AARE election priorities

The AARE election collection

AARE blog, election priorities,

EduResearch Matters presents all the articles it published in the lead-up to the 2025 Australian federal election 2025, held on on May 3.

Table of contents

AARE election priorities

Election 2025: AARE priorities now

Boosting the teacher workforce

Anna Hogan, QUT: “Workforce sustainability won’t be solved through recruitment alone; we need to focus on retention by making the job one that teachers can realistically and sustainably do.” 

Breakthrough: what we should do to build our teacher workforce

Nicole Mockler, The University of Sydney: “The more we assume that teachers need think tanks or economists or politicians or anyone else to ‘help them fend’, the more it feeds the teacher shortage. Teachers are human. If they don’t feel valued, and are constantly exposed to arguments about their work mounted by people with strong views but next to no actual knowledge of their work, it’s hard to keep showing up.“

Just because you went to school doesn’t make you an expert on teaching

Steven Hodge, Griffith University, and Emily Ross, University of Queensland: “Research shows teachers feel obliged to make modifications because they know their students and are ethically bound to adjust resources to suit them.” 

What teachers need now (or ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!’)

Steven Hodge, Griffith University: “We want experts to be VET teachers. Here’s what happens next”Honouring the desire in teachers to advance their industries and pass on quality practices is something that could help everyone linked to the VET system – and that really is everyone!”

We want experts to be VET teachers. Here’s what happens next

Connection solutions

Martin Mills, QUT: “There are multiple crises facing education. These relate, amongst other things, to teacher shortages, to the fair distribution of the academic benefits of schooling, and to providing young people with an adequate preparation for living in a complex and fast changing world.”

Building joined up policy now, across and beyond the education sector

Donna Pendergast, Griffith University:  “The possibility to explore greater connectedness and a longitudinal framework of success for our students is needed now.” 

The urgent need for connectedness

Research-informed policy

Emma Rowe, Deakin University:  We have a great deal of expertise within universities without resorting to think-tanks or knowledge brokers, who do not make their finances or funding apparent.

How can we advance research-informed policy?

Penny Van Bergen, Macquarie University: “Evidence-based policymaking means turning away from populist views and towards genuine topic experts who have the expertise to advise how robust particular phenomena are, whether suggested applications are generalisable or specific to particular ages and disciplines, and how these insights knit together with other phenomena, explanations, and educational goals. Such policymaking is more challenging, but worth it. Our children deserve it.”  

Turning away from celebrity and towards genuine topic experts

Gwilym Croucher, University of Melbourne:  “If Australia seeks to send signals that we do not welcome students or our education quality is seen to be slipping, the future might not be so sunny. The major source countries of China and India are building their domestic systems. China has invested vast sums in educating its population.”

Here’s how to ensure a healthy future for universities

Equity and educational outcomes

Pat Thomson, University of South Australia: “So this is my challenge for those currently standing for election, an election where poverty seems to be off the agenda. We need a bold new vision for addressing the long tail of educational underachievement and child poverty. We need the courage and curiosity to inquire, to review, to face up to the equity challenge. One in six Australian children needs your commitment to do better.”

Equity: Now’s the time to tackle child poverty

 Kitty te Riele, Sherridan Emery and Emily Rudling, University of Tasmania: “It is not too late to learn from the pandemic – and to systematically and sustainably introduce approaches that proved to make our education, and our society, more equitable.”

Learning from a crisis – building back better

Robert Hattam, University of South Australia: “This inequality machine is now well ensconced  and teflon-coated and there are many snouts in the trough, making money from sustaining a failing policy regime. Is it possible that Australian schooling could become a machine for equality?”

Inequality: How Australian schools churn it out

Jill Blackmore, Deakin University: “Academic workforce is extremely discontented with the system and disenchanted with university management—they feel undervalued as core workers. The university sector has been corporatised, managerialised, marketized, commercialised and now digitalised. Gen AI is impacting on teaching and research.”

Has the social licence of universities been lost?

Widening participation, nurturing aspirations

Marnee Shay, University of Queensland: “Enabling aspirations and strong futures means building a rigorous, research-informed understanding of how the most educationally disadvantaged students can thrive in all schooling contexts.”

Aspiration: Why hope is not enough

Sally Patfield, University of Newcastle: “As we look towards the future of university admissions, we must move beyond the damaging depictions of early entry. These condemn young people for using these pathways. Instead, we must consider how these principles can foreground reform in this area, and how admissions processes can continue to evolve to better meet the needs of all Australians.”

Early entry offers: how doing things kindly can make change

Emma Burns, Macquarie University: “Sadly, one of the main factors that differentiates schools with cultures that foster adaptive emotional coping, social relationships, and achievement and those with less positive cultures is socio-economic and cultural status.”

Aspirations act as a road map for future action. Here’s what we must do now

Sarah O’Shea, Charles Sturt University:

What really happens straight after school: the messy educational journey

Will we ever have an education election?

Julie McLeod, University of Melbourne: “For a resoundingly re-elected government, heading into a new term with ambitious commitments to building fairer futures and lifting aspirations, this is the time for education to be elevated as a national priority, to be a defining feature of the coming years – not just bits and pieces of help to make different stages of the education journey more affordable but to deliver on bigger and more systematic reform.”

