William Wood, MA (Qld), BEd (Melb.), ABPsS, FACE

Educator

Born: Paisley, Scotland, 4 October 1910.

Died: Currumbin Beach, Queensland, 17 March 2006.

During his 47-year professional life, Bill Wood pioneered changes in Queensland education.  He was the first Queensland (and second Australian) teacher seconded to the newly formed Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).  After teaching Scholarship classes at the Central Practising School, being Head Teacher at two small country schools and serving in the RAAF, he returned to organise and direct refresher courses for teachers who had served in World War II.  As the State’s first Principal Research and Guidance Officer, he initiated and developed a State-wide guidance service and initiated investigations into aspects of curriculum and administrative policy.  As the State’s first Director of Special Education Services he expanded provision for teaching intellectually and physically handicapped children.  As first Chairman of the Board of Advanced Education he was instrumental in establishing the framework which enabled individual colleges to become degree-granting institutions.  According to a press release issued by the Minister for Education on the occasion of his retirement, Bill was “widely regarded as Queensland’s leading educationist”.

Early Years

Bill was the youngest of the six children of Alexander and Margaret.  The family emigrated from Scotland in 1915 on the 7000-ton migrant ship SS Roscommon.  The trip to Australia was dangerous and circuitous because of German U-boats.  Bill spent his 5^th birthday aboard Roscommon, which berthed at the Charlotte Street wharf in Brisbane.

The family lived initially at Kangaroo Point, then Bulimba from 1919 to 1922 where Bill and his brothers spent many leisure hours sailing on and fishing in the Brisbane River.  Later, tennis was to become a favourite recreational activity after the family moved to Hawthorne where Bill and his brothers constructed a tennis court.

Education

Bill’s primary schooling at Bulimba State School concluded with a scholarship to the Brisbane Grammar School (BGS).  At BGS he was a member of the undefeated tennis team, passed eight subjects in the Senior Examination, was awarded the Upper School Lilley Gold Medal for topping Latin, and gained a scholarship to the Teachers’ Training College.

While training as a teacher, he completed two subjects towards an Arts degree; his superior results allowed him to enrol for three university subjects in his first year as a teacher.  He then went on to complete an honours degree in Philosophy as a part-time student.  A thesis on The Philosophical Basis of Italian Education gained him the MA degree.  By this time he had completed the Bachelor of Education degree as an external student of the University of Melbourne.

Teaching

In 1930, Bill was appointed to the Buranda Boys School.  In his first year he received superior ratings from the District Inspector.

In November 1931 Bill had been informed of a pending transfer to Killarney.  However, the Department of Education had agreed to second a teacher to ACER for two years, and senior Departmental staff selected Bill after considering the Inspector’s reports and the Professor of Philosophy’s comment that Bill was “a careful and industrious worker”.

At the two-roomed ACER office in central Melbourne, Bill assisted in analysing the results from a nation-wide arithmetic testing program; he also read and sorted the books, journals and tests for the professional library.  In 1933 Bill became Senior Research Assistant, responsible for constructing five reading tests, for organizing the testing of 32,000 pupils in 426 schools, and for analysing the results.  He jointly authored the report published in 1935 as The Standardisation of an Australian Reading Test.  It was in Melbourne that he met Edna May Tregellas, whom he married in 1934.

Subsequently, Bill became a member of ACER’s governing body, on which he served for 24 years, and was its Vice-President from 1964 to 1977. 

After his return to Queensland in 1934, Bill taught Scholarship classes at the Central Practising  School (now named the Brisbane Central State School) in Spring Hill.  In 1939, anticipating appointment to a small school, Bill spent weekends copying by hand the workbooks for each year level.  In 1940 he was promoted to Head Teacher at Amamoor, a 50-pupil school 18 km south of Gympie in the Mary Valley, where he lived with his wife and daughter for the next two years.

Amamoor pupils had rarely passed the State Scholarship Examination.  When word of the good results of his first candidates spread, pupils from neighbouring districts, including the son of the Head Teacher at a nearby school, transferred to Amamoor.

Bill’s teaching strategies soon attracted the attention of the District Inspector, who wrote in April 1940: “This young man is definitely worth nursing.”  He commented further that Wood “shapes as a coming Inspector”.  In the following year, after Bill had applied for a larger school, the Inspector recommended him for “faster than normal promotion”.  At the end of 1941, the Wood family moved to Aloomba, a nominally two-teacher school south of Gordonvale – although at the beginning of 1942 he was the only teacher for all eight grades.  Family life was disrupted by the evacuation to Brisbane of Bill’s wife and daughter, and school life was disrupted by the internment of the Italian-born fathers of many of Bill’s pupils.

Military Service

Bill enlisted in the RAAF in 1942 and a month later was commissioned.  He taught navigation, meteorology and ship and aircraft recognition to aircrew personnel, firstly at Kingaroy (Qld) and later at Nowra (NSW).  He was demobilised in Brisbane in March 1946 with the rank of temporary Flight Lieutenant.

