Meet Paul Billings - Principal at Yule Brook College

Paul BillingsMeet Paul Billing, principal of Yule Brook College in WA.

Yule brook College is a Big Picture Inspired school focusing on personalising learning through individual learning plans and internships.

Their experiences planning and implementing Big Picture ideas into an Australian high school is both challenging and rewarding.

In this interview, Paul reflects on the process, offering valuable insights.

INTERVIEWER:    Can you describe Yule brook College?

PAUL:    Yule brook is Southeast of Perth. It's a pretty low socio‑economic group area.  It's in this district that we have got the lowest socio-economic index of all the high schools and we have about forty percent indigenous population at this school so it's a small school as well, so in terms of, you know, being a good fit for Big Picture we tick a few of the boxes there, you know, it's got a high degree of disengagement from the students, it's definitely low socio-economic area where  typically you find that level of disengagement and probably fortunately we're a small school which means that we're in a position to be flexible and make the sorts of changes that we feel are necessary.

INTERVIEWER:    So what's the journey been, how have you approached taking up some of these ideas?

PAUL:    Well, I mean typically the sorts of problems we've had at this school, certainly had when I arrived at this school 5 years ago were, you know, typical sorts of things with student misbehaviour, disrespect of teachers, fighting, a whole range of pretty antisocial things, and we initially put a lot of effort and energy into dealing with the social issues around the school.  

Trying to get people to exercise greater respect for one another, doing a lot of team building in the school and running special programs to do that but the thing that we, you know, and we thought that we did a really good job with that, it made quite a bit of difference.

So now that we've got the place running in a pretty positive sort of way and the relationships that were building in the school were much stronger, what do we do about improving academic performance?  The history of this school going back beyond it's inception as a middle school has been one of pretty poor academic performance and that's really the critical thing that we have exercised a lot of time thinking about and trying to work out how we can overcome.

INTERVIEWER:    And so what practical changes have you made?

PAUL:    Leading up to the introduction of the Big Picture approach, we'd done a lot of work on developing relationships between teachers and students so we put in place a pastoral care program that really focussed on building strong relationships between teachers and a small group of students.  

And also building relationships between kids across the school and immediately I hear myself saying those things I start to recognise some of the things that are the principles of Big Picture.  The notion of students being well‑known in the school and we'd already had, we'd developed partnerships outside the school to find um find ways of connecting student learning to the real world, which again is one of those sorts of things that the Big Picture promotes and so we were sort of halfway down the track in terms of our thinking, in terms of that and when we examined what Big Picture had to offer us, we looked at all the sorts of things that Big Picture represented and pretty much went down the list ticking and thinking "yeah that's the kind of thing that we've been thinking about, you know, what we need to do here to make a success or to start to become more successful anyway"  

So really, the size of the school, the building ‑‑ putting programs into place to build relationships between students and trying to think innovatively about how we could deliver curriculum.  They were the sort of key areas that we were looking at.

INTERVIEWER:    And so where are we at now?

PAUL:    Well the school is a three‑year high school;  what was called middle school when it was developed here.  So we have year 8, year 9, year 10, so that's thirteen to fifteen year-olds here at this school and two years ago, I guess it was, we decided that we wanted to embark on implementing the design principles of Big Picture schooling here and we decided that we'd do it in a stepped way.  

We felt that because we'd already started to work in a particular kind of way and we decided to honour that with them, that we would explore Big Picture in year 8, then move into year 9 and then next year into year 10.  So the initial steps we took were to structure advisory classes and to bring them down to the sorts of sizes that are recommended by Big Picture and we were lucky enough to be able to keep our groupings between twelve and fifteen students, and that's worked through into year 9 this year.  

In year 8 we've got a similar sort of setup, and year 8 in a way is replicating what we did in year 8 last year and one of the things we gave a lot of thought to was, how do we make a transition between what the students have experienced in primary school with what we want to start doing here now?  

So rather than sort of dropping them in the deep end with Big Picture, we tried to take a staged approach throughout year 8 and have quite structured ways of introducing them to what advisory actually meant, teaching them about doing individual projects and then working towards and getting them to identify their interests and passions as part of the project work they did and, of course, by the time we reached year 9 we're starting to become fully immersed in doing it that way.  So in year 8 really we've started with an approach which is, we've been calling it ‘Big Picture with training wheels’ really, where we are slowly introducing the kids and getting to the point by the end of the year where they are pursuing their own interests in advisory.

Year 9, they're very immersed in it and by the second semester in year 9, which we're into now, we're only just starting to get kids out undertaking internships.  And the reason we've taken our time doing that is, not only did we want to get used to doing it, um and finding the most affective ways of doing it, we wanted the kids to grow into it as well and also we wondered if the kids might not be just a little bit too young um immediately go launching into such an independent way of learning.  

