schools.
Dr Katitza Marinkovic Chavez, Phoebe Quinn, Nathaniel Barker and Prof Lisa Gibbs discuss new research and co-designed resources to support teacher wellbeing in the face of climate change…
Climate change is a wellbeing issue for students and teachers. In this article, we share insights from research into the challenges teachers face and what can help support their ‘climate wellbeing’, while also supporting student wellbeing and learning. We also introduce the Teacher Climate Superpowers resources, which have been co-developed with Australian teachers, to support them, their students and the planet in the face of climate change.
Climate change is a wellbeing issue for students and teachers
There is growing awareness of climate distress among students, with teachers playinga vital role in helping them navigate it. However, teachers’ own climate wellbeing is often overlooked, with limited research and resources to promote it.
We approach the notion of ‘climate wellbeing’ from a holistic perspective to better understand how people experience their wellbeing in the face of the various challenges presented by climate change. Teacher climate wellbeing is important in its own right, as well as being necessary for teachers’ ability to support students and promote sustainable practices in schools.
Building on a Strength-Based Approach: Your Climate Superpowers
In 2022, we collaborated with over 70 young people to develop a resource to support young people’s climate well-being (Marinkovic Chavez et al, 2023). The resulting website, www.climatesuperpowers.org, centres on the idea of ‘climate superpowers’ that enhance personal and collective resilience.
There are seven superpowers: social, natural, cultural, political, built, financial, and human (Quinn & Marinkovic Chavez, 2022). The website includes a fun quiz to help students discover their main superpowers. Based on their personal strengths and interests (superpowers), students are invited to engage in different actions for climate learning, self-care, and social transformation. The website’s content and its design, including the interactive quiz and striking illustrations, were all shaped by co-designers aged between 12 and 25 years over a series of workshops (Marinkovic Chavez et al, 2023).
Climate Superpowers in the Classroom
After the Climate Superpowers website launched, we heard from many teachers interested in using it to support their conversations with students about climate change. However, given the many demands on teachers’ time, there was a clear need for classroom-ready resources to facilitate this uptake.
So, along with teacher and student co-designers, we created lesson plans, curriculum guides, and activity materials to discuss climate change in the classroom. These resources were aligned with the Australian Curriculum and made freely accessible via the existing website (see the Classroom Resources section of the website). This is an evolving set of resources, which is being refined and grown as passionate teachers and students experiment with activity formats in classrooms.
Throughout this process, we have encountered many dedicated teachers going above and beyond in their efforts to support students and sustainability in schools, often with very little recognition or resourcing. This highlighted an important area for further attention and support: teacher climate wellbeing.
New Insights on The Emotional Weight of Climate Change for Teachers
Previous research has shown evidence of teachers dealing with their personal concerns about climate change and experiencing feelings of anxiety, helplessness, guilt, and frustration (Hermans, 2016; Pihkala, 2020). Many have reported feeling unsure or underprepared to manage climate discussions without distressing students (Bleazby et al., 2023; Hopman, 2022) due to a lack of knowledge or access to information about the topic. However, research on teacher climate-related experiences is scant, and often narrowly focused on impacts on student learning.
With support of the Teachers Health Foundation and the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, we have been conducting further research to deepen understandings of current experiences of teachers in Australia, including challenges they are facing, strategies they find helpful, and changes they want to see in relation to climate wellbeing (students’ and their own). This project, called Teacher Climate Superpowers, aims to develop strategies to support teachers, school leaders, and the education system in holistically supporting climate wellbeing.
Across 14 qualitative interviews and four workshops with 56 teachers, we have heard about a wide range of wellbeing challenges, relating to teachers’ own thoughts and feelings relating to climate change, difficulties relating to student climate distress (e.g. anxiety, anger, hopelessness) or disengagement, systemic and resourcing issues, (e.g. curriculum and time constraints), tensions within some school communities (e.g. interactions with colleagues or parents, political disagreements), and environmental events such as bushfires, floods, storms, drought and extreme heat.
Teacher Climate Superpowers: a professional development resource co-developed with Australian teachers
Through the workshops and interviews described above, we have also been collaborating with Australian teachers to create a strengths-based, practically useful online resource. This Teacher Climate Superpowers professional development resource is specifically designed to support teacher climate wellbeingwhile continuing to develop the student-focused resources. The aim is to empower teachers by providing a structured space to explore, plan, and act on their climate wellbeing alongside their efforts to support students and the environment.
The Teacher Climate Superpowers resource is being piloted from May 2025. It is a choose-your-own-adventure kind of resource, with multiple possible modes of engaging with the content depending on each teacher’s preferences. This includes:
webinars (live and recorded)
a quiz, teachers can discover their personal strengths (superpowers) relevant to climate action and well-being.
a guided reflection ‘action plan’ tool to help teachers promote their wellbeing, student wellbeing and learning, and planetary health. For each one of these three topics, teachers are invited to explore their personal challenges, existing strengths/resources/practices/successes, and plans for action going forward.
interactive, self-paced modules that provide evidence-based strategies for addressing climate anxiety and stress, and opportunities for connecting with other teachers.
