 Yeah, good. I'm observing which of the CFA and the SCS people move the slides. Okay, I've been giving the thumbs up from Keith so it's time to go. Alright, good morning everybody. Welcome to the 2015 State Forum. It's great to see so many people here. From my understanding this is the first time that the forums had a combination of SCS and CFA people here. So it's a great turnout and it's good to see all your smiling faces. My name's Matt Henry. I'm part of the CFA project program design team and my responsibility is for school, program, development and education. Today I'm going to be talking about building relationships with schools and disaster learning too loud. I've spent a long time working outdoors and sometimes I get a bit over the top. My background, just briefly, I've been with CFA for the past 18 months. It's been a fantastic time. We've worked on some really interesting and challenging projects and I'm working with a really good team. In my previous life I was a teacher for 20 years. Have we got any teachers in the room? Okay, so you're going to know what I'm talking about in a minute. I spent 15 years working with youth at risk who were disengaged from school from disadvantaged backgrounds. So I've had some pretty interesting days over the past 15 years and surprisingly since I've been at CFA headquarters at Burwood I've only been sworn at four times and I've only had two chairs thrown at me. So it's a real change to where I was working before. But it's not all about me today, that's my past. I'm sure that everybody's been flying down the highway to get here at the speed limit of course. I've passed a lot of CFA and SES vehicles along the road. So you probably haven't even had a chance to say good-bye to people. So I want to give you one minute and Jamie's got the stopwatch on. Turn to the person on your left and your right. Say good-bye, shake their hand. Ask them where they're from. Okay, I've just been given the one minute place because I thought it was a good idea. I have to speak for half an hour this morning and I've introduced myself so if we just start in the front row if you could all go through and just introduce yourselves. Whenever I travel to a new place and I shouldn't say Chriswick's a new place I live in Geelong, I'm only an hour and 20 minutes away. It's only two hours to get to Burwood every morning. So it was quite a nice drive this morning but I had fond memories of Creswick. I went to college in Ballarat and we used to come and swim in a lagoon here. Is everyone from Creswick here? No? It was a lagoon, I think it was an old mine but it had this really weird bluey green water. And years later I found that there was something to do with what they used to use when they were extracting the gold from the soil. I was asking these to use. So I hope that wasn't the case. So I like to investigate where I'm going so I looked it up on the internet. Pretty interesting place. Gold Rush Town in the 1850s started to die off when they hit it big in Ballarat and Castle Main. Lots of historic buildings lots of outdoor pursuits like riding, hiking, canoeing. Pretty interesting little town but I dug a little bit further and I found a map that is an SES CFA Jewel Badge map which is good. It talks about Victorian localities, flood, storm hazards and fire risk and if I can get this point of working that's Ballarat and we're just above that. And I dug a little bit further Creswick's had a pretty rough time over the past five years. An enormous flood in September. Have we got any people from Unit or Brigades who turned out to any of these events? Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. The fire at Ball Hills in 2013 and some pretty severe storms in 2015. So if you look back even further than that we're not going to do that today because this isn't a history lesson but Creswick's had a pretty rough time. But today what I'd like to talk about is three things in general. I want to look at disaster risk reduction and how that's developed over the past few decades. I want to look at agencies working together not just SES and CFA but all agencies and I want to look at building relationships with schools. So disaster risk reduction. We've been talking about it for a long time. In 2005 the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction and we love acronyms. A whole group of delegates from around the world got together and said you know what we need to do something about reducing the risks from disaster. As it says the conference underscored the need for and identified ways of building the resilience of nations and communities to disaster. There was five key priorities and as you look at those they all make good sense. The first one was to ensure that disaster risk reduction is a national and a local priority with a strong institutional basis for implementation. So that involves getting governments both federal and local and international on board to start looking at the issue. The second key priority was identify, assess and monitor disaster risks and enhance early warning. So as emergency services organisations would play a big part in that. The third one used knowledge, innovation and education to build a culture of safety and resilience at all levels and being a teacher I can see that's an important priority. Number four reduced the underlying risk factors so starting to look at where we build our houses what we build them out of those sorts of issues and to strengthen disaster preparedness for effective response at all levels. Now the higher go framework is about 70 pages long so I've tried to condense it into about three slides and I've tried to just focus on what I'm talking about today and I'm sure that there'd be lots of other discussions and I'm happy to talk with people over lunch or over the next couple of days about any other issues that they might have about that framework. So I'm going to look at key priority three