Episode 5: What if we have more freedom in schools than we think?

What if the way we designed career education wasn't just through a lens of “what works”, but “what **might** work **here**”.  The “here” makes it about context. The “might” makes it an experiment - something that is crucial to how we design schooling for student futures.  In this episode, Liv and Marian talk with Professor Glenn Savage, Professor of Education Futures at the University of Melbourne and author of The Quest for Revolution in Australian Schooling Policy. Glenn was the 15 year old in punk bands asking his teachers why they were learning any of this. He is now a policy sociologist who spends his time on the frontline of how policy gets made, and how schools enact it.  We get into: - How we should see schools as possibility architectures. They open up certain futures for young people and close down others, and they shape what students believe they can become. - The difference between direction and destination, and why asking a 15 year old to choose what they will be is an impoverished way to prepare them for an uncertain future. - Why a policy mandate isn’t necessarily the answer to all our career education problems. NAPLAN gets attention because of its accountability stakes, but not every priority can or should carry that weight, so the rest has to win hearts and minds. - Why the future of schooling, at least according to the OECD's Flourishing Futures work, is moving away from the 'human capital' logic, which means it's more about living better lives than building skills for the economy. - How school leaders can find more freedom than they think, even inside increasingly prescriptive and compliance driven systems. And in this episode's I Didn’t Know That Was a Thing, Glenn brings the mystery job of the person who presses the button for Wharfie Time at the Fremantle Dockers. Turns out there's a few jobs in sport that require the very important job of pushing buttons.  We finish with a quick fire round, including the one thing Glenn thinks we should focus our productive rage on: learning how to be misbehaved without getting yourself into trouble. Links to Glenn’s book, his writing for The Conversation and his university profile are in the show notes. **Learn more about Glenn and his work** - Professor Glenn Savage, University of Melbourne: https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/197905-glenn-savage - ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn-Savage - The Conversation author page: https://theconversation.com/profiles/glenn-savage-102699 - The Quest for Revolution in Australian Schooling Policy (Routledge, 2021): https://www.routledge.com/The-Quest-for-Revolution-in-Australian-Schooling-Policy/Savage/p/book/9781003141792 **The books we mentioned** - Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing\Like\a\_State - The Allure of Order, Jal Mehta: https://academic.oup.com/book/40930 - Rebel Ideas, Matthew Syed: https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/matthew-syed/rebel-ideas/9781473613942/ **Reports and organisations mentioned** - OECD, Education for Human Flourishing: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/education-for-human-flourishing\_cb043494.html - World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs Report 2025: https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/ - Amplify Music Education: https://amplifymusiceducation.com.au **Get in touch** Find us on Instagram @thegreatcareersprogram and on Substack at thegreatcareersprogram.substack.com for episode recaps, research links, and the conversation between episodes. Got a question, a story, or something you want us to talk about? Email us at [hi@thegreatcareersprogram.com](mailto:hi@thegreatcareersprogram.com). **Credits** The Great Careers Program is a collaboration between BECOME Education and Coherence Co-Lab, and is hosted and produced by Liv Pennie and Marian Wright, with production support from Bev Laing. Music by Chad Crouch.