FROM THE HEADMASTER

Our Prefects of 2023 have once again been such a support to me and to the School community. Their work was more or less faultless throughout the year, and their role in energising the School through their community and charitable endeavours has contributed enormously to the spirit of the School. The leadership of Senior Prefect Jeffrey Chen and the efforts of his fellow Prefects would without doubt have met the studied approval of AB Weigall. I’m grateful to Jeffrey for his calm demeanour, his loyalty to the School and his dedication to the best of Grammar. He and his Prefects have maintained a standard for the Prefect bodies of the future at Grammar, a standard that the current Prefects are already seeking to match under the leadership of 2024’s Senior Prefect Nirav Keshava.

2023 at College Street has been an excitingly vibrant year. While that sentence might seem at first glance the stuff of headmasterly cliché, one should not forget that 2022 commenced with very high rates of the pandemic virus and serious limitations imposed on schools. By contrast, a liberated spirit seems to have animated the life of the School during 2023, with a heady profusion of events throughout our calendar, ranging from our concerts, parental gatherings, Old Sydneian reunions, and much more. I think it is fair to note that our Director of Community, Ms Sharon Ditmarsch, has been more than a little busy.

Across the landscape of our School, whichever campus they occupy, our staff remain variously and individually dedicated to the intrinsic purpose of a Grammar education. Nonetheless, I was once asked in the course of a Trustees’ meeting whether I was worried about the School’s ability to secure top-quality teachers. The question, as it happens, was posed by a former Trustee, Michelle Simmons, a recent Australian of the Year and international trailblazer in quantum physics. Michelle was unsurprisingly concerned about the dearth of well-qualified and capable science and mathematics teachers in the teaching sector. My categorical answer to her question then, as it would be now, was that Grammar continues to attract impressive candidates across all our subject disciplines. At Grammar, our boys are taught by fine masters who care deeply about their subject and know their material. But Michelle’s question emboldened a thesis I’ve nursed for some time about the teaching profession more generally in this country, well beyond the bounds of Grammar.

Whilst the Bachelor of Education degree has many laudable components, it changes one fundamental aspect of the traditional education of future teachers, namely that they generally no longer need to complete a full degree in their chosen subject area or ‘specialism’ (and I should note that I have spoken at length with a Professor of Education from one of Sydney’s leading universities about these issues). In other words, rather than becoming degree level experts in an academic field and then taking on a postgraduate teaching qualification, young people can leave school and begin to train as teachers before they have acquired more than HSC level knowledge. In this model, the craft of teaching risks being advanced at the cost of genuine and enduring subject knowledge and understanding.

Further compounding this situation across the profession is the requirement nowadays to achieve NESA accreditation to teach in our schools. No doubt, the architects of the accreditation system had the high ideals of accountability and enduring professionalism in mind, but the reality is that our teachers across the state need to spend far too much time satisfying the demands of a regulatory body which charges teachers to be regulated. In fact, teachers would benefit from fewer external regulatory hurdles and more time for dedication to their subject. The Australian Professional Standards for Teachers as imposed by NESA are valuable, but the heavy-handed imposition of them on the life of a teacher is rather less so.

Finally, given an environment in which teachers run the risk of graduating with a relative paucity of subject knowledge, it is worth observing that a not inconsiderable proportion of commissioned educational advisors regarding curriculum change in NSW are of the view that the teachers should cease to be the ‘sage of the stage’ in the classroom and instead see themselves as being functionary ‘guides on the side’ and as co-learners with their pupils. Somewhere in there lies the logic that the internet has limitless information and that the teacher must admit his or her manifest limitations.