4 February 2026

Start the new school year inspired with Chief Executive Martin Westwell as he joins Teach to discuss the year ahead. From encouraging new teachers and exploring the updated curriculum, to the introduction of three-year-old preschool and the first technical college student graduates, the Chief Executive shares his optimism, vision, and practical insights for educators. Discover how South Australia is broadening what success looks like for every learner and be energised for the year ahead.

Show Notes

Transcript

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and we're joined again by our Chief Executive Professor Martin Westwell. Martin, welcome.

Martin Westwell: Hi Dale. Is it too late to say Happy New Year? Here we are.

Dale Atkinson: No, we'll take, we'll take that. We'll take that. Because it's happy new school year.

Martin Westwell: Yeah. Right.

Dale Atkinson:  Do chief executives get start of school nerves? Are there any jitters for Chief Executives in the way there are for young children and sometimes teachers?

Martin Westwell: Yeah. I'm not sure it's so much nerves as you know, there's just a kind of refresh, there's a hopefulness, there's a, you know, whether it's a kindy, a primary school, a high school, you've got a new cohort of kids and everybody's there in their kind of oversized shoes and their you know, their new things and you know, it's just such a positive time I think. And what you look, I think from my perspective, what you're looking for is just a great start. Great start for kids, great start for teachers and leaders and yeah, so I think we come at it with kind of, full of hope and opportunity.

Dale Atkinson: What about our new teachers that are stepping in for the first time this year? People have just recently graduated. What's your message to them?

Martin Westwell: Yeah, look, I think it's a fantastic time to be in teaching and of course, I would say in South Australia in particular. I think the way in which we're valuing the profession means that there's just so much opportunity to, to grow and develop. New teachers come with their expertise and often with experience as well, that they can bring to the, to the classroom, to their experience. You know, being part of that new team, getting to know those people, you know, it really is all about kind of leaning in, you know, building those relationships. And I think one of the things that we've got good at is thinking about not turning up as experts; but turning up with our expertise. You know, bringing the expertise that you've got, but coming in as a learner and wanting to learn and you see that in our preschools and schools right across the state with our new educators, I think. And, you know again, full of opportunity, full of, full of promise.

Dale Atkinson: Bring the energy. Now, when we spoke at the end of last year you thanked staff for “stepping in” to the department’s Strategy. What does the next phase look like for us in 2026?

Martin Westwell: I’d really want people to see it as an opportunity. I know it can feel like, you know, the requirement of the department, the department says you have to do this, even if it is a choice that you're making. But I do think it's an opportunity. I do think it's an opportunity for schools and for individual educators to express, you know, what they're about, either as a school or as a professional. You know to kind of be able to bring themselves a bit more perhaps to the work than they might have been able to do in the past. So, if you see it as an opportunity, you know, which parts of that are you going to grab? Which parts of that are you going to really get a hold of this year? And you know, and that's, I think how we’ll move forward, by us all kind of making the most of the opportunities that we've got.

Dale Atkinson: So one of the tools that we've created for helping educators express their, their professionalism, is the curriculum for, the South Australian curriculum for public education. We've taken a lot of feedback through the first iterations of the development of that curriculum. We're about to release that second prototype. What advice do you have for teachers as they sort of delve into it and unpack it?

Martin Westwell:  We've tried to think about the curriculum a bit different from the Australian Curriculum, that’s very syllabus-y really, and a place to start is always, is the knowledge piece, the knowledge and skills that we want students to develop, and that is a place to start. But I think there's an opportunity there to do some thought experiments as well. You know, so what if you came, what if you were to come in through the dispositions? What if you were to say, yeah, I know there's all this, there's the content that I need to teach the students and that's really important and we've expressed it as concepts, so, yep, it's not, lots of bits and pieces of knowledge that you’ve got to fit together and it's got to make sense and we're, how are we helping students to make meaning. But it's also, but it could be, you know, I really want these students to be resilient. I really want these students to be creative. And then thinking about, well, how does the description of the, the content and how it might unfold over the year, how does that bring out and develop that creativity? How does it, again, what are the opportunities that it creates in the classroom when I'm doing my learning design? You know, it'd be great if people could see the curriculum in that sort of way – as a curriculum, as a guide to their own choices rather than kind of the checklist of things to go through.

Dale Atkinson: It's interesting that like a lot of the feedback we had through the development of the strategy and, and indeed research elsewhere has demonstrated that, you know, business leaders are indicating that those dispositions are really strongly favoured in terms of what they want from the education system. Is that part of the reason we're going after this as an approach?