Teacher Climate Superpowers aims to be a useful professional development resource for teachers to connect to the latest evidence on student and teacher climate wellbeing. It is meant to serve as a practical tool to deal with everyday challenges and promote in-depth reflection.
Invitation to participate in the Teacher Climate Superpowers pilot
We invite teachers working across Australia to join the Teacher Climate Superpowers pilot study between Terms 2 and 3, 2025. Participation is open to individuals as well as groups of teachers who want to engage as part of a school or teacher network.
Based on your feedback, we will continue refining the platform as a living and growing resource so it can effectively help teachers feel confident to discuss climate change with students and manage the impacts of climate change on their wellbeing. Listening to teachers is crucial for this resource to meet the needs of both teachers and students effectively. Tailoring resources to teachers’ needs is essential to foster resilience and wellbeing within the education sector amid growing environmental challenges.
The Teacher Climate Superpowers has components based on the Australian Curriculum, which can be used directly by a number of States and Territories. The NSW Teachers Federation and the Centre for Professional Learning are in discussions with the University of Melbourne to develop a NSW curriculum focus.The program is up and running but certain parts of the platform are still under construction.
Reference list
Bleazby, J., Burgh, G., Thornton, S., Graham, M., Reid, A., & Finefter-Ronsebluh, I. (2023). Teaching about climate change in the midst of ecological crisis: Responsibilities, challenges, and possibilities. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 55(10), 1087-1095. DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2023.2211260
Hermans, M. (2016). Geography Teachers and Climate Change: Emotions about Consequences, Coping Strategies, and Views on Mitigation. International Journal of Environmental and Science Education, 11(4), 389-408.
Marinkovic Chavez, K., Quinn, P., Gibbs, L., Block, K., Leppold, C., Stanley, J., & Vella-Brodrick, D. (2023). Growing up in Victoria, Australia, in the midst of the climate emergency. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/01650254231205239
Katitza Marinkovic Chavez is a psychologist and Research Fellow in Participatory Methods at the Disaster, Climate and Adversity Unit in Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. Her research focuses on empowering children and young adults to articulate their strengths in advocating for climate action, and has co-developed with young people the Your ClimateSuperpowers website. With Phoebe Quinn, Katitza led the Young People’s Climate Superpowers project, and co-leads the Intergenerational Justice Stream of the Climate Collaborative Action for Transformative Change in Health and Healthcare (CATCH) Lab.
Phoebe Quinn
Phoebe Quinn is a Research Fellow in Disaster Recovery at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. Her work focuses on disaster resilience, community wellbeing and social justice, and the development of strengths-based resources relating to disasters and climate change. Phoebe’s research is firmly oriented towards informing policy and practice, and exploring how democratic innovations using digital technologies can support community decision-making around disasters and climate change. With Katitza Marinkovic Chavez, Phoebe led the Young People’s Climate Superpowers project, and co-leads the Intergenerational Justice Stream of the Climate Collaborative Action for Transformative Change in Health and Healthcare (CATCH) Lab.
Professor Lisa Gibbs
Lisa Gibbs is a Professor of Public Health and Director of the Disaster, Climate and Adversity Unit in Melbourne School of Population and Global Health and Academic Lead for Community Resilience and Public Health in the Centre for Disaster Management and Public Safety. Her research focuses on disaster recovery and resilience particularly relating to the interplay between individual and community level outcomes. Professor Gibbs also leads a range of research studies relating to child health, wellbeing, and citizenship. Prof Gibbs also leads the Teacher Climate Superpowers project, to co-develop resources with and for teachers to promote teacher wellbeing in the context of climate change.
Nathaniel Barker, MPH
Nate, an educator and holder of a Master’s in Public Health, is deeply committed to climate education. In his role, he has been part of the Teacher Climate Superpowers project, collaborating with fellow educators to co-create effective and tailored resources informed by evidence and lived experiences. Nate’s research has focused on exploring teachers’ experiences of well-being in the face of climate change, a crucial aspect of equipping educators to address this pressing issue.
In a world-first study Dr. Sally Patfield and Dr. Leanne Fray look at the importance of student aspirations and how they can be nurtured in public education…
While careers advice largely takes place in the later years of high school, young people begin to form ideas about their futures starting in the early years of primary school. How those aspirations take shape, what factors influence them, and what challenges they face in achieving their goals were some of the key questions at the heart of an Australian-first, decade-long study by us and our colleagues at the University of Newcastle.
When we first spoke to Dahlia* in 2016, she was a high achieving Year 11 student with aspirations to become a criminal psychologist. A young Aboriginal woman passionate about social justice, Dahlia had ambitions to create a different kind of future for First Nations people through reform of the criminal justice system.
However, the following year during Year 12, Dahlia suffered from severe mental ill health. Five years later, we spoke again with Dahlia who told us how the pressure of Year 12 had caused her to drop out of school:
It was just a burn out, like, I was just so overwhelmed. I felt like I was so pressured to do the best and I felt like I wasn’t the best […] then I’d get anxiety about not being as good as everyone thinks I am […] that’s why I really wanted to do this interview, because I wanted to put it out there that high school is not the be all, end all […] getting that high [Year 12] mark isn’t the be all, end all.
