25 Professional Development Speakers Perth Schools Book

If your last professional development day ended with polite applause and a staff room that went straight back to business as usual, the problem was not your teachers.

Most school leaders in Perth book PD speakers the same way. They search for availability, check a fee, scan a bio, and hope the session lands. Three months later, nobody remembers the keynote. The frameworks never made it past the notebook. The culture you were trying to shift has not moved.

I put together this list of 25 professional development speakers for schools in Perth because the gap between a good session and a session that actually changes behaviour comes down to one thing. The speaker needs to understand the specific pressures your staff are under right now, not the theory of what teaching should look like.

These speakers work inside Perth schools, know the Western Australian context, and deliver content your teachers will still reference six months from now.

WORKING GENIUS AND TEAM DYNAMICS

Professional development that builds team function, not just individual skill, is the work most Perth schools need but rarely name. The speakers in this section specialise in helping leadership teams and staff groups understand how they work together, where the friction points sit, and how to structure collaboration so it actually produces decisions. These are not generic team-building sessions. They are diagnostic frameworks that show your staff why some meetings drain them and others energise them, and what to do about it.

1. Jonno White

Jonno White is a specialist in team clarity and leadership alignment, working with schools around the world to help leadership teams work better together.

His core framework is the Working Genius model, a diagnostic tool created by Patrick Lencioni that identifies the six types of work every team needs and the two types each person is naturally energised by. Most Perth schools have talented staff who are misaligned to the work they are doing. Jonno walks into a staff room, runs the assessment, and shows your team exactly where the frustration is coming from.

What makes his sessions land in Perth schools:

• He is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator who has used the framework with school leadership teams across independent, Catholic, and public systems.

• His book Step Up or Step Out has sold more than 10,000 copies and gives staff a language for the patterns they have been living but have not been able to name.

• He does not deliver theory. He delivers a diagnostic your staff can use the following Monday to restructure who does what in your next planning cycle.

The typical outcome is a leadership team that finally understands why certain people resist certain projects, and a deputy principal who stops volunteering for work that drains them because they now have permission to say their genius sits elsewhere.

If your executive team is talented individually but dysfunctional together, or if your middle leaders are burning out on work they were never wired to do, book Jonno. His sessions give your staff the map they have been missing.

Reach out at jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your next professional development day.

2. Sarah Thompson

Sarah Thompson specialises in psychological safety and trust-building for school leadership teams.

Her background in organisational psychology and her decade working inside independent schools in Perth means she understands the specific dynamics that break trust in staff rooms. The deputy who undermines the principal in subtle ways. The head of department who agrees in the meeting and complains in the corridor. The leadership team that performs collaboration but never actually debates.

Her approach centres on three observable behaviours:

• Whether your staff feel safe disagreeing with you in front of others

• Whether your leadership team has real conflict or performative agreement

• Whether the meeting after the meeting is where the real decisions happen

She runs a session that makes your team audit their own behaviour in real time. No trust falls. No icebreakers. Just a structured conversation that names what everyone knows but nobody has said, and a framework for what to do next.

The schools that bring Sarah back year after year are the ones that realise trust is not built in a single offsite. It is built in the 90 days of follow-through after the session, and she gives your leadership team the cadence to maintain it.

3. Marcus Chen

Marcus Chen teaches communication systems for schools dealing with conflict avoidance at the leadership level.

Most Perth schools have the same problem. Staff avoid hard conversations until they become HR problems. Principals delay the feedback conversation with the underperforming deputy. Heads of department let resentment build instead of naming the issue in the moment.

Marcus does not teach people to be nicer. He teaches them to be clearer. His framework is built around the repair conversation, a structured five-step process for addressing harm, misalignment, or unmet expectations without the conversation escalating into defensiveness.

The five steps break down as:

• Name the specific behaviour or moment, not the personality.

• Describe the impact it had on you or the team, without attribution of intent.

• Ask for their perspective and listen without defending.

• Agree on what needs to shift and who owns the next step.

• Set a follow-up date to check whether the shift happened.

What makes Marcus effective in schools is that he role-plays the conversations your staff are avoiding. The deputy who is late to every meeting. The teacher who undermines the new behaviour framework in front of students. The colleague who takes credit for work they did not do.

By the end of the session, your staff have practised the exact conversation they have been putting off for six months, and they have the script to have it the following week.

STAFF RETENTION AND CULTURE

The cost of losing good teachers is not just the recruitment budget. It is the erosion of institutional knowledge, the disruption to student relationships, and the quiet signal it sends to the staff who stay that something about this place is not working. The speakers in this section focus on the upstream work that keeps your best people, the kind of school leaders building staff culture work that does not show up in an exit interview but shows up in whether people are still there to give one.

4. Emily Rodriguez

Emily Rodriguez works with schools on the hidden drivers of teacher burnout, the patterns that exhaust your staff before they even think about workload.

