SPEAKER:
So without further ado. Do you need me to introduce Kevan? Yes. Alright. OK. Do your job. Righto, fine. Sir Kevan Collins, the founding CEO of the Education Endowment Fund, has had a very distinguished career in education work for the UK Public service for more than 30 years, led the English primary strategy as national director, was knighted for his services to education in 2015, has a long association here in Australia. A board member with the Australian Education Research Organisation and as an advisor to the SA Government and other governments and private providers here in Australia about evidence-based practice, best practice and practical applications for all that we learn, please make him very welcome, Sir Kevan.
SIR KEVAN COLLINS:
Very much. Thank you very much and good afternoon. I've got that slot, which is between you and the wine, and I know who will win. There's no... don't say that. Anyway, and there's always wine if you look hard enough. It's fantastic to be here today. And it's just so brilliant what's happening here in Australia generally, but in Victoria in particular around early learning. You know, as Kim was telling us this morning, from 1600 hours to 1800 hours, these aren't kind of little reforms. These are transformational opportunities. And this whole movement around the world of understanding and the value of early learning is unstoppable. And the challenge for us as early learning practitioners, experts is how do we take that opportunity and make it ours and it can never go back. And how do we keep growing it? Jane, my great friend, Jane Bertram there with June, my other mucker, when we hang out in Australia. Talked about what are you in your bare bones. And she talked about being an early educator. I think for those people that this is a translation problem with English, take me to my bare bones, I'm an infant school teacher.
So what does that mean? That means I started teaching 43 years ago in East London, and I taught a class of kids, 18 of them. A third were 5 to 6, a third were six... A third were 4 to 5, a third were 5 to 6, and a third were 6 to 7. And the ones who were 4 to 5 I had every day for three years. So quite a lot of what I'm going to talk to you about is what those children taught me because they taught me so much about teaching and they taught me most of all what I didn't know. And we'll come to that later on. The other thing about my presentation, I haven't got very long I'm going to be quick is that I want to sit in the space between the brilliant insights from the academic, from Aaron, from Jane, from the session we had on conceptual play, sitting between the insights from research and the business of bringing it to life in a setting. And when I say that's my role, I think that that's vital because I don't think it's unfair for me to say that what we found in education around the world generally is if you have the academics doing the great work, there is a huge chasm between that and the practice. And we need a bridge, we need brokers, we need a way of bridging that gap. And that's my work. And the thing... what I'm most interested in at the moment.
Philip Larkin For those people who don't know him, an English poet, and the reason I'm using this line is when you're a leader in organisation, time is your enemy. Someone said it earlier, it's just stolen away from you. And what happens with the time because is it's stolen away. Is that the life of the leader? Your life of leadership has a habit of living you rather than you living it. It just takes over and you're just consumed by events. The great thing about days like today is you get a moment to just pause and ask the question, Am I being the leader I want to be? Am I leading in the way I want to be? If you like the metacognition of leadership to do to use our education jargon. By the way, the other the other line from Philip, he's not really a great friend of ours in terms of early learning because his other great line is while I was growing up, I hated everybody. When I grew up, I realised it was just children I didn't like. But anyway, that's a... but there are many Larkin lines and some get a bit juicy. We need to do those late at night. The second, I want to show you this picture. I was scheduled to do one of these talks in Manchester in the north of England to all the directors of our children's services across the country. And just before the talk the night before, you had to go to one of these dinners.
Now, I really don't like having dinners when I've got to sit next to someone I don't know and do small talk and, you know, and I just honestly just drink my way out of it. I really don't like those kind of events. And I noticed in the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester and the same evening they had this exhibition by a woman called Shirley Baker of Childhood in the northwest of England, 1962 to 1972. My childhood spent in many parts of the world. My father was in the army, but my grandmother, my family a place I grew up. After we came back to England was the north west of England in Preston. And these are our images of childhood. And the reason I like this image is because what I want to remember about anything we do today and anything we do in our work, we are in the business of helping children have thriving and flourishing childhoods. And we're not alone in that. We're involved in that as educators and early years we're involved in that in primary schools. We're involved in that in secondary schools. And the issue that faces us around the world is childhood itself. And I had a role recently in England as the recovery commissioner appointed by the Prime Minister to look at the education challenge of recovery through COVID. It all didn't end well. It ended in tears. But that was my fault for agreeing to do it. And when I got the role, I said, I don't want to be the catch up commissioner.
