Australia, like many countries, has a history of colonisation and extensive controlled and humanitarian immigration, with country prosperity partly tied to continued population growth. The last seventy years has seen migration move from an Anglo-Celtic emphasis to include, in succession, an emphasis on migrants from Europe, Asia and Africa. In this presentation we provide several perspectives on evidence-based school development in this changing context. The first focus is on national school-wide improvement initiatives and two programs are described. IDEAS (Innovative Designs for Enhancing Achievements in Schools), is an extensive and on-going school improvement project that has developed a framework for establishing professional learning communities to improve school outcomes (e.g. Crowther, Ferguson & Hann, 2009). PALL (Principals as Literacy Leaders) is an on-going research, school improvement and professional learning program focussed on improving literacy in schools through providing principals with literacy and leadership knowledge to support teachers to improve student reading performance (Dempster, Townsend, Johnson, Bayetto, Lovett & Stevens, 2017). The second perspective explores the state level through considering work at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education in terms of evidence-based teacher training through the development of a clinical teaching model, and evidence-based school improvement through the Science of Learning Schools Partnership Initiative which utilises a cycle of inquiry approach to develop an important learning focus; in 2019 the focus is on using student voice to inform school improvement (solcnetwork.com/solnos2019). The final perspective is at the school level, where the development of a school formed from the closure of three failing schools is explored, with particular attention paid to the role of critical friends in this improvement process (Gurr, Drysdale, Longmuir & McCrohan, 2018). A flier describing the programs will be provided to session participants so that the presentation can focus on the key ideas arising from consideration of these programs.

Crowther, F., Ferguson, M., & Hann, L. (2009). Developing Teacher Leaders (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Dempster, N., Townsend, T., Johnson, g., Bayetto, A., Lovett, S. & Stevens, E. (2017). Leadership and Literacy: Principals, Partnerships and Pathways to Improvement (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing). Gurr, D., Drysdale, L., Longmuir, F., & McCrohan, K. (2018a). Leading the improvement of schools in challenging circumstances, International Studies in Educational Administration,46(1), 22-44.