Dahlia’s story is just one from the thousands of interviews we conducted as part of the Aspirations Longitudinal Study, which began in 2012 and is continuing today, providing comprehensive insights into the factors which shape the career and educational aspirations of Australia’s young people – and how these aspirations actually eventuate. The insights produced by this research have significant implications for teachers, schools and communities.
The Aspirations Longitudinal Study
The Aspirations Longitudinal Study began as an ARC (Australian Research Council) Linkage Project in 2012, led by Laureate Professor Jenny Gore AM and the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre at the University of Newcastle.
The study sought to understand the way in which students from Years 3 to 12 think about the post-school options available to them, what factors shape their choices, how possibilities might be opened up or closed off, and the impact teachers, families and society can have on the pursuit of their goals.
In the first year of the study, students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 from 64 government schools in various locations across NSW undertook a survey about their career and educational aspirations. The students repeated the survey over four consecutive years which enabled us to follow students throughout their schooling, providing a range of views from Years 3 to 12, matched with NAPLAN data and other socio-educational data. We also undertook interviews and focus groups with students, teachers, parents, and community members.
In total, the study collected more than 12,000 survey responses and 1,000 interview and focus group transcripts and paved the way for ten additional studies which looked at everything from the aspirations of Indigenous students and students from regional and remote Australia, implications for the VET and Higher Education sectors, to the impact of bushfires, floods, and COVID-19 on the formation and pursuit of young people’s aspirations.
This year, we have returned to several of the schools involved in the original study to conduct a follow up study to understand how student aspirations might have changed over the decade since we first began collecting this data.
Key insights
Analysis of this data produced a number of important insights that are extremely relevant to teachers, school leaders and careers advisers, as well as education system leaders, policymakers, tertiary and higher education providers, and university staff developing community outreach programs.
Some of our findings are intuitive – we still see stubborn and highly gendered aspirations among young people. Males are more likely to aspire to careers such as Engineering, Defence, Sports, and STEM disciplines. Female students are more likely to aspire to careers such as Nursing, Teaching, Social Work and the Arts.
But many of the findings really challenge common assumptions about how students decide what they want or don’t want to pursue after school.
For instance, we found that Indigenous students have very similar career aspirations to their non-Indigenous peers, however teachers often perceive a difference. Interestingly, where the aspirations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students really diverge is among the highest achieving students – where Indigenous students are significantly less likely to aspire to a university education career path than their non-Indigenous peers. For Indigenous students, the path to higher education often involves navigating complex intersections of racial, socioeconomic, and cultural barriers—challenges that are typically not experienced by non-Indigenous young people.
We also found that aspirations for university among students in regional and remote communities are often shaped by the presence or proximity of university to their community. While governments and universities often emphasise scholarships and other financial incentives for rural and remote students, cost is just one factor impacting young people’s desire to pursue higher education. Distance, job opportunities closer to home and emotional attachment to their communities are often of greater concern.
Starkly, another key finding of our research was that young people who don’t have parents who have been to university often discount the possibility of future study at a very young age when compared to their peers with university-educated parents. Those students without university-educated parents who go on to higher education are often referred to as ‘first in family’ students. These students sometimes fall into multiple equity categories – more likely to be Indigenous, live in a regional or remote area, and attend a relatively disadvantaged school – but they also face the unique challenge of navigating towards a new and alien environment. Our research calls for specific policies and supports for these students.
Translating these findings into practical applications for teachers and the wider community
In 2018, following the completion of the major arm of the Aspirations Longitudinal Study, the Australian Government commissioned the development of a professional development course to translate these research findings into practice.
Aspirations: Supporting Students’ Futures is a free, online self-paced course for teachers that unpacks the evidence-base produced during the longitudinal study. It provides a framework and practical strategies for teachers to understand how aspirations form and the role they can play in nurturing the aspirations of students from diverse backgrounds, with applications both within and outside the classroom.
On the back of the positive reception to this course, we also developed a second course,When I Grow Up: Supporting Children’s Aspirations, which is a free online course designed specifically for parents, carers and community members. Like the first course, it also provides evidence-based approaches for nurturing the educational and career aspirations of young people, with a particular focus on life outside of the classroom.
The Path Travelled
Thankfully, Dahlia’s story, which we began this article with, is a happy one. After leaving high school before the HSC, Dahlia took up a series of retail and hospitality jobs in her local community. But when she came across an advertisement for an Aboriginal traineeship at a local Indigenous pre-school, her passion to work with First Nations Australians was reignited. She completed her traineeship before entering university to study a combined degree in primary and early childhood teaching.
While her original career aspirations changed, the underpinning desire to create systematic change remains a driving force for Dahlia:
There’s such a push now for formal schooling to start early. But those first five years, just being able to be a kid and enjoy your childhood is just so important. I really want to give our Goori kids a chance to do that… I’m very passionate about culture so I do a lot of language and songs and dance in my practice so that these kids have culture in their lives and feel connected before they start school.
