This paper explores how an extensive rural diocese in Victoria, Australia responded to school closure and the move to remote learning in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic. It demonstrates how context has played an important part in the educational practices within remote and rural communities. It shows how the Diocesan leadership team in the Catholic Education Diocese of Ballarat (CEOB) and its community responded to the unprecedented new challenge of COVID-19, by developing key strategies that supported the whole educational community and challenged traditional approaches to learning and teaching. COVID-19 compelled communities of students, families and educators to scramble to find new ways to provide schooling to children and young people (Bush, 2021; Gurr, 2021).

When schools across Victoria were compelled to shift to remote learning in March 2020, the diocese was in a good position to respond. The CEOB quickly leveraged existing strengths and adopted an adaptive leadership approach to respond to remote learning provision. In 2014, the diocese had adopted the principles of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), the tenets of which include Lave and Wenger’s (1991) concepts of a focus on collaboration and a commitment to work in communities of practice. 

As with Notman’s (2015) research in New Zealand after the Christchurch earthquake, the leaders within Catholic education in this diocese responded to this crisis with an ethic of care. The study found that attention did not waiver; learning remained important but so did the wellbeing needs of those in their communities.

Smith and Riley (2012) suggested a framework that outlines a process for leaders responding to crises in schools: gathering information; adapting; making rapid decisions; demonstrating concern; and communicating clearly and honestly. Understanding how key educational stakeholders made sense of and responded to this time offers an unprecedented opportunity to elucidate change experiences and the prospects for schooling to evolve and develop in new and innovative ways. (Longmuir, 2021).

In addition to the concept of PLC’s being evident in all primary schools in the diocese as well as most of the secondary schools, an online component, The HIVE website (https://hive.ceob.edu.au/), was already developed to support the most isolated students, teachers and leaders. The HIVE Learning Exchange was actioned to provide a forum for all the school leaders, teachers and support staff to share resources, ask questions, offer suggestions and source inspiration. Within days, hundreds had joined the Learning Exchange Google Community (located with The HIVE) and were supporting each other in the delivery of quality remote learning information and experiences.

Remote Learning TV was an open invitation for diocesan schools and the wider educational community to meet virtually and connect. The Remote Learning TV episodes were simply Google Meets, hosted by CEOB, attended by educators across and beyond the diocese, and sometimes featuring special invited guests. Each Meet was planned around a specific need – for example, ‘Managing the Return to Onsite Learning’ and advertised via the Learning Exchange. Sessions were recorded, and then added to The HIVE as an asynchronous resource. School-based presenters were particularly well received. Valuable feedback for The HIVE team in designing future episodes of HIVE TV (or HIVE LIVE).

The leaders within the CEOB focused on building ‘a strong sense of group cohesiveness’ (Notman, 2015: 452) where trust and confidence, based on an ethic of care, were central to crisis leadership work.

This Diocese is no stranger to crises but it is the impact of these crises on systems,  structures and most importantly on relationships that is examined in this paper.

School leaders have been shown to use sensemaking to ‘make sense of changes, contrasts and surprises found in new working situations’ (Spillane and Anderson, 2014: 4). During periods of rapid change, such as are required during a crisis, leaders draw on a range of resources to comprehend the circumstances to frame and re-frame responses (Muhren et al., 2008). Gurr and Drysdale (2020) propose that in such times, school leaders activate the concept of responsive direction orientation in response to change, ambiguity and uncertainty. A qualitative design was most appropriate for this study as this enabled consideration of how participants made sense of the crisis experiences and responded. The research question was: ‘Is the challenge of COVID-19 different to the challenges that staff and school communities have faced in the past, and, if it is, does it require a different response?’ Two of the co-authors were Education Officers employed by this country Diocese which extends across hundreds of kilometres of rural Victoria and provides a multi-tiered system of support to 53 primary (students aged between 5-12) schools and 11 secondary (students 12-18) schools. They were directly involved in supporting the schools and their leaders. They were also members of a project The Hive, which was being developed to support schools by building an online suite of school improvement tools. The first author was a former senior employee who had retained close connections with many of the schools and their principals hence through the medium of Learning Exchange Google Community the three researchers were able to collect data by encouraging participants to share their stories and reflect on their experiences (sense making and responsive direction to change) based on the following guiding questions: 1. With the sudden move to remote learning, what existing strengths of support were leveraged? 2. What additional supports were employed? 3. As an outcome, how might education in rural and remote areas be re-imagined?

Rather than focus on a deficit ‘What don’t we have?’ approach, the leaders in the Diocese approached this dilemma with positivity thinking, an appreciative inquiry approach (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005) asking ‘What do we have that we can use right now?’ thereby leveraging existing strengths. These included fully utilizing what was already there: the strong partnerships that existed between the schools and between the schools and the CEOB leaders; the commitment to communities of practice; that the secondary schools and many of the primary (elementary) schools already had one to one devices and access to digital technicians and reliable internet connectivity and the video conferencing equipment with which all schools and education offices had been equipped. So what are the lessons for the future? The communities of practice have been strengthened. The Learning Exchange Google Community has continued to support teachers both within the diocese and beyond. The success of remote learning has encouraged schools to cooperate, to expand subject choices for senior students by sharing access to quality teaching for small numbers of students. Most importantly, leadership within the diocese has continued to model Starratt’s (2005) virtues of ethical leadership: responsibility, authenticity and presence. An authentic sense of community, warmth and connection has been created amid crisis. Harris (2020, n.p.) suggests that COVID 19 is ‘writing a new chapter in educational leadership’. Researchers (Gurr and Drysdale, 2020; Longmuir 2021; Notman 2015) have examined the changing role of leaders in time of crisis. This paper has looked more to the role of a system in unprecedented times. Leaders from CEOB and across the diocese navigated the crisis by opening the lines of communication, adopting a flexible, patient stance, considering wellbeing as well as academic priorities and, perhaps most vitally, by connecting with others.

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