While shareholders can be a difficult bunch to impress, Microsoft Australia’s managing director, Tracey Fellows, discovered during Education Week that Kindergarten kids can be a tough audience, too.

As principal for a day at Double Bay Public School, Ms Fellows found the key to instant popularity had nothing to do with the title on her business card, and everything to do with “being seen” with principal, Andrea Garling.

“When we walked in to the classroom it was ‘Ah Miss Garling!’ There’s a real sense of [her] being looked up to, and I was treated with enormous respect because she introduced me,” Ms Fellows says.

During what she described as a “great day”, Ms Fellows compared her role with that of a school leader.

“The principal is like the CEO of the school. But she has a more challenging job than I do. Parents are a complex set of stakeholders that are not necessarily objective,” she says.

Ms Fellows says success in business, as in schools, “gets down to people; having the right leadership team, having the right people and keeping them motivated and excited, having a sense of common purpose and goals you’re trying to achieve”.

Among the other guest principals during Education Week were Professor Derrick Armstrong, pro-vice chancellor at the University of Sydney and Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, who took a day away from her role as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA).

Professor Armstrong swapped rubbing shoulders with academics and university students to sit cross legged in the playground with the children of Newtown’s Australia Street Infants School.

“It’s nice to be able to do this, especially in an infants school,” Professor Armstrong says.

“We’ve made the decision to introduce an early childhood degree at Sydney University and it’s been a nice opportunity for me to get a very informal look at what’s going on in a school.”

Professor Armstrong is keen to make his new relationship with the school a reciprocal one. He has invited principal Bernard Cheng to spend a day in the university faculty and to join an advisory group on the new early childhood degree.

Making valuable contacts was also one of the benefits of the day for students and staff at Sydney Secondary College’s Blackwattle Bay campus.

Principal Jill Collier says MCA director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor’s visit to the school provided a “good opportunity to establish some relationships with her and the museum” and to learn more about the art world.

“As part of looking at students studying for the HSC I usually visit various classes, so we visited some visual arts classes and they were working on their HSC bodies of work. She went around and talked to the individual students about their works. They’re at a stage where it’s really starting to come together now, so that was great.”

Ms Macgregor says she was “impressed by the ambition of the work and the way in which they were encouraged to take feedback, positive and negative”.

Later in the day, all Year 11 and 12 visual arts students engaged in a “very good, topical discussion” with their guest, which ranged from the details of her role at the MCA to the photography of Bill Henson.

“I was also struck by how articulate they were about art issues. The level of debate about a range of topics that I witnessed was extraordinary,” Ms Macgregor says.

She also commented on how well the school’s special needs students were integrated, academically and socially.

“They were so much part of the school, but had the specialist attention they needed as well. Indeed, the range and diversity of students from different backgrounds and with different needs is a very positive feature of the school.”

Ms Collier says she hopes Ms Macgregor will be able to attend the school art exhibition in September and a student breakfast later in the year.

“Our student activist group organise a breakfast every term, and we’ve talked about inviting her to one on the theme of ‘the arts’ role in influencing society’.”