priority fraction three because it's to do with education. I'm going to use knowledge, innovation and education to build a culture of safety and resilience at all levels. That makes pretty good sense doesn't it? I think that's a good priority. And here's a quote from the framework Disasters can be substantially reduced if people are well informed and motivated towards a culture of disaster prevention and resilience and as people working out in the field you'd be doing that every day. But the part that's interesting to me from an education point of view it says which in turn requires the collection compilation and dissemination of relevant knowledge and information on hazards, vulnerabilities and capacities. That's a mouthful I know but what that's saying is is that it's not just about creating, not just students in schools but communities in general. From that key priority area there's activities from priority action three. These are all about education. We want to do some work with education and training once again. This has been condensed so it's not the entire framework by any stretch. Promote the inclusion of disaster risk reduction knowledge in relevant sections of school curricula preparedness programs in schools and institutions of higher education. Promote the implementation of programs and activities in schools for learning how to minimise the effects of hazards. And the last one to develop training and learning programs in disaster risk reduction targeted at specific sectors development planners, emergency managers local government officials and I would include teachers and principals and schools in that as well. Does that sound familiar to anyone that we're going to do? Does RC give it away? We had a royal commission in 1939 and Judge Stretton said we need to do more about educating our students about the hazards and risks of bushfire. That's a long time ago. 2009 one of the recommendations of the royal commission was we need to do more about educating our students about the risks of fire. That's a long time ago too. The higher go framework was in 2005. Admittedly it goes through to 2015 but 2005 is a long time ago. I haven't seen much action on the ground in schools. I've seen stacks of action everywhere else but not necessarily in schools and that's what I'm here to talk about is schools and education. So where do we go from here? I asked you to ask people where they were from and I didn't even find out who everyone's from. Is anyone from Malacuta? You're a good man to come here on a weekend. You could be fishing. What about a chuka? No? I'm going to a chuka next week. I love a chuka. Portland Wow, you're a long way from home. Anyone from Geelong? Go cats. I'm from Geelong. Eddie, is anyone from Richmond? If they were, they'd be standing on the seat with their scarf on. We've got a Richmond supporter. As I walked into the car park today I must have seen a hundred vehicles, maybe more. Badge CFA SES Who came in a unit or brigade vehicle? I knew that was going to happen. I tried to book a pool car at headquarters last week and our pool system bless you our pool system at CFA works really well until everyone wants to go somewhere at the same time. So I thought, well that's a bit of a bummer. I'm going to have to drive my own car from Geelong. It's not that far. And then during the week I'm driving down the highway listening to the radio as I do a lot and I came up with an idea as I was listening to the news. Does anyone know what this picture is of? It's a golf course. It's awesome, isn't it? Does anyone know what this building here is? That's where we are now. I took that picture this morning as I landed in my chopper. I wouldn't do that. It's a government agency. I worked for the government. We didn't carpool. That wouldn't have been a bad idea. It would have only cost two and a half thousand. Alright, but back to the serious side of things. Putting the high-go framework into practice and I failed to mention that at the start of this year there was the Sendai framework that was developed. The high-go framework was 2005 to 2015. The Sendai framework from 2015 to 2030. My hope is that in 2030 we're not having a forum and I'm standing here a fair bit older than I am now saying, remember when I was saying we had to do something about this and we still haven't done anything? That's our challenge. How do we find a place for our messages in a crowded school curriculum? That's me in the middle saying, hey, fire safety is really important but it doesn't necessarily have to me. It could be someone who works for SES. It could be someone who works for Lifestyle in Victoria. Anyone who's trying to make their way into a crowded school curriculum because I would hope that we think that our messages are important. Short story. I run a pilot project with seven schools in the Department of Education and Training on the bushfire risk register last year in Term 4 and the program was really great. I did some face-to-face contact with principals. I worked with teachers. I did some professional development with teachers. I talked to the kids. We developed a really, really good fire safety resource for both bushfire and home fire. We turned it out into the classrooms and we had some amazing results and I'll show you some of those results. But that's not what the story is about. At the end of it, I was feeling really good and I went round and I spoke to all the principals who'd been part of the project and one of the principals said to me, you know what Matt? The program that CFI are running is probably one of the best programs we've ever seen and I'm not pumping up my entire set because I only was part of it. But he said, you know what the problem with the emergency services is? And I said, well, yeah. I said no because I didn't know there was any. He said, you're complete for the same space. He said, your program was fantastic and here it is and you had them all