Would mandating career education or anything that's of importance right now in the world have the impact that it wanted to have?

There are so many ways I could get into that question.

I mean, you know, like to be – and I don't mean to be flippant because I'll give a more academic response in a minute, but you can't make people do stuff they don't want to do and you can't make people value things they don't want to do unless – there is some really important factor attached to it like a measurement that matters that decides um something so like naplan is a great example because schools are publicly rewarded or shamed for better or worse based on their results so you introduce what in the public policy world we would call You introduce a policy instrument like NAPLAN that has real accountability effects and real implications and everyone jumps up and does something because that is the thing that matters.

But you can't do that for every area and you don't want to do that for every area because it's not, you know... possible or feasible or a good idea to have every area high stakes attached to some sort of measure like that so in a way to get people to do things you've got to win their hearts and minds you've got to see that it's important when the curriculum has so much in it and there's so much going on you know you've got to you've got to make the case that this is something that needs to be really promoted and privileged so that would be my really like layman's terms answer But to go back to the idea of alignment thinking, that argument came out of my book, The Quest for Revolution in Australian Schooling Policy.

And the short kind of version of that argument was I'm really worried that we've had sort of decades of reform.

in Australia that have pretty much been based around a logic that says the path to improvement lies in just finding what works and then put in place, like finding the evidence.

We know what works, let's use that and let's put in place processes and policies and practices and measures to make sure everyone's doing what works.

you talk about, you know, a leader and a teacher exercising their autonomy and their agency in a professional sense, What is your advice for schools and leaders who are really like in that tension? How do they exercise that sense of agency when so much is becoming more and more sort of prescriptive and regimented?