Dahlia’s story – like those of the many other young people we’ve spoken to over the course of the past 10 years – emphasises the need for all of us to understand how young people’s aspirations form, what values and beliefs drive them, and what supports – both at an individual and systemic level – we need to provide to enable them to achieve their goals.
*Names have been changed
About the Authors
Dr Sally Patfield is a lecturer in the School of Education and member of the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre at the University of Newcastle. Her research focuses on issues of equity and social justice across formal schooling and higher education, particularly in relation to educational and social inequities connected to social class, rurality, first-in-family status, race, and the changing nature of the education system.
Dr Leanne Fray is a senior lecturer in the School of Education and member of the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre at the University of Newcastle. Leanne’s research focuses on improving educational outcomes for students from complex backgrounds. Her work is centred on the impact of professional development in specialised school contexts, the effects of COVID-19 on teachers and students, and student education and career aspirations. Leanne leads the Primary Literacy team at the University of Newcastle.
Judy King suggests that a woman’s place is everywhere, including the NSW History Syllabuses : HSIE K-6, History Years 7-10, History Elective Years 9-10, Modern History Years 11-12, Ancient History Years 11-12 and Extension History Year 12...
Ensuring that the achievements of women are included in the History curriculum cannot be left to a happy accident. It requires systematic planning and programming. It does not require extensive lists of content, but it does require some fresh approaches to programming and the framing of challenging enquiry questions which will engage students K-12.
The scope and sequence for each year or stage will depend on the time allocated for History lessons in each school. The hours in each school vary and are not always the same number of hours prescribed in the NESA syllabuses. The scope and sequence for a Year 8 class allocated 80 hours of History per year will be different from that of a Year 8 class allocated 100 hours or 120 hours.
The planning does not have to cover pages and pages. For mandatory History years 7-10, schools often allocate one major area/unit of work per term, a total of 4 each year, or 6-8 per year if some units are allocated half terms of 5 weeks instead of a whole term of 10 weeks.
Hours allocated for excursions, tests/exams, school assemblies and events should be factored into the planning page so as the ELT (engaged learning time) is the planning focus rather than the TLT (theoretical timetabled learning time)
The planning for each topic or area of enquiry can be outlined on a single A3 page, which includes brief notes on
Essential knowledge and understanding (what will students know and understand?)
Big enquiry questions which will stimulate debate, research, discussion
Historical concepts from the syllabus (including cause and effect, continuity and change, contestability, heritage, empathy)
Evidence of learning (what am I going to see, read, view, assess as a result of the work completed by the students? formal/informal assessment)
Skills relevant to the chosen area of study (these will vary from topic to topic and will not necessarily be the same each time (recall, summarise, explain/account for, define, argue, interpret, compare and contrast, deconstruct sources/evidence, draw inferences, investigate, research)
Essential vocabulary (all key terms associated with the new area of study)
Resources (including written, film and visual sources, graphs, maps, sites, websites, photographs, monuments)
Extension activities or modifications for mixed ability classes
Years 7-10 students should be exposed to all the skills listed in the syllabus over a four year period and this requires keeping records especially if Mandatory History and Geography courses are semesterised in the timetable and are not taught by the same teachers over each of the four years.
We do not have to lift large slabs of content straight from the syllabus. We do not have to outline every lesson over the 5 or 10 weeks per unit. Lesson outlines can be part of a support document rather than the streamlined teaching program itself. It is essential that students are issued with a unit of work outline before each unit of work begins. The essentials will fit on one page. Expectations of what students will come to know and understand and be able to do as a result of the unit should be clearly identified. Evidence of learning should also be clearly indicated and then followed up and recorded in each unit.
Thematic programming gives teachers the opportunity to teach more than one area of the syllabus in the same unit of work. In Stage 5 students are required to study seven focus areas in 100 hours, including three core depthstudies Australia: Making a Nation, Australia at War and HumanRights and Freedoms via the choice of two options a case study and a site study.
Why not list the big enquiry questions up front and then use the content from all three or some of the Stage 5 depth studies to answer them. If half the population of any given period is to be included in the academic discourse, some key questions will need to refer specifically to women and women’s achievements
Some of the questions could include:
1.In what ways has the history of women and women’s voices been silenced over millennia/the last 200 years/until post-World War Two?
2.Why is the image of a “green faced witch with a pointed hat, large nose and broomstick” constantly used in the 21st century to denigrate women politicians and leaders (e g Thatcher, Gillard, Merkel, Clinton)?
3.What ten items would you select to represent the history of women in Australia in an exhibition covering the period of World War 1/Word War Two /post-World War Two?
4.What are the opportunities available in 2025 for us to hear the voices of Aboriginal women and/or migrant women in our 21st century Australia? What rights and freedoms have been gained, and which ones have been denied?
5.Why were women in France granted the vote in 1944 while Australian women were granted the vote and the right to stand for public office in 1901 at Federation?
6.Did militancy hinder or assist the campaigns by the suffragettes in the Uk, USA and Australia to secure the franchise for women? What was the difference between a suffragist and a suffragette? Why is the distinction important?