The big question: will we ever have an education election?
education election

The big question: will we ever have an education election?

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Beaming with relief and self-declared optimism, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in his election night victory speech talked up his government’s commitment to building a future for all Australians.  Invoking signature Labor agendas, he lifted the crowd with the language of “fairness, aspirations and opportunity for all”, of striving “for futures that bring us together” with “new hope” and with “no-one left behind”.

In case the message slipped us by, the Prime Minister reminded again that “fairness, equality and respect for one another” were foundational. 

Picking up the cues, commentators were quick to describe Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s campaign as backward looking, pessimistic, worried and grievance-driven. The Labor Party and Albanese were positioned as forward looking, builders, practical, offering hope and a sense of optimism for the future.

It is possible I missed some of these more elevated dimensions of the Labor campaign but in any case, Labor’s victory is being put into history and characterised by such promises and the next term of government set up to deliver on them.

All about the future

It shouldn’t need to be said, but it clearly does. Education is fundamental to realising these promises about the future. Education is all about the future, about better worlds and times and opportunities to come, as so many of us can bang on about.

Yet where was education during the campaign? How can we ensure it is in prime position for the incoming government?

Once a trademark Labor platform item, proud and prominent in the Labor policy handbook (and not just for Whitlam), education was largely absent as a priority during the campaign, across the board. It was there in the ALP platform for 2025 but the brief education section ranged from childcare to tertiary education with an emphasis on small economic adjustments rather than big visions.

Instead of offering a coherent and compelling agenda for urgently needed reform and a vision for change – in all sectors – the electorate was offered piecemeal policy, bits and pieces of things scattered here and there. We didn’t even get the usual clever country, knowledge economy slogans of past elections.

Schooling barely registered

On the upside, Labor pushed free TAFE, a one-off 20% reduction in HECs debt and, from time-to time, mentioned early childhood education and care. Schooling barely registering in the campaign messaging, despite the ALP platform promising better and fairer funding for our public schools. This is even more alarming given that Jason Clare, Minister for Education, was also Labor’s election spokesperson. When higher education was noted, it was more likely to be indirectly via the nexus of international students, immigration and housing – a budget problem, not a national strength.

As Stephen Matchett writing in Future Campus observed, “Never has the low ebb of social licence [for higher education] and lack of electoral pull been more evident.” In the final week, the Opposition somewhat predictably tried to reignite the curriculum culture wars, a feeble effort to resuscitate the old ambition for MPs to direct curriculum content towards a more nationalistic and ideologically preferred focus, displaying not only a naïve grasp of how curriculum policy making actually works in this country but also showing how out of touch they were with the mood. How last-decade, if not last century, these protestations sounded.

What’s on the horizon

So, what’s on the horizon for education in the next three years and more? In the lead up to the Federal election the Australian Association for Research in Education issued a statement outlining five election priorities for education: 1) Boosting the education workforce: 2) Research informed policy; 3) Connected solutions; 4) Equity and educational outcomes; 5) Widening participation and nurturing aspirations. For each day last week, expert education researchers provided evidence-rich commentary on these issues, diagnosing the challenges for sure, but also offering ways forward, outlining powerful directions for reform and spelling out concrete and practical suggestions for change, building on what the research already shows.

These blog posts also highlight some of the major sticking points, the issues on which governments continue to stumble or default, despite all that is known from the research. For example, given all the talk about hope and aspirations in the immediate aftermath of the election, Marnee Shay’s blogpost provided a salutary view onto the differential and uneven opportunities available for hopefulness. Reflecting that “hope alone isn’t enough”, she argues for a more research-informed “policy focus on these cohorts who face layers of external challenges and who need robust schooling provision to create [accessible] pathways”.

What have we learned over 50 years?

In the case of equity and child poverty, Pat Thomson reminds us of findings from more than 50 years of research on poverty and its relation to education inequality. How many times does this need to be rediscovered? Looking to a hypothetical national review of child poverty and education, Thomson outlines seven key propositions that could guide such work, each based on a substantial volume of evidence gathered over many decades. These seven propositions themselves provide an initial road map for future policy reform and for a program of work that could genuinely tackle disadvantage not simply rehearse what we know about documented patterns.

This is the type of synthesis of research needed to take the rhetoric of building aspirations beyond feel-good talk to deliver actual change. And the type of research being drawn upon matters. As Penny Van Bergen argued in her blogpost on the valuing of different types of expert voices, “Effective policymaking must consider how research-informed insights from different disciplines informing education knit together” . The careful evaluation and bringing together of different types of research evidence is a crucial part of the policy informing process, yet one that can be all too easily missed in the rush to be heard.

This is the time to elevate education as a national priority

There is no lack of self-proclaimed experts on education and schools, as Nicole Mockler observed in her blogpost on the teaching workforce. Simply holding a strong opinion or having been to school does not really meet the threshold. Nor does selectively reading the research, cherry picking the data, ignoring contrary findings or foreclosing on whole fields of education research. Education advocacy is a crowded and noisy field, with thinktanks, consultants, lobbyists, national research organisations such as AERO, all part of the mix vying for influence in the political realm and in public discourse. But the quality and rigour of the research that is heard and listened to matters.

