For the teacher documenting at 9:40pm. The leader who can’t remember their last real conversation about learning. The parent deciphering the portal, and the kid quietly playing the game of school. If something about it all feels wrong and you can’t quite say why — this is a guide to the why. Written with affection for everyone in the ecosystem: no villains here, only good ideas a long way from home.
NeoliberalismNew Public ManagementReductionismActually reasonable
Stage one — Feel it
Something isn't right
Before any theory, there's a feeling. It shows up differently depending on where you stand — see if one of these is yours.
Field observation · the teacher
It's 9:40 on a Tuesday night and you're uploading evidence of learning that happened nine hours ago, for an audience that will never watch it, while the marking sits untouched. You became a teacher to teach. Lately that feels like the part that gets the leftovers.
You're walking the corridor with a checklist you didn't write, checking walls for displays you privately doubt, on your way to a conversation with a brilliant colleague you'd rather not have. “Caught in the middle” isn't a feeling anymore. It's the job description.
Another week gone: compliance, facilities, a complaint, the marketing meeting. You can't remember the last conversation about learning that ran longer than ten minutes. You wanted to lead a school. Most days, you appear to be running a firm.
The portal says your child has tasks. Your child says school makes them feel sick. The report is full of numbers and tells you nothing. You're starting to wonder if you're the only one who can see it — and whether wondering that makes you the difficult one.
You worked it out ages ago: there's learning, and there's the game, and they're not the same sport. You're good at the game. You're just not sure anyone noticed that somewhere around Year 7, you stopped being curious — and the school gave you full marks anyway.
If one of those tightened your chest — good. Not good that it's happening; good that you felt it, because the feeling is accurate. It is not nostalgia, not weakness, and not resistance to change. It's your professional (or parental, or personal) judgment detecting something real that you haven't yet been given words for.
Fair warning before we find the words: three pulls will offer themselves along the way. Nostalgia whispers that it was all better before (it wasn't, not for everyone). Cynicism whispers that nothing can change (it can — just not by revolution). And anger whispers that someone must be to blame (read on: there are no villains here). Each pull is understandable. None of them is the path. The path has four stages, and you've just finished the first.
In the 1950s, the World Health Organization set out to end malaria in the villages of Borneo. They sprayed DDT, and it worked — the mosquitoes died. So did the wasps that ate the thatch-eating caterpillars, and so, eventually, did the village cats, poisoned up the food chain. The rats arrived in their absence, carrying worse than malaria. The response has become legend: the RAF parachuting crates of live cats into the jungle. Operation Cat Drop. (The cats and the airdrop are documented; the neat causal chain has grown in seventy years of retelling — parables migrate outside their native range too. The point survives.) Nobody in that story is a villain. Every single actor was trying to help.
That's the honest history of the ideas in this guide. Market thinking was introduced by people who wanted to free ordinary families from remote bureaucracies. Audit culture was introduced by people who remembered public institutions that answered to nobody. Measurement was introduced by people who refused to let children fail invisibly. Good intentions, every one — and good ideas, in their native range. Market logic is genuinely brilliant at allocating shoes. Audits genuinely catch fraud. Reductionism split the atom. The trouble was never their nature; it's their range. Released into an ecosystem nobody fully understood, they've naturalised far from home — self-sustaining, thriving, and long past the point of being recalled by their architects.
A naturalist doesn't blame a species for thriving outside its native range. They study how it behaves, why it flourishes here, and what the ecosystem needs in order to live well alongside it.
Something happens in a meeting. A new platform, a new framework, a new set of targets — presented as obvious, and everyone nods, and something in you doesn't. That discomfort is usually not resistance to change. It's an accurate detection of an imported logic answering questions schools never asked it. This guide exists to give the discomfort a vocabulary — so the conversation can shift from "I'm against this" to "I can see the good intention this proposal carries, and the logic it's running on, and I want us to check whether that logic fits the problem." One caution before you begin: you will find your own voice in these pages. Everyone runs these logics sometimes. The right response is a laugh of recognition, not a wince — and the same courtesy extended to colleagues.
