PETAA staff

Megan Edwards
General Manager

Megan has over a decade’s experience in marketing and communications, customer relationship and experience management, project management, general management and business development, with strong experience in the not for profit sector. She has a passion for English Language and Literature and the work that PETAA does to help support our teachers around Australia with imparting literacy knowledge and skills to primary school children. 

Robyn Topp
Manager of Professional Learning

An educator with over 35 years’ experience working with children from 2–12 years, Robyn has a B.Ed (Hons) from The University of Sydney and a postgraduate Certificate of Learning Difficulties from UNSW. She has been a classroom teacher, teacher of gifted students, teacher of children with learning difficulties, a specialist literacy teacher, K–2 Coordinator, Vice Principal and Acting Principal in schools both in Sydney, and overseas. Robyn has experience with children from diverse cultural backgrounds and has run professional development courses for teachers in Jakarta. She is passionate about teaching and believes that all children need to feel safe, respected and comfortable in order to develop confidence and maximise learning opportunities. Robyn is committed to providing high quality and flexible Professional Learning to support and empower teachers to enable the best outcomes for their students.

Maria Thompson
Membership and Operations Manager

Maria is a passionate customer focused team member who has supported all the office functions at PETAA and is now the primary contact with the members. Maria has had wide experience across multiple disciplines. A registered Nurse, specialising in Children’s Intensive Care and midwifery. Maria has also had a successful career in medical sales, marketing, business development and recently working with Primary School educational content providers in science and literacy. Maria is renowned for her energy, enthusiasm and getting things done and is always striving to improve the service offered by PETAA to its members.

Cassie Tongue
Marketing and Communications Coordinator

Cassie has been working in not-for-profit communications, media, marketing and program operations for the last decade. She believes in the power of a good story, especially when it can shed light on people who make positive change — people like teachers and educators. She joined PETAA in 2017 after working at Keep Australia Beautiful on their communications, marketing and branding, and was closely involved with their slate of environmentally conscious community programs, including Tidy Towns. She studied Communications (Media Studies) at the University of Newcastle and still fondly remembers all the primary school teachers that encouraged her appetite for reading and writing.

Linden Hyatt
Digital Publishing and Strategic Support

Linden has an academic background in writing with a BA (Communications) major and Masters by-research degrees both from UTS, with a small record of literary publications. A decades long editorial career in educational publishing and distance education has evolved into digital production and project management, working with teachers, learning designers, programmers and analysts to create and curate rich resources and websites. Since 2013 he has applied those myriad skills to building and supporting a digital repository and resource base for PETAA. His passion in supporting educators has been more recently sparked by helping to create the platform for quality online courses, especially for being able to support and inspire classroom teachers in remote settings.

Michael Zhu
Finance Manager

Michael has worked for PETAA for more than a decade as finance manager, he has extensive experience in all aspects of financial management, budget accounting, cash flow analysis, and financial strategy. Over the years, he has managed the compilation of accurate periodic finance reports for both internal and external stakeholders including general manager, boards and auditor.