Actually, I don't want to be the education commissioner. I want to be the childhood recovery commissioner because that's what happened in COVID. There was a there was an impact on childhood, an impact we hadn't seen for 50 years on childhood. And the question of childhoods that are flourishing and happy and fulfilled is something we need to revisit because it hasn't gone away. It's not over. The more important picture from the exhibition is this one. So here we are in Salford in the northwest of England, and these children are playing. Now, the reason I like this picture is I've written before about the three spaces of childhood. The first space of childhood is the most important of all your family. Your family, as we all know, has the capacity to give you a life. As mine did. Six boys, a mother who was a hero and a life of just complete satisfaction in many ways, and a platform that's given me the chance to stand up like this and arrogantly talk to people I don't know. So a sort of confidence cross arrogance. Some childhoods aren't like that. They leave people fearful. They leave people frightened. They leave people with all sorts of long-term issues. So the first space of childhood is the most important. The most enduring teacher of every child is their family. The second space of childhood is when people hand over to us and to other adults in schools in early years, in sports clubs all over the place, hand over their most treasured possession for time and say, Will you now care for this child and do something with them? The second space of childhood, the awesome responsibility we have at that moment to take that most treasured possession and care for it. That's why we're here. That's why we do what we do.
The third space of childhood used to be this space. No adults around going out in groups. We now call those gangs. Going out and exploring the world, testing boundaries, building alliances, falling in and out with people, discovering things to play with. Even, no, oh, my god. That's not safe. That's not safe there. They're in there. But that space has been squeezed away. And because it's been squeezed away, the learning that was happening in the third space, self-regulation, social skills, taking risks, all sorts of things that's been pushed down that we've now got to do that as well. More of that. It's been squeezed away, by the way. I'll give you three reasons, I think. The first is it's been appropriated by the commercial capital world who have decided you have to now pay to take your child to jump around on balls or climb things. You can now pay for this, which is handy. The second is because you see the man over there in the doorway. Stranger danger. There's now this obsession that children are constantly under threat.
The evidence from northern Europe because I used to run social services well in East London is that child harm hasn't really changed much in the last 40 years. The most dangerous place, the greatest harm done to children is where? On average in the home, a person they know. Not saying we shouldn't be worried about strangers. Of course, we should. But we... should it? Has it? Have we gone too far in the way that it's restricted children's lives? And the third theft of the time is the fact that many of these should now be sitting on home looking at a screen rather than out playing. The third space of childhood. The challenge on this space has impacted on us. It's changed what we have to do and what we have to focus on because the learning that was happening is critical. You can't not have that learning social skills, risk. You have to have that. But it's loaded more onto the second space if you like. So I wanted to say that because I want to talk about childhood. My talk is about childhood, not one domain of childhood. Frankl, the positive psychologist. This is about the session this morning from Kim on ourselves. Who are we? His line is we are pushed by drives, but we're pulled by values.
Now we do what we do for the vast salaries we're paid in early education and the wonderful life we have. Not because of the drives necessarily, but because we have this deep love and belief in the fact that it's worthy and noble to support children. That's a deep value and we shouldn't lose sight of that. And I'm glad it's been mentioned this morning that it's not all technical, it's not all procedural. It is about who we are and what motivates us to be who we are. It's the values that pull us. But the drives are important. And drives are things like salaries, our incentives and all the rest of it. But they have to be in balance with your, if you like, with your pulls. And that pulls are more important in the long run. So two assertions for the 30 minutes. The mastery of behaviours and knowledge are essential. We heard a lot about that today. We've heard a lot about knowledge and mastery of our technical skills, but they're not sufficient. They will be trumped by our emotional commitment to the work.