Plate II — Identification key
Start with what you feel
Nobody arrives troubled by “New Public Management.” They arrive with a Tuesday feeling. Find yours below and follow it to the species — the proper name comes second, and that's the right order.
Most of what unsettles educators traces back to one of three lineages — all introduced species, all released with the best of intentions. They interbreed constantly, but each has a distinct origin, a distinct good intention at its heart, and a distinct tell.
Neoliberalism
Logica mercatus
Origin
Political economy, 1970s–80s. The conviction that markets allocate everything better than institutions or professions can — so extend market logic to everything, including people.
The good intention
Freeing ordinary people from remote bureaucracies that decided things over their heads; faith that a family's own choices carry knowledge no planner can hold.
In schools
My School comparisons and enrolment competition. Marketing budgets. Families recast as customers, education as a private investment, the student as an entrepreneur of their own future.
The tellSentences in which a child's education makes sense as a purchase.
New Public Management
Administratio corporata
Origin
Public administration reform, 1980s–90s (named by Christopher Hood, 1991). The idea that public services should be run like corporations: targets, audits, KPIs, performance pay, compliance trails.
The good intention
Public money and children's futures held in trust deserve an account; the memory of institutions that answered to nobody, and the people they quietly failed.
In schools
NAPLAN season and My School comparisons. Portfolio-certified pay tiers. Dashboards for leadership. The documentation load that eats Sunday afternoon.
The tellAccountability that flows upward to the system, and rarely downward to children.
Reductionism
Totum in partes
Origin
Borrowed from science, where it works brilliantly on simple systems. The move: treat a complex whole as the sum of measurable parts. If you can't count it, it isn't really there.
The good intention
The honest scientific instinct: break the problem down, test, and know rather than assume — a refusal to let children fail invisibly behind comfortable impressions.
In schools
Learning as a test score. Teaching as a checklist of techniques. Reading as a pipeline of inputs. A child as a data point. Wellbeing as a weekly number.
The tellThe word just. ("Learning is just…") Complexity science's reply: learning is emergent — the whole misbehaves.
Plate IV — Common specimens
Specimen index
Sixteen species frequently observed in Australian schools. Each entry records the call (what it sounds like in the wild), the good intention inside — because every one of these began as an act of care — field notes on what the frame then does to that care, and what the term should not be confused with. Most of these words have honest uses. The problem is the frame, not the vocabulary, and never the person. Watch for the guide’s one documented hybrid — and for the responsibilised forms of neoliberalism, which relocate structural problems into individual people and may be the most commonly sighted species of all.
Neoliberalism
Stakeholder
Particeps mercatus
We'll consult all stakeholders before finalising the uniform policy.
The good intention insideThe wish to listen widely — to make sure no one affected by a decision is left out of it.
Recasts children, families and communities as parties holding a stake in an enterprise. A moral relationship — what a school owes a child — flattens into a commercial one: what an organisation negotiates with interested parties.
Not to be confused withGenuine consultation, which is excellent practice. It's the frame that imports the market, not the listening.
New Public Management
Data-driven
Datum dominans
Every decision in this school is data-driven.
The good intention insideThe refusal to let any child slip by unnoticed; the memory of schools where decisions ran on vibes, favourites and the loudest voice in the room.
Promotes numbers from servant to master. Professional judgment gets quietly reframed as bias — something data exists to eliminate rather than inform. What can't be captured in the system stops counting as knowledge.
Not to be confused withData-informed practice, where evidence feeds teacher judgment instead of replacing it. One word, entirely different politics.
Reductionism
Delivery
Curriculum consignatum
Staff will deliver the new literacy block with fidelity.
The good intention insideConsistency as fairness — the wish that every child gets the good stuff, regardless of which classroom door they happened to walk through.
