Education Strategy

Our consulting team can help you bring people, space, technology and learning culture together into a unified and actionable whole. Our consultants are all experienced educators.

Unmatched Experience

Highly experienced in ways of work as well as learning and teaching, Education Strategy at Amicus is a unique blend of workplace and education expertise. Steve Collis and Sophie Fenton are experienced at tailoring solutions and facilitating change in educational settings.

Workplace and learning place boundaries are blurring, as classrooms become entrepreneurial education centres and workplaces engage in play and exploration. We understand that education consulting is about knowing both of these worlds. We can develop Future of Learning and Teaching strategy that marries real-world pedagogical experience with real-world design & build experience.

As change partner strategists, we can develop a workplace strategy to support new ways of working for your administration staff or design a professional development strategy to support new hybrid learning contexts.

We can consult on strategy at the School Master Plan stage, guiding the design of a new or re-purposed build with your educational imperatives at the centre of the strategy, because we know both: the build and the learning and teaching you want to see taking place in it.

Optimising Teaching & Learning Environments

As highly experienced change partners and designers of built environment, we can design spaces that foster modern teaching practices and develop strategies to their implementation. Our education consultants are experts in a wide range of pedagogies and curricula, and draw on this knowledge when designing new learning and teaching environments that promote 21st Century Learning, like Project-based Learning.

As strategists, we can work with you to plan for the adaptive re-use of existing buildings and transform them into Maker Spaces or collaborative learning spaces. This strategy can involve building design or learning and teaching design, as we support your learning community to transition to and gain optimum educational value from the new space.

We understand that learning environments are physical, experiential, pedagogical and technological. Our strategic planning includes the technology piece along with the pedagogy design.

Education Consulting

As highly experienced educators and change partners, we can design modern teaching strategies to support the professional development of your teaching staff. Our education consultants are experts in a wide range of pedagogies and curricula, and can change partner with you in developing new learning and teaching experiences, including capabilities-based pedagogies and assessment techniques.

As education researchers and practitioners in futures of learning in schools and universities, we can consult in pedagogy design to enable hybrid and blended forms of learning, the authentication of remote assessment, or incorporate Extended Reality (XR) technologies for a remote immersive and active learning experience.

We understand that learning environments are the sum of their parts. Along with consultancy in learning and teaching, Amicus Education provides consultancy on educational leadership for changing times and workplace professional development in new ways of working for non-teaching staff.

Our Team
  • Experience Counts
    Robert Frost once said, "How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?".

    Perhaps this is the most poignant way to introduce the level of experience that resides in the Education transformation team at Amicus. They have been there and they certainly have done it, but like all good educators, what always occurs to them is that the paradigm of learning is, and always will, be an infinite journey of discovery.

    The irony of the concept of experience is that it is beautifully vivid and somewhat essential for progress, but also a perpetual dream that we can never quite wake up to.
  • Steve Collis
    Education guru, award-winning teacher and Director of Innovation at the Sydney Centre for Innovation In Learning, Steve Collis joined Amicus in 2016 to lead its Strategy team across all sectors.

    Steve left the silo of education to take on a dream role at Amicus, providing human-centred research and visioning to underpin the creation of all new environments.

    His unstoppable obsession remains unchanged: how to achieve transformation not by willpower or effort, but by working with a single astonishing truth: what surrounds us in our environment exerts a powerful, and perhaps ‘harness-able’, force! The shape of our environment ultimately shapes us.
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  • Sophie Fenton
    An educator, innovator, founder, researcher and strategist, education pioneer Sophie’s repertoire includes whole school design, curriculum adaptation and pedagogy innovation.

    She brings the experience and expertise of creating and launching schools, developing staff and designing innovative education programs to the Education strategy team at Amicus.

    Sophie is highly experienced in end-to-end design, from considerations of the physical spaces to the learning and teaching that happens in them.

    Drawing on her education expertise, Sophie tailors new environments through co-design and facilitates change through learning. She is inspired when working with leaders, teachers and learners to create spaces and experiences where they can flourish and their schools and universities can thrive. To learn in the best place, you have to place yourself with the learned.

    A multi-award winning educator, Sophie has completed a PhD in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, with a pedagogical focus on human-centred learning for the emerging cyber-physical world.

What We Do
  • Education Strategy Consulting
    We’re experts at uncovering how every puzzle piece fits together to enable your school or university’s purpose to become an actionable plan.

    Our education consultants know how to engage a room of leaders, of teaching staff, of students or of parents and find insights and directions that everyone can embrace.

    Our ‘Touchline’ method provides an integrated scaffold that is guaranteed to yield actionable answers – showing how pedagogy and teacher development fits with the set up of the learning environment and technologies to enable your vision to come true at a practical, moment to moment level.
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  • Learning Environment Design
    Design takes you on a journey of creativity and inspiration that stays anchored to the learner experience.

    We not only offer our own in-house classroom design and school design expertise, we also regularly join forces and collaborate with a curated network of industry-leading designers and architects.

    We’re especially interested in marrying the most progressive potentials of innovative learning environments with the lived experience and practicalities of learners and teachers.
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  • School and learning space construction
    We are highly experienced builders, having completed countless highly successful construction projects from minor interior fitouts through to massive ground-up infrastructure (we rebuilt Daydream island in a recent $70 million project).

    Our speciality is in integrating design and build with careful integration between the budget, design, and timeline.

    To set up your school building construction for success, we recommend early engagement in the role of project manager. Whatever your situation, get in touch and let’s see how we can assist.
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  • Technology
    Education technology is an intrinsic component of learning environments. The technology, space, and pedagogy can work together to empower learners and open up incredible learning possibilities that will prepare students for an ever evolving digital world.

    We have an expert team of technologists who are fully fluent and up to date in the latest and best practice solutions for classroom technology.

    When they are not consulting in education they are consulting with Australia’s top workplaces, so you know the solutions will be aligned with the world in which your students will thrive.
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Latest Projects
Education
Al-Faisal College Library
Auburn, Sydney
Education
Education Provider (Confidential)
Metroplex Ave, Murarrie
Education
St Catherine's School
Albion St, Waverley
Education
Association of Independent Schools of NSW
York St, Sydney
Education
Ravenswood School
Gordan, Sydney
Education
International Grammar School
Ultimo, Sydney
People are enthusiastic to be here. You can tell there is a sense of belonging here that we didn’t have in our previous environment - it’s been a fantastic move.
- Jamie Davidson, Jamf
I feel that Amicus is working with us, Amicus have our interests at heart.
- Aaron Alphonso, Macquarie Media
The collaborative and engaging environment created by the Amicus project team, enabled an easy working relationship to be developed which made the entire build process simple, easy and non-combative.
- Laurette Chang-Leng, IHG
I have worked with many fitout companies but can honestly say that I have never come across anyone like Amicus! The team are so attentive and really know how to make your client feel extremely special.
- Diem Bui, Coles

Clients we work with

Download the ebook
Profile: Education Spaces
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