Rebranding InformEducation to Kirstin Bourne

For those who don’t know, way back in January 2015 I was facing a huge decision. Our son had been born in December 2013 and I knew that 2015 was the cut-off point where I either recommitted to working full-time in a school or I made a leap of faith and started working for myself. I think all of us who have taught have had moments where we asked ourselves how much we were enjoying our work and if what we were doing was really making the kind of difference that is important to us. By the beginning of 2015 I knew that what I really enjoyed was problem solving and I knew that I wanted to work beyond a single school. Initially, I thought that I would be focusing on English departments and the English curriculum, and so I set up my business, InformEducation to do that. The initial name came from two ideas: the first was that I felt as though I had expertise that I could share with others and that I could make a positive difference; the second was a lack of confidence in my own name. Looking at LinkedIn now, with the huge cult of the educational personality, not calling my business my own name seems nonsensical. But in 2015 I think I wanted to focus on the expertise that I had to offer and a brand name that put that up front made sense.

Fast forward eight years and I am in the extremely fortunate position where I have worked with schools who do know my name and know what I do. People now ask me why the business is called InformEducation and not Kirstin Bourne when what they are interested in are my ideas, perspectives and expertise. I stopped having a good answer to that question a long time ago, and so I called in an expert, Anna Stanford, who has been working behind the scenes with me for several months now on my rebrand that I’m so excited to launch with this newsletter. 

I had the luxury of really talking through what I do in my business with Anna, and how that work now falls into three main categories. I still love working with English departments and do everything from re-vamping curriculum to using data to selecting new and exciting texts to really focusing on strategic ways of improving VCE results. What I also do now is work with a small team to produce bespoke curriculum documentation for units of work that run from anything from a couple of weeks to a whole semester. This curriculum documentation includes overviews, lesson plans, resources, basically everything and anything that a school wants. I am loving this work because it really reflects my belief that there isn’t a single way to “fix” results or teaching and (despite what people on LinkedIn might market to you) there isn’t a single book or method that once implemented will work miracles. Instead, I like to listen to schools and teachers. I like to hear what you think and what you do and also what you want to do and then I go away and work with the team to make something that I think will work for your very particular school and students. It’s bespoke and we are having amazing feedback from the schools we have produced this for.

The second area I am now doing a lot of work in is whole-school improvement. I’ve followed and read a lot of the work out of the UK from Katharine Birbalsingh, Alex Quigley, David Didau, Kathrine Mortimore and Daisy Christodoulou for a while now. In the often fraught world of educational politics, I follow them because they are interested in smart people who want to know what actually works in a classroom when teachers implement ideas and how they can make teaching and learning better for students. The real-world experiences and success that they reflect is something that I admire and want to learn from. There are also people here in Australia doing the same thing and I’m closely following thought leaders like Elena Douglas, data storytellers like Selena Fisk, Jamie Clark who shares his amazing one-pagers free of charge and Reid Smith, whose Ochre Education project is incredible. All of these people excite me because they express a passion and a freshness for education that I want to learn from and use myself. Again, this means I’m not selling a “method”, instead I’m working with schools to find for them the best ideas (plural!) that are out there and thinking about how a combination of these might work for them, their teachers and their students.

The final big thing that I have been so lucky to work on for several years now are system projects. Those are the projects that I have been delivering for Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools (MACS) in the VCE and Disciplinary Literacy spaces. System projects impact huge numbers of schools and so they are about building trust and connections across organisations in order to be able to respond to specific areas of need in the most effective way possible. These projects keep me thinking about learning and teaching and challenge me every day to think again about how ideas and learning can be most effectively shared and improved by teachers of very different groups of students. In 2023, I’m excited to be working with another system on a project that I’m looking forward to sharing the details of later on in the year.

I suppose this is a rather long winded way of saying that all of these things that I now do are a long way from just being “Informed” about education. What I now hope that I bring is experience, expertise and the ability to really listen and apply my ideas to different contexts. Kirstin Bourne as a new brand is about saying that this is what I do. I’m not selling a book or a method, what I am doing is offering you everything that I know and shaping it to benefit what you need. Oh, and as for the lightbulb… well, it’s about ideas and inspiration. Working with so many schools and teachers, I am constantly inspired by what I see and the amazing educational ideas that people have. The lightbulb is as much about my clients as it is about me. Ideas, after all, are what really great teaching is always about.