7.Why and how were convict women, transported to Australia 1788-1867, demonized as “damned whores and obstreperous strumpets” in 18th and 19th century Australia?
It doesn’t matter which areas of the syllabus are being taught, the questions really matter.
When studying Ancient Greece and Rome in Stage 4 we need to ask questions similar to these:
1.Why were women excluded from the Agora and from the Forum in Ancient Greece and Rome?
2.Can Athens really be regarded as the “birthplace of democracy” if only 35% of the population could vote, women, slaves and metics were excluded from voting and engaging in popular discourse?
3. How has the fact that most of what is taught about Roman history includes military campaigns and “big events” led to the ignoring of the significant contribution of Roman women?
If teachers have programmed a unit of work on Heroes and Villains for Elective History
Years 9-10 there is perfect opportunity to ensure that the achievements of women and girls are included as part of the focus on “good/bad” deeds of individuals and groups of both men and women. Lots of possible organizing themes comes to mind, including:
Organizing theme
Key individual women
Important questions
Women warriors and leaders
Joan of Arc, Boudicca, Cartimandua Queen of the Brigantes, Nancy Wake and the SOE women spies of World War 11, Soviet Women’s Airforce and Sniper Brigades of World War 11, Cleopatra V11, Zenobia of Palmyra, Margaret of Anjou,
How were they viewed by their contemporaries? How were they viewed by later historians? Have the views changed over time? If so, why? Who opposed the women leaders or groups of women at the time? How did the women withstand the criticism and vilification? How did they lose/retain their power? Why were women scientists excluded from the Royal Society 1662-1946? Why are so few women awarded the Nobel Prize? Did the women leave any documents, art works, publications? What is their legacy in 2025? Which women with a book, an opinion and an ambition to be heard or included in public discourse have been silenced over the centuries and how? Why were women forbidden to run the Marathon in the Olympics until 1984 ? Why were Sophie Scholl and fellow members of the White Rose Resistance to Nazi Germany guillotined in 1944? How widespread was the resistance to Hitler inside Germany during World War Two? In what ways did Aboriginal men and women resist the British colonial government and armed forces 1788-1850s? Why has the AWM consistently resisted pleas to include the Frontier Wars in its displays within the War Memorial? Who were the radical women who were transported to Australia after the Peterloo Massacre 1819 in Manchester and the Irish rebellion in 1799? Why are they regarded as some of the “first teachers in the new colonies of NSW and Tasmania”?
Women as social justice agents, reformers in UK, USA and Australia
Coretta King and the civil rights activists in the USA, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Davison, Emmeline Pankhurst, Vida Goldstein, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Malala Yusofzai, Rachel Perkins, Oogeroo Noonuccal, Chartists, Abolitionists, Convict radicals, Suffragists
Scientists and Mathematicians
Laura Bassi Italy, Marie Curie Poland and France, Caroline Herschel UK, Fiona Wood Aus, Elizabeth Blackwell USA, Rosalind Franklin UK
Women with “Dangerous Ideas”
Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Afra Behn, Margaret Cavendish (Duchess of Newcastle), Louisa Lawson, Gloria Steinem, Malala Yusofzai, Greta Thunberg, Taylor Swift, Artemisia Gentileschi, “Witches” 14th– 19th centuries
Women in the dock and executed
Mary Queen of Scots 1587, Ruth Ellis 1955, Sophie Scholl 1944, Mata Hari 1917, Edith Cavell 1916, Ethel Rosenberg 1953, Martha Corey 1692, Marie Antoinette 1793, Mary Surratt 1865, Dora Kaplan 1924, Charlotte Corday 1793
Early Colonial History of Australia
Mary Bligh, Elizabeth Macarthur, Mary Reiby, Barangaroo, Truganini, Elizabeth Macquarie, Anna King, 25,000 women convicts transported to Australia 1788-1867, Emancipated, ticket of leave women
It is essential that, as History teachers, we inspire students to
Ask further questions
Make connections
Interrogate sources and determine ones which provide us with evidence
Extend their vocabulary
Understand our political, social and cultural heritage
Construct arguments based on the evidence available
We cannot meet any of those challenges in our History classrooms if we omit half the population from our steely gaze and from our historical enquiry questions.
No matter what the unit of work and no matter what the age and experience of the student we should be asking students to think about:
Who has the power?
How did they achieve that power?
Who has been prevented from sharing that power?
How did they keep/lose that power?
What terms and concepts have we inherited from ancient civilisations?
What were the consequences of a narrow power base in the short/longer term?
Which websites speak with authority? How do we know?
Are historical facts different from scientific facts? if so, in what ways?
What photos or images have changed the world?
In what ways can false images be created in the 21st century?
What are the challenges for the next generation of historians?
If you make a deliberate decision to include women in all aspects of your History teaching, after a few years it will be so usual to see them there, that CPL would not need to run any courses about Reclaiming (In)Visible Women in the History Curriculum. Women would be right there as you prepared of your units of work, your big questions, your formative and summative assessment strategies. They would appear in the source materials and written and visual stimulus materials you provided for the students. They would pop up in verbal quizzes and games. If you have your own classroom, their pictures would be on the wall and on the noticeboards alongside the men being studied.
