Dr Claire Brown

Dr Claire Brown previously hold the role of National Director, AVID Australia partnering with over 65 AVID schools and universities across Australia to improve the quality of teaching and learning for teachers and students regardless of their postcodes or circumstances. AVID Australia has been operating at VU since 2012. AVID @ VU is the only site licensed to implement AVID outside of the USA.

Claire now works at VU in an honorary capacity, as an Adjunct Fellow in First Year College.

Her PhD on education policy, titled Murder on the Education Policy Express: Requiem for New Basics was awarded in 2020. Claire's current research interests are teacher professional learning, improving the status and quality of teaching and learning, education policy, and initial teacher education.

About AVID

AVID is a whole school improvement system built around three levels of professional learning strengthening teaching excellence and learning outcomes for every student over time. It is unique in that its tertiary and career readiness framework is customised to the needs of each school community as we know that context matters when preparing young people for the world they are encountering.

In Australia, there are over 45,000 students and over 4000 teachers experiencing the AVID system. In the USA, AVID is one of the largest, continuous, and most successful not-for-profit school improvement systems. There are over 3 million students in over 7000 AVID schools with hundreds of thousands of teachers experiencing AVID professional learning for over 40 years. In Australia, AVID has been supported by government, industry, and philanthropic funding worth over $6 million. In 2020, AVID Australia partnered with Toyota in a secondary STEM initiative with schools in Melbourne's West. In 2018, AVID Australia received a William Buckland Foundation grant. In 2017, AVID was honoured to receive a Helen McPherson Smith Trust grant with the Australian Health Policy Collaboration to establish AVID learning communities in two regional areas of Victoria: Ballarat and Geelong. AVID and AHPC are exploring the intersections between education and mental health and wellbeing for students, teachers and leaders. In 2017, AVID in Australia was honoured to receive a Sidney Myer Fund grant to develop an AVID primary program to specifically support and improve the quality of primary school maths teaching and learning.

We thank all our philanthropic supporters and deeply appreciate their support to improve the quality of teaching and learning across Australia.