Director of the Centre for the Future of Schooling and Associate Dean, Dr David Hastie today thanked the ABC for its interest in innovative Hub-based teacher education models, and for permitting him some time on ABC TV to clarify elements which have elsewhere been misreported. The footage of the live interview can be found here.  The program does not, he noted, allow students to 'skip attending a university'. Rather, what the program does is transfer agency from a tertiary-centred model, to a school-centred model, in which students complete an accredited tertiary degree in the sort of cadetship mode very common in other disciplines. It was not, Hastie noted, a direct appropriation of the British model, but rather it takes 'the best of British' and dispenses with the ideologically-driven applications which elsewhere have proven ineffective. It adopts the leading practices of the University of Melbourne's Clinical Practice Model, and improves on these by focussing on the student experience and career track.
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An Alphacrucis National Roundtable on "Planting Christian Schools: Reigniting Missional Momentum" will be held on the Gold Cost on October 21. Hosted at the expanding Kings Christian College, Reedy Creek, this invitation-only gathering will see the first common meeting of the great practitioners in the independent schools space, committed to seeing the Christian mission of Independent schools sustained through the efficient and agile development of new schools and campuses.

As Dr David Hastie notes, reflecting on the new head of the National Catholic Education Commission's comments in The Australian  last Friday: "Jacinta Collin’s call for more capital funding for Catholic schools anticipates one of the great challenges for governments in the coming era. The challenge is even greater for Independent schools. It is one of the trickiest elements of our social contract: public / private partnerships for essential services." 

According to the School Infrastructure NSW Advisory Council: “There will be a massive 21% growth in student numbers by 2031. This means NSW schools will need to accommodate an extra 269,000 students, with 164,000 of these students in the public system.” In other words, inbuilt state under-provision of new schools is no secret: it’s public policy. NSW is expecting the Non-Government sector to enrol ten thousand new students every year for the next decade.
The Roundtable will explore solutions for this great challenge, ahead of a planned National Summit open to all in 2020.