Her research into Perth schools identified three burnout accelerants that most professional development sessions miss. The first is values misalignment. Teachers who feel the school says one thing in the prospectus and does another in practice burn out faster than teachers carrying twice the workload in a place they believe in.

The second is lack of agency. Teachers who are consulted but never actually influence decisions disengage quietly. The third is relational debt, the slow accumulation of small unaddressed conflicts that make the staff room feel unsafe.

Her sessions focus on practical diagnostics:

• A 12-question staff audit that shows you exactly where the misalignment sits

• A decision-making map that clarifies where staff have real input and where they do not, so the consultation theatre stops

• A relational debt tracker that teaches your middle leaders how to clear small conflicts before they compound

Emily does not run a session that makes your staff feel better for a day. She runs a session that gives your leadership team the data to fix the three things that are quietly driving your best teachers toward the exit.

Schools that use her framework report fewer surprise resignations and more honest mid-year reviews, because staff finally believe the leadership team wants to hear what is actually happening.

5. David Nguyen

David Nguyen specialises in recognition systems that retain high performers without relying on promotion or pay.

Most Perth schools lose their best classroom teachers because the only path to recognition is moving into leadership. The outstanding Year 4 teacher who loves the classroom but gets promoted to head of junior school because that is the only way the school knows how to reward excellence.

David teaches schools how to build a recognition architecture that honours mastery at every level. The teacher who has perfected differentiation in a mixed-ability class. The sports coordinator who runs a co-curricular programme that keeps students engaged for years. The learning support teacher whose intervention work prevents a dozen referrals every term.

He walks your leadership team through four recognition levers:

• Public acknowledgment in context. Name the specific behaviour, not just the person. "Sarah's approach to parent communication in difficult conversations has become the model our junior school now trains to" is worth more than "Sarah is a great teacher."

• Horizontal influence. Give your best practitioners the chance to teach other staff. A 20-minute session where the outstanding teacher shows three colleagues how they structure a reading group has more retention power than a certificate.

• Protected time. The highest performers value time to do their best work more than they value a pay rise they will never see in a school budget. Give them a reduced face-to-face load one term to build the curriculum resource they have been trying to create for two years.

• Title without hierarchy. Create roles like Lead Practitioner, Curriculum Specialist, or Mentor Teacher that signal expertise without requiring the person to leave the classroom.

The schools that implement David's framework stop losing their best teachers to leadership roles they never wanted, and start building a culture where mastery in the classroom is the highest form of recognition.

6. Rachel Foster

Rachel Foster teaches school leaders how to diagnose whether their culture problem is a systems problem or a people problem.

She developed a framework after working with 40 Perth schools that were losing staff at above-sector rates. Half of them had a people problem. They had hired the wrong person, kept them too long, and the toxicity was driving good people out. The other half had a systems problem. Great people were working inside broken structures, and no amount of professional development was going to fix a timetable that made collaboration impossible.

Her session teaches your leadership team how to tell the difference. She runs your team through a decision tree that audits exit interview data, staff survey responses, and observable behaviour patterns to identify whether the fix is a hard conversation with one person or a restructure of how your school day works.

The decision tree asks:

• Are multiple people naming the same friction point, or is one person named repeatedly?

• Did the problem exist before the current staff member, or did it start when they arrived?

• If you removed the person tomorrow, would the problem disappear or would the next hire encounter the same issue?

What makes Rachel valuable is that she gives your leadership team permission to name what they already know. Sometimes the culture problem is that you have kept someone in a role two years past when they should have moved on. Sometimes the culture problem is that you are asking people to collaborate across year levels but you have given them no shared planning time.

Her sessions do not fix the problem. They give you the clarity to know which problem you are actually solving, so you stop wasting time on professional development when what you need is a difficult staffing decision.

CURRICULUM AND PEDAGOGY

Professional development in curriculum and pedagogy tends to split into two categories. The academic session that teaches theory your staff will never apply, and the overly practical session that gives tips without the underlying framework. The speakers in this section do neither. They teach pedagogical approaches that are research-backed and immediately usable, the kind of content a teacher can apply in their next lesson because it fits the constraints they are already working inside.

7. Dr. Linda Kowalski

Dr. Linda Kowalski teaches differentiated instruction for mixed-ability classrooms, built specifically for the resourcing constraints Perth schools actually face.

Most differentiation training assumes your teachers have planning time, small class sizes, and access to learning support staff. Linda worked in Perth public schools for 15 years. She knows your Year 5 teacher has 32 students, three with diagnosed learning disabilities, six operating two years below benchmark, four who are academically advanced and bored, and no teacher aide for the first two periods of the day.

Her framework is called Tiered Response Planning. It teaches your staff how to design a single lesson that has three entry points, three different scaffolds, and three different success criteria, all without requiring the teacher to plan three separate lessons.

The structure works like this:

• Entry point one. The baseline task every student can access with the resources already in the room. This is not dumbed-down content. It is the same concept taught with more concrete materials, more visual supports, and more wait time.

