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Lyndsay Connors was appointed to the Commonwealth Schools Commission in 1983 and in that capacity, chaired the Australian Curriculum Development Council. In 1988, she was appointed to chair the Schools Council of the National Board of Employment, Education and Training. In the early 1990s, she served as Deputy Chair of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and was a member of the Board of the Open Learning Technology Corporation and the Australian Children’s Television Foundation. She subsequently worked in the New South Wales Department of Education and Training, first as director for inner city schools, then as director of equity programs and, later, of higher education. When the New South Wales Public Education Council was set up in 2002, she was appointed as chair. In 2006 she was appointed as a Member in the Order of Australia; and then as an Officer in 2017. She has served as President of the Australian College of Educators. In 2012 she was awarded honorary life membership of the Australian Education Union. As honorary Adjunct Associate Professors in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney, Lyndsay Connors and Dr Jim McMorrow co-authored the 2010 independent report New Directions in Schools Funding: A Proposed Model. In 2015, they co-authored a further report on schools funding in the Australian Education Review series produced by the Australian Council for Educational Research: Imperatives in schools funding.
CRAIG: let us start at the beginning. Where and when did you grow up, and what schools did you go to? Do you think the experience of your own schooling conditioned your thinking about education in later times?
LYNDSAY: I was born in 1941 and started school early, aged 4, at my local public school in what was then an outer suburb of Sydney. I then spent my two last primary school years in a New South Wales Opportunity Class (OC) in a school a few suburbs away from home. And then on to an academically selective girls high school, where I completed the New South Wales Leaving Certificate in 1958.
I have certainly never felt that personal nostalgia was a sound basis for policy. I am not sure how much my own experience of schooling contributed to my later thinking about...