Victoria Maynard*

Victoria Maynard*

Unknown

Victoria* has been actively involved in educational change since becoming a teacher in the late 1960s. Her first teaching position was at Drouin High School where she was involved in development of materials for the internal assessment of Biology as responsibility for assessment began to be moved from predominantly external to mostly school-based. She remembers one of the influential figures in education at the time was Robert Reed, who in 1968 was Director of Secondary Education and phased out the Intermediate Certificate examinations and developed the ‘Ten Principles of Secondary Education’, which helped to guide reform. She recalls how this marked the end of segregated subjects such as woodwork and created foundations for greater equity in schools in which everyone had to have access to all subjects in the curriculum. 'Victoria went on to work in the Psychology Office of the Education Department in the 1970s, initially part-time while studying, and then taking on a full-time position that included some in-service training for teachers and some research work with Kyneton High School. Victoria remembers that the special annexe program initiated by the teachers at Kyneton High and supported by the Psychology Office of the Department of Education was highly successful: ‘It was really interesting to see that you could actually move a group of students to having better social relationships and more comfort with being around the school and so on’. She notes that the active progressive schools’ movement in Victoria was highly diverse, offering options for students who were disengaged socially, academically and emotionally from school and also options for more connected students and families wanting to push the boundaries of what education was about. She remembers it being an amazing time in education – ‘the sorts of things that you could do; it was incredible’. Victoria then joined the Australian Labor Party and in 1979 was involved in the Policy Committee for Youth, Sport and Recreation, initiating a subcommittee dealing with issues of youth unemployment and education. This subcommittee engaged with youth and developed a series of motions for the State Conference, enabling some substantial change in the ways education was structured and how it could better support all students.

*A pseudonym

Primary: Unknown

Secondary: Unknown

Tertiary: [Melbourne?] Teachers’ College

University of Melbourne (Science/Psychology) (1970s)

MacRobertson Girls High School, c1953–1965 (detail). Australian News and Information Bureau. State Library of Victoria, SLV_H88.33/95