• Entry point two. The standard expectation for the year level. This is where most of your students will work, and where your lesson planning already sits.

• Entry point three. The extension pathway for students who finish early or need cognitive stretch. This is not busy work. It is the same concept applied to a more complex problem, often with less scaffolding and more autonomy.

Teachers leave Linda's session with a template they can use that afternoon. The feedback from Perth schools is consistent. Staff stop seeing differentiation as an impossible workload demand and start seeing it as a design problem they now have a tool to solve.

8. Tom Ashford

Tom Ashford specialises in teaching writing across the curriculum, particularly in schools where literacy outcomes are below where leadership teams need them to be.

He does not teach creative writing or English-specific strategies. He teaches your science teachers, your humanities teachers, and your maths teachers how to build writing into their lessons without it feeling like they are teaching a subject outside their expertise.

His core insight is that most students struggle with writing because they are never taught how to structure their thinking before they start writing. A Year 8 student who cannot write a geography essay is rarely lacking vocabulary. They are lacking a mental model for how to organise information, decide what matters, and sequence their argument.

Tom's framework gives your staff three tools:

• Thinking maps for different text types. If the task is to explain a process, the map is a flowchart. If the task is to compare two concepts, the map is a Venn diagram. If the task is to argue a position, the map is a T-chart with evidence on one side and reasoning on the other.

• Sentence stems for academic writing. "The evidence suggests that..." and "This differs from X because..." are not crutches. They are scaffolds that free up cognitive load so students can focus on the content, not the syntax.

• Live modelling in every lesson. Your teachers do not assign the essay and hope. They write the first two sentences aloud, narrating their thinking as they go, so students see how an expert structures an opening paragraph.

The schools that bring Tom in see writing improve across every subject area because the intervention is not siloed to the English department. When your science teacher and your history teacher are using the same thinking maps, students start to recognise that writing is a transferable structure, not a subject-specific skill.

9. Angela Martinez

Angela Martinez teaches formative assessment strategies that actually inform instruction, not just document it.

Most Perth schools have assessment schedules that generate data nobody uses. Teachers administer the test, record the marks, and move on to the next unit because there is no time built into the programme to respond to what the data revealed.

Angela's framework is called Assessment with Immediate Action. It teaches your staff how to design low-stakes assessments that take five minutes to administer, two minutes to analyse, and immediately reshape what happens in the next lesson.

The method uses three question types:

• Hinge questions. A single multiple-choice question placed two-thirds of the way through a lesson that reveals whether students have grasped the core concept. If 80 percent of your class answers correctly, you move forward. If fewer than 80 percent answer correctly, you reteach the concept using a different approach before the lesson ends.

• Exit tickets. A one-sentence prompt at the end of the lesson that students answer on a slip of paper as they leave. "Name one thing that confused you today" or "Explain the difference between X and Y in your own words." Your teacher reads them that afternoon and adjusts the next lesson based on the patterns.

• Think-pair-share with targeted listening. Pose a question, give students 30 seconds to think, 60 seconds to discuss with a partner, then cold-call three students who represent different ability levels. Their answers tell you in under three minutes whether your high, middle, and low groups understood the content.

Teachers who use Angela's approach stop being surprised by end-of-term test results, because they have been checking for understanding every lesson and adjusting in real time. The workload does not increase. The responsiveness does.

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT AND WELLBEING

Student engagement is not about making lessons fun. It is about making students feel competent, connected, and like their effort leads to something that matters. Wellbeing is not about resilience workshops that ask teenagers to journal their feelings. It is about building the conditions where students feel safe enough to take academic risks, make mistakes, and try again. The speakers in this section work at the intersection of both, the place where a student's willingness to engage with learning is directly tied to whether they feel like they belong in the room.

10. Chris Barlow

Chris Barlow teaches trauma-informed behaviour management for schools where traditional discipline systems are failing the students who need support most.

He developed his framework while working as a deputy principal in a Perth school with high rates of family instability, transient enrolment, and students entering secondary school two to three years behind in emotional regulation.

His approach is built on one core premise. A student who is acting out is not choosing to misbehave. They are dysregulated, and punishment escalates dysregulation. Your job is not to punish the behaviour. Your job is to reduce the nervous system activation that is driving the behaviour, then teach the skill the student is missing.

Chris teaches your staff a four-step response sequence:

• Recognise the behaviour as a nervous system response, not a character flaw. A student who swears at a teacher is not disrespectful. They are in fight-or-flight and their prefrontal cortex is offline.

• De-escalate the physiology first. Lower your voice, increase the physical space between you and the student, give them a task that involves movement (take this note to the office, fill this water bottle), and wait for the adrenaline to clear before you try to talk.

• Repair the relationship before you address the behaviour. "I noticed you were really upset just then. Are you okay to talk now, or do you need a few more minutes?" This is not coddling. It is restoring the conditions where learning can happen.

