Leading system transformation: A work in progress

Internationally, the COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly disrupted the education sector. While NSW has avoided the longer periods of remote learning that our colleagues in Victoria and other countries have experienced, we have nonetheless been provoked to reflect on the nature of schooling and the systemic support we provide to transform the learning of each student and enrich the professional lives of staff within our Catholic learning community. At Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta (CEDP), a key pillar of our approach is to create conditions that enable everyone to be a leader. Following the initial lockdown period in 2020 when students learned remotely, we undertook an informal teacher voice piece with the purpose of engaging teachers and leaders from across our 80 schools in Greater Western Sydney to reflect on and capture key learnings. This project revealed teachers and leaders reported very high feelings of self-efficacy, motivation and confidence in their capacity to learn and lead in the volatile pandemic landscape. These findings raised the question: how do we enable this self-efficacy, motivation and confidence in an ongoing way? This paper documents the systematic reflection process undertaken by CEDP to understand the enabling conditions a system can provide to activate everyone to be a leader in the post-pandemic future and the key learnings emerging from this process.