For a resoundingly re-elected government, heading into a new term with ambitious commitments to building fairer futures and lifting aspirations, this is the time for education to be elevated as a national priority, to be a defining feature of the coming years – not just bits and pieces of help to make different stages of the education journey more affordable but to deliver on bigger and more systematic reform.

High quality education research, examples of which the blogposts have showcased, must drive these agendas, it must be listened to and acted upon if the ambitions for change are to be met.  It is equally critical for education researchers not to wait around to be listened to, but to seize the space and time this moment offers.

Julie McLeod is professor of curriculum, equity and social change in the Faculty of Education and from 2017 to 2023 was Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research Capability) at the University of Melbourne. Her research is in the history and sociology of education, with a focus on youth, gender, inequality and educational reform, and particular interests in histories of educational ideas and qualitative methodologies . She is the immediate past president of AARE.

What really happens straight after school: the messy educational journey

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This is the final post in our series of posts on AARE’s education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about widening participation and nurturing aspirations.

When we think about pathways between spaces or places, our imagination often conjures up straight or linear routes that effectively moves someone from ‘point A’ to ‘point B’. Imaginings about educational pathways are no different. There remains an unspoken expectation that the ‘ideal’ student will move from school to university seamlessly, study full-time. The ‘ideal’ student prioritises studies over all other activities and move efficiently through the system and into employability. But this idyll of the ‘turbo’ student is simply that: an idyll. The pathways into and through university can be highly disjointed. The material realities of life often significantly impact on educational decision making.

For those of us who work in the higher education sector, we have probably witnessed the very complex or circuitous paths taken through university. The convoluted nature of university pathways is statistically evidenced by the diversity in rates of completion. The most recent data reports that after 4 years of study (the average full-time duration of a degree) only 40.9% of all university students had successfully graduated with 37.39% still enrolled.

After school: dipping in and out

After 6 years, completion rates had increased to 61.77% with a significant percentage (12.88%) still enrolled, at nine years of enrollment nearly 70% had completed with 4.5% still enrolled (Australian Department of Education, 2023). We also know that learners frequently dip in and out of study. In 2023, 20% of domestic students deferred or departed university – that is 1 in 5 students choose to either leave or ‘pause’ their studies.

Despite these statistics, our understanding of learner pathways remains very limited. In Australia, we still do not have a way to comprehensively map the entry and exit points that our learners take. Once they leave university, there is currently no reliable and universally available pathway data to evidence future educational participation. This is a significant problem. In my own research with first-in-family university students, I have been repeatedly struck by the ‘messiness’ of these educational journeys.

An impossible destination

A project funded by the Australian Research Council highlighted how first in family learners (n= 375) reflected upon their own educational  biographies, describing  pathways that were both circuitous and meandering in nature. Many of these learners had left school early or had experienced absences from formal learning environments due to ill-health, poverty, or family caring responsibilities. Like the participants in the recent Aspirations Longitudinal Study, attending university was often ‘barely imaginable’ for many (Gore et al., 2023, p. 9). Some learners in my research indicated how university was regarded as an impossible destination for people ‘like’ them, as Mahalia explained:

‘University was probably something that I always wanted to do. When you haven’t got people that have been there before, it’s that whole stigma of “What do you want to do that for”, because it’s out of the norm so there’s not much encouragement…’

Mahalia (First-in Family, 43, Final Year B. Social Work)

The desire to attend university was similarly often crushed before even having the chance to mature, as Bailie highlighted:

‘‘When you are relatively consistently told that with your demographic, your background, you’re specifically more likely to fail it sort of sets up that whole culture of low expectations.’ (Bailie, First-in Family, 26, B. Arts/Law)

Several attempts

Confidence was a big issue for these learners and frequently it took several attempts at university study before individuals felt capable of persisting. Without a family tradition of attending university, learners described difficulty in gaining an understanding of the ‘inner’ workings of the system.

For example, Bradley, in the third year of an Arts Degree, reflected how his university attendance was ‘difficult because I don’t have that ultimate level of understanding at home or within a family circle’ (Bradley, First in Family, 20, B. Arts).  This gap in understanding could result in a much lower sense of belonging, or ‘less stickiness’ to the university setting, and as a result thoughts of leaving can consistently pervade university careers.

This is not a new problem. Over twenty years ago, Robinson (2004) pointed out the need for a longitudinal focus on the ‘educational “process” of student progression’ highlighting the lack of understanding about the ‘pathways’ that students ‘take through their courses’ (p.2). This continues to be the case. In Australia, and other countries, there is an ongoing focus on single points of progression, rather than examining the continuity of this enrolment throughout the student life-course.

A radical overhaul

To address this issue, we need a radical overhaul of understandings about university progression. Firstly, degrees should not be marketed and messaged to students in terms of a time-bounded commitment, a four-year degree remains a timeframe that is both normalised and assumed for commencing students. However, data has repeatedly indicated that concluding a degree within this timeframe is simply not achievable for many cohorts.

Instead, we need degrees designed with fluidity in mind, including the provision of nested qualifications that enable learners to depart in an ‘orderly and low cost’ manner. Having multiple departure points also provides the opportunity to slowly build confidence, the decision to leave early not understood as a deficit or problem but rather an accepted solution to personal circumstances or contexts.

