Innovation and Tradition

I am sorry to report that I did not make a good impression on arriving at Brisbane Grammar. A twenty-minute walk at 8.00 a.m., albeit uphill, seemed a perfect way to start the day. I had reckoned without the wet heat of Queensland; it may have been 10 degrees cooler than Melbourne, it was a mere 30 degrees, but Queensland stretches well into the tropics and I was drenched on arrival. ‘You can always tell someone who’s not from Queensland as they’ll be walking around in a jacket,’ said my host, Chris, who has taught here for more than thirty years but still has a youthful enthusiasm for the School. He himself was wearing shirt and tie and informed me that the day before (the start of term) the whole school had roasted in the Hall together with all staff members wearing gowns. The quirky uniform of shorts and wide brimmed hats certainly made sense now and, several paper towels later, I was able to discard my own jacket in Chris’s office and spend the rest of the morning learning more about this Queensland School founded over fifty years before Ryde. It has just celebrated 150 years in fact, founded in 1868 not long after the city of Brisbane itself.

Brisbane Grammar is probably the best example of all six Australian schools I have now visited in its dramatic blend of modernity and tradition. In just the same way as the Bembridge Building looks across at Westmont, so their Lilley building, an ultra-modern learning hub with ‘innovation rooms’, open plan library and glass fronted classrooms, sits alongside a collection of C19th brick buildings including the chapel, original boarding house and memorial hall. Without the heat and ibis you could easily think you were in England, and the England of Malory Towers and Greyfriars at that. If Las Vegas were to open a hotel called the English Public School it would look like this, and with the heat too. Australian private schools really do seem to be managing to embrace innovation and change without turning their back on tradition and values. They have held onto many things that British schools carelessly threw away in the name of progress in the 60s and 70s. There’s a significant emphasis on character education, a recognition of the value of outdoor learning, strong discipline and moral codes, vibrant uniforms and clear statements of values that run through the schools and their communities. These are all things we are talking about again in the UK, but to some extent we are rebuilding them. And there is also, in rather a humbling way, a reminder of the debt Britain owes to the lost children of Gallipoli and Burma. All around the walls of Brisbane Grammar were the names of former pupils who perished far from home fighting for King and the Old Country, volunteers all as conscription was not introduced here.

For Chris, it’s a mixed blessing. The extraordinary stability of middle class Australian life over the last century is evident in this continuity and certainty but it has made for complacency, some lack of confidence in self and also difficult questions for Australian history. The stained glass in the Memorial Hall records the great writers, scientists and explorers of British history, with Queen Victoria in the centre; the influence of the Aborigines, here for centuries before any European, are few and far between. Their oral and visual traditions make for scant historical record and so a more complex historical understanding. It’s a relationship Australia has not yet resolved as the mixed responses to Australia Day showed. 

The continued links to the UK are evident everywhere. Anyone who has taught in British public schools knows the extraordinary way in which everyone knows everyone else but it extends out here too. I found myself swapping stories of shared colleagues from my Leys and Sherborne days and whilst I was in Melbourne I found the recently retired heads of both Frensham Heights and Bedales were staying with Australian educators I was visiting. It is also interesting to share experiences and warn of potential hazards borne of experience. There was a growing concern about the decline of amateurism in school sport, especially rugby, where something of an arms race in using scholarships to secure players is slowly pushing out the schoolboy player and making the game increasingly dangerous. Queensland schools are about to get their first external examinations – incredibly up to this point teachers have marked, assessed and graded all their own students work with no equivalent of GCSE, A level or IB to give external validation. Sadly Australia, like the UK, is also having to confront historic cases of abuse. This, alongside the work Australian schools are clearly doing regarding learning spaces and building learning communities, made for lots of shared ideas and conversation.

For me, as I prepare to move on to New Zealand, the overwhelming take away from Australia is this confident blend of innovation and tradition. The classrooms are more exciting than the UK, there is a greater sense that schools and teachers are engaged in and motivated by what they term ‘pedagogy’, there is a stronger sense of team here too – what one Head called the ‘de-privatisation of the classroom’ yet all this exists alongside a respect for the past and the timeless values of a liberal education. Australian schools should be more confident than I sense they are, and we have plenty to learn from them.