lined up on a bench. Your program was great. SES programs is awesome. Estes is fantastic. The ambulance is great. Lifestyle in Victoria one out of the box. There's even one from the Attorney General's Department about disaster resilience education for schools. He said that's about 800 pages of information. This is our year five science tech for the year. We can't teach all that. There's nowhere for us to go. We just have to put it on the shelf and forget about it. What you guys need to do is you guys need to get together and come up with something that's that thick that we can then say, hey, this stuff's important to us and we're going to use it. I'll talk about our job in a minute. Not only have we got our stuff but there's other people in the space too. Looking at the curriculum and saying this is what we think's important but we're not working with them. They're doing it on their own. We're doing it on our own. So SES are working on their own. We're working on our own. I hope I don't step back and trip over those. So that's the story. So I walked out feeling sort of good and sort of like there was a lot of work to do. Here we are. Isn't it great when you're coming up with a little bit of a story and you go on the internet and you find something that's just perfect. Here's all the emergency services sitting around the table. There's not room for every one of our pieces in that puzzle. So we need to somehow do it and it's not going to be easy. It's our greatest challenge. It's not the curriculum's fault because the curriculum is what it is and if we wait for the curriculum to change the next time I speak here I'll be 57 and a half. Because I'm only 21 now. I mean I'll be 150. We need to be proactive. We need to get it going. How do we do it? I don't know. But I think a start would be get a table, get all our resources, sit down and say that's got to go. That's got to go. We both do this so let's put that in. You guys do this better than us so let's put that in. It's got to be a real collaborative approach otherwise we're never going to get there. The pilot project and I put this up because it's a project that I've been working on but I think it gives a pretty good idea about where I think we need to go. It's about developing relationships with schools. We did a pilot project I mentioned we worked with seven schools. We did some pre-pilot surveys sorry about the figures and numbers I know statistics lie 50% of the time but it's the best I could do. We've got 44 pre-pilot surveys back. We asked teachers had they taught any fire safety lessons in the previous two years. Notwithstanding that these are schools on the bushfire risk register so they're well aware of the risk. 15.9% said they taught class in the past two years. Any suggestions who they may have been CFA volunteers. Okay. On a scale of this is the part I found interesting. On a scale of one to five everyone not everyone but most teachers put the priority of teaching fire safety right at the top but weren't teaching anything. Why? I think there's a couple of reasons. The first one is because as an agency CFA has traditionally taken responsibility for teaching fire safety. Would everyone at CFA SES people agree with that? Yeah. Okay. In the 70s or 60s 60s. 50s. Towns were small they had three pubs a CFA and a school so we could do it then. Okay. But that's not the way it is anymore. Most local towns are buying their own pubs because there's no one who wants to run them. Our brigades don't have the capacity to get out into schools and I'll show you some statistics about that to do later. Okay. Postpilot. Obviously the same 44 teachers participated. All the teachers who returned to Postpilot survey had completed at least one fire safety lesson. Could this be skewed because only the people who returned the pilot project survey's taught a lesson? Yes. Okay. But I can't control everything. There was 105 lessons taught 485 students participated in fire safety education classes after we'd done some professional development with the teachers. That was a no brainer to me. After 20 years teaching someone gives you something and says hey, here's a really good resource. I'll sit you down for two hours and I'll talk you through it tell you all about it, give you the knowledge that you need and then if you see that it's important you can go out and teach the students in your class. That should be easy. The evaluation of the pilot project indicated that if you provide schools and teachers with well structured curriculum based, has to be curriculum based. Let's take the fire safety out of this now for anything to do with our emergency services organizations it'll increase the number of lessons that are taught. If school teachers feel confident in teaching fire safety because we give them professional learning opportunities they're more likely to teach your class. Now that's common sense I'm going to talk to you a little bit just towards the end of the session about a project that we're working on and we're going to try and test that out. This is why I don't sleep at night. This is stats I've paired it down to just primary schools because it's a big state. It's 2028 primary schools in Victoria that is including MFB and CFA Nearly half a million students we've got some fantastic volunteers who go out in our schools and teach our fire safe kids program. Pointing sometimes is they mention to me we taught three classes this year but we got asked to teach 33 and I feel bad about it I say hey, free is fantastic you're working full time you've only got the capacity to do what you can do but if we stuck with our 1148 presenters who are fantastic and I take that off to them that's 431 students they've got to be in contact with every year that's 20 classes that's 20 well you wouldn't do more than one class in a day that's 20 days not possible we need to say hey get out there and get the teachers on board if you add the 