So when you're trying to build commitment in your place as a leader. Attend to the emotional needs of your staff. Attend to their emotional commitment to the work. Keep revisiting why we do what we do. And I know we do that, but it's so important. And the leadership task for all of us, whether you're a pedagogical leader, a centre leader, you're running whatever you're running. In my life, I've had the fortune of moving from an infant. How did it happen? An infant school teacher to being the national director for primary education, early years in England or being a chief executive, a council or whatever it might be. The leadership task has always been the same. How do I build the professional trust in people in me as a... how do I build professional trust? I am not interested at all in what I call compliance leadership. Compliance leadership, you will see... compliance leadership. There's a problem. I know what you should do. My job is to make you all do it. I'm really good at making people then who are really good at making people do what they want them to do. Actually, are celebrated. You know, you're really good at getting let's give you more people to tell what to do. And you've got compliance leadership, which is very shallow, and people are doing it because they're told to. And it's tick box and it's low-level professional trust.
Leadership is going way deeper into building people's understanding of why they're doing it. And the buy-in of leadership, the kind of tactics that Jane told us today, the notice and name, are the kind of things that people who want deep trust do every day when they're with people. And I just love that example. It's a brilliant one, isn't it? If you take one away today, take that one. You're not going to use this slide. I'm just saying that we don't need to much more arguments about is early learning important? There is mountains of evidence. It's all with us. And at last, governments and treasuries have woken up. If you've got those people believing it, then we really are home and dry. And look at what's happening in Australia. You're now spending more and more... by the way, not to prick the bubble or rain on the parade. It's great what's happening? It's brilliant. But you're still behind the line as a nation on this. So if I tell you in England, for example, 98% of four-year-olds get free education every day of every week. 97% of three-year-olds get free education and care every day, every week. 60% of two-year-olds get free education and care every day of every week.
So, yes, it's great we're moving in the direction we're moving in, but we have to keep celebrating that, being grateful for that and then saying, what about three-year-olds? What about two-year-olds? Keep the argument up because the evidence is telling us if we invest early, we'll get the return, some of the fundamental issues. And there are lots of this. This is from the OECD. But you don't, you know, have this list already when someone challenges you. But we don't need to go through it because it's this one is pretty much home and dry, in my view. Now this building, anyone likes to have a go? City. Exactly, where? Barcelona. It's not a cathedral. It's a church. The guy there Gaudi, architect of the said church never saw it finished. Of course, because a tram killed him just outside the front door. When you go into the familiar, you'll see an engraving from Gaudi, To do things right, we first need... we need first of all, to love what we do. But then we need technique. So I'm going to say. The love for what we do, I feel very strongly in early learning. What I'm going to urge now is that we build the technique of leadership. I'm not talking about the technique of practice now, I'm talking about the technique of leading.
There is a kind of... the evidence tells us there are features, behaviours, knowledge about leadership that will make you more effective than somebody else. And I want to kind of take you through some of that evidence from that work. So I'm taking it that we love. Now we're going to go into technique. And by the way, the reason I like this is because. This is one of the weirdest, most creative, fantastic structures you'll ever go to. And he still believed in technique. You know, there's nothing wrong with practice. If we just have a moment on instruction on what children are doing. Picasso's father was an artist that people might know that he was a professor of art. He forced Picasso every day. I don't know if he forced him, but whatever he did, but every day to draw pigeons, draw 100 pigeons a day. Beautiful, beautiful pictures. And yet did that make him a kind of narrow, uncreative person? No. So, technique, control of certain core knowledge is fundamental to creativity. But what are the things you need to have really good control over? And that's one of the general questions. Just quickly, I don't think there's much debate anymore about what it is that's important you want to see happening in your centre or in your work.
Again, we've heard Aaron has talked a lot about. This is from some work that Aaron was doing and obviously, they were doing with some studies on Estonia, US and UK. Emergent literacy, the best proxy indicator actually to wealth well-being that we know when a child is seven is their literacy level. Best proxy indicator. It matters. Self regulation. Increasingly, we know this is central to and the evidence has changed here. We've really, really I think, increasingly confident that self-regulation matters in all sorts of issues around relationships. Learning your capacity to not get caught up in addiction. There's a whole set of things that we see fall out of people who can regulate and have met a executive functioning. A meta, if you like cognition. Numeracy and social-emotional skills can actually get on with others.