Place-based pathways

Equally, the sector needs to foreground place-based pathways to allow seamless and circular movements between local educational providers. This includes shifting away from a narrow vision of pathways that assumes a one-way direction between VET and HE, instead encouraging and supporting multiple entry and exit points.

This pattern of attendance is simply more reflective of the actual lived realities of our learners. Finally, to achieve this a national (or international) system of recognition of prior learning (RPL) is needed. The current system remains state based and is somewhat ad-hoc, adding to the complexity of managing this pathway for learners and their families.

As universities shift inexorably into the ‘post-Accord’ environment, the need to embrace the circularity and ‘zig-zag’ nature of educational pathways becomes paramount, particularly if we are to retain and support learners from more diverse backgrounds.

Sarah O’Shea is a distinguished professor, acting pro-vice chancellor, research and governance and dean, graduate research at Charles Sturt University, a Churchill Fellow, principal fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has just completed an ARC Discovery Project exploring the persistence behaviours of first in family students. She is also a member of the ARC College of Experts

Aspiration: Why hope is not enough

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This is the fifth and final day in our series of posts on AARE’s education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about widening participation and nurturing aspirations.

We may all have things in common, but we are not all the same. We may technically all be able to aspire to become doctors, teachers, or lawyers. But we all know that many in our communities won’t have the resources or capital to achieve those aspirations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the analogy of us all being “in the same boat” was used frequently to suggest that we all are experiencing the same issues. But the reality is that some people were on five-star yachts. Others were on rubber dinghies with patches over punctures to keep them afloat. Some were in the process of sinking. The same analogy can be used when we think about educational access and outcomes.

Hope, motivation, and drive have played some roles for people who have risen above their circumstances to achieve great things. But hope alone isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to achieve the widespread systemic equity measures needed to ensure all young people can achieve their goals, whatever they may be. The most disadvantaged young people in Australia have as much talent and promise as any other young person. We must implement evidence-based approaches to ensure this cohort has the same rigorous educational experiences as any other young person in this country. 

Talent in abundance

Talent is in abundance across all identities and communities in our societies. But there are some cohorts who we statistically know are more likely to be disengaged or educationally disadvantaged, such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, students with disability, students under child protection orders, LGBTIQ students and students from low socio-economic backgrounds. This list isn’t exhaustive. But we know young people from these demographics are increasingly being excluded (formally and informally) from accessing mainstream schooling options. 

Over the past decades, there has been an increase in alternative or flexible schooling options for young people for whom mainstream schooling is no longer an option. These schools play a critical role in keeping young people engaged in education. But as the sector has shown no signs of slowing in its growth, we need to invest in understanding the short-term and long-term outcomes for young people who attend them. This is critically important because of the cohorts who attend them and the challenges some of these young people will face in the longer term, particularly if they have not received a high-quality education. 

Many young people have strong relationships with staff

In 2022, we delivered Australia’s largest survey of young people who attend flexi schools. 483 young people from 19 flexi schools nationally shared their perspectives on a range of topics including their experiences of learning, what they would like to learn about and their career goals. The survey revealed many young people have strong relationships with staff. They feel supported and that learning was ‘right for them’. However, just over half of the young people did not feel challenged in their learning. We also found that young people in flexi schools have diverse and high aspirations. The risk we outline in the findings is that flexi schools may have low expectations of young people’s willingness to engage critically with academic content. 

We talk about building aspirations and strong futures in providing accessible schooling pathways. But there needs to be closer policy focus on these cohorts who face layers of external challenges and who need robust schooling provision to create these pathways. There are gaps in policy and research in understanding the role flexi schools are playing in the education ecosystem. Because the cohort who attend flexis are more likely to be in groups who experience educational disadvantage as outlined above, this glaring gap needs urgent attention. 

Imagination Declaration

There is capability and excellence within all young people. If we look at the Imagination Declaration 2019, young people eloquently articulated:

 “The future of this country lies in all of our hands… we do not want to inherit a world that is in pain. We do not want to stare down huge inequality feeling powerless to our fate… it is time to think differently”. 

Enabling aspirations and strong futures means building a rigorous, research-informed understanding of how the most educationally disadvantaged students can thrive in all schooling contexts.

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Marnee Shay is associate professor and deputy head of school in the School of Education at the University of Queensland. She is nationally recognised for her research and expertise in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education, codesign, strengths-based approaches, educational policy and youth studies. Her maternal family are from the Ngen’giwumirri language group, Daly River region (Northern Territory). Her research has substantially impacted policy and practice in her field. She serves on multiple Government and School boards, including the Indigenous Forum at the Australian Research Council (ARC). She is a qualified and experienced Queensland registered teacher.

Early entry offers: how doing things kindly can make change

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This is the fifth and final day in our series of posts on AARE’s education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about widening participation and nurturing aspirations.

We have a long way to go to make higher education more equitable. Postcode, income, family background, and Indigenous status are still major determinants of who gains entry to university in Australia.

Thankfully, the incumbent federal government recently reaffirmed its commitment to equity as part of the Universities Accord. It states 80 per cent of Australians will need post-school qualifications to meet the workforce needs of 2050. It has also has proposed new participation targets for First Nations students, students from low SES backgrounds, those from regional and remote areas, and students with a disability by 2035.

