Cactus Education Collective is active across all sectors of education. As its founder, I have shaped it around the issues I care most about: making education more inclusive, more responsive, and more human. This includes working directly with diverse learners to design programs that remove barriers to learning—and just as importantly, equipping teachers and schools to do the same.
Why Cactus?
Cacti are resilient, adaptive, and rooted in purpose
The cactus has a quiet kind of strength; it’s resilient, adaptive, and full of life beneath the surface. Cacti teach us that thriving doesn’t always look the same: sometimes it’s slow, sometimes hidden, always shaped by the environment. At Cactus Education Collective, we design learning that honours those truths.
We work with students who’ve been underserved by systems not built with their needs in mind, helping them rediscover confidence and find strategies that work for them. We support families and educators with curriculum design that is flexible, inclusive, and grounded in real-world learning goals.
Teachers are cacti too: growing in tough conditions, holding more than they show, and finding new ways to adapt without losing their shape. We train educators, not just as facilitators of education, but as lifelong learners themselves, professionals who adapt, reflect, and teach with integrity.
Our professional learning supports teachers to design inclusive, purposeful education that grows with the learners in front of them, and stays true to the values that brought them to the work in the first place. Whether adapting a unit, rethinking assessment, or supporting a learner who doesn’t fit the mould, we help teachers build practices that are sustainable, authentic, and responsive.
What do we offer?
1:1 and Group Tutoring & Learning Support
Support with planning, organisation, and confidence-building in academic tasks
- Help with reading, writing, and communication using scaffolded and visual learning tools
- Flexible strategies tailored to how each learner engages, processes, and demonstrates understanding
- Responsive support for learners who may face barriers in traditional classroom settings, including executive functioning challenges, learning anxiety, or sensory overload
Whether your child is thriving in a home education setting or struggling to find their feet in a mainstream school, I work closely with each learner to uncover what helps them feel capable, calm, and ready to grow.
Curriculum Design & Consulting
- Custom curriculum design aligned with the Australian Curriculum (v9.0) and inclusive teaching practices.
- Assistance for independent schools to map alternative objectives, such as school-specific graduate outcomes or values-based priorities, authentically into scope and sequence documents and units of work.
- Differentiated units and project-based learning sequences suitable for classrooms or home education, aligned with individual or group interests.
- Strategy advice for families designing home-based programs or needing help interpreting curriculum documents, including literacy and numeracy progressions, arts-based performance criteria and language learning goals
- Resource development for culturally responsive, plurilingual, or cross-curricular learning goals, including the embedding of the cross curriculum priorities and general capabilities in the Australian Curriculum
I specialise in curriculum work that’s both ambitious and achievable—whether it’s for a classroom, a family, or a learning team designing something new.
Teacher Professional Learning
- Workshops and mentoring in inclusive planning, learner agency, and Universal Design for Learning
- Professional development for school staff, including early-career and experienced teachers, mentors and curriculum leaders.
- Teacher as researcher workshops: Promotes dialogic thinking and reflective teaching, using the reflective framework developed through my PhD research
- PD aligned with the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APSTs) and responsive to your school context
- Resource and assessment design training for teams working toward equity and clarity in their learning programs
I work alongside schools and systems to build thoughtful, inclusive teaching practice — grounded in research and shaped by the learners we’re here to serve.
Background info about the Cactus Education Collective approach
I apply the action research cycle not only to meeting students’ needs, but to understanding how those needs present: through the ways learners think, feel, process, and engage. My experience includes teaching in a remote Indigenous community, supporting neurodivergent students in tertiary access programs, teaching English as an additional language, home education, and working in regional teacher education. Across all of these settings, I have seen how traditional schooling often fails to reach students with exceptional strengths who simply need a different way in.
Over the past 20 years, I have worked extensively with plurilingual students to help them harness their linguistic superpowers in an education system dominated by English. Since moving into teacher education, enabling and curriculum development, I’ve worked to support learners whose attention, processing, or memory patterns don’t always match classroom routines. Equally, I’ve trained teachers to build responsive, inclusive environments using research-backed frameworks like Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and intercultural education frameworks, such as Scarino et al.’s (2009) intercultural learning cycle.
Grounded in Universal Design for Learning and informed by current research in inclusive practice, my approach is scaffolded, responsive, and person-centred. Whether I’m tutoring a student, building curriculum resources, or training educators, I’m always asking: What do the learners need to thrive—and how do we build for that?
My approach is evidence-based, but always personal. Teaching and learning can be augmented, but they are essentially socially mediated practices, and essentially human.