Teaching becomes freight. The teacher is a courier, the learner a recipient address, and the curriculum a parcel that arrives intact or doesn't. Notice the implication: if learning can be delivered, then anyone — or anything — can deliver it.
Not to be confused withHonest talk about implementation, which still leaves room for professional adaptation to the actual children in the room.
New Public Management
Value-add
Additamentum mensurabile
We can demonstrate significant value-add from Year 3 to Year 5.
The good intention insideFairness to schools serving struggling communities: judge us on the growth we make with these children, not on the postcode they arrived from.
Borrowed from production economics. The child is raw material, the school a factory, growth scores the margin. Whatever growth the instrument can't see — confidence, friendship, a reading life — contributes no "value."
Not to be confused withCaring whether children make progress. Teachers did that long before the spreadsheet, and will after it.
Neoliberalism
Human capital
Homo capitalis
Education is the best investment in our nation's human capital.
The good intention insideWanting education taken seriously by treasuries — a seat at the funding table, argued in the only language the table speaks.
The purpose of schooling collapses into future economic output. Art, play, citizenship, care — anything without a wage return — becomes an inefficiency to be tolerated or trimmed. The child is an asset under development.
Not to be confused withAcknowledging that education has economic benefits. It does. It also has other purposes, and they don't survive this frame.
Reductionism
Best practice
Praxis una vera
This is simply best practice — the research is settled.
The good intention insideHumility, oddly enough: the wish to learn from what has worked elsewhere rather than make every child a fresh experiment.
Assumes what worked somewhere works everywhere, for everyone, at any scale. Strips away context — the very thing complexity science says determines whether a practice transfers — and closes the conversation with the word best.
Not to be confused withGood practice, promising practice, well-evidenced practice — phrasings that stay plural, contestable and open to local judgment.
New Public Management
Performance management
Magister auditandus
Any concerns will be addressed through our performance management framework.
The good intention insideProtecting children from the rare colleague who genuinely harms, and fairness to staff — concerns handled through open process, not corridor whispers.
Imported directly from corporate HR. Trust is replaced by surveillance and documentation, and it breeds what Stephen Ball called performativity — teaching aimed at the audit rather than the child, and the slow corrosion of why people entered the profession.
Not to be confused withProfessional growth and honest feedback, which require trust and relationship — precisely what audit templates struggle to hold.
Neoliberalism
School choice
Electio mercati
Competition between schools lifts quality for everyone.
The good intention insideRespect for what families know about their own child, and an escape route from schools that were failing them with no consequence.
The founding claim of the education market. The international evidence suggests competition mostly lifts sorting — by class, faith and capacity to travel — while the promised quality tide is hard to find. A policy position wearing the costume of a natural law.
Not to be confused withRespecting family preference, which matters — and doesn't require league tables or marketing arms races to matter.
Reductionism
Learning outcome, as target
Effectus praestitutus
Every lesson must display its measurable learning outcome.
The good intention insideClarity of purpose — teaching that knows what it’s for, and a promise never to waste children’s time.
Whatever can't be pre-specified quietly falls off the plan: curiosity, productive confusion, the tangent that changes a life. And Goodhart's law waits at the end — when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Not to be confused withIntentional planning, which sets a direction without pretending learning is fully predictable in advance.
Neoliberalism
Customer service
Servitium clientis
The successful applicant will demonstrate outstanding customer service and stakeholder engagement.
The good intention insideWanting staff who treat families with warmth, respect and responsiveness — which every good teacher already believes in without being told.
Now appearing in actual teacher job advertisements. When the ad says customer service, the relationship has been quietly re-typed: the parent becomes a client to be satisfied, and the professional judgment that sometimes disappoints a customer for the sake of a child gets harder to defend. Complaint-handling logic follows close behind.
Not to be confused withWarm, responsive communication with families — a genuine professional skill that needs no retail metaphor to describe it.
Reductionism
Every brain learns the same way
Cerebrum uniforme
The science is settled — all brains learn the same way, so every classroom should run the same way.
