Founder & National Director
For more than thirty years, Vaughan Cleary has worked with schools and organisations to build places where people feel motivated, connected and able to do their best.
One observation has driven most of that work: give people real autonomy, relationships and competence, and things change. Motivation climbs, engagement deepens, and the community around them gets stronger.
HRPA's approach is grounded in a nine-year longitudinal case study of a Victorian secondary school tracking the impact of a structural curriculum intervention that gave students genuine choice over the majority of their subjects. The findings are clear. Students produced NAPLAN writing growth statistically significantly above both Victorian and national benchmarks sustained across two consecutive cohorts. Student engagement, tracked against the Catholic sector from 2019 to 2023, moved from below sector to 10.9 percentage points above, while the sector declined every year. Against a national backdrop where 44% of Year 9 boys fail minimum writing standards, the school's boys produced growth broadly comparable to girls and substantially above state benchmarks.
The mechanism wasn't better teaching of writing. It was structural: students who chose subjects they genuinely valued wrote with more effort, more investment and more care.
That is what HRPA is built on. The conviction that a lot of what organisations write off as people problems are really design problems — and that when you change the design, you change what's possible.
vaughan@humanrestorationproject.orgThe people closest to an organisation are often the people best placed to imagine its future.
Vaughan Cleary / Founder & National DirectorEvery partnership begins with a conversation. We'd love to hear about your context.
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