Directing Refresher Courses for Ex-service Teachers

A month after returning to Aloomba, Bill was recalled to Brisbane to plan, organise, and direct refresher programs to improve the academic and professional qualifications of ex-servicemen before their return to teaching.  Bill recruited an able, interested staff (including Bill Brown, a former member of the Army Psychology Section) who built up the self-esteem of the 400 who qualified under the scheme.  Some required completion of only a single matriculation subject; others required a full-year course.  Bill taught Education, Modern History and Psychology.  The enthusiasm of these mature students made these two years a very satisfying experience for him.

Principal Research and Guidance Officer

Bill had joined the Queensland Institute for Educational Research (QIER) soon after his return from ACER.  In the post-World War II years QIER began formulating proposals for a “Bureau of Educational Research”.  After successive submissions to the Department had been rejected as “Too ambitious” or “Inadequate”, Bill and Bill Brown proposed establishment of a Research and Guidance Branch.  Bill was appointed Acting Guidance Officer in 1948;  a year later, with three assistants and four tables and chairs, he occupied an empty classroom at the Central Technical College (now the Gardens Point campus of QUT).

At that time “guidance” principally connoted assistance for those seeking employment.  Bill’s view was that “Educational Guidance” should be an integral part of the school system and that the guidance officers’ special training and experience should assist school staff in dealing with problems.  His vision was that educational guidance which took account of attainments in both primary and secondary school, of psychological test results, and of discussions with the student and parents, was a desirable prelude to advice on further education or potential occupations.  Such a State-wide program would be possible only as staff became available.

In June 1949 Bill was appointed Principal Research and Guidance Officer, with three assistants.  After three vocational guidance officers had been transferred from the Labour Department, aptitude tests were given to students in 15 metropolitan primary schools and a guidance officer was associated with each school.  The benefits of the new program were appreciated by parents; additional staff were allocated, country visits started, and extra services were added.

Further significant increases in Branch staff numbers occurred in 1951, when the Commonwealth transferred to the States the responsibility for guidance of university scholarship-holders, and in 1952 with the incorporation of speech-correction teachers formerly on the staff of the Blind and Deaf School.

Schooling of the intellectually handicapped was always among Bill’s major interests.  Special classes and schools were established outside the metropolitan area following the identification of sufficient need.

To stimulate retention rates, leaflets were written for distribution to upper-primary and secondary students, describing the different courses leading to the Junior Examination and the Senior Examination respectively. Later a small booklet pointed to the variety of tertiary and further-education courses.

Many research projects arose, both from Bill’s discussions with the Director of Secondary Education and from his reading of overseas studies; these included recommendations on areas where larger primary-school enrolments would soon make a new high school desirable, on the need to recruit specialist secondary teachers, and on the occupations entered by school-leavers. 

One major project was an eight-year comparison of preparatory-class reading books; there were also periodic comparisons of performance in reading and arithmetic.

Bill was awarded a travel and research bursary by the prestigious Carnegie Corporation of New York which funded a six-month visit to the USA in 1957.  He then travelled to Geneva, Switzerland, where he represented Australia at a world conference on education.

Bill’s innovative flair and prudent administration led to his promotion in 1958 to the newly created position of Director of Special Education.

Director of Special Education Services

Bill’s transfer to the Department’s Head Office in the old Treasury Building (now the Conrad Treasury Casino) brought him closer to fellow Directors; more importantly, he was now near the new Minister and Deputy Premier, Jack Pizzey, who had been a contemporary at the Central Practising School in the 1930s and who had occasionally visited him at the Research and Guidance Branch.  As both Bill and Jack invariably arrived early at the office, informal discussions on the Department, its problems, and its development occurred.  Bill also now had direct access to the Minister when dealing more formally.

Bill soon was allotted other responsibilities (Adult Education, the Conservatorium of Music, the Museum) which did not fall directly into the primary, secondary or technical areas.  He remained responsible for Research and Guidance activities and could more readily increase its resources.  By the 1960s, tasks associated with syllabi had so expanded that the Research and Guidance Branch was split into a Research and Curriculum Branch and a Guidance and Special Education Branch. 

Provision for atypical children remained a dominant interest for Bill.  His article in The Australian Journal of Education (October 1966) showed how facilities had been extended to types and degrees of handicap which had previously received little attention.  By comparison with the earlier lack of discrimination among different categories of special-needs children, after World War II their right to high-quality education had been accepted. 

Chairman of the Board of Advanced Education

In 1970 Cabinet appointed Bill to the new post of Chairman of the Board of Advanced Education.  His administrative skills, honed over 30 years, guided the colleges (soon renamed institutes) towards autonomy.  Prominent community members were appointed as chairs and members of their councils; a system of course assessment confirmed the quality of curricula.  Demographic studies showing the growth potential of the Gold Coast and of outer-metropolitan areas pointed to the need for future expansion.

When Bill retired in 1975, the Board acknowledged his vision, strength of purpose, and wise guidance during the formative years of advanced education in Queensland.

Retirement

This obituary was complied by Rod Hardaker from material supplied by Bill’s daughter Diana Barry, his grandson Alex Beavers, and his former colleague Sam Rayner.