Do give it some thought and good luck!
References
What is History Teaching Now ? A Practical Handbook for All History Teachers and Educators (John Catt 2023) Alex Fairlamb and Rachel Ball
History Thinking For History Teachers, A New Approach to Engaging Students and Developing Historical Consciousness(Routledge 2020) ed. Tim Allender, Anna Clark and Robert Parkes
About the author
Judy King OAM MA Dip Ed
Judy King is a former high school principal and a Life Member of the NSW Teachers Federation, the Australian Education Union and Secondary Principals’ Council. She retired from Riverside Girls High School in 2010 after 19 years as a secondary principal.
Since retirement Judy has worked part time at Chifley College Mt Druitt campus, Northmead High and Georges River College in an executive support role with a strong focus on teaching and learning, assessment and reporting, especially in the areas of reading for meaning and writing for purpose.
She currently teaches History and Politics at WEA , the oldest adult education foundation in the CBD of Sydney.
Judy represented secondary principals on the Board of Studies (now NESA) from 1998-2004 and was History Inspector at the Board in 1991. Judy was deputy president of the SPC from 1998-2006.
In 2018 she researched and wrote a history of the NSW Teachers Federation 1918-2018 as part of its centenary celebrations. The articles were published throughout each edition of Education in 2018 and were featured as part of a three week exhibition in the Federation building.
In 2007 Judy was awarded the Meritorious Service in Public Education medal by the Department of Education.
Judy has an abiding interest in all aspects of Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern History as well as archaeology, politics and film. In 2014 and 2019 she attended the Cambridge University History Summer School for international students and hopes to return in 2025.
In 2024, Judy was awarded an OAM for “services to secondary education.”
Jen Moes offers an insight into Aboriginal women’s history, focussing on two extraordinary women from early contact history…
When investigating and reclaiming the voices of women in Australian history, it is essential that we include the voices of Aboriginal Women and Torres Strait Islander Women. I write this expressly acknowledging that this piece is exploring the reclaiming of invisible Aboriginal women in the records of western, post invasion history. Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islander Peoples have, since time immemorial, valued equally the roles of women and men. Both women and men have shared the responsibilities of lore, custom and practice. Women’s lore is equally as important as men’s lore in maintaining social and cultural practice.
In 1788, when the way history was recorded on this continent changed dramatically and irreversibly, Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islander People’s experience and history was recorded through the lens of western patriarchy. The experiences and voices of Aboriginal Women and Torres Strait Islander Women, like those of other women, were rarely publicly recorded and therefore their voices are either missing, forgotten, ignored or subject to interpretation by the men recording and publishing their experiences.
Contact history is a great place to begin exploring the hidden history and women’s voices in early European records in NSW. By exploring the experiences of women, we see a more diverse range of social and cultural contacts and interactions than those traditionally presented. By exploring the experiences of Aboriginal women in early contact history, we can broaden our understanding of the shared experience that contact is. Contact is not just an experience one group has over another, or something that happens to one group by another group.
Here are two examples of the hidden histories of Aboriginal women in early contact history:
Patyegarang
Patyegarang was a young woman who spoke the Gadigal language and is recorded in some of the very earliest written records as the first teacher of Gadigal Language in the new colony.
William Dawes was an English Lieutenant and scientist who arrived on the First Fleet and remained in the colony until 1791. He recorded his experiences in the colony in detailed notes and manuscripts.
Patyegarang and William struck up what appears to be an unlikely friendship based on mutual respect, humour and a shared curiosity and interest in each other’s ways. In his notes Dawes records the conversations between them across a broad range of subjects.
Patyegarang taught Dawes Gadigal and she learnt English herself. Both learnt each other’s language in a functional manner which allowed them to communicate in depth and showed the intellect of both. Dawes recorded a conversation where Patyegarang explained the anger of the local people, that the colonists had stayed on their land and that they were afraid of the guns. Dawes later refused to follow orders to participate in punitive and violent actions against the local peoples and was likely sent back to England due to his sympathetic views towards the local Aboriginal peoples.
Maria Locke
Maria, a Dharug woman, was born on the Hawkesbury River between 1794-1804.
In 1814, Maria was in the first group of children placed in the newly created ‘Native Institution for tuition’, which was created to teach Aboriginal children basic education, moral and religious instruction and manual skills, to allow them to be useful to the new colony. Despite this radical and total upheaval in the young Maria’s life, she excelled in learning. In 1819, Maria won the top prize in the yearly exam for the children engaged in education in the colony, including nearly 100 European children.
In 1822, Maria married William Walker, a Dharug man she had spent time with at the Native Institute. Unfortunately, within weeks of their marriage, William died of illness. In 1823, Maria married convict, Robert Locke, in the first sanctioned marriage between an Aboriginal person and a European. As Robert was a convict, he was ‘assigned’ to Maria, making her the first Aboriginal supervisor of a convict.