There's a nice line at the moment that if you look at the World Bank, we're doing a piece of work looking at some of the most highly paid effective people in world kind of industry. It turns out that it's a people-loving mathematician. Mathematics, as you know, has a higher and higher value in the marketplace. And in England, for example, the most popular subject taught at A-level which is 16 to 18, is maths. Well over half the kids choose to do maths at A-level. And they understand where the value is in the economy. And but you need to be a people-loving mathematician if you're going to be successful. On that, the other bit of that study was they looked at people who had great qualifications and got great jobs around the world in leading industries, and then they followed them later, ten years later, to see who had really thrived at work in the workplace. And these people were in commercial, public or whatever sectors. And it turned out that people who really thrived weren't the people who had great qualifications. They got them the job. They were the people who had great social skills. They went on and really thrived in the work.
So qualifications get you so far, but you need these social-emotional skills if you're really going to thrive in life. And I'm all about... you know, by the way, should have said I'm all about early learning for its own sake, but I'm really about how learning and education breaks poverty cycles. The thing that keeps me up all night, most nights, well, actually, it doesn't keep me up anymore. But the thing that... well, it does when I've got jetlag, but the thing that I'm obsessed with is why is our education systems around the world so poor at delivering better outcomes for our most disadvantaged communities. It is the great scar of the system. If you're in the top 25% of earners in Australia, your children actually have a trajectory into education which rivals anyone in the world. That is not the problem. If you're in the bottom 20%, there is a real issue. And in fact, you're one of the nations in the world where the gaps widening. And that's a way another talk. I'm so talking of the craft. Now we're getting into the technique bit. Three quick questions for you as the person who's leading the work. Who tells you what to do? On what basis do they tell you? And is it serving all children well? I believe that we have much more freedom than we tend to think.
If you look at any research of outcomes in learning, you will see that there is a variation in outcome depending on which school or setting you go to or which adult teaches you. They're in the same building. They've got the same curriculum, got same resources. But the variation is because the person with you has made a different decision when they talk to you, when they encounter you. And at the... and this is John Hattie's work, the EEF's work, the work I'm doing in AERO, here in Australia, it turns out that the really big things that matter aren't what hot dogs in offices say, they're what people on the ground say in a room with a child tomorrow. We heard about it today. The formative assessment on the run, the things you're saying to give child feedback by far and away the most effective teaching strategy we know. And that's a decision you make on the run. And yet they're the hardest things to change, by the way.
So what matters most is the hardest thing to change. Pedagogical leaders, you need, you know, you can change how people plan. That's not hard, actually. You can change paperwork. That's not that hard. You try changing how people talk to children on the run. That's the really hard thing to change. And yet that is the gold dust of changing outcomes. The second one is you heard 3 or 4 presentations from academics today. Who do you trust? Are they all... are they... is it all right? Are they all telling you the truth? Is it all really correct? Who do you trust and how do you trust people? It's really hard, isn't it, to know you've got to be sceptical, not cynical. Cynical is awful. But sceptical. Show me the evidence. Prove the point. Let me see the data. Early years is becoming, fantastic this news, we're becoming increasingly an evidence-informed profession, not evidence-led, evidence-informed. We'll use evidence. But as Jane rightly said, we'll put the evidence alongside our professional personal judgement and will come to a view about what's the best thing to do for our children. But who do you trust and how do you trust them?
So organisations like AERO or the EEF in England are trying to say, we're going to give you a trusted source of evidence. You might be say... you could well be there sitting, oh, I don't trust him. But that's you know, this trust question is critical. And then finally, I still think the challenge of our generation is this narrowing of gaps. Children with special educational needs. Vulnerable children. This is our challenge that we've got to face down all altogether across education, not just in... across all of us. And that's our great challenge. Are we meeting all children's needs? What we know about leadership so far and this is drawn from the leadership research, which actually isn't as strong as it needs to be. So take this with a pinch. We haven't got really great what you call causal evidence on leadership. We've got what's called correlational evidence. So in effect, Aaron was taking us through some of this... in effective settings, we saw this behaviour and therefore, we're going to say it's effective because it was seen in that setting. That's not the same as causal evidence.
