Victorian Educational Leadership Consortium

High quality but inexpensive professional support and development is provided by VELC‚ the Victorian Educational Leadership Consortium, a partnership of the AEU‚ Deakin University and the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development.

VELC is a PD consultancy which provides a range of professional learning programs for principals and assistant principals‚ as well as programs for aspirant and emerging leaders and leadership teams‚ to support their growth‚ learning and wellbeing. It runs one and two-day workshops throughout the year‚ including:

It also tailors programs to the needs of individual schools‚ to support them in managing change by:

  • Providing information‚ guided discussion‚ and referral to appropriate facilitators
  • Gathering information from staff
  • Providing reports‚ analysing issues and making recommendations
  • Acting as a critical friend to support leadership teams
  • Developing a whole PD plan to support the directions of the school.

For more information about VELC programs and services, contact:
Ross Dean, VELC project developer & manager - (03) 9418 4873
Mary O'Hagan, VELC administration officer - (03) 9418 4967

Balanced Leadership: McREL leadership summits

VELC, in collaboration with leading US education consultancy McREL, will run two leadership summits in Melbourne and Brisbane in early 2012.

What Matters Most: Connecting vision with action is a two-day summit that will offer world's best practice and research for school leadership teams, taking as its starting point McREL's What Matters Most framework for school improvement.

Turning what works in teaching, leading and learning into innovation and results is a three-day course offered to educators in the Western Metropolitan region who have already completed the Balanced Leadership course. For details of both courses, download the course flyers below.

  • What Matters Most — Melbourne, Flemington Racecourse, February 23–24: Download flyer (PDF)
  • What Matters Most — Brisbane, Novotel, March 2–3: Download flyer (PDF)
  • Turning What Works ... into Innovation and Results — Melbourne, Flemington Racecourse, February 20–22: Download flyer (PDF)
What the research says

The Balanced Leadership program was the subject of an evaluation by researchers at Texas A&M University and the University of Southern Florida, led by Robert J Miller and Roger Goddard, published in Novemebr 2011. It noted that, despite compelling evidence for the importance of leadership to improvements in instruction and school effectiveness, "effective leadership training programs are not widely available and few training programs are directly supported by research evidence" (p1). Among its findings, it concluded:

  • "The Balanced Leadership program decidedly delivered substantive treatment effects after only 50% of the training was complete" (p10)
  • "Balanced Leadership itself is not so much a grand theory of educational administration as it is a compilation and synthesis of what works in education leadership research" (p3)
  • "Our findings confirm that the multi-session delivery of the McREL Balanced Leadership program is effective in producing measurable learning of the principles, strategies and techniques represented in McREL's BLPD program" (p14)
  • "Clearly, the treatment principals have gained knowledge of leadership principles, strategies and techniques the research literature has linked to improved student outcomes" p15.

Ref: Evaluation of principals' professional development learning: Results from a randomized control trial, Robert J. Miller, Roger Goddard, Minjung Kim, Yvonne Goddard, Patricia Schroeder Texas A&M University and Eun Sook Kim University of Southern Florida 2011


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