The good intention insideA fair fight against genuine myths (learning styles chief among them), and the wish that effective teaching reaches every child rather than depending on the postcode.
Cognitive science has real universals — working memory is limited, retrieval practice works. The overreach is the leap from shared architecture to identical experience: same lesson, same pace, same script, with culture, context, neurodivergence and motivation waved away as noise. A finding about brains becomes a mandate about classrooms, and the learners who don’t fit the mandate become the problem.
Not to be confused withThe learning sciences themselves, which are far more humble about context and transfer than the slogan version doing the rounds.
New Public Management
Professional learning, mandated
Doctrina obligata
A reminder to complete the six compliance modules before week 3 — on top of the PL calendar.
The good intention insideWanting staff genuinely equipped and children genuinely safe — some of this training protects kids, and everyone knows it.
Audit logic converts learning into evidence of learning: modules, certificates, sign-off registers. Volume becomes the metric, the calendar fills, and the slow collaborative learning that actually changes practice is crowded out by the tick-box kind that merely proves it occurred. Staff leave PL days more compliant and less curious — the exact inversion of the words on the calendar invite.
Not to be confused withThe compliance training that truly matters, or professional learning teachers chose because it solves a problem they actually have.
Documented hybrid — all three families
Technosolutionism
Solutio venditur
This AI platform will halve your workload, personalise every child’s learning — and leadership gets a live dashboard.
The good intention insideTeachers drowning in genuine complexity, and the honest hope that a well-built tool could hand some of it back — plus a vendor who often truly believes it can.
The jungle’s great crossbreed: sold like a market good (neoliberalism), promising dashboards and accountability (NPM), and assuming learning is a delivery problem that scales (reductionism). The current apex form is AI: pitched to teachers as workload relief, to students as personalised learning, and to leadership as analytics — three promises, one product, zero questions about what teaching is for. Spotting all three bloodlines in a single vendor demo is the best taxonomy training available.
Not to be confused withGood tools, which exist. The test is whether the tool serves a problem teachers actually named — or whether the problem was reshaped to fit the product.
Neoliberalism · responsibilised form
Resilience, as program
Onus translatum
We’re rolling out a whole-school resilience program to address the wellbeing data.
The good intention insideWanting children equipped for a hard world — nobody who loves kids wants them fragile in the face of what’s coming.
Responsibilisation’s signature move: a structural problem is relocated into the individual child. The overloaded timetable, the testing pressure, the underfunded support — all reframed as a deficit of grit in the person experiencing them. The conditions stay; the responsibility moves.
Not to be confused withTeaching children genuine coping skills, which is a gift — provided the adults are also working on the things being coped with.
Neoliberalism · responsibilised form
School can’t
Absentia culpanda
We need to hold families accountable for attendance — the data has to improve.
The good intention insideAttendance genuinely matters; every educator has watched disconnection compound, and nobody wants a child to drift away.
When a child’s nervous system refuses the building, the refusal is data about the habitat — sensory load, unmet needs, learning that’s stopped making sense. The responsibilised frame reads it instead as defiance in the child or failure in the parenting, and answers with letters, conciliation meetings and fines, delivered to families already at breaking point. The community’s own renaming — school can’t, not school refusal — is itself a masterclass in the reframing this guide is about: not won’t. Can’t.
Not to be confused withTaking attendance seriously, which begins with a different question: what is this absence telling us about us?
Neoliberalism · responsibilised form
Self-care
Cura sui delegata
Term four is always big — please remember to prioritise your self-care.
The good intention insideReal concern from real colleagues — the sender of that email almost certainly means it, and is probably exhausted too.
Burnout reframed as a personal maintenance failure. The workload that caused the exhaustion remains untouched, while responsibility for surviving it transfers to the individual — ideally via a mindfulness app (see Solutio venditur, with which this species is frequently found nesting).
Not to be confused withActually caring for staff, which looks like subtraction: fewer meetings, less documentation, protected time — changes to the habitat, not homework for the inhabitants.
