27 November 2025

In this episode Stew Nancarrow, Assistant Principal at Colonel Light Gardens Primary School and Sarah Bradbury, Assistant Director in the Department for Education’s Learning and Teaching Directorate discuss the Curriculum Leaders' Network. This initiative is designed to connect leaders of curriculum and pedagogy in public schools across South Australia. There are separate networks for the Primary Years context and for the Secondary Years context, but each is designed to enable participants to lead and design for learning that activates our Strategy for Public Education and SA Curriculum Framework prototype. Learn how these networks empower educators to design for the SA Curriculum through peer learning, sharing of practice, and a focus on developing dispositions, capabilities and conceptual understanding. Hear firsthand accounts of how curriculum leaders are supporting each other, implementing new approaches, and preparing students to learn and thrive.

Show Notes

• SA Curriculum website.

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 today we're talking Curriculum Leaders’ Network with a couple of new friends for me. Stew Nancarrow, who's the Assistant Principal of Colonel Light Gardens, welcome to you.

Stew Nancarrow: Thank you very much.

Dale Atkinson: And Sarah Bradbury, who's the Assistant Director, Primary Years in the Learning and Teaching Directorate. Welcome to you, Sarah.

Sarah Bradbury: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: I'm going to address my first question to you, Sarah. What is the Curriculum Leaders’ Network?

Sarah Bradbury: Great question. So this year, as part of our work in activating the strategy, and starting to work with the SA curriculum framework prototype, we know there's this amazing expertise that is in our system, and it lives in schools and the Curriculum Leaders’ Network was born to bring those people together to talk about how we're going to design for learning that activates the strategy and the new curriculum.

Dale Atkinson: So the traditional way of developing curriculum within education departments is you bring a bunch of people in, and they sit there as curriculum writers, and they produce a thing and then they fire it back out into the system and they're like, there you go. That's what you do. What's different this time, Sarah?

Sarah Bradbury: What's different this time is that we're working with the system to create a curriculum document, a curriculum framework that's going to work for us in activating our strategy in our context. So we had this wonderful team of people who are writing the curriculum. But what's happening is that we're getting feedback from the system, to evolve that curriculum and make it work for us.

Dale Atkinson: Now, I guess that's a good point to bring Stu into the conversation. What's your role been in this?

Stew Nancarrow: I'm so I've been lucky enough to be a participant, so I've been able to head in, as a, as a site leader with some key members of my team and have a bit of a look at this network and engage in conversations with people about how we can increase our awareness of the pedagogy and the dispositions that we that we're trying to embrace at the moment, which is really exciting.

Dale Atkinson: So we've had a series of professional learning days. What’ve they looked like, Sarah?

Sarah Bradbury: So we have them in both primary and secondary. So at the moment we've got the Curriculum Leaders’ Network. But there's many networks within that network. There are primary leaders’ networks that are focused on thinking about our new maths curriculum and, and how we bring that to life.

And in secondary, what that looks like is it's different networks across the different learning areas we have in the SA curriculum to bring curriculum leaders who are leading those learning areas together to have conversations. So we've had two professional learning days. When you're in a network, you get access to two days of professional learning happening in semester one and semester two. In the primary network, what that looked like was we we partnered with Professor Amy Ulbrich, who is a professor at University of SA. And we talked about pedagogical pragmatism. So, the idea that we don't have one dominant pedagogy that we're using all the time, that we have a toolkit of pedagogies that we're using,

In the secondary years network, we also partnered with SACE Board, and there's a lot of changes happening at the SACE end of schooling at the moment, and they're really exciting. And so there's a wonderful opportunity with the SA curriculum to make sure that we're supporting learners as they're moving into that new model of learning in SACE.

Dale Atkinson: Now, Stu. You're an assistant principal. You're a busy guy.

Stew Nancarrow: Yep

Dale Atkinson: What are you getting out of this?

Stew Nancarrow: This has been really interesting because we initially went, “our focus is literacy we're going to pause”. And then someone reached out and said, “before you miss this opportunity. I think this is a really good idea”. So we're, okay – eyes open, we head inside. And what we got out of it straightaway was just this, this insight into how to access the SA curriculum and how it actually can look boots on ground and how it can look in our school. So as a leader, I walked straight away going, “I have so much more language and so much more understanding of how to to embed this in our school”.

So I've got the language, I've got some of the key phrases, I've got some application, some really easy pick up and runs that I can use with our staff to open the door to the SA curriculum. So it was instantly – straight away went, “I can see how this works for us”.

Dale Atkinson: And what are the changes you've been able to implement in your school?