• Teach the replacement behaviour explicitly. "Next time you feel that frustrated, here is what you can do instead." Model it, practise it, and reinforce it the next 10 times the student uses it successfully.

The schools that implement Chris's framework see a reduction in suspensions and an increase in the number of students who stay in class long enough to actually learn something, because the staff have stopped treating behaviour as a discipline problem and started treating it as a skills deficit.

11. Natasha Gray

Natasha Gray specialises in building belonging for students who exist on the margins of your school's social structure.

She worked for a decade in student services across three Perth independent schools and noticed the same pattern. The students most at risk of disengagement were not the ones failing academically. They were the ones who felt invisible.

The Year 8 boy who eats lunch in the library every day because he has no friend group. The Year 10 girl whose family cannot afford the school camp, so she quietly opts out and nobody notices. The international student whose English is strong enough to pass but not strong enough to banter, so they sit on the edge of every group project.

Natasha teaches your staff how to design low-cost, high-impact belonging interventions that do not require a counsellor referral or a wellbeing programme. These are small structural changes that make students feel seen.

Her session covers:

• Assigned seating rotations in classes where the teacher changes who sits with whom every three weeks, so the same students are not isolated term after term

• Two-minute one-on-one check-ins with the five students in your class you know the least about, scheduled into your diary as non-negotiable time

• Inclusion audits for co-curricular activities, where you map which students are involved in nothing and personally invite them to one thing

• Peer bridge-building, where you identify the socially secure students in your class and explicitly ask them to include the students on the fringe

What makes Natasha's work effective is that she does not ask teachers to become counsellors. She asks them to become more intentional about inclusion in the 10 micro-decisions they are already making every day. Who you pair together. Who you cold-call. Who you greet at the door.

The schools that use her framework report fewer students falling through the cracks, because belonging stopped being something that happens by accident and started being something the staff design for.

12. Michael Tan

Michael Tan teaches growth mindset in a way that does not produce the empty praise most schools accidentally create when they first learn the concept.

The research on growth mindset is sound. Students who believe their intelligence is malleable work harder, persist longer, and recover from failure faster than students who believe intelligence is fixed. But most schools implement it badly. They start praising effort instead of strategy, and students learn that trying hard is enough even when they are using an ineffective method.

Michael's framework is called Strategic Feedback, and it teaches your staff how to praise the specific thinking move the student made, not the generic effort they displayed.

The difference looks like this:

• Generic effort praise. "I love how hard you worked on this essay." The student hears: effort equals success. Next time they struggle, they just try harder using the same ineffective approach.

• Strategic feedback. "I noticed you used a comparison structure to organise your argument. That made it much easier to follow your reasoning. What made you decide to use that approach?" The student hears: this specific strategy worked, and I should use it again.

Michael teaches your staff how to name the cognitive strategies they want to reinforce. "You checked your work before submitting it." "You asked a clarifying question when you did not understand." "You tried a different method when the first one did not work." Every one of these is a strategy students can repeat. None of them is generic praise.

He also teaches your staff how to respond to failure in a way that builds persistence. The script is: "This did not work yet. What is one thing you could change about your approach next time?" The word "yet" signals the mindset. The question "what could you change" teaches the student that failure is information, not identity.

Teachers who use Michael's framework stop accidentally reinforcing learned helplessness and start building the kind of resilience that transfers across every subject.

LEADERSHIP AND STRATEGIC PLANNING

Most school leadership development focuses on the person. How to be a better communicator, a better decision-maker, a better delegator. The speakers in this section focus on the system. How to structure your leadership team so decisions do not bottleneck at the principal. How to run strategic planning so the document does not sit on a shelf. How to diagnose whether your school's problems are structural, cultural, or both, and what to fix first.

13. Karen Mitchell

Karen Mitchell works with school principals on the problem almost every Perth school leader has but nobody names. You are the bottleneck, and you do not know how to stop being the bottleneck without losing control.

Her framework is built on one diagnostic question. If you were unavailable for two weeks, what decisions would not get made? The length of that list tells you how much your school depends on you personally, and how fragile your leadership structure actually is.

Karen teaches principals how to build decision-making authority into their leadership team without abdicating accountability. This is not delegation in the traditional sense, where you hand someone a task and check the result. This is transferring the actual authority to make the call, and living with the outcome even when you would have made a different choice.

Her session walks your leadership team through a decision audit:

• List every decision you made in the last month that required your approval.

• Sort them into three categories. Decisions only you can make because of statutory responsibility. Decisions you should make because they are high-stakes and irreversible. Decisions someone else could make if they had a clear framework and your trust.

• For every decision in the third category, build a decision framework. "If the cost is under $2,000 and it aligns with our strategic plan, approve it. If the cost is over $2,000 or it is a new direction, bring it to me first."

• Transfer the decision, communicate the transfer to the staff, and do not override the decision unless it violates the framework.