Plate V — Field identification test
Spot it in the wild
Ten statements overheard in Australian schools, every one of them said by someone who cares. Your task isn't to catch anyone out — it's to identify the logic a good intention is travelling on. Careful: some of these are perfectly reasonable, and a good naturalist knows when there's nothing to report.
SPECIMEN 1 OF 8SCORE 0
Field certification
Stage three — Understand each other
Same jungle, five vantage points
What you see depends on where you're standing — and from every position, the trouble looks like it's coming from one of the others. It isn't. Find your vantage point, then read one more: the fastest route to the middle path is discovering the person you thought was the problem is standing downstream of the same logics you are.
The classroom teacher
Observed: at a laptop, 9:40pm, evidencingWhat you're seeing
Learning intentions and success criteria on the board for every lesson, whether or not the lesson is improved by them. NCCD evidence folders. Adjustment registers. Reports drafted, moderated and data-walled. A strange arithmetic has taken hold: every hour of teaching now generates another of proving the teaching happened — until teaching children starts to feel like the thing you fit in between documentation. You didn't imagine this, and it isn't a time-management problem.
Dominant species from here
Doctrina obligataDatum dominansEffectus praestitutusCura sui delegata
A field note for you
Your discomfort is an accurate reading of audit logic, not a resilience deficit — and naming it that way, out loud, is already resistance of the most durable kind. The middle-path move: satisfice the audit. Meet compliance at the standard compliance requires, not the standard you bring to teaching; your craft-pride belongs to the children, and spending it on paperwork is giving the audit something it never asked for and doesn't deserve.
Looking across the jungleThe middle leader checking your walls didn't write the checklist — they're its next visitor, and they usually know exactly what it misses.
You're the transmission mechanism. Handed a consistency agenda and asked to enforce standardisation on colleagues you respect, you live close enough to the classroom to know precisely what the checklist misses — and senior enough to be accountable for the checklist anyway. It can feel like being the audit's local representative, trusted fully by neither floor of the building.
Dominant species from here
Praxis una veraMagister auditandusAdministratio corporata
A field note for you
Quietly, you hold the most leverage in the school: logics don't land on classrooms directly, they land through you, and translation is a form of power. You can pass demands down at compliance-grade rather than amplifying them. You can add the “what this misses” line to every data conversation. You can shield the sanctioned experiment a teacher is running. The middle path is mostly walked at your level — it just rarely gets called leadership.
Looking across the jungleThe principal driving your agenda spends their week being audited by forces you never see — and took the job for the same reasons you took yours.
The principal
Observed: back-to-back meetings, none of them about learningWhat you're seeing
You trained as an educational leader and spend your days as a CEO: compliance, WHS, finance, facilities, marketing, HR, system reporting. Educational leadership — the reason you wanted the chair — gets the scraps of the calendar. The loneliness is structural: accountable for everything, in command of surprisingly little, and the only person in the building expected to speak fluent market, fluent audit and fluent child at once.
You can't refuse the CEO work — but you decide what your attention endorses, and you own the school's biggest lever: auditing cheaply on everyone's behalf. Every template you decline to create, every meeting you cancel, every “that's good enough for compliance” you declare is habitat restoration your staff will feel by Friday. And guard one visible block of educational leadership a week — in a classroom, in a learning conversation — because where the principal's attention goes tells the whole school what it's actually for.
Looking across the jungleThe teacher who seems resistant to your initiative is usually protecting the very thing you became a principal to protect.
The parent
Observed: at the kitchen table, deciphering the portalWhat you're seeing
A portal full of tasks that seem to be about school rather than about your child. Reports rich in data and strangely empty of meaning. And if your child is neurodivergent, something harder: watching them spend themselves performing “engagement” in a habitat not built for their nervous system — and then being invited to meetings about their deficits. Your confusion isn't ignorance. Some of what your child is asked to do genuinely exists for the audit, not for them, and you're perceiving that correctly.