Stew Nancarrow: The big one for us is, looking at how we can take some of these dispositions and embed them in what we're doing. So we've made the conscious choice at our site to play with the SA curriculum this whole year. And we've gone nice and slow, which has been really exciting, but we've been able to go, “how can we take some of these, these tweaks and how do we embed a bit more of our dispositions, some more of our dispositions in there? How do we embed some more capabilities and be really purposeful in that?”.

So straight away we've got teachers playing with the idea of, “how do I plan a split screen approach with some curriculum, but also some skills and some dispositions as well?”. And that was just through one professional learning day here, taking it back and discussing the ideas and the benefits with the staff and the why. And the staff went, “yeah, okay, we can give that a shot”.

So it hasn't added to our workload. It's good conversation. There's more conversation, there's more purposeful thinking in the fore.

Dale Atkinson: And, Sarah, what's the role of the networks in terms of supporting the activity at the individual sites?

Sarah Bradbury: So we know through research that professional learning – attending the day is great. You know, you get out of the school, you get to have a really good feed, and you get to connect with other educators.

But the evidence shows that it doesn't actually make a lot of difference on our teaching practice and the difference it can make in the classroom. So the idea of the networks is that we're continually bringing those layers together to have discussions about what they're doing in their site, what they're trialling, maybe what they're grappling with, the mistakes that maybe they've, they've made in the process so that we're nurturing that idea of a learning system, learning within from each other, and really activating that guiding principle of collective responsibility that we have for our kids across the state. So that the network is the thing that's the driving force that enables the work to keep on progressing.

And especially the wonderful opportunity we've got at the moment with the curriculum being a prototype in that we're playing with it, we're learning with it before it actually becomes, a version that will be our written curriculum document.

Dale Atkinson: And Stu, do you find that you're getting quite a bit out of the peer-to-peer interactions?

Stew Nancarrow: Yeah, I, I am actually quite blown away with how much I'm getting away from the networking, and the, the constant check-ins with other leaders because there's that familiarity. It's not somebody on the stage telling me what to do. We're actually talking as I saw leaders going, oh, I'm really struggling with this. How are you? Fine. Yep, we're in the exact same boat.

So then our conversation, instead of just being kind of tokenistic, it's really purposeful. And we're also getting a lot of successes where, you know, here we're going to look at feedback. “Oh, our site has just done something. Let me flick it through to you and have a look and see what fits”. And we can take bits of it and make it our own. And then conversely, that feeling of going, oh, I've actually been able to help another site leader and not go through the same challenges that we've gone through, is really powerful.

And I didn't appreciate necessarily how much those, those check-ins on Teams, they were so beneficial. Like, I've actively looked forward to them. I'm like, “right, I've got a question for the network today I need to know”.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that's one of the huge benefits of having these sorts of online forums, isn't it, Sarah?

Sarah Bradbury: Absolutely, so we have our Teams channel. That's where all our networks live. In those networks that are online is there's a huge generosity, I think, of sharing resources and sharing practice and people learning with and from each other.

You've got access to a learning partner, someone from my team who's supporting those conversations, sharing research and sharing updates around what's happening with the curriculum as it's evolving. And it also enables us to meet, no matter where we are in the state. So our networks have been intentionally designed to be a mix of geographical regions.

So you might be a leader who's based out in Ceduna now, for example, on the Eyre Peninsula, you might be the only leader of a particular learning area within 200km. But we're connecting you with other curriculum leaders of that area. So that you can have those rich discussions and learn from each other.

Dale Atkinson: So, Sarah, we've currently got 500 primary, and 300 secondary educators involved in these networks. Who else should be involved and how do they do that?

Sarah Bradbury: Okay, so we're really keen to get more people on board next year. So you can register to be part of the network in 2026 if you lead one or more curriculum areas in a secondary setting, or you’re an executive leader, or if you lead mathematics in a primary setting – you are absolutely welcome to register for the leaders’ network in 2026. There'll be some information coming out on EDi in the next few weeks, so keep an eye on that.

Dale Atkinson: And final word for you, Stew. Recommendations for others? What's your advice?

Stew Nancarrow: I would absolutely tell anyone to jump in the amount of stuff that my staff have walked away with and gone, “this has worked really well for us”. What I was just saying to Sarah as I was walking in, we had people come in for this, looking at a fantastic maths lesson that one of the learning partners ran and both of my staff that went to that session have taken it and are now using those pedagogical shifts, those really minor tweaks across in English and in HASS.

And we've got a JP teacher doing it in reception with amazing results. And then we've got a year five teacher doing some fantastic stuff and feedback purely out of watching a learning partner teach a lesson in one of these PD days, and then also connecting with the people in the network, going, “I like this idea. I'm going to try this, or I’m going to try this”. I'm a big advocate for it.

Dale Atkinson: Well, we might leave it at that. Stuart. Sarah, thank you for your time.

Sarah Bradbury: Thank you.

Stew Nancarrow: Thanks, Dale.