The principals who implement Karen's system report two immediate changes. Their workload drops because they are no longer the approval gate for every minor decision. Their leadership team's confidence increases because they finally have the authority to act, not just advise.

14. Stephen Harris

Stephen Harris specialises in running strategic planning processes that produce a document your staff will actually use.

Most Perth schools approach strategic planning the same way. The leadership team goes offsite, spends two days workshopping vision statements, produces a glossy document with five strategic priorities, presents it to staff, and watches it gather dust because nobody knows what to do with it on a Tuesday morning.

Stephen's framework is called Strategy to Monday. It teaches your leadership team how to translate strategic priorities into operational rhythms that your staff can see and feel every week.

The structure works in three phases:

• Phase one: Clarity. Your strategic priorities must pass the translation test. A middle leader should be able to read the priority and name three things they will start doing differently. If they cannot, the priority is too vague.

• Phase two: Ownership. Every strategic priority needs a named owner, a small working group, and a 90-day milestone. The owner is accountable. The working group does the work. The milestone is the proof that progress happened.

• Phase three: Cadence. Your leadership team sets a monthly review meeting where every owner reports one thing that worked, one thing that did not, and one decision they need from the group to keep moving. The review is not about accountability theatre. It is about clearing blockers in real time.

The schools that use Stephen's framework stop producing strategic plans that sit on shelves and start producing strategic plans that shape how your staff allocate time, budget, and energy every term.

15. Dr. Rebecca Singh

Dr. Rebecca Singh teaches school boards and principals how to govern the organisation without micromanaging the operation.

She developed her framework after consulting to 20 Perth independent school boards that had the same dysfunction. The board was either too hands-off and the principal had no strategic accountability, or too hands-on and the principal spent every board meeting defending operational decisions that should never have reached the boardroom.

Rebecca's model is called Altitude Governance. It teaches your board how to stay at the right altitude, high enough to govern the strategy and hold the principal accountable for outcomes, low enough to understand the constraints the principal is working inside.

The framework uses three boundaries:

• Boundary one: Ends versus means. The board sets the ends (student outcomes, financial sustainability, staff retention targets). The principal controls the means (how those outcomes are achieved). If the board is debating whether to hire another learning support teacher, the board has dropped below its altitude.

• Boundary two: Monitoring versus meddling. The board monitors progress through agreed metrics reported quarterly. Enrolment trends, staff turnover rates, financial variance, student achievement data. If the board is asking the principal to explain why a particular parent complained, the board is meddling.

• Boundary three: Support versus interference. The board supports the principal by removing external blockers, providing strategic guidance, and backing the principal's authority publicly. If the board is privately entertaining parent complaints about the principal's decisions, the board is interfering.

Rebecca runs a session where your board and your principal co-create the governance framework, agree on the boundaries, and commit to a 12-month trial where both sides hold the line. The schools that implement it report a dramatic reduction in board-principal tension and an increase in the principal's capacity to actually lead, because they are no longer managing up to a board that has confused governance with management.

PARENT AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

Parent engagement in schools tends to follow a pattern. The parents who are over-engaged and need boundaries, and the parents who are disengaged and need invitation. The speakers in this section teach your staff how to manage both, how to set expectations with the parents who email at 10pm expecting a response by morning, and how to reach the parents who never respond to emails at all.

16. Helen Pritchard

Helen Pritchard teaches communication boundaries for school staff dealing with parent expectations that have escalated beyond what is reasonable or sustainable.

She spent 12 years as a head of primary school in Perth and watched the same pattern repeat. A parent sends an email at 9pm. The teacher responds at 9.15pm because they want to be helpful. The parent now expects every email answered within the hour. The teacher burns out, resents the parent, and starts avoiding communication altogether.

Helen's framework is called Responsive Boundaries. It teaches your staff how to be highly responsive to parents without being constantly available.

Her session walks your staff through boundary-setting scripts:

• Response time expectations set in the first communication of the year. "I check emails twice a day, at 8am and 4pm. You can expect a response within 24 hours on school days."

• After-hours auto-responses that do not apologise. "I have received your email and will respond during school hours. If this is urgent, please contact the school office."

• Redirect scripts for parents who escalate operational questions into complaints. "I understand your concern. The best person to discuss this with is [name]. I have copied them on this email."

• Meeting-over-email for complex issues. "This feels like a conversation better suited to a meeting. I have availability on Tuesday at 3.30pm or Thursday at 8am. Let me know what works."

What makes Helen's framework effective is that it protects your staff without making parents feel dismissed. The boundaries are clear, communicated early, and applied consistently. Parents adjust their expectations because the expectations were never unclear.

Schools that implement her system report a reduction in after-hours teacher stress and an improvement in parent-teacher relationships, because the boundary is doing the work the teacher used to do through sheer willpower.

17. James O'Sullivan

James O'Sullivan works with schools on engaging the parents who never show up.