In 1831, Maria petitioned Governor Darling to be given her deceased brother’s land grant at Blacktown. Maria had been promised a grant of land as part of her marriage to Robert but this had not been provided. The grant was not given; however, 40 acres of land were granted to Robert on Maria’s behalf. In 1833 a further 44 acres of land was granted to her in Robert’s name at Liverpool and in 1843, after 10 years perseverance, Maria was granted her brother’s land.
Maria outlived Robert by 24 years. She spent her life engaged in the day-to-day life as a land holder in the colonies. On her death in July 1878, her land passed to her nine surviving children.
Troy, Jakelin (1993) The Sydney Language, Aboriginal Studies Press (Produced with the assistance of the Australian Dictionaries Project and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies)
Monika Schwarz uses modern data analysis to shed new light on how 19th Century female convicts resisted the system designed to keep them in place. . .
The Bread Riot
In May 1839 the usual proceedings in the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart were disrupted by a major incident. 200 convict women, all held at the crime class1 of the institution at the time, instigated a food riot after they found that instead of wheat the bread they received, as their ration that day, had been made of inferior barley. The women took control over the factory, forcing the principal superintendent for convicts, Josiah Spode, to hurry to the scene, followed by the chief constable and a dozen police men. When they arrived, the Colonial Times, a Hobart newspaper at the time, claimed that they were held ‘absolutely in deviance’ by the women (Smith 2021, p. 205). It wasn’t the only riot ever to occur in a female factory with similar events documented in Parramatta or Launceston (Daniels 1998, pp.146-151).
The Function of the Female Factories
Female Convicts could see the insides of a female factory at various stages of their passage through the colonial penal system. The first time was usually directly after their arrival, as the factories were used as distribution centres. In total, between 1788 and 1868, 168.000 convicts, predominantly from England and Ireland, were transported to Australia. Instead of filling up English gaols, they were brought across the seas to help with the colonisation of the newest addition to the British Empire . One in every six convicts was female, about 25,500 women overall. After their first brief stint in the assignment class of a factory, female convicts were usually assigned as servants into the settler households.
Every offence perpetrated by a convict while ‘under servitude’ and brought to a prosecution was entered into the conduct registers. Female convicts, different to male convicts, often worked and lived in very close proximity to their employers, usually under the same roof, and under the constant surveillance of their mistresses. Naturally, this situation could cause a lot of friction. An analysis of the offences recorded for female convicts bears witness to the kind of workplace battles in which the female convict servants and their colonial keepers were embroiled. 65% of the entries can be classified as offences against convict regulations, and ranged, in escalating order, from mere insolence and disobedience to neglect of work or refusing to work, to being out after hours or absent without leave, and finally, if things turned really sour, absconding (Cowley et al. 2021, pp. 29-30).
Repeated offences, or severe offences like absconding, could bring a convict woman back into the factory, but this time she would serve a limited time, ranging from one month to a year, in the crime class. And while the women could be cut off from their peers while assigned to a specific household, the crime class in the factory gave them a chance to exchange experiences and get organised. As the superintendent of the Cascades Female Factory, Mr. Hutchinson, put it when he was interviewed for an official inquiry into the state of the factories, the biggest problem in the factory was that the women ‘talked’ (Smith 2021, p. 193).
It is incredibly lucky that the convict archives of Van Diemen’s Land have been fully preserved. And, through massive volunteering efforts like the one spear-headed by the Female Convicts Research Centre (https://femaleconvicts.org.au/), recent years have seen the complete digitisation and transcription of all female convict records. Having the conduct registers available in tabular, machine-readable form has a particular advantage. The original conduct registers are large leather-bound ledgers, where, for each arriving ship, details about every new convict, like their name, birthplace, age on arrival and reason for transportation, were recorded. After those details a part of the page was initially left empty, but every time a convict was brought to trial, the ledger would come out again to record the new offence along with its date, the sitting magistrate and the resulting sentence. Until now, these conduct registers were mostly used to reconstruct individual life courses. But in machine-readable form it is now possible to reorder the recorded offences by date and find connections between them. It is now possible to read the conduct registers across the grain.
This means that we can now identify collective action in the female factories, in total 87 incidents between the years 1823 and 1854, when counting every instance where more than two women were sentenced for the same offence on the same day, in the same factory and by the same magistrate (Schwarz 2023, pp. 177-78). For example, the Bread Riot mentioned above led to the sentencing of 49 women, presumably the ring leaders. On the 6th of May 1839, every one of their offence registers received the same peculiar entry ‘Insubordination on the 4th instant in a forcibly, violently and turbulent manner resisting Mr. Hutchinson & and openly refusing to obey his lawful commands’.
The Bread Riot as an event made the news at the time and has been described by historians previously (e.g. Frost 2012, p.71; Smith 2021, p. 205). But through digital analysis we now know 49 names of participating female convicts.