So we've got to halfway through year 9 now and many of the year 9 students are undertaking internships now and we have you know, we're meeting with greater and greater success with those students who undertake, you know, those internships now.  So the journey has been long and bumpy and at times we sort of think we wonder if we're doing the right thing but I think when we stand back and look at it we can see the progress we've made from year 8 through to year 9 and it's quite considerable.

INTERVIEWER:    What it is for you that you see that most re‑affirms that it is successful?

PAUL:    Well I think it's that the main thing is that I see that, even though we've still got kids that still struggle against their levels of disengagement and still have you know little hiccups with their behaviour and attitude at school.

Now, I actually see kids get excited about some of the work they're doing and I can go into classes and talk to kids and ask them what they're doing and they will start to talk to me in an interested way about the projects they're undertaking; sometimes it's sensational, the depth to which the students are going.  

I mean, there will always be students who are struggling with it, who are working superficially with what they're doing but they can speak to you quite articulately about what it is that they're actually doing.  So that tells me that they're taking some sense of ownership for the work they are doing; whereas if you talk to a kid in traditional school like, you know, the typical thing, when the kid comes home from school ‑ "what did you do today?”  “Nuthin" - you know, that kind of response.  I think that we wouldn't get that sort of response.  The kids might say that to their parents but if you delved a little bit deeper and ask them "what did you do in advisory, what are you working on?"  Um, you start to get answers which tell you that they're in charge of their work and they can tell you where they're going with it or at least if they've got questions about their work, they're self generated questions.  

So it's really the engagement with those projects that I find is qualitatively different and I mean at just a very simple level, I reckon that our kids are doing much more work than they've ever done before.  You know even if we just wanted to put it on a set of scales, you'd actually see that physically the kids have done and are doing more work than they've ever done before.

INTERVIEWER:    You mentioned problems with violence and stuff like that previously at the school.  Has there been any improvement in those areas?

PAUL:    Yeah, that's improved significantly.  I mean, that's not solely down to Big Picture but I guess the principles of Big Picture support what we've been trying to do anyway.  

We have taken a very concerted approach to restorative approaches to conflict resolution at this school and that in concert with the whole thing about building strong relationships which is part of one of the design features of Big Picture means that there's a real synergy between where we're coming from, where we picked up on Big Picture and we're we are going and you know in terms of a simple statistic like suspensions, in the last two years we've had dramatically reduced suspensions at this school.  

The two figures I love to quote is that in term one of each of the last two years we've had no suspensions at all and in the whole history of this school I think that's a pretty remarkable outcome.

INTERVIEWER:    Do you get much feedback from parents?

PAUL:    Yeah, we've had very strong positive feedback from the parents.  You know, people saying "why didn't you think of this before?"  

We’ve had parents who've said to us that they've seen a marked change in their children since they came to us school from primary school which is remarkable because often when parents reflect on the transition from primary school to high school, they say "well, you know if only it could be like primary school".  

We've had parents saying "If only primary school had been like this"; we've had parents saying things like "if only they'd done things like this at school when I was there, I wouldn't spend my days behind a grinder eight hours a day ".  

Another parent saying about a young indigenous girl "we can't believe how she's come out of herself since she's been at this school"  - countless anecdotes where parents have, unprompted by us, told us about the transformation that's occurred with their kids since they've been here.  

That's very gratifying.

INTERVIEWER:    And has it been a big change for the teachers, for the staff?

PAUL:    It's been a profound difference for them.  

Number one; in the way they think about the way we go about things but also just in terms of the workload and demands on them, I mean you can't sit in a room with twelve to fifteen kids all working on twelve to fifteen different things and not be drawn upon a little bit more than what you might have been doing if you were standing at the front of the room teaching one thing to twenty kids.  So that's been quite a drain on them but I have to say that the one thing that I find is remarkable about this is that it's the first time I've been in a school where a single idea has captured the imagination of a whole staff.  

Sure, we have our days when we are down about it and we're thinking we're not making progress, but at least even at those moments we're actually talking at a professional level about what we need to do to make it better and we're talking about teaching and learning, we're not whingeing about kids.  

Over my thirty years of teaching I've been in schools where people have had good ideas and there will be a group of people who will say "yeah, let's do that"  and there'll be a group of other people saying "well, we'll let them get on with it but we're not going to have a bar of it"  through to a school like this where the good sense of the ideas has been a catalyst for people to come together and wanting to make sure that this thing works and making a commitment to making it work too and feeling a sense of professional pride that it does work.  

They've been the most outstanding things that I've seen from the point of view of the staff but I will say, and I wouldn't want to shy away from this, it is hard work.  It's kind of harder work in the sense of the energy put in but I guess it's more rewarding in the sense that what we get out of it is a better outcome than what would have been if we'd been working in a traditional environment where the energy going in was just being bounced back at you rather than being taken on and you seeing some kind of outcome in terms of the way kids are engaged with the work.