Bring one question to every meeting, asked with genuine warmth: “Can you help me understand how this helps my child learn?” It's unanswerable in audit language, so it gently forces the conversation back to the child — which is where everyone at the table secretly wants it to be. You'll usually find the teacher opposite you is as constrained by the system as you are, and your question just gave them permission to say so.
Looking across the jungleThose confusing report comments were written at 10pm, inside a template the teacher didn't choose, by someone who does know your child.
The student
Observed: writing for the rubric, saving the real questions for laterWhat you're seeing
You worked out the game years ago: learning things and getting marks are different sports, and school mostly rewards the second one. So you write for the rubric, perform engagement when it's being scored, and budget your effort like a professional. If your brain runs on a different operating system, you're playing on hard mode — masking all day, spending the fuel that was meant for actual learning on appearing fine.
Playing the game isn't cynicism — it's an intelligent adaptation to the habitat as you found it, and the adults built the habitat, not you. One move worth protecting: keep something you're learning because you want to, off the ledger, unmeasured, yours. That's not slacking; that's what learning felt like before anyone attached a score to it, and it's the part of you the game can't reach.
Looking across the jungleAsk your teacher what they have to document each week, and watch the solidarity appear — most of the adults are playing a version of the game too.
Stage four — Navigate
You've spotted it. Now what?
Naming the species is one skill; choosing your move is another. Five scenarios, four responses each — and every response is understandable, because each one is a pull you'll genuinely feel. Only one in each tends to change the conditions and keep you in the room. See how the others play out, kindly.
SCENARIO 1 OF 5MIDDLE PATHS 0
Navigation assessment
Plate VII — For the pocket
Finding your words
Naming the species is step one. Step two is having something to say in the meeting that opens a conversation rather than a fight. These questions travel well.
“Are we measuring what we value — or starting to value what we can measure?”
The all-purpose reductionism probe. Almost impossible to answer dishonestly.
“When this measure becomes a target, what will happen to it?”
Goodhart's law, phrased as a genuine question. Works on any KPI proposal.
“What is this number a proxy for — and how far can the proxy drift from the real thing?”
Separates the metric from the mission without rejecting measurement itself.
“Who is the customer in this sentence? And who were they before?”
Surfaces the market frame gently. Often produces a useful silence.
“What does this frame make visible — and what does it make invisible?”
Treats the proposal as a lens rather than a truth. Invites addition, not opposition.
“Is this decision serving learning, or serving the audit?”
The NPM litmus test. Best asked with curiosity rather than an eyebrow.
“Best practice — for whom, where, and under what conditions?”
Restores the context that the phrase deletes. The complexity move in nine words.
“Which purpose is this serving — qualification, socialisation, or forming the person? What's the cost to the other two?”
Gert Biesta's three purposes of education, deployable in any curriculum debate.
“What's the good intention inside this proposal — and will the design as written actually protect it?”
The kindest question in the guide, and often the most disarming. It honours the person while examining the frame.
Fig. 2 — Handle with care
There are no villains in this guide
Not even the architects. The economists, the reformers, the system designers — they were parachuting cats into the jungle: solving the real problem in front of them, unable to see the food chain their solution would travel up. The data lead down the corridor started as someone who watched children fall through cracks nobody was counting. The reading-science colleague watched children leave school unable to read and swore never again. The technology enthusiast found a tool that genuinely worked in their hands. Every species in this guide began as an act of care.
What we face now is a paradigm naturalised far beyond its native range — self-sustaining, beyond recall by the people who released it, and doing real work in some places even as it overruns others. That calls for a particular temperament: not the hunt, and not despair, but the naturalist's patient work of understanding how the ecosystem actually behaves, and helping good intentions survive contact with it. Accountability is not a dirty word; schools hold public money and children's futures in trust. Evidence matters; measurement, well used, has told the profession true and uncomfortable things. Data informing judgment is a gift. The trouble begins only at the moment a useful tool starts posing as the whole truth.