That's a correlation that might be true. It might have been something else. But so you've got to just be careful with correlations. But the correlations are that we definitely see leadership where you focus on improving outcomes for children. You're unapologetic about the fact that we're trying to improve the outcomes. We are fostering effective relationships. These are all kind of uncommon common sense, really. Establishing reliable processes and routines, investing in professional development. We heard a lot about that from the study Aaron did. Ironically, in education, we don't know that much about how adults learn. It's a bit of irony for our profession. And we don't invest much in it either. In the UK you might have the same company Otis lifts. They spend on average three times a year on an engineer's training that we spend on a teacher's professional development. And all they do is go up and down. And so and there is a phrase about education. It's not like rocket science. It's actually much more complicated than that. And yet we invest in our people at quite a low level. So we will look to Aaron's charts this morning. Four Days of PD. My god, that's amazing. Is it really? Should we be expecting? Should that be seen as outrageous that we would expect to invest in somebody at that level when what they're doing is educating different children with complex needs and trying to get the best out of them?
At the moment, our investment levels in PD are too low and we don't do it in a way that's significantly informed by the evidence. And then it shouldn't be the last one because it's critical. Building our partnerships with families. One of the best returns we can ever get is by fostering better relationships with families. We don't need evidence. Again, this is one of the areas we've got 25 years of research that says parental involvement matters. The research we really need now is how do I improve better parental involvement. I've had the buffets, I've had the dancing girls with petals to the pathway to the parent class. I've tried everything and still they won't come. How do I get parents involved? How do I foster that? That's what we really, really need to know. We even tried to study with the EEF where we just paid them cash. We got twice as many coming, but still only half the ones we wanted. You can imagine how it went down with the newspapers, by the way.
Now, this business of your own theory then as leaders, I'm trying to say that I'm not talking about the what you want to change. You've heard today something, you think I'm going to take that back. So my challenge now would be, what is your theory of change that you're going to put that into when you go back? We know full well that if you go back to and then on Wednesday you do a presentation next week and say, I went to this conference and here's what I learned and want you all to do it. It's not going to work. We know that there's a lot of ancient research, even from people like Joyce and Showers. When someone's been on a one-off training course, it lasts about 14 days before they revert back to previous practice or before they get better and recover from what we've been through. Yeah, how many times you've been in a room when someone she's been on a course, just leave her alone for a minute. She'll be fine later. She'll get over it. How do you get sustained change? And I'm going to suggest that you need to take a kind of higher road. And this is a model I use. You'll have your own, but I do think... my challenge is that we do need a personal theory of how we bring change about. I actually don't care if it's changing how we're going to organise lunch, how we're going to organise, the way that we gather the children in or how we're going to set. I think all these things need to be put into some sort of framework of change that makes them sustainable. And the reason that I like things like this is because I would have a conversation with the people I'm working with together and say, do we agree that this is a good approach. Without content? Because when we get into it with content, we've got a framework to go back to. We're at stage two. Do you remember?
So you've got this language and framework for change to happen rather than what's going on? What's going on? We're not doing it well enough. Well, actually, we're at the stage where we're now going to do this for a reason. So what's your theory of changing? And from the 200 or so studies we've done at the EEF, we've been gleaning out of them where people have implemented change well, and some really difficult things like dialogic talking with kids. And what we've learned is they go through a sort of model that looks a bit like this, and we're testing this model now back in the UK a lot. The first stage is that... this sounds obvious, this one, doesn't it? What do you want to do? What do you want to achieve? How clear is that? And usually, that has to, in Jane's language, be described as an outcomes for children language. You know, it's not I want to achieve excellent on that rating. That's not good enough. It's got to be much more detail about what is it I want our children to be able to do next.
What is it we want to achieve? What's the thing? Identifying your priorities. School their read earlier setting. Sorry. And use data and professional judgement to get to that point. The second one is identify possible solutions. Now, sometimes at this point, what people do is get around the table with 3 or 4 of you, and that is a very powerful group of knowledge. But I have to say there are other bits of knowledge as well, and you can cast your net a long way now across the research, across the evidence. And that's what people like the EEF, I keep going on about it because it's my baby or AERO in Australia. We've tried to bring the evidence together. If you want to know more about the effective ways of supporting intentional play, there's quite a lot of research you can read and here it all is summarised. Now which one speaks to you and you pull from that, the one that you want to kind of explore and look at in detail. And there's a thing called a toolkit. It's all freely available. I'm not going to go into that today.