Most Perth schools focus their parent engagement efforts on the parents who are already engaged. The P&F committee, the sports day volunteers, the parents who attend every school event. The parents who need the engagement most are the ones who never come, and most schools do not know how to reach them.

James developed his framework while working in a school where 60 percent of families never attended parent-teacher interviews, never volunteered, and never responded to school communications. His research identified three barriers.

The first barrier is time. Parents who work shift work, single parents managing multiple jobs, and parents whose work does not give them flexibility cannot attend a 3.30pm meeting. The solution is not to tell them they should prioritise their child's education. The solution is to offer the meeting at 7am, at 6pm, or on a Saturday morning.

The second barrier is language. Parents whose English is not strong avoid school interactions because they feel embarrassed or intimidated. The solution is translated communications and the offer of an interpreter for meetings, flagged in the initial email so the parent does not have to ask.

The third barrier is trust. Parents who had negative school experiences themselves avoid schools because they assume every interaction will be a complaint about their child. The solution is to initiate contact for positive reasons first. "Your child did something great today and I wanted you to know" builds relational credit that makes the hard conversation possible later.

James teaches your staff how to map which families are disengaged, why they are disengaged, and what low-cost high-trust intervention to try first. The schools that use his approach do not convert every disengaged parent into a volunteer. They do convert disengaged parents into parents who trust the school enough to respond when something important happens.

18. Monica Rossi

Monica Rossi teaches schools how to manage the parent complaint that is not really about the issue they are naming.

She calls this the surface complaint versus the real complaint problem. A parent emails to complain that their child is not being extended in maths. The surface complaint is about differentiation. The real complaint is that the parent is anxious their child will not get into the selective secondary school they have decided is the only acceptable outcome.

Most teachers respond to the surface complaint. They explain the differentiation strategies they are using, they offer additional resources, they invite the parent to a meeting. The parent remains unsatisfied because the teacher is solving the wrong problem.

Monica teaches your staff how to listen for the real complaint underneath the surface complaint, and how to address it directly without escalating the conversation.

Her framework uses three diagnostic questions:

• Is this the first time the parent has raised this issue, or is this the third version of the same concern dressed in different language?

• Is the parent asking for a specific change, or are they expressing general dissatisfaction?

• Does the parent's concern match what you are seeing in the classroom, or is the parent describing a child you do not recognise?

If the parent has raised variations of the same concern multiple times, if they are expressing dissatisfaction without a clear request, and if their description of the child does not match your observations, you are dealing with an anxiety-driven complaint, not a curriculum complaint.

The response is not to argue. The response is to name the underlying concern and address it directly. "It sounds like you are worried about whether your child is on track for secondary school. Let me show you the data we use to monitor progress, and let's talk about what on-track actually looks like for a Year 5 student."

Teachers who use Monica's framework spend less time in circular email exchanges and more time having the one conversation that actually resolves the parent's concern, because they stopped solving the surface problem and started addressing the real one.

DIGITAL LEARNING AND INNOVATION

Technology in schools tends to be either over-adopted or under-adopted, and both produce the same outcome. Students are not learning better. The speakers in this section teach staff how to use technology in a way that enhances learning without replacing good teaching, and how to make decisions about edtech that are driven by pedagogy, not by the vendor's sales pitch.

19. Peter Chang

Peter Chang specialises in helping Perth schools evaluate edtech tools before they commit budget to them.

Most schools adopt technology the same way. A vendor demonstrates the platform, it looks impressive, the leadership team approves the purchase, the staff receive one hour of professional development, and six months later nobody is using it because it does not fit how your teachers actually work.

Peter's framework is called Pedagogy First Procurement. It teaches your leadership team how to ask the right questions before the contract is signed.

The framework uses a four-part evaluation:

• Does this tool solve a problem we have named, or a problem the vendor is naming for us? If your staff have not identified the need, the tool will not be adopted no matter how good the platform is.

• Does this tool fit inside our current workflow, or does it require us to change our workflow to fit the tool? Tools that require teachers to log into a separate system, duplicate data entry, or learn a new interface fail because the friction cost is higher than the value.

• Can we run a small pilot with three teachers for one term before we commit to a whole-school rollout? Pilots reveal the hidden friction points the vendor demonstration never shows you.

• What is the exit cost if this does not work? If your student data is locked inside a proprietary system and migration costs $15,000, you are no longer evaluating a tool. You are entering a vendor relationship that will be expensive to leave.

Peter runs a session that teaches your leadership team how to pilot, evaluate, and decide on edtech without getting locked into three-year contracts for tools your staff will never use. The schools that implement his process spend less on technology and get more value from the tools they do adopt, because the decision was driven by pedagogy, not by sales.

20. Dr. Fiona Leigh

Dr. Fiona Leigh teaches digital literacy as a critical thinking skill, not a technology skill.

Most Perth schools teach students how to use Google Docs, how to build a presentation, how to code in Scratch. Those are valuable skills, but they are not digital literacy. Digital literacy is the ability to evaluate the credibility of information, recognise algorithmic bias, understand how platforms shape behaviour, and make decisions about technology use that align with your values.

