About
Advancing educational outcomes
Who we are
Fogarty EDvance was founded by the Fogarty Foundation in 2012. It was established to support schools in challenging communities by enhancing the capacity of school leaders to address the complex challenges in their schools.
Our vision
To improve the educational outcomes of children attending schools in challenging communities. We see a future where every child can have a great education in Western Australia.
Every child deserves a quality education regardless of their postcode.
Why we need to support our schools
Students attending schools in low socio-economic communities face challenges that make it difficult to achieve valuable learning outcomes.
- Students from households with less educated parents are 4 years behind students from highly educated parents
- 1 in 2 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults don’t finish schools. This gap has remained the same for the past decade.
- The share of young people not learning or earning is 50% in the most disadvantaged communities, compared with 13% of young people from more affluent backgrounds
As in business the most valuable strategy to increase the effectiveness of a school is to improve the quality of its leadership. High quality school leadership enables high quality teaching, enhances parent and community support for the school and the fundamental aim: learning by the children. This is why we decided to invest in a program to improve school leadership by creating Fogarty EDvance.
School Improvement Program
We provide high quality support to build leadership capability and increase the overall effectiveness of schools, through our unique three-year School Improvement Program, which brings together the best resources and tools from education, business, philanthropy and community groups.
Supporting school leaders
The Fogarty EDvance Program is school (and school leader) driven, context specific and adaptable. The key focus is on supporting school leaders to identify effective practice that can work for them and translate that practice into their schools and classrooms.
Fogarty EDvance believes that with strong leadership, a whole school improvement strategy can be successfully implemented.
EDvance tackles all of the key variables in school reform – school leadership, effective teaching and assessment that drives learning – and supports schools to make real differences to the life chances of children and young people. It is an impressive demonstration of the impact that schools can make, working together in an evidence based improvement program.
Trialling new ideas
We learn from best-practice research and what works in our EDvance schools, as well as high performing schools across the country. This enables us to identify gaps in the provision of support to schools and trial innovative ideas that might otherwise not come to life.
In recent years EDvance has focused efforts upon trialling high impact instruction for secondary schools and professional learning models that incorporate a heavy emphasis on coaching and feedback for classroom teachers adopting new practices. In trialling these approaches we are enriching the evidence base and supporting the scaling of effective practices in WA.
Advocacy
Fogarty EDvance plays an important role in an education system where schools are increasingly more autonomous. Schools are afforded more flexibility to innovate, however they can find themselves without a clear pathway in escalating key opportunities requiring coordinated action beyond the school level.
EDvance can highlight issues and opportunities requiring further investment from other players in the system. In recent years, EDvance focused on the challenge of principal transitions, student transiency, the literacy skills of our year 7 students entering high school and the opportunity to see double the number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds entering university by 2022.