INTERVIEWER: Could you talk a little bit about the difference between using Big Picture ideas or developing your own ideas.  Why have you chosen to take what some people say is pre‑made?

PAUL:    The advantages of working with Big Picture is that the design principles really suit the sorts of things that we'd been thinking about what we wanted to do at this school.  I don't actually believe that there's anything in Big Picture that is brand new thinking, a lot of it, well lots of the things in Big Picture are things that we've all at different times tried and trialled in schooling, certainly in the time I've been teaching.

Occasionally we'll try something that looks like an individual learning plan, we'll explore something that looks like internships, and we've always known that forging strong relationships with kids is a good thing anyway, I mean how can it not be a good thing?  So, really the advantage I think of adopting the principles of Big Picture is that a lot of the thinking has been proven thinking drawn together in Big Picture and whilst it might sound like it's a product that we have just taken off the shelf, it's not like that at all, I mean we have taken the literature that supports Big Picture, we have looked at it, we've thought about how it might fit into our context and we've worked with it and adapted it and will continue to adapt it and I imagine that in five years time what we think is Big Picture now will look nothing like it because we will have explored it and adapted it, worked with it until it works for us in the way that we're getting the kind of traction that we want to get and, whilst I'm very pleased with the outcomes that we've got at the moment, because immediately we made a change we saw things that we hadn't seen before in the school.

If we stopped at this point, I'd be very disappointed.  I don't know what the nirvana of this would look like but I believe that we will continue to improve with it.  You know very simple things that changed immediately with this is not only the quality and the engagement of the work of the students but the level of connection that we have with parents now is significantly different to what we have ever had before.  I reckon that we have had probably over ninety percent of our parents come regularly to the school to see their kids give exhibitions.  Now, in the years immediately preceding this, and even during the implementation when we have run traditional parent teacher evenings for those groups of students not involved in Big Picture, there's virtually been more staff than parents there and spinnafex  rolling down the aisle of the library whereas when we have exhibitions um there are parents lined up here cycling through the school on a regular basis interested and participating in um meaningful discussions with their children about the progress they're making and it's very moving.  

We've had parents crying at exhibitions, giving testimonials about how wonderful their children are, and parents berating their students for not doing enough work and we've just sat back as interested observers and not had to take accountability for the students.  The students are the ones who have had to take accountability for themselves and that has been a real important shift for us.  

It's not perfect and there are some students who take more and some students who take less accountability for themselves but that link with parents I think which had been missing previously has actually made the whole thing, well it's meant that it's gained greater traction in the school.  

What I'm saying is that it's the mix of the ideas, the balance of the ideas and the synergies between them which have really meant that this has made a difference because even in the time leading up to us adopting Big Picture we'd done some of the things in the school in isolation.  We had done exhibitions if you like and we had actually isolated great success with exhibitions and wondered then how could we integrate this more effectively into the school.  So, yeah, we'd been around some of the ideas and I'm sure lots of schools have been, but it really...  as I say the synergy of the ideas coming together that really has made a holistic difference that what we're getting at this school. 

INTERVIEWER: What would your advice be for other schools in a similar type environment or context about taking these ideas on?

PAUL:    I've always said to people that this isn't a prescription for anyone, it's a prescription for Yule brook College because we looked at our environment, we made an assessment about the sorts of things that were and weren't working and then made a decision about the things that were missing and those things happened to line up the design principles of Big Picture.  

I can envisage schools in similar circumstances looking at this and saying yes that's exactly for us but I think the important thing about it is that, apart from the fact that I'm convinced that the idea sells itself, it's really important to make sure that you've got a team of teachers who really want to take something like this on board and are committed enough to want to make change that they're prepared to invest the intellectual and emotional energy in exploring the ideas and then making the changes and that they've got the capacity to be excited about their work.  That's, you know for me, that was the most important thing and I guess the other thing is that our lack of success was hitting us between the eyes.  We were staring at it or it was staring us in the face. It's all about being prepared for change or to make change and being ready to acknowledge that what you're doing currently isn't working.

It would be quite possible for me to walk by any school and say "look they're a candidate for Big Picture, I can see that, it's written large for me but unless it's written large for the people in the school, then it doesn't mean anything, it will just be someone saying you should do this".  

People taking things on on a compliance basis and not doing it properly.  Really the most critical thing is not only seeing a need for this but actually having a commitment to do it.  I mean I can describe the social factors, the levels of disengagement, all those things which point to the need to use an approach like Big Picture but in the end it comes down to the team of people who are prepared to make that change, prepared to put their hand up and say "this isn't working any more" and then to commit themselves to actually bringing that change about.

End of Interview