Such goals have become increasingly important in recent months against a broader international backdrop of “anti-DEI” sentiment fuelled by the Trump administration. Equity is becoming heavily politicised and decades of progress already being erased in the United States.

Ensuring young people from underrepresented backgrounds have the opportunity to access university is important now more than ever.

Achieving these goals requires genuine structural reform. My research shows that early entry schemes offer some timely insights into what is needed.

Admission: A key piece in the puzzle

In Australia, the single most common pathway for a young person to gain entry to university is via an ATAR. That’s the scaled rank students receive at the end of secondary school based on their final exams and assessments.

However, young people experiencing disadvantage are either less likely to receive an ATAR at the end of high school or more likely to receive a lower ranking compared to their more advantaged peers.

Numerous studies have demonstrated this biased nature of the ATAR. It has even been suggested that the use of the ATAR as the major selection tool for university entry has directly led to the “replication…of the [university] student profile” over time.

To counter this lack of diversity, an increasing number of ‘alternative’ pathways to enter university have been developed. These pathways include, for example, enabling and bridging programs, portfolio entry, and articulation through a VET provider.

Such initiatives are designed to meet the needs, experiences and identities of a more diverse range of students. It also challenges conventional beliefs that ability, merit and talent are only expressed through certain forms of academic achievement.

University early entry: A contentious practice?

Many of these ‘alternative’ entry pathways support non-school leaver entry to university. Early entry schemes target Year 12 students by offering potential candidates a place at university using criteria other than (or in addition to) their ATAR.

By targeting this cohort, early entry schemes are seen as a “contentious practice,” sparking a moral panic. That’s based on the belief they cause students to lose motivation at school. This is because – as the name implies – students receive their offer well before main round university offers and sometimes even before their final exams.

Equity features in these schemes through shifting the dominant measure of achievement and ability beyond the ATAR. Instead, an offer might be based on a combination of Year 11 coursework, a recommendation from a principal, extracurricular achievements, a personal statement, or contribution to the community. Some schemes also target specific equity groups.

However, concerns have been expressed that early entry might actually work against equity goals. Why? More privileged students are also more likely to be able to accrue valuable extracurricular experiences and leverage their social networks. Early entry has also been called an aggressive “arms race” among universities. That’s based on the belief that universities use the schemes to simply meet their recruitment targets.

To counter some of these issues, new guidelines were put in place by the federal government in 2024 to restrict the timing of early offers. A new national framework  is currently being developed.

A chance to do admissions differently

Instead of seeing early entry as a ‘contentious practice’ because it is disrupting tradition, we should think differently. What if such schemes actually offered a genuine chance to do university admissions differently, ensuring university is accessible to all?

As part of a research study I led in 2023, I conducted interviews with school-leavers from underrepresented backgrounds who had gained admission to university via early entry. These students described complex home lives, forced displacement, struggles with physical and/or mental ill-health. They experienced intersecting forms of material and social disadvantage. Underlying their stories were four key principles inherent in early entry that played a significant role in widening access to those most in need. These included:

·   Recognition of broader forms of success and different kinds of capabilities, opening up the possibility of higher education.

·   The certainty of having a university offer much earlier in the calendar year. That alleviated the pressure and anxiety commonly experienced during senior secondary school for both young people and their families.

·   A sense of care for young people’s health and wellbeing, treating these as genuine concerns.

·   Empathy for the complexities of young people’s lives, helping them to make a more positive post-school transition.

The future

As we look towards the future of university admissions, we must move beyond the damaging depictions of early entry. These condemn young people for using these pathways. Instead, we must consider how these principles can foreground reform in this area, and how admissions processes can continue to evolve to better meet the needs of all Australians.

Sally Patfield is a lecturer in the School of Education and member of the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre at the University of Newcastle. Her research focusses on issues of equity and social justice across formal schooling and higher education, particularly in relation to educational and social inequities connected to social class, rurality, first-in-family status, race, and the changing nature of the education system.

Aspirations act as a road map for future action. Here’s what we must do now

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This is the fifth and final day in our series of posts on AARE’s education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about widening participation and nurturing aspirations.

Aspirations help students identify who they want to be and how they want to get there. For example, we know students who report stronger aspirations to finish secondary school are much more likely to go on to do so, which has invaluable benefits for their future and the future of the country. 

Educators and school leaders build positive aspirations in young people by creating school cultures and environments in which students are able to envisage a future for themselves and, crucially, can access the supports and resources they need to make that future possible. School culture is multifaceted, comprising social, emotional, and motivational dimensions. My research has provided evidence for the crucial role of these different elements of school culture in fostering aspirations. 

A sense of belonging

Positive social relationships among students, teachers, school staff, and parents foster a sense of belonging, care, and safety within a school. Students that report stronger relationships with their parents, teachers, and peers are more likely to report higher levels of motivation and engagement, including higher aspirations. Positive school culture also includes individual and shared positive affective experiences.

Enjoyment and enthusiasm are influential: teachers’ expressions of enthusiasm for their work and their subjects informs students’ enthusiasm for learning, both in the long and short-term. Schools that actively foster students’ intrapersonal motivational resources via effective practices are better positioned to support students’ long term aspirations. When schools foster positive motivation, students develop the skills and underlying self-belief necessary to maintain their drive for their long-term aspirations. Similarly, schools that have a culture of high expectations are better able to communicate to their students that they believe in their capacity to make those aspirations a reality. 