19,691 primary school teachers into that mix here comes the cavalry all of a sudden we're back to less than one class that's manageable not only that we can use our volunteers who in a lot of ways have got more experience and more expertise I don't necessarily want to see one of our volunteers going in and teaching the kids how to get down low and go go go yeah I do but the teachers could teach that I want our volunteers to answer questions from the students because that's where you really get the knowledge base out to the students I could stand here and talk to a whole bunch of students about fire safety and not really hit the mark with one particular point that they wanted to know what I wanted to learn about if I say hey has anyone got any questions which I will do shortly then I start to get some feedback about what it's all about my catch cry is that future training staff development is where our future efforts need to be directed we've got limited staff we need to use our limited staff to get out into the field there it is I should have had the Star Wars music on then it's a big state and there's a lot of schools that's all schools primary and secondary and MFA I travelled to all the secondary schools in the state last year who were on the bushfire register 40,000 K from Malacur to Muljura it was great fun didn't catch one fish it's cool they didn't take my fishing rod I was working this is the project that we're looking at working on now I had the great opportunity to meet with the community resilience coordinators from SES that was the first contact I've had with are any of them in the room it makes me feel good oh yes great and I've also met with our community education coordinators are any of them in the room I'm playing golf where is everyone they probably knew it was me so they went to the other one and heard it all before that's okay we're going to work on a joint project CFA, SES and the Department of Education and Training it's a bigger version of what we did with fire safety last year and it's to do with all hazards all agencies although we're going to be the lead agencies in it we're going to look at educating students about disaster we know it increases resilience from all the work that's been done over the last couple of decades but we want to put it into practice and we want to try and work in areas where heaven forbid and we hope it doesn't happen but we do some work with the community and then they're struck with fire flood or storm and we can somehow gauge how they recover from that is it better than they would have recovered beforehand is it the same have we made it worse project summary is about developing curriculum based resources the thing I'm really going to enjoy with that is when I if I could click back to the slide with the all the coloured people on it I would but I don't have to announce we need to get all those people at that table so when we're developing these resources I want to be able to say at the end of 2017 when this project winds up I knew that we were going to have teachers teaching more classes because we go into professional development and good resources but look what we designed we went from 800 pages to something that we can give to a principal with our salesman's hat on and say hey here's some really important messages let's try and get these out through being mapped to the curriculum that's what the principals want to know I say what we do is we go to the principals who then go to the teachers and say hey this stuff's important who then go to the students rather than crying about the curriculum authority and they won't change and they won't add our stuff in we need to go the other way in summary I think what our plan should be we should work together to develop classroom ready resources I think that's a no brainer we need to develop a shared responsibility approach for teaching disaster risk reduction in schools that makes good sense to we need to provide quality professional learning opportunities we need to become a professional learning machine so that we use the people who are in this room to train up teachers and whether we just have to make a calendar and say every year we're going to run for development for teachers we had an idea that we're going to run it across travel more than about 100k it takes time but we need to get the ball rolling and that's what I'm talking about I don't want to be standing here in when's the next forum next year that's okay if I'm standing here next year saying we haven't done much that's alright but in five years time I expect us to have done more I've got one minute has anyone got a question if we had more than one question I'm happy to talk to people over lunch at any stage over the weekend yes okay I couldn't agree with you more if I had another half an hour I'd go through a whole process of saying I want the teachers to be doing the mundane stuff and I want our volunteers and our staff to be not the cake but the cherry on top of the cake so I agree if we've got capacity to go into schools and do that 100% and personally I think that was a great way to get younger students into CFA yep I agree with you again why can't we pump back more into the schools yeah and we're in the process of having some discussions about how we actually get that up and going at the upper year level, 10, 11 and 12 it's a great question unfortunately that's all I have time for I'd be delighted to speak to people over lunch or over the next couple of days thank you very much for your time hands together for Matt Henry fantastic session thanks very much Matt so the best area for you guys to probably have lunch is through these doors so the other session that's just finishing there are three lunch areas for those with dietary requirements again the Blue Gum Cafe just on your left up this way but the best way for you guys to get a feed probably right now is through these doors out here, thank you