Game Changers

Game Changers is an education interview series hosted by Phil Cummins, and its steady preoccupation is character: what schools form in young people, and what success means when character counts toward it. Cummins introduces himself as managing partner of A School for Tomorrow and Circle Education, and as a professor of practice in educational leadership at the University of Sydney, where the Sydney Character Initiative has been established. Conversations run in parts. A guest, or a pair of guests, comes back across several episodes, and each part carries a title of its own. Ross Featherston and Dr Ray Swann, introduced as coming from Brighton Grammar School and the Positive Masculinity Institute, appear in parts titled 'Intentional and Foundational', 'Clear and Supportive' and 'Sacred and Profane'. The subject is positive masculinities, set inside the Series 18 theme, 'The Character of Success', and Cummins frames it plainly: traditional hegemonic masculinity has been challenged, so what does it mean to be a good man? The answers keep coming back to school life. One exchange reaches for the Kipling line at the entrance to Wimbledon's Centre Court, the one that calls triumph an impostor. From there it moves to a junior-school climbing course built to be challenging yet safe, where a boy who cannot get up the rope can find some success on a nearby trampoline instead. The principle is stated outright: educators know you learn more when you lose than when you win. Melissa Kennedy's conversation shows the host's editorial habit most clearly. Opening its third part, Cummins calls the first two masterclasses, names them 'question' and 'challenge', and adds a third verb, sustain, asking how the character of success is built and kept up over a lifetime. That is the show's usual motion. Gather what a guest has said, give it a frame, then ask the larger question. The range reaches past the classroom. Amy Baker and Clare Gossage talk about the enterprise of international education, and when Cummins asks what a strategy is, the answer is simple: a blueprint. That part is titled 'A Blueprint for Experimentation'. A conversation with Dr Selena Fisk turns to a memory of teaching at a first school, where the best storytellers were invited to kindergarten fruit time under Moreton Bay fig trees and anyone who could not hold a group of small boys was not asked back. It becomes a reflection on how adult strengths are often the ones worked at hardest since childhood. The register is measured and warm, with room for dry asides and plain excitement, and the intros sign off with the same refrain: 'I'm excited. I can't wait. Let's go.'