Every student aspires, so let’s help them achieve

Senior lecturer and lead of primary literacy, Dr Leanne Fray, is committed to making a difference in the lives of students from diverse backgrounds and improving the quality of education. By helping shift understanding, she’s enabling change.

Leanne’s research can be broadly split into three key areas: student aspirations, literacy education and quality teaching (QT).

For the former, Leanne was part of a one-of-kind program of work undertaken by the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre (TTRC) that has been running since 2012, which looks at students’ educational and occupational aspirations. The Aspirations Longitudinal Study followed thousands of students through their school years and then interviewed them again in 2020, once they’d finished.

A new Australian government grant will enable Leanne and her colleagues to repeat this original study with a new cohort of students from the same school more than 10 years later.

Literacy is a relatively new research pursuit for Leanne, but one that’s crucial in ensuring students are set up for success in their schooling and life beyond.

Stepping back from the controversies of the ‘reading wars’, her research seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of the best approaches to teaching literacy and ways to support teachers in the classroom.

Finally, Leanne leads the TTRC’s work on how the Quality Teaching (QT) Model can support teaching in inclusive education, complex and low socioeconomic settings, as well as in initial teacher education.

Shared aspirations; blocked access

Holistically, Leanne’s work has focused on equity and inclusion and supporting students and teachers to navigate the education system—a system Leanne says is often very much targeted at the ‘narrow average’.

“What I’m really interested in doing is supporting students who are outside of that narrow average. It’s about ensuring that those who might need extra support get the support they need.”

A lot of the work Leanne and her team have done to date around student aspirations highlights how those from diverse and more challenging backgrounds have similar aspirations and plans for the future as everyone else.

This includes First Nations students, low socioeconomic status (SES) students and those in targeted equity groups, including people with a disability, women, and non-English speakers.

“There is this kind of lived idea that students from these types of backgrounds don’t aspire in the same way. But our work has found that this simply isn’t true. These students seek the same jobs and careers and have similar educational ambitions.”

“Unfortunately, they’re often blocked from achieving these aspirations because they simply don’t have access to the same types of capital,” she continues.

“This includes economic and social capital. For example, they don’t have the funds to pay for education or access to people they can talk to about university. This can prevent them from applying or being able to negotiate the application process.”

Growing up in a rural community

Leanne’s passion for equity comes from her first-hand experience growing up in a rural community, attending a one-class primary school of 17 students and a high school with a poor reputation.

It wasn’t until her adult life that she had the funds and capacity to access higher education. As a mature student, she became the first person in her family to get a university education.

In part, her work is about giving students the opportunities she never had. But she’s keen to point out that her work is not about pushing all kids into university; it’s about giving them options.

Building data to shift policy

The Aspirations project has had a significant impact on policy and how people think about their students and careers.

The project was the first of its kind in Australia. It still stands as one of the largest data sets on aspirations, with over 12,000 student surveys and more than 1,000 interviews.

This research also led to the development of a series of courses, including a professional development course for teachers, a course for parents and carers and a course for University of Newcastle students.

“These courses are breaking down the preconceived notions that certain types of kids aspire to certain types of careers or educational pathways,” says Leanne.

"Teachers have told us, for example, that the professional learning course has totally changed the way they think about their students. It highlights the impact they can have on a day-to-day basis. It shows how the little things that are done in the classroom can make a positive difference.”

A pandemic shift in aspirations

When Leanne and her colleagues return to do their second round of Aspirations research in 2024, they’ll look at the changes in how students imagine their futures compared to 10 years ago.

The research will be very important in the context of government ambitions for higher education outlined in the new Universities Accord final report.

Research undertaken during the pandemic by Leanne and her colleagues showed that aspirations for university were impacted by broader societal trends, which were supercharged by the pandemic and consecutive years of natural disasters.

“We’ve got some anecdotal evidence which suggests that about 60 per cent of students were thinking about going to university, but this dropped off to about 35 per cent during the pandemic. It’s something that has changed radically, and we hope to explore this a bit more closely.”

The pandemic also provided an opportunity for Leanne and her colleagues to undertake a body of research that became some of the world’s earliest empirical evidence on the impact of lockdowns on student learning outcomes and student and teacher wellbeing.

“We found that, despite rampant speculation, the pandemic in Australia didn’t result in ‘learning loss’ for students. In fact, some students in disadvantaged settings caught up with their more privileged peers. However, the repeated lockdowns and the ‘back-to-basics’ narrow focus on literacy and numeracy in schools resulted in significant and concerning negative effects on both teacher and student wellbeing.”

Collaborations and challenges

Working with others has been key to Leanne’s work.

Beyond the university, some of her collaborators include the NSW Department of Education and the Australian Department of Education. She’s currently collaborating on the new aspirations work with the Australian Department of Employment and Workplace Relations and the Australian Centre for Student Access and Success.

Leanne has recently completed a research project on literacy education in Australian and New Zealand primary schools with a colleague from the University of Waikato. She also facilitates an ongoing seminar series for students, teachers and academics. Seminars include guest presentations from national and international literacy experts.

Along with her TTRC colleagues, Leanne is collaborating with research teams based at Oxford University in the UK and Mälardalen University in Sweden on implementing QT in international contexts, and researchers from universities around Australia researching teacher retention.

“All our work is undertaken in a collaborative environment. We make a real point of working together, and it produces great outcomes for our research and for teachers and students everywhere.”

A story of success

Leanne continues to push forward in her work, motivated by the real difference it makes.

A local primary school undertook a two-year partnership with Leanne and her colleagues focused on QT for the whole school. The partnership resulted in significant benefits for student engagement and achievement, and really crucially, in these challenging times, resulted in a positive boost to teachers’ morale.

This partnership showed how shifts in understanding pedagogy can make a tangible impact on the lives of teachers and their students.