Adelaide - the 14th Annual CEFPI Australasia Conference.

Message from the Conference Chair

I invite you to join us in May 2014 for the CEFPI Regional conference in the heart of Adelaide.

This is the not only the  second CEFPI conference in Adelaide , but the latest in a succession of  major education facilities conferences in Adelaide that started  with the LETA series of conferences, the first of which was twenty years ago  and the largest of which included the birth of CEFPI in Australia in 2000.

But even those of you who thought you knew Colonel Light’s planned city, will be treated to a stimulatingly different experience, which will include the city’s new public face as well an insiders’ view  of many of its secrets.

Our conference base, on the banks of the Torrens, is the transformed Adelaide Oval which in May 2014 will have been complete for just two months. Instead of the dark spaces you usually expect in conference centres, this year’s main venue brings the outside in.  It looks north to the Oval and its famous northern end cathedral backdrop and to the south  looks over the Torrens River and the city’s  main festival venues  centred around  Elder Park. The Oval is linked back to the city via a new pedestrian bridge which will take you through to North Terrace which is the city’s civic centrepiece and  which in addition to the conference  hotels, two universities, includes the major  South Australian cultural institutions grouped together along a internationally acclaimed pedestrian boulevard. With this abundance of great public facilities close at hand including several outstanding schools and early learning facilities, the conference will make good use of its CBD location as well as taking you to some outstanding sites further afield.

In the spirit  keeping with  of “having a go”, which at the last conference in Adelaide in 2006  gave birth to the Mayfield Project, thanks to the energy and enthusiasm of the late Dr John Mayfield, our theme for 2014 is “Inside Out/ Upside Down”.

The concept of our theme is to look at education facilities from different points of view and to create a different sort of conference that engages delegates as learners in some of the ways we strive to promote in the facilities we are creating for new generations of learners.

The 2014 program has been put together with the help of three prominent educators, who have been engaged as curators for the program.  We also have two keynote speakers who are successfully challenging orthodox educational thinking.  Features of the program are linking the popular site visit program with the themes pursued by the curators so that site visits are about exploring new ideas and then seeing them in practice. Also through the Mayfield Project, teams from across the country will share their explorations of our themes.

After each day’s core program we have scheduled a late afternoon “Fringe” where delegates can share ideas, successes and even failures, as well as meet our sponsors and their products  in a relaxed atmosphere with some busker-style entertainment.

Also we have scheduled a public event that gives the public the opportunity to engage with CEFPI and our regional awards program.

Evenings will be focused on getting together with informal networking celebrating South Australia’s renowned food and wine, the regional awards and the unique venue.

Our 2014 Conference is an event not to be missed. The CEFPI benchmark is already high but we are confident 2014 will take it even higher.

Andrew Gehling

Conference Chair