'Time for someone else': Unlikely revolutionary Ross Fox to leave Catholic Education

The man who led a transformational change in Catholic education in the Canberra region and, as a result, also influenced government thinking on its own schools, has called it a day after eight momentous years.

Catholic Education CEO Ross Fox found a school system where, despite no lack of commitment or effort from teachers and principals, student results were not improving.

“I did have one particular meeting where a parent said to me really clearly, I remember it very vividly: ‘This is a great school, so caring, so welcoming’. And then they said, ‘It’s just a pity about the academic results’.

“That was quite challenging for me.”

That prompted a search for answers, some of which were provided on a long drive from Moruya to West Wyalong, during which Mr Fox listened to a series of education podcasts. It was during one drive he came across WA academic Lorraine Hammond, a sometimes unpopular pioneer of knowledge-based learning and explicit teaching.

Mr Fox said she discovered as a high school English teacher that many of her students didn’t have the requisite knowledge to understand what she was trying to teach them.

“So she had to go back to what they actually needed, which in some cases was more training in reading, more automaticity in being able to code words, more vocabulary, you know, all those things,” he said.

Thus began a revolution in the region’s Catholic school through its Catalyst program, which swapped the dominant enquiry-based approach for explicit teaching based on the science of learning.

Dr Hammond remains connected with the Archdiocese, last month running a coaching clinic for teachers in Canberra.

Mr Fox was also quite taken by podcasts from the US, where many teachers adopted the mantra ‘when I know better, I do better’.

It was an admission that “maybe we didn’t know what we needed to know”.

He has had principals and teachers with a strong commitment to enquiry learning realise that it can only be successful after students have lots of knowledge to enquire with.

It wasn’t just a pedagogical shift but a structural one as well, with a school-based curriculum approach replaced by a consistent system-wide one, or common language, that saved teachers precious time developing their own materials and made movement between schools easier.

“We’ve done some things, providing curriculum resources that teachers regularly say have saved them more than five hours a week, particularly in our maths resources,” Mr Fox said.

The results have been gratifying, with improved NAPLAN and ATAR scores, as well as feedback from teachers and principals who see firsthand the enthusiasm and higher engagement in the classroom.

The turnaround in the NSW schools, which historically had underperformed compared with their more privileged ACT cousins, has been especially satisfying, with half of the Archdiocese’s top 10 schools in NSW.

“Our system results are showing we’re addressing some of those inequities and reversing some of those expectations, and that schools throughout our Archdiocese can perform really well now because of the learning and teaching going on in the classroom, that the background or the context of the town or family doesn’t determine academic results, and that’s really exciting to be part of,” Mr Fox said.

An important point for the ACT, where equity is a mantra, is that after a long-called-for inquiry into literacy and numeracy, public schools are embarking on their own reform program.

Mr Fox said change was not easy and it was never motivated by a desire to be better or different but because it was the right thing to do.

He said one of the reasons education in the English-speaking world had taken so long to make a shift, despite the continuing poor results, was its focus on novelty and innovation, but not necessarily effectiveness or whether it actually enhanced learning.

“We have to keep testing ourselves,” Mr Fox said.

While the Archdiocese’s schools had come a long way, they were still in a profound state of change, which Mr Fox called a continuing journey.

So why leave now?

“We’ve made huge progress, and I’ve really given it a good go, and I think it’s had results,” Mr Fox said.

“It’s time for someone else with energy and focus to take it to the next level.

“We’re a good system. We can be a great one by continuing to pursue what we’re doing.”

Mr Fox was confident that the system would not backslide or lose momentum, with teachers and principals saying they would not want to change a winning formula.

“That’s the reassurance I’ve got. It’s not about me building a legacy,” he said.

He believed there was also more consensus these days across the different sectors that bode well for all teachers, students and parents.

“We’ll be able to have more deep and profound conversations with our colleagues in the independent and public sectors because, I guess, we’ve arguably got more in common now about how we will approach the important task of learning and teaching,” he said.

Mr Fox also had to steer his schools through the pandemic, from which communities are only just starting to recover from the loss of connection and socialisation for their children.

But it did spur the technology solutions for staff communication and school learning, particularly at the senior secondary level where virtual learning to supplement their school experience had been appreciated by students.

The building of two new early learning centres was also a highlight.

Mr Fox plans to take a break and then consider suggestions about writing essays or a book about his experience.