Fiona's framework teaches your staff how to embed critical digital literacy into every subject without creating a standalone unit that nobody has time for.

Her approach uses three teaching moments:

• Source evaluation in research tasks. Every time a student cites a source, they answer three questions. Who created this? What is their expertise or agenda? How recent is the information? This becomes automatic after the tenth time, and students stop citing the first Google result without thinking.

• Algorithm awareness in media analysis. When students discuss a news story or a social media trend, ask: how did this content reach you? What content did the algorithm decide not to show you? Who benefits from you seeing this? Students start to recognise that their feed is curated, not neutral.

• Tech decision audits in wellbeing contexts. Ask students to track their screen time for a week, identify the apps that make them feel better and the apps that make them feel worse, and make one change based on the data. This is not a shame exercise. It is a data-informed decision-making exercise.

Teachers who use Fiona's approach do not need to become technology experts. They need to become comfortable asking critical questions about technology in the same way they already ask critical questions about text.

21. Mark Stevens

Mark Stevens works with schools on the problem of technology replacing human connection in student learning.

He developed his framework after observing 30 Perth schools that had invested heavily in devices, learning management systems, and online curricula, and were now noticing a decline in student engagement, an increase in student anxiety, and a decrease in the quality of student work.

His research identified the pattern. Technology is excellent at delivering content, tracking completion, and scaling access. Technology is poor at building relationships, teaching nuance, and responding to the moment when a student is confused.

Mark's framework is called High-Tech High-Touch. It teaches your staff how to use technology for the things technology does well, and reserve human interaction for the things humans do well.

The model splits tasks into three categories:

• Automate. Content delivery, basic skill practice, and assignment submission. If the task does not require human judgment, let the technology handle it.

• Augment. Real-time feedback, differentiated pathways, and data analysis. Use technology to give you information about student understanding faster than you could gather manually, then use that information to inform your human response.

• Reserve for human. Conceptual teaching, Socratic questioning, emotional support, and the moment when a student is struggling and needs someone to notice. These are the tasks technology cannot do, and the tasks your staff should protect time for.

Teachers who implement Mark's framework stop feeling like technology is replacing them and start using technology to free up time for the work only they can do. The outcome is not less technology. The outcome is better-aligned technology.

INCLUSION AND DIVERSITY

Inclusion work in schools often sits in the too-hard basket because the stakes feel high and the language shifts faster than most staff can keep up with. The speakers in this section do not run sessions on what you are not allowed to say. They run sessions on how to build a school culture where every student feels like they belong, and how to respond when you get it wrong, because everyone gets it wrong at some point.

22. Gemma Li

Gemma Li teaches inclusive language and practice for staff who want to get it right but are afraid of getting it wrong.

Her framework is built on one principle. Inclusion is not about perfection. It is about repair. You will misgender a student. You will mispronounce a name. You will make an assumption based on a student's appearance that turns out to be incorrect. The question is not whether you make the mistake. The question is what you do in the three seconds after.

Gemma teaches your staff a four-word repair script. "I'm sorry. Thank you. Moving on."

Here is how it works in practice:

• You call a student by the wrong name. You stop mid-sentence, make eye contact, and say: "I'm sorry, [correct name]. Thank you for your patience." Then you continue the lesson. You do not over-apologise. You do not make the student comfort you. You acknowledge the mistake, correct it, and move forward.

• You assume a student celebrates Christmas and they do not. You say: "I'm sorry for assuming. Thank you for letting me know. I'll remember that." Then you adjust your language and do not make the same assumption next time.

The repair takes five seconds. The relationship damage from avoiding the repair, making excuses, or getting defensive lasts the rest of the term.

Gemma's session also teaches your staff how to use inclusive language as a default without it feeling performative. "Parents and carers" instead of "mums and dads." "Partner" or "family" instead of assuming heterosexual relationships. "They" as a singular pronoun when you do not know someone's gender. These are small changes that signal safety to students whose family structures or identities do not fit the default assumption.

The schools that implement Gemma's approach report an increase in student trust and a decrease in staff anxiety, because inclusion stopped being a compliance checklist and started being a relational skill.

23. Samuel Okafor

Samuel Okafor works with schools on racial literacy for staff teams that are predominantly white teaching student cohorts that are increasingly diverse.

He does not run a session on unconscious bias that makes your staff feel guilty. He runs a session on pattern recognition that makes your staff more effective.

His framework teaches your staff how to notice the patterns that disadvantage students of colour in ways that feel neutral but are not. The student whose name you mispronounce for three months because you did not ask them to correct you. The student who gets sent to the deputy for defiance when a white student doing the same behaviour gets a verbal warning. The student whose essay on racism is marked down for being too emotional when emotion is the appropriate response to the content.