Then the third one is the really heavy lifting. It's not very sexy this heavy lifting. You know, you can do it glamorously, but it's not that sexy. This is where you say, what do we need to do to give this the best chance of success? People have said to me, look, I heard about that practice. I tried. It didn't work. Didn't work in our setting. I say, what did you actually... well, I know it says you have to do this every day, but we decided just to do it three days a week. I know it says you need to go on training, but we couldn't do that. We, we just, we just use this manual. You've got to give you've got to be fair. You've got to give things the best chance of success. What preparation do you need? What resources do you need? What materials do you need? What kind of professional development do you need? That's all got to be prepared to give things the chance of success. Well, because, by the way, every intervention people bring you there are no silver bullets.
The implementation always trumps the intervention. I'll just say that again. The implementation of the change always trumps the intervention. I've never seen an intervention that you can bring into early learning. That doesn't need really good implementation to work. I hope this isn't out of school. I'm looking at Junam. I'm out of school, all the good start folk here. I'm on the board and good starts had a good reading today, so why don't I say something that's a bit more challenging? We were introducing... we are introducing, we're working with, here in Victoria, particularly the use of toolbox, which is an early years assessment instrument. What we've learnt is brilliant work. Wollongong, Oxford, Ted, Steven, wonderful people on its own without the professional support behind it, it's not going to work. So implementation matters actually more than the intervention. So if you're going to bring something new in, if you're going to lead something new you have to do the heavy lifting of preparing its implementation properly. And that's just a given, I think.
The four steps really interesting because what we do is a social act. It's not medicine. There isn't a tablet I can give you for that condition. It's a bit more like public health or diabetes. It's a combination when you're facing these things of, yes, there might be a bit of given, but there's also history, there's heritage, there's legacy, there's habits and behaviours. What we do is all social, so everything works somewhere, nothing works everywhere. So when you make a change and you bring it into your setting, you need to evaluate it. Because it might not work. And then you need to go back and try again. Just might not fit your context, your culture, your, the nature of the people you are and who you serve. But you only do that evaluation if you've definitely done number three properly. And then you'd be ready to say, we tried it. We gave it every chance success. It didn't work. We're going to stop. We're really, really bad at stopping things. That person's now retired. Thank god we can stop doing that. Because it's their thing.
We've got to find space to do new things. And one of the ways we find space is stop doing the things that aren't very effective. I, you know, you might want to take away today, one of the things you might want to do is stop doing one thing. One of the practices in your setting is probably not going to be as effective as you think it is, and it takes a lot more time and effort than it deserves, and you should stop doing it. And that might be another challenge. We always talk about what you should people want to add to the list. I've got the great new idea. Actually, you might want to go back and say, Do we need to do all the stuff we're doing? Anyway, I've gone about that much more. But you do need to evaluate in situ. You need to ask yourself the question, is it making the difference we want it to make? If not, let's stop or change. And then finally, because it's working, I think it gives you and you've gone on this journey together. This is not you in your room. This is with, with the team.
What is the issue? What we, you know, and I've seen people what's the priority we should work on. People have less than votes and all the rest of it involving families and children, all sorts of people. This is the one thing we want to change. We're going to find a good thing to do. We're going to give it the best chance. Do you know what, the evidence is telling us? It's working. You then have a platform of real authority to say to each other, that's why every day we do it like that here. And I'm sorry I looked you in the eye, but I want to give the notion at that point you go quite tough because the first bit feels a bit. This is nice and woolly. This is not compliance leadership. But once you've got something, you know works and you've been on this professional journey, I think you have the professional authority then to say, that's why every day, we do it here. Because what we've learned about serving, particularly the most disadvantaged and vulnerable children, is routine and clarity and consistency really, really matters. But you get to that point on the basis of something having real authority through these sort of processes proved itself. I don't know why I did that. It's fancy. Underpinning that kind of circle. And the reason I follow those sort of circles in my work is because I think they're part of me building trust. And that's what I'm always, you know, people have heard me say before, I guess that after love in education, trust is the most important word. And trust, by the way, is a thread that works from me with a child to me leading the centre. If you believe in education, there are loads of theories, aren't there?
