Australia Association for Research in Education
Education policy
The One Teacher Test Which Won’t Make A Difference
Improving teacher quality has been central to recent education reform initiatives around the world. However, what counts as …
The White Paper: old, tired and lacking evidence
In the months before the pandemic gripped the world, the NSW Productivity Commission released a presciently titled discussion paper, Kickstarting the Productivity Conversation. Its recently released followup White Paper sets out its plan for rebooting the economy. Lifting school results is part of the plan. The Commission acknowledges the ‘pandemic has shown how quickly schools, …
Q:Which major party will fully fund public schools? A:None. Here’s what’s happening
You would be forgiven for thinking that policy related to schooling is not a major issue in Australia. …
Put professional judgement of teachers first or we’ll never get the systemic education improvements we all want. Let’s talk about it
In this blog I’d like to bring together three different lines of educational analysis to show how our …
Time’s up. Australia needs to ditch its bad education policies
What kind of schooling system do we want for our kids in Australia? I ask because In England, after almost thirty years of high stakes testing, the Chief Inspector of Schools, Amanda Spielman, is talking about a decline in England’s quality of education and blaming “an endemic pattern of prioritising data and performance results, ahead …
Economic thinking is corrupting education in Australia
There is a growing trend in education of proposing and enacting policy ideas that are based primarily upon …
Specialist science and maths teachers in primary schools are not the solution
The idea to put specialist science and maths teachers into Australian primary schools gained a lot of support after the latest results of international tests were announced. It even became official policy in NSW last year when then Education Minister, Adrian Piccoli, announced a plan to deliver hundreds of specialist STEM (science, technology, engineering and …
Secondary schooling in Australia needs to change: throw out the tests and bring in deep learning
There is a problem in some Australian secondary schools right now. ‘Endgame’ assessments such as the Higher School Certificate (HSC) in NSW and the requirements of an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) to gain entrance to university, place restrictions on the kinds of teaching and learning that goes on in classrooms. Some teachers are frustrated …
Fast policy: when educational research morphs into quick fixes and ‘silver bullets’
Education is increasingly positioned as a problem in need of fixing. Faced with demands for accountability and transparency …