Martin Westwell: School has to, and what students are learning, has to be relevant to them. And what I mean by that is they have to make meaning. It has to be part of kind of how they see themselves as a learner and who they are as a learner. So, I think that's really important.

You know, it's, it's 20 years, almost exactly 20 years since Ken Robinson did his “Do schools kill creativity?” – a TED Talk. The most watched TED Talk ever. You know, and in that he was talking about how, you know, that old industrial model of education, and if an alien came down to earth, they'd think that education, the purpose of education was to develop professors, you know, and as a former professor, it kind of did an okay job for me. But, but that narrowness, being able to shift to a broader definition of success so that students can make meaning. You know, so if you think about, you know, in the work around Aboriginal education, the Kaurna curriculum that we've developed, the bilingual education, now really working on with the Aṉangu schools in the APY Lands, in the SACE being able to recognise cultural knowledge and learning – all of those things broaden what success looks like. And it's not to say that, oh well we're not doing literacy and numeracy, we're not doing foundational knowledge now, we're gonna skip that and move on to these things. It's not that. It's not an either or. It's a broadening of what success can look like. And so, you know the work with the curriculum, the work on the dispositions is trying to do the same thing, is trying to broaden that success, find other ways of making meaning for students. So that's really important in, in its own right, I think.

What we also are seeing is exactly as you said – when we talked with students, educators, teachers, employers, they were all saying; this has to be part of education too. It wasn't a shift away from knowledge. It was a - this has to be part of it too. Because if young people are going to be able to go into the world as children and you know, the transition from school into employment and other things, they're gonna need these dispositions in order to thrive. So can we make that part of the story of education? So that's been part of it. And so all of those things add up to why we can't carry on with a curriculum that's just about knowledge and skills, and we've got to shift. And this is South Australia now taking the first steps towards that.

Dale Atkinson: Now we are welcoming for the first time with the introduction of three-year-old preschool - what's that about? What are we gonna do with these very small humans?

Martin Westwell: We're gonna love them and nurture them - that's the first thing we're gonna do. But um, we're gonna create places where they feel like they belong and that they're connected to other people and they're gonna learn. Right? So, and that's true of preschools and schools as well.

But with the three-year-olds, you know lots of our preschools, lots of our sites have got three year olds anyway – and some got quite a lot of three year-olds, and so for them, you know, it's not, not a huge change. With the, this year probably the focus will be on, for public education will be around regional sites and making sure that there's a provision of preschool for three-year-olds, as well as that provision for four-year-olds, because we know how important that is to communities and we know how important it is for those students.

And so, you know, clearly there's two things going on here with the government's commitment to three-year-old preschool. One is that preschool is available and that people can access that, and there's a bit of a, you know, an economic participation, making sure that there's a place where students, where children are gonna be, are gonna learn and are gonna be cared for. But of course in preschool, the focus is on the, very much on the learning. But it's gotta have an equity impact as well.

We know that if this is gonna make a difference in South Australia, it's gonna make a difference in the communities where; perhaps lower SES communities, communities where children will really benefit from the socialisation with other children, the education that we can provide, the support that we can provide, and that how, just how important that is to set children up for, yeah to be a brilliant three-year-old and to be able to go on through preschool and into school, and be successful because of those aspects of child development that have been, we've been able to kind of grapple with and support the development of, right from being three-years-old.

Dale Atkinson: At the other end of the scale, last year we had our first of our year 12 graduates from Findon Technical College. So the technical college is new approach for us as an education department in terms of the approach that we've got there and those kids are making their way in the workforce. What, what's been your impression of the development of that and, and how that's, that's been working?

Martin Westwell: It's funny isn't it, this time of year you're kinda looking forwards, but there's also that like kinda looking back on where we've been as well.

And in, was it 2010 – the new SACE? For, in South Australia we said we're gonna value vocational education and training just as much as academic subjects. You do a year of VET or a year of Physics, you get the same number of credits. We're gonna say these two things are equally valued, and whether that's useful or not to you as a student, well, that's your choice, and depending on your pathway and where you want to go, and for some people, and for some people, one thing is gonna be really valuable and the other thing wouldn't be valuable. So of course that's, that, that's important. And so we incorporated that into the SACE.

Sisteen years on, we're still the only state to have done anything really like that. Other states have, are doing some interesting things, but not really kind of reaching right into the certificate and saying, yeah, this is important. And so we're building on strong foundations in South Australia with the technical colleges. And so then being able to say, okay, well these are places, these are gonna be the hubs, the places where that vocational education is gonna be available. Students are still doing their SACE but the vocational education is available and you're gonna be able to experience that in a way that is authentic and in a way that's gonna be hard to achieve anywhere else. Almost anywhere else in the country, let alone in South Australia.