One of these convict women was Fanny Jarvis. Originally a servant girl from Staffordshire, she was sentenced to life after stealing from her employer. It was a harsh sentence which may have caused Fanny’s recalcitrance. Her conduct register tells us that she spent long stints in the factories rather than serving some employer. She tried to incite her fellow prisoners to insubordination on at least one more occasion and once refused to testify in court (Follow this link to Conviction Politics’ documentary Fanny Jarvis – Right in the Middle )
And she participated not only in the Bread Riot, but ,three years later, also in the second largest collective event in the Cascades Female Factory, now dubbed the We Are All Alike incident:
In August 1842 the water pipes in the wash yard, where most of the women of the crime class would spend their day washing the colony’s linen, froze and broke down. Workmen had to be brought in to repair them, and the women were locked up in one of the upper bedrooms instead.
‘By mid-afternoon about 150 of them had reached frustration point. They began singing, dancing, shouting, clapping their hands and stamping their feet’ (Smith 2021, p. 206). When pressed for their ringleader’s names, the women first started chanting ‘We are all alike’. Eventually, 31 women were sentenced as a result of their involvement in this incident.
It is possible to look back at these events from a network analysis angle. By participating in the two separate events Fanny Jarvis created a connection between them, just like other women who participated in multiple events created further connections. And it is possible to visualise this network. It proves that collective resistance in the female factories were not isolated incidents. They were connected events, carried out by a body of women grouping together, time and again, to fight back against a system designed to exploit them as a cheap labour force. The network visualisation shows an intriguing amount of collusion, reflecting the social network the women became part of in the factories. The network also shows that the web of collusion spread across the different Van Diemen’s Land factories, most prominently the Cascades Female Factory, a converted distillery in the west of Hobart and the custom-built panopticon- style Female Factory at Launceston (Frost and Maxwell-Stewart 2022).
Image 4 Visualisation of the Female Factories Resistance Network (blue nodes: Cascades Female Factory, red nodes: Launceston Female Factory, beige nodes: other factories)
Conclusion
Historically, convict women were judged harshly. Comments by their contemporaries, usually coming from male writers with little to no experience nor understanding of the life of the lower classes, described them as ‘rebellious hussies’ (Frost 2012, pp. 66-67) or ‘contumacious, ungovernable and incorrigible’ (Reid 1997, p.106). This judgment was repeated for decades and only questioned by a first wave of female historians in the nineteen nineties (Daniels 1996, Oxley 1996, Damousi 1997). A lot of the early misconception around convict women, the female part of this first forced wave of European settlers, came from their own voices being largely absent. The use of modern data analysis can continue to change this perception. Originally the conduct registers were designed by the British bureaucracy to keep convicts in check by minutely recording every single one of their colonial perpetrations. Now, through digitisation and a modern ‘big data’ approach, the same registers can be used to show the convict women in a new light. Not as criminals. Not as victims. But as courageous and determined women, ready to organise themselves to fight back.
End notes
1 Crime class – the part of the factory set aside for female convicts who were repeat offenders.
References
Cowley, T., Frost, L., Inwood, K., Kippen, R., Maxwell-Stewart, H., Schwarz, M., Shepherd, J., Tuffin, R., Williams, M., Wilson, J. & Wilson, P. (2021). Reconstructing a longitudinal dataset for Tasmania. Historical Life Course Studies, 11, 20-47.
Damousi, J. (1997). Depraved and disorderly: female convicts, sexuality and gender in colonial Australia. Cambridge University Press, doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511470172.
Daniels, K. (1998). Convict Women. Allen & Unwin.
Frost, L. (2012). Abandoned women: Scottish convicts exiled beyond the seas. Allen & Unwin.
Frost, L. & Maxwell-Stewart, H. (2021). A Panoptic Eye: The Punishment and Reform of Female Convicts in Van Diemen’s Land. Revenue D’études Benthamiennes 21. doi.org/10.4000/etudes-benthamiennes.9802
Oxley, D. (1996). Convict maids: the forced migration of women to Australia. Cambridge University Press.
Reid, K. (1997). ‘Contumacious, Ungovernable and Incorrigible’: Convict Women and Workplace Resistance, Van Diemen’s Land, 1820–1839. In. I. Duffield & J. Bradley (Eds.), Representing Convicts: New Perspectives on Convict Forced Labour Migration. Leicester University Press.
Schwarz, M. (2023). ‘Round ring on the floor’—Collective resistance networks in female factories. Australian Journal of Biography and History, (7), 175-196.
Smith, B. (2021). Defiant Voices: How Australia’s Female Convicts Challenged Authority 1788–1853. NLA Publishing.
About the author
Dr Monika Schwarz is a research fellow at Monash University’s SensiLab. She holds a PhD in archaeology, with over 15 years of experience in that field, and a Master’s degree in information technology. Now specialising in the analysis, visualisation and even physicalisation of historical data, she has been and continues to work on various projects like ‘Conviction Politics’ (ARC funded), ‘A Stitch in Time’ (Whyte fund grant), ‘Putting Death in its Place’ (ARC funded) or ‘Making Crime Pay’ (ARC funded) since 2020. In these projects she is combining skills from her two careers in archaeology and information technology, for example by turning 19th century convict records into interactive data visualisations. Monika’s work has a particular focus on female narratives.
