A lot has changed in teaching since Kiama resident Belinda Mackinnon first started more than 40 years ago but she has adapted to the changes to become a role model for students and fellow educators.

Belinda was rewarded with a Public Service Medal in the King’s Birthday Honours List when they were announced on Monday.

After recently being informed that she was receiving the honour, Belinda had to keep it a secret, not even telling her husband Rod until it was officially announced on Monday morning.

“No one knew until it was announced. I had to keep it strictly confidential so I didn’t even tell my husband,” she told The Bugle.

“I showed him on my phone and that set everything in motion. First of all he said ‘what is it’, just bleary-eyed, waking up. Then it was ‘oh my goodness’. He was very proud of me.”

Belinda was recognised for “outstanding public service to TAFE NSW in the delivery of education and organisational leadership”.

The executive director of Business Enablement at TAFE NSW, she started as a fill-in when a staff member was off sick after spending the first five years of her career as a primary school teacher.

One of her main responsibilities has been to teach literary and numeracy skills to guide vulnerable learners with complex needs.

“My background is language, literacy and numeracy so certainly for the first 20 or so years, I’ve been dealing with people with low literacy and numeracy skills and being able to provide them the opportunities to learn, and to achieve the things they want to achieve,” she explained.

“Some of the people that I remember didn’t know how to read a bus timetable so they’d wait at the bus stop until one came along.

“People are very good at being able to disguise it.

“I’d work with them with the skills they already have because people have some amazing ways of coping and surviving.

“Being able to make a difference is really critical to me.

"For people of all ages - from very young students who have found school hard and different, and they didn’t fit in, to older adults who might have left the workforce who want to contribute more to their local community.

“You get the whole gamut of different people.”

Belinda often runs into former students in the community and it fills her heart with pride when she hears how they have improved their lives, emphasising that it was not unique to her and that a lot of TAFE teachers have similar tales to tell.

To illustrate examples of mathematics in educating students, Belinda would use a pool table to explain geometry or a darts board to help people learn addition and subtraction.

In the second half of her career at TAFE NSW, she played a vital role in bringing the Illawarra and Riverina institutes together as a cohesive entity after the organisation’s structure was changed.

Over the past few years, Belinda has led the Education Technology Ecosystem implemented by TAFE.

Although she is not an IT whiz herself, she has driven technological, system, and process improvements to deliver a more seamless and enriching educational experience for TAFE NSW’s 400,000 learners and 10,000 teachers.

As someone who used Gestetner machines when she first started teaching, the computer age has been an eye-opening experience but Belinda has adapted to the online education revolution to continue doing what she loves.

“While ever I can make a difference and I enjoy what I do and I’m in tune with the same values of the organisation, I’ll be around.”