Ms Katherine Adnett

Katherine Adnett is a Senior Research Fellow in UniSA’s Education Futures unit and leads the Teaching Futures Pathway project within the Education Futures Academy.  This initiative is a key component of the High Achieving Teachers (HAT) Program, funded by the Australian Government Department of Education. 

Katherine brings extensive expertise in educational leadership, management, governance, and innovation across diverse school sectors (R–12) in both Australia and the United Kingdom. She has held senior executive and sector-level roles shaping national education policy and reform, most recently as Director of The Centre for Innovation at Association of Independent Schools. Her school leadership expertise was nationally recognised as Excellence Awardee – Deputy Principal of the Year.  

Katherine’s practice-led research with 90+ schools in South Australia, enables educational leaders to navigate complexity with strategic foresight, effective project leadership, and deep organisational learning awareness. Working with academics from US and UK, including Charles Leadbeater and Yong Zhao, Katherine led sustained educational innovation projects over six years which formed the basis of her thesis in Leading Innovation and Change and have been featured in publications by the Centre for Strategic Education. 

She also contributes to innovations in teaching, pedagogy and assessment through portfolio-based, reflexive learning design, a central focus of her publication Teaching for Growth.

As a future-oriented systems thinker her research engagement enables: 

• Adaptive and enabling leadership of innovation and change in education 
• Local learning ecosystems Leadership of complex change in schools  
• Empowering and enabling high-performing teams through networked learning labs, applying culturally and contextually responsive approaches 
• Learning design and assessment for transformative competencies and learner agency   

Qualifications

• Master of Arts York St John University