Moving the Needle: lessons from successful reforms
Our country gets better when good people do good work. Here are three stories of change, from those who made it happen.
We’re excited to release a recording of our launch event, Moving The Needle, on our recently launched podcast. This event focused on three successful efforts to drive reform. It included speeches by:
Katie Roberts-Hull on the fight to mandate phonics in Victorian schools.
Brendan Coates on reforming Australia’s skilled migration system.
Michael Brennan on how Australia abolished non-compete clauses.
After these brief speeches, Myriam Robbin from the Australian Financial Review led a short panel discussion with the speakers, to understand how they think about influencing change in the Australian policy landscape.
You can listen to the Inflection Points Podcast below or on all podcast platforms (Apple Podcasts; Spotify; Pocketcasts; RSS).
A recording of the event is available on YouTube.
You can read an abridged version of these speeches on our website.
One of the most insightful perspectives from the event came from Katie Roberts-Hull, who suggested three lessons from her experience in driving the adoption of phonics in schools. See her words below.
The first lesson for policymakers is to be correct, not balanced. This isn't true in all cases: there are a lot of policy positions that are created through compromise that are good. But I think in some cases, policy really is zero-sum. And when there's evidence strongly on one side, the balanced approach, such as the balanced literacy approach, really doesn't lead to good outcomes and can be quite negative in terms of its impact, in this case, on children and student learning.
The second lesson is that research is not enough; it has to be activated. The research part is obviously really important… but it took decades to activate this research in schools. That activation process came a little bit from think tanks. It came a lot from bloggers and people starting to sort of share ideas, and then it became really activated through the creation of new groups.
The third lesson is to create new groups. It's really helpful to have many different types of groups that have different stakeholders, but that all share similar goals. So when the media is trying to pick up stories, having a parent group and a teacher group is really helpful. Or having researchers and academics… is really helpful as well. Creating those new groups and those new experts was a really important part of this.
Other updates from the Inflection Points team
Sydney get-together
We’re also hosting a small get-together for Inflection Points readers (Inflection Pints) in Sydney, to better understand our audience. The event will be held on Thursday 28 August from 6:30pm at the Dove & Olive in Surry Hills.
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What’s next for Inflection Points
We'll be following up our first issue in a few weeks’ time with new and engaging essays on productivity, innovation and the care economy. We’ll use this newsletter to let you know when the next edition of Inflection Points is released.
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– The Inflection Points Team