Building a positive school culture is an intentional process and is a shared endeavour between school staff and students. Said another way, building this positive school culture takes time, effort, and resources. 

A vicious cycle can emerge

Sadly, one of the main factors that differentiates schools with cultures that foster adaptive emotional coping, social relationships, and achievement and those with less positive cultures is socio-economic and cultural status. A vicious cycle can emerge. Lower socio-economic and cultural status schools tend to report lower levels of achievement and other issues with building positive school culture. However, it is precisely the students who struggle with achievement and academic success that tend to benefit the most from positive relationships, shared positive affective experiences, and practices that foster motivation – in short these are the students who gain most from positive school culture. Because of this, equitable school funding, both in terms of money and resources, is inexorably linked with how we can help to build positive aspirations in our young people. 

Aspirations are not built alone. Students take in so many messages from their social relationships, their community, their school, and the broader culture to develop an imagined desirable future. Students work with teachers, parents, coaches, and other role models to identify where they want their life to go, including at school, at university, and beyond. All students deserve to have a ‘fair go’ at achieving that imagined future. It is our responsibility to advocate for practices and vote for policies that make this possible. 

Emma Burns is an ARC DECRA Fellow and Senior Lecturer of educational psychology at the Macquarie School of Education. Emma’s research focuses on the socio-motivational factors and processes that impact adolescents’ adaptive engagement, achievement and development, especially in STEM. To examine these diverse mechanisms, she uses advanced quantitative research methodology, such as latent growth modelling and multi-level structural equation modelling.

equity and educational outcomes in universities

Inequality: How Australian schools churn it out

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Economic inequality in Australia is intensifying. We now live in a society that funnels money up to the already wealthy. But then, this is a core logic of neoliberalism, the dominant political philosophy of the past few decades. And all social policy is being refashioned in the name of offloading demands onto the market and slowly undermining democratic decision making. And schooling now plays its part in this process but then also has one of the most significant roles in Australia’s social policy mix. Mostly because it is through schooling that families get out of poverty. At least that is the egalitarian myth. 

Unfortunately, schooling has gone missing again as a significant topic for the next federal election. It is not surprising because schooling has a set of very significant and difficult policy challenges that neither of the political parties wants to discuss. Briefly schooling now has the following policy troubles: falling student achievement compared to international standards, intensifying teacher shortage, a school leadership crisis with too few aspiring leaders, and increasing numbers of students not attending, disengaged and not completing schooling.

What we hear: Let’s just go harder

What is moot here is the response by those governing to this set of troubles. All we hear from governments and key knowledge brokers is let’s just go harder with the policy we have in place. But the key logics of Australia’s policy regime for schooling have weak evidence at best.

Most importantly though, Australian schooling is now one of the most unequal systems in the OECD and I want to argue that this set of troubles has at its centre, this inequality problem. But then the inequality problem for Australian schooling is: laminated over in policy debates; the very notion of equality is reframed inside of a neoliberal logic and now gets discussed in terms of ‘every child’ and not how schooling as system fails specific groups; and the strong correlation between SES status of school communities and student achievement is now treated as irrelevant, it’s not a topic for policy intervention and schools are evaluated as though they operate on a level playing field.  

Unfortunately, in response to these troubles, governments treat these issues separately, hide their own policy failures, and mostly blame schools and teachers. All we hear ad nauseum is that the policy is working and that teachers aren’t implementing the science. And the solutions are most often strategies to undermine the professional autonomy of teachers. Let’s mandate dumbed down teaching [explicit instruction (sic)], and give the stressed overworked teachers lesson plans, teach the students how to sit still, and force adoption of a phonics fundamentalism. 

What makes the machine

I argue that Australian schooling is now an inequality machine. I am using the metaphor of a machine to focus attention on an assemblage of elements that collectively shape and exercise power through schooling policy. In this case, the machine includes a government policy regime, various knowledge brokers, and the school systems. And to be more precise, schooling is a logic machine that is now driven by policy logics that have little to no evidence that they improve learning, and these logics rarely get a mention when governments discuss the policy challenges.

Four key policy logics

I note four key policy logics that drive the sector: a marketized version of school devolution, standardisation, NAPLAN and demands to implement a what works learning science [often referred to also as a Science of Teaching Paradigm SoT]. Each of these policy logics feeds the inequality machine!

Sham commitment

  • A marketised version of school devolution asserts a one-size-fits-all logic, and intensifies the residualisation of schools serving high poverty communities. As well, this policy logic promotes a sham commitment to parental choice given most parents can’t choose and hence must send their kids to the local public school. But public schooling is being actively undermined by the other 2 sectors and other policy logics. And even though the present government has finally ‘fixed’ the funding demands from Gonski, Australia ranks first among OECD countries in terms of government funding for private schools. 

Standardisation

  • Standardisation in Australian schooling contributes to educational inequality in several ways, including: narrowing the curriculum leading to disengagement and lower achievement among some students; undermines teacher professional autonomy and hence their ability to respond to the unique needs of their students, reducing the quality of instruction and student engagement, leads to fetishising a focus on raising test scores, rather than addressing underlying causes of educational inequality

Raising test scores narrows curriculum

  • The NAPLAN and the Myschool website contribute to the production of educational inequality by: placing a strong emphasis on raising test scores, which has led to a narrowing of curriculum and to teaching to the test, rather than addressing deeper learning or critical thinking skills; creates high-pressure environments that disadvantage some students; undermines alternative measures of good practice and drives teachers towards narrow, unproductive definitions of literacy and numeracy, at a time when Australia needs to be advancing as a highly developed knowledge economy.

