Joshua Basford
Thebarton Senior College, SA
Kaurna
Teaching Fellow
Joshua Basford is the Thebarton Senior College teacher whose literacy reforms and student leadership programs are reshaping outcomes at a Category 2 disadvantaged school serving students from over 76 cultures.
Recognising that many Australian-born students were arriving with significant schooling gaps, Joshua led a proposal securing a five-year speech pathology partnership, screening or supporting 558 students in 2025 alone.
This led to the trialing and refining of the REWARDS reading intervention, reaching 114 students through 11 trained teachers with strong gains in reading fluency and decoding. Under his leadership, A-band results have climbed by 33–40%, well above state averages, a shift Joshua attributes to embedded practice change across faculties.
Joshua has sustained this reform through a weekly Professional Learning Community that gives teachers a safe space to rehearse instruction and adopt evidence-based practice. He extended his leadership school-wide by redesigning the timetable around adolescent sleep research and staff feedback, restructured the middle leadership model into a proactive working-group approach, and partnered with the Department of Education to showcase AI-integrated pedagogy, contributing directly to student-facing AI product development. He has become an advocate for how careful and considered use of AI can boost student agency while building teacher confidence in using emerging technology.
Beyond the classroom, Joshua co-designed and launched the SACE Stage 2 subject Student Voice and Leadership, now fully enrolled with a waitlist, the program has built a strong culture of student voice: graduates now return to the College as volunteers, and from next year will take on paid support roles. Joshua hopes that this model of students meaningfully feeding into the teaching and learning cycle can be replicated across other learning areas.
He negotiated ongoing access to the National Leadership Forum, where students raised $22,000 to attend in 2025, and this year helped his students launch their own Student Leadership Summit to extend equity-driven leadership opportunities to public school students across Adelaide’s western region.