Australia Association for Research in Education
Education policy
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 contemporary discussions of policy are really not going to lead to any significant change or educationally defensible reforms. I realise that is a very big call, but I’m pretty confident in saying it, and I hope to …
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 …
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 …
What’s a Good Education System Worth?
The Turnbull Government’s education election manifesto, Quality Schools, Quality Outcomes claims (several times over) that when it comes to the funding of schooling, it matters less how much is spent and more how the resources are spent. This is a convenient argument for a government chasing a budget surplus, and the Turnbull Government makes no …
Are think tanks having too much influence on Australian schooling policies?
The past decade has seen think tanks operate in sophisticated ways to influence the development of Australian schooling …
Why condemning international tests is a distraction, and what we really should be worried about
Governments all around the world seem to be influenced by the international rankings of students by the Organisation …
Education in Australia needs to change direction NOW, before it’s too late
We believe the next five years are vital to the future of education in Australia. As we see …