Pushing a paradigm

  • Pushing a “Science of Teaching” paradigm contributes to educational inequality through: decontexualised truth claims about what works invariably neglects socio-economic factors such as poverty, racism, and lack of resources, which do have a significant impact on student achievement; the emphasis on standardised, evidence-based (sic) practices limits teachers’ capability to teach to the specific unique needs and interests of their students, particularly in disadvantaged communities; and tends to reinforce existing inequalities by failing to address systemic biases and barriers to learning.

Governments rave on about evidence based practice but Australian schooling policy has four key logics that have weak evidence at best that they improve students learning. And there is a strong case that these logics, operating as a set, are in large part responsible for Australia’s appalling claim to be one of the most unequal schooling systems in the OECD.

This inequality machine is now well ensconced  and teflon coated and there are many snouts in the trough, making money from sustaining a failing policy regime. Is it possible that Australian schooling could become a machine for equality? Some ideas:

  • A royal commission into inequality in Australian schooling
  • Scrap or rebuild AERO from the ground up and through the adoption of a ‘good social science’ and not a scientism that fetishes measuring as the only way to reform.
  • Rebuild the ‘educational’ intelligence of federal and state governments and hence undermine the reliance of policy brokers (grifters?)
  • Weaken policy borrowing from the UK and the USA who have both shown the weakness of their own schooling systems of late
  • Recalibrate the policy regime, away from a neoliberalisng marketizing logic to one that rebuilds school and teacher professional autonomy
  • Cease blaming schools, teachers and students for policy failure

Robert Hattam is emeritus professor of educational justice at the University of South Australia. His research interests include social justice critical pedagogy, school reform, educational policy and culturally responsive schools.

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Learning from a crisis – building back better

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This is the fourth day in a series of posts on AARE education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about equity and educational outcomes.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was living a learning crisis . . .Even worse, the crisis was not equally distributed: the most disadvantaged children and youth had the worst access to schooling, highest dropout rates, and the largest learning deficits. . . .But it is possible to counter those shocks, and to turn crisis into opportunity. . . . As the school system stabilises, countries can use the focus and innovativeness of the recovery period to “build back better.” World Bank. 

From early on in the COVID-19 pandemic there were calls not to go back to ‘business as usual’ (BAU) in education but to ‘build back better’ once school lockdowns ended.

Five years on, these calls are even more urgent. Australia faces high levels of school refusal and youth mental health concerns. Some of these concerns are attributed to COVID school lockdowns. And inequities are deepening; and as environmental crises cause disruptions to education and schooling more and more often – it can feel like the call to build back better was not heard.

Crises offer valuable lessons

Experiences during a crisis offer valuable lessons for improving educational equity. In our book  – which called for rebuilding more equitable education systems after crises like COVD-19 – we provide extensive evidence for some key lessons related to learners’:

·  material needs

·  emotional wellbeing, and

·  access to learning.

Of course, these three aspects are linked, with the learner’s family, learning contexts, education systems and structural dimensions that shape everyday life during and beyond the pandemic. All of these dimensions form a web of interconnected factors that affect educational equity. We address each dimension in turn below emphasising the ongoing impact of these factors on learners. Systems leaders can choose to focus efforts on these dimensions to improve equity in education.

Material needs

The economic pressure of COVID-19 lockdowns placed extraordinary financial stress on many families. It highlighted that material basics are essential for enhancing educational equity.

·         Breakfast clubs and free school lunches are an essential support that helps to mitigate food poverty and help prepare students for learning. Rather than the BAU of ad hoc food provision that relies on insecure funding, schools need a systematic strategy to provide healthy food in non-stigmatising ways.

·         Overcrowded and insecure housing has negative impacts on learning. Ultimately, housing is also an educational equity issue.

·         Student access to their own digital hardware and software, and to reliable internet connection, is a crucial enabler of learning. Addressing the digital divide is a core component of achieving educational equity.

Emotional wellbeing 

The pandemic made visible the essential (but previously undervalued) work of educational providers for supporting student wellbeing (see Chapters 2 and 5 of our book). Working towards enhanced educational equity requires recognition of this role, especially for already disenfranchised and traumatised children and young people.

·         The effects of crisis-related trauma on emotional wellbeing can continue for years after the event and create a ‘shadow pandemic’. Funding for ongoing collaboration between families, education, allied health services, and other agencies is vital. 

·         Students who rely heavily on schools for wellbeing and safety need additional support. This includes students who may not be safe at home due to violence, abuse, or neglect.

Access to learning 

Despite the seeming intractability of educational inequity, there have been promising signs  of commitment to change and actual improvement in the 21st century. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant setback to these advances.

·         The achievement gap between more disadvantaged and more privileged students widened through the pandemic. Targeted, substantial support is needed to ensure inequitable learning losses do not have deep and long-term consequences.