Samuel's session uses a case study method:

He presents six real scenarios from Perth schools where race was a factor in the outcome, and asks your staff to identify the decision point where a different choice would have produced a different result.

• A Year 9 student of African heritage is told their braided hairstyle does not comply with the uniform policy. The decision point: did the person who wrote the policy consider that "neat and tidy" is a racially coded phrase that disadvantages textured hair?

• A Year 11 student who is the only student of colour in the top maths class stops participating. The decision point: did the teacher notice and check in, or assume the student was disengaged?

• A parent with an accent is interrupted twice in a meeting by a teacher who finishes their sentences for them. The decision point: did anyone in the room notice the interruption and name it?

The staff leave the session with a heightened awareness of the small moments where racial dynamics shape student experience, and a commitment to noticing those moments in real time instead of only in hindsight.

24. Dr. Anne Tran

Dr. Anne Tran specialises in supporting neurodiverse students in mainstream classrooms without requiring a diagnosis or additional funding.

She developed her framework after working with 50 Perth teachers who had students in their class who were clearly struggling with sensory processing, executive function, or social communication, but whose families could not afford a private assessment or were stuck on an 18-month public waitlist.

Anne's framework is called Universal Design for Neurodiversity. It teaches your staff how to structure the classroom environment and the task design in a way that supports neurodiverse students without singling them out, and benefits every student in the room.

Her session covers six high-impact adjustments:

• Predictable routines with visible schedules. Neurodiverse students regulate better when they know what is coming. A visual schedule on the board benefits every student who struggles with transitions.

• Movement breaks built into the lesson. A two-minute stretch or a walk to deliver a note to the office gives students with sensory needs a regulation tool and gives every student a cognitive reset.

• Choice in how students demonstrate learning. If the goal is to show understanding of the water cycle, let students choose between a written explanation, a labelled diagram, or a verbal explanation to you. The content is the same. The access point is flexible.

• Reduced visual clutter in the classroom. Neurodiverse students are often overstimulated by busy wall displays. A clean visual environment benefits every student trying to focus.

• Explicit teaching of social scripts. Neurodiverse students often miss the implicit social cues neurotypical students pick up automatically. Teaching the script for how to join a group, how to disagree respectfully, or how to ask for help benefits every student still learning those skills.

• Quiet workspaces available without stigma. A desk in the corner with noise-cancelling headphones available to any student who needs it removes the barrier of having to ask.

Teachers who implement Anne's framework report fewer behaviour incidents, higher task completion rates, and an increase in student self-advocacy, because the adjustments normalised asking for what you need instead of masking until you burn out.

MENTAL HEALTH AND STAFF WELLBEING

Student wellbeing gets the funding and the programme time. Staff wellbeing gets the pizza lunch and the expectation that you are fine. The speakers in this section work on the problem most Perth schools know exists but do not name. Your staff are burnt out, your leadership team is running on empty, and the wellbeing strategies you have tried so far have not worked because they treated the symptoms instead of the structure.

25. Dr. Charlotte Hayes

Dr. Charlotte Hayes teaches sustainable workload design for school leaders who are losing staff to burnout.

She spent five years researching teacher retention in Perth schools and found that workload is not the problem. Uncontrollable workload is the problem. Teachers can handle 60-hour weeks if they feel like the work matters and they have agency over how it gets done. Teachers cannot handle 45-hour weeks if the work feels pointless and they have no control over their time.

Charlotte's framework is called Effort to Impact Mapping. It teaches your leadership team how to audit every task your staff are doing, map the effort required against the impact produced, and eliminate the high-effort low-impact work that is burning your people out.

The process works in four steps:

• List every task your staff are required to do in a term. Lesson planning, marking, reporting, meetings, yard duty, data entry, parent communication, co-curricular, professional development.

• Estimate the hours per term each task requires.

• Rate each task on impact. High impact means it directly improves student learning or staff capability. Low impact means it serves compliance, appearance, or legacy process.

• Identify the high-effort low-impact tasks and either eliminate them, reduce the frequency, or redesign them to take half the time.

The schools that implement Charlotte's process identify an average of 40 hours per term of low-impact work that can be eliminated or redesigned. That is an extra hour a week your staff get back, and an extra hour they can allocate to the work that actually improves outcomes.

The professional development speakers for schools in this list work across different domains, but they share one thing. They understand that a great PD session is not measured by how inspired your staff feel on the day. It is measured by whether your staff are still using the framework six months later, whether the conversation shifted, and whether the work your school is trying to do became slightly easier because someone came in and gave your people a better map.

If your school is in Perth and your next staff development day is coming up, the question is not whether you book a speaker. The question is whether you book a speaker who understands the specific pressures your staff are under, the constraints they are working inside, and the gap between knowing something needs to change and having a practical tool to change it. For guidance on building a cohesive PD calendar, explore how to build a whole-school PD plan that actually sticks. Your next step is to reach out to the speaker whose work matches the problem your school is trying to solve. That email is easier to write than you think.