And we've really thought about kind of, what the student experience looks like there as well. And so, each technical college is slightly different, because it's gotta serve that community, slightly different because it's got different industry partners. And you know, that guaranteed job that's available to students is such a big part of it, such an important part of it. But then in places like Port Augusta and the Limestone Coast where we knew that we had to provide some connection to students who were perhaps not from that, that town, Port Augusta or Mount Gambier, but from a bit further afield, we put accommodation in place so they could come and stay and do block training.

And when you talk to some of the students who have started this year at Port Augusta, how important that's been. You know, there's a student from Roxby Downs who was talking about, you know, what they wanted to do and the dreams that they had, and they never thought they were gonna be able to do it. But now because of the technical college, they can do that thing. They already knew what they wanted to do. They already knew that kind of, yeah the job, but the kind of person that they wanted to be, and they couldn't necessarily see a pathway to it. And now they could, because we put a technical college at Port Augusta. I mean, that's, you know, when you talk to the students and you hear the stories and yeah, it's just one story. But that story's replicated over and over and over again. This is, this is how we change the world. This is how we change the experience of so many of our students in South Australia. And the technical colleges is just one big way, but one way in which we're doing that.

Dale Atkinson: Can I talk to you about challenges?

Martin Westwell: Oh yeah.

Dale Atkinson: Alright. What challenges do you anticipate for the coming year and how are we gonna tackle them?

Martin Westwell: There's always challenges in any system I think. When you've got an opportunity, you've got a challenge as well, and the challenge is making the most of the opportunity, right? And so, with the Strategy, there's still gonna be some challenges around, you know, bedding it in, us getting a settlement and understanding of what the Areas of Impact really mean; that grapple and that challenge is a purposeful one, right? Because if we wrote it down and said ‘this is it’, we would narrow the idea so much that it'd stop being meaningful and we'd just be going through the motions. So, we'll continue to grapple with that. I think that is a challenge.

I think, you know, we know some of the challenges that we've got. Whenever you talk to principals, well the challenges, the challenges are staffing, infrastructure, staffing and staffing. Yeah? Yeah. So, so I think we need more work there and I think there's good work to come around working with the universities, working with others to create pathways and, you know, employment-based pathways, other ways of helping people to access the profession. There's low barriers to exit and there's high barriers to coming in sometimes for some people, and so we want to lower some of those barriers, you know. I think we've gotta double down on that work this year, but I am optimistic about it. I think there are some challenges, but I, but I am optimistic.

I think that some of those, those notions around the workforce, I think that there are challenges and, and the way in which we address, one of the ways in which we address them is making sure that there's kind of, that there's more joy in the work, you know, that people are doing. You know, we all have to do things we don't want to do at work. But people are doing the things that kind of feed the soul, you know? It's hard work. Yeah. But you feel like it's, you know, you're really achieving something. And making sure that we're kind of clearing things out of the way that are not connected with that for educators. So, it kind of raises the satisfaction that the profession is getting. So, I think there's something there as well.

You know, we're seeing more young people signing up for education degrees, which I think is a good thing. That's gonna take a while to flow through. I think there's something there about, you know, also some challenges around how are we using our SSOs and do some of those SSOs want to become educators and how do we support them to do that whilst maintaining quality? We're not interested in kind of quick fixes that don't maintain teacher quality.

Dale Atkinson: So an interesting set of challenges there. Let's pivot to a more optimistic… it's not that that's pessimistic, let's, let's, let's be fair – and we can be optimistic about a lot of those things, but, I know you're an optimistic person. What is your optimistic message for educators and staff at the start of 2026?

Martin Westwell: It, it's really hard work being an educator. And in a way, in a way kinda so it should be right. There's so few people that get to kind of reach out and touch the future and educators are doing that all the time. So, you know, and because of the hard work and because of those things, it can kind of make you look down at the, you know, the day-to-day things we're doing. So, like the, the piece about the, the optimism is to kind of look up and just see how brilliant we're being, you know. Yes, with challenges and with some things that are getting in the way. But if we can look up and just see above those from time to time, to see how brilliant we're being, to see what a difference we're making, see the, recognise the change in your students over this coming year in response to your teaching and their learning. So, you know, the message is, is be brilliant. We've seen that brilliance. Carry on being brilliant. Be a learner and continue to kind of reach out. Not only touch the future but shape the future.

Dale Atkinson: Touch the future. Shape the future. Sounds like a nineties dance hit. We'll take that. Thank you very much, Martin. Thanks for your time.

Martin Westwell: Thanks, Dale.