I mean, one that always struck me was someone like Vygotsky. And this is the notion that when a child is learning anything, they face a gap. The zone of proximal development, they call it. I know this. I don't know that I've got to cross this zone of proximal development. And I now know new. My world has changed. When you're facing the gap, the distance you're willing to travel will be dependent on the level of trust you have of the person who is going to guide you across. Is that person going to support me as I fall? Is that person going to belittle me if I fail? Is that... does that person know what they're doing to give me the confidence that they know how to get me across this gap? Trust is so fundamental. And the interesting when I said trust there he knows what he's talking about. He'll be with me in a street fight. He won't let me down, if it gets bad. He won't blame me if it goes wrong. So what are the features of professional trust and assured trust? Are really interesting in the end in that relationship. And no blame. We're in this together. Things that we can celebrate, stuff that works. But together we take responsibility for things that are failing. I'm not pointing at anybody. This is our collective responsibility.
Evidence and reason. I think evidence and reason gives you this assurance. The person knows that they're not just making it up. They know what they're talking about. Shared buy into what really matters. And I really believe in that person's values. Deep down, their values are with me, so I sometimes will go with them on quite interesting journeys. I know in the end we're going. To the same place. I trust their values. That's why I've talked about it from the very beginning. And we're really honest and open about our weaknesses. There is a tendency to fall into... and I think it's part of the accountability regimes we now live in, we talk up, and it's right to talk up, but somewhere we need to be in a room and just say, let's. Be honest with each other about what isn't going on right here. Where do we have those open conversations about weaknesses as well as successes?
Final, I want to show you this picture, a bit egotistical. I know. What happened to him anyway. I wanted to show you this picture because I've talked about leadership and you've got the opportunity to be leaders and you are leaders. We really need to remember humility in leadership. Because the most... in the end, what really, really matters... and in the end, what really mattered for me and I still think was probably the most important thing I ever did, was teach these children. So what really matters, in the end, is not the leadership, is not the fancy titles, it's the authentic, really core work of being the person supporting the children. Here we are in 1982, parents were on our... this is in East London. Now this boy here Trevor with the rather attractive brown two-piece, he haunts me because I didn't teach Trevor well enough to read. I know I didn't. I failed Trevor. Drove me on, did a PhD, went to New Zealand with Murray Clay. The... my ultimate responsibility, of course, is, was and is to these children. And the fact that I failed with Trevor is something which I never... stop thinking about. Thank you very much, everybody.
SPEAKER:
Thank you very much. With just the two minutes remaining perhaps, I can hurl a question or two at you and remind everyone who's in the room with us that after we have our tea and coffee. Sorry, Kevan. Afterwards, we will be asking our keynote speakers for their reflections on the day. You talked about the theory of change. It reminded me both of dieting and of an older nurse that I met once who stood up in the middle of a big reform conference in New South Wales and she'd been the chief nurse years before. And she said the simple thing that you people need to understand is if you're going to start doing something new, what is it that you're going to stop doing? And the room stopped and went. She's right. She's right. So my only question in the minute and a half remaining is what is the degree of urgency that should attend leaders going back into their environment to get this change done?
SIR KEVAN COLLINS:
Yeah.
SPEAKER:
Sand in the oyster, a sense of awkwardness. Christie was talking about where you sort of living in the midst of neither in the past nor in the future.
SIR KEVAN COLLINS:
I think I get the, I mean, I think I get the question. You know, I think it's urgent. I think when you look at any of the data we see on children's outcomes around the world, actually, not just in Australia, we know that childhood isn't thriving and flourishing in the way that it should for too many children. Not for all of them, but for too many. So it's urgent that we get this right, and I think it's particularly urgent that we prove the point in Early Learning.
SPEAKER:
And if you were a leader in a setting which you have been you showed us the photograph, what sort of pace would you be bringing to this change?
SIR KEVAN COLLINS:
So I'm really annoying about that because I'm pretty... you might get this. I'm a bit impatient about this and I believe improvement is a habit, not an event. It just becomes a culture. You know, the people will know the lines I use. You don't have to be sick to get better. It's a constant. And being the best at getting better is the kind of ambition and I'm pretty... when it comes to children, I'm a bit relentless and annoying about it. I want to keep the pressure on.
SPEAKER:
Keep at it.
SIR KEVAN COLLINS:
Yeah.
SPEAKER:
Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, Sir Kevan, please thank him very much for his time.
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