So the aim was never to win the staffroom argument, and it certainly isn't to spot what's wrong with colleagues. It's to raise the quality of the conversation — to be the person who can name the care inside a proposal and the logic bending it, and ask the question that lets everyone, enthusiasts included, think a little more freely than the momentum was allowing. And it starts closest to home: you will catch these species in your own speech, probably this week. Laugh, adjust, extend the same grace outward. That's the whole method. That's the middle path.
Plate VIII — The literature
Further reading
Where the ideas in this guide come from, roughly in order of accessibility.
Jerry Z. MullerThe Tyranny of Metrics (2018) — the most readable single account of measurement culture across professions. Start here.
Gert BiestaGood Education in an Age of Measurement (2010) — the philosophical case for asking what education is for before asking how it scores.
Stephen J. Ball“The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity” (2003) — the classic article on what audit culture does to teachers from the inside.
Pasi SahlbergFinnish Lessons (2011, updated since) — coined GERM, the “Global Educational Reform Movement,” and shows a system that declined to catch it.
Christopher Hood“A Public Management for All Seasons?” (1991) — the paper that named New Public Management. Dry, short, foundational.
Raewyn Connell“The neoliberal cascade and education” (2013) — the Australian account of how market logic moved through our system specifically.
Yong ZhaoWhat Works May Hurt (2018) — why education borrows the language of evidence but rarely its habit of studying side effects.
David Snowden & Mary Boone“A Leader's Framework for Decision Making” (Harvard Business Review, 2007) — the Cynefin framework: how to tell a complicated problem from a complex one, and why it changes what leaders should do. Short and immediately usable.
Mary Uhl-Bien“Complexity Leadership: Enabling People and Organizations for Adaptability” (with Michael Arena, 2017) — leadership as creating the conditions for adaptation, rather than driving change through the machine.
Leonard, Fowler, Kennedy & DevisPragmatic Adaptive Leadership (2025) — a complexity-informed alternative for leaders: what to do once you've named the species.
Provenance & thanks
No field guide evolves in isolation. This one owes its way of seeing to friends and colleagues at the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning (C3L), now within Adelaide University — years of thinking together about schools as living systems left fingerprints on every page. Its intellectual debts run to Mary Uhl-Bien on complexity leadership, Dave Snowden on sense-making in complex systems, and Gert Biesta on what education is for — and to every colleague whose staffroom conversation sharpened a specimen entry. Any errors of classification are the naturalist's own.
Plate IX — The naturalist
About the naturalist
This guide is written from inside the habitat, not above it. I've spent more than twenty years in South Australian schools — classroom teacher, careers counsellor, and five years as Director of Research on a college executive, where my job was essentially cross-breeding school practice with learning-sciences research alongside university colleagues. I've run the audits, built the dashboards, and said “data-driven” in meetings without flinching. Several specimens in this guide were first identified in my own speech.
These days the fieldwork looks different: relief teaching a couple of days a week, homeschooling my daughter while her three brothers are happily in school, and studying digital learning and AI in education — because the habitat keeps changing and I'd rather understand it than be surprised by it. The thread through all of it is a simple conviction: education exists to nurture good people who flourish and shape a future that benefits everyone, and the way there is pragmatic and adaptive rather than revolutionary. A middle path, walked with company.
Nothing here is for sale. The guide is shared to connect, compare field notes, and learn together. If it's useful, pass it on. If you've spotted a new specimen in the wild, I'd genuinely love to hear about it.
Call“What's the good intention here — and will the design as written protect it?”
HabitatAdelaide, South Australia. Sighted in relief classrooms, a home school with a single pupil, university seminars, and occasionally a strategic planning meeting where it appears to be enjoying itself.
Distinguishing featuresTwenty-plus years across classroom and executive. Former research director; recovering dashboard-builder. Reads complexity science for fun. Four children; one kitchen table doubling as a school.
BehaviourNon-aggressive. Approaches enthusiasts, sceptics and vendors with equal curiosity. Does not sell. Responds well to good questions and strong coffee.