·         Students learn best through active, face-to-face teaching by a qualified professional with whom they have positive relationships. Wholehearted government and community support for the teaching profession is essential for student learning.

Building back better 

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted potential innovations in the education sector that could improve equitable access to learning. These include enhanced digital learning, stronger home-school connections, targeted ‘catch up’ learning programs, and increased respect for the work of teachers. 

Smoother interagency collaboration was also a feature of the pandemic. Schools and school systems, welfare agencies, and charities and other non-government services overcame barriers that usually make such collaboration difficult. This helped to quickly identify students who most needed targeted support.   

Innovative approaches to income support provided in the early stages of COVID-19 demonstrated that it is possible to lift families and children out of poverty. Ultimately educational equity will be served best by a more equitable society. No matter how hard schools work they cannot overcome the impact of entrenched poverty.

Unfortunately, back to BAU means that many valuable innovations, programs, platforms and policies that were implemented during COVID-19 have disappeared. As a result, educational inequities are becoming even more entrenched. But it is not too late to learn from the pandemic – and to systematically and sustainably introduce approaches that proved to make our education, and our society, more equitable.

Acknowledgements 

This blog piece is based on a book that was authored by Emily Rudling, Sherridan Emery, Becky Shelley, Kitty te Riele, Jess Woodroffe and Natalie Brown.

Kitty te Riele is professor of education in the Peter Underwood Centre at the University of Tasmania. Sherridan Emery is a research fellow in the Peter Underwood Centre at the University of Tasmania. Emily Rudling is a research ellow in the Peter Underwood Centre at the University of Tasmania.

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Equity: Now’s the time to tackle child poverty

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This is the fourth day in a series of posts on AARE education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about equity and educational outcomes.

Fifty years ago the federal Commission of Inquiry into Poverty published its main report – usually called the Henderson Report. At the time, some 17.5% of Australia’s children under the age of 15 were estimated to be living below the poverty line. In 2025 this figure has barely shifted. There are no official tallies of child poverty in Australia, but UNICEF, ACOSS, the Valuing Child Initiative, the Australia Institute and the Paul Ramsay Foundation and their various academic partners agree that the 2025 child poverty figure is still around 17%. Just as it was fifty years ago, about one in six children in Australia currently live in poverty. This is a national disgrace. 

The reasons for the child poverty plateau are very complex. Ending poverty is not just about increasing family incomes, although that is crucial. It also involves a raft of changes across state and federal jurisdictions in health, housing, employment, welfare, transport and regional development, to name just some.  Education, particularly schooling, is part of the problem. It is also part of the solution, as the Henderson Report made clear. 

A significant and persistent gap

Of course, some things have changed in education since the Henderson Report and the subsequent Fitzgerald report (1976) on poverty and education. Take school retention.

A combination of factors, including the collapse of the youth labour market, public policies which made it difficult for young people to leave school early, the constructive efforts of educators, combined mean that more young people now stay at school for longer. Retention to Year 12  sat at around 35% in the late 1970s compared to around 80% now. But being at school for longer has not translated into better life chances for everyone. Australia has a significant and persistent gap in educational outcomes.

PISA results show that disadvantaged  students are much more likely to lag behind their peers. Here, disadvantaged refers to students who are ‘low socioeconomic status’, located in regional and remote areas or are First Nations.  Girls are also again falling behind their male peers in maths and science, according to the TIMMS tests. It is not surprising that in 2020, a Mitchell Institute report card on the agreed goals set out in the Mparntwe Declaration argued that gaps in achievement could largely be attributed to students’ postcodes and family resources.   

Time to take a hard look at the problem

Given the enduring relationship between poverty, place, First Nations and schooling  –  these were the focus of some of the very first funded Commonwealth equity programmes – it is surely time for us to take a hard look at the problem. We need to step away from political arithmetic and federal-states horse-trading about the distribution of money and the establishment of performance frameworks. These are necessary but hardly sufficient to tackle a national schooling system which does very well for some children but not others. We need to focus directly on children in poverty and their schools. 

But is any political party brave enough to put child poverty and schooling back on the agenda? Could we revisit Henderson? Should we have a fifty year anniversary stock-take of our successes and our ongoing problems? What if we had another review? 

Towards a national review of child poverty and education

Let’s imagine that there is a 2025 review of poverty and schooling. Yes, it’s a stretch, but bear with me. My imaginary review terms of reference include the following seven points:

1. Poverty is concentrated in particular locations and schools.

Via the real estate market, school location is inseparable from neighbourhood concentrations of wealth and poverty and the associated uneven distribution of achievement. It is entirely different to be and work in a school where one in fifty children are living in poverty compared to being in a school where it is one in three. Or one in two. Wealth, educational success, life chances and geography are knotted together. 

2. Context matters – school mix matters

No school serving a community left in poverty is exactly the same. Take the school serving a community made up largely of the working poor. Parents work multiple precarious jobs all hours of the day and night to put food on the table. Another school serves communities where combinations of public housing policy and private rental markets lead to high numbers of very recent refugees. How about the school in a regional town with a dwindling population where families who can afford to do so have their children board in town while the rest go local. Or the school in a public housing estate where a significant proportion of residents are dependent on income support. And so on. None of these schools are the same.  “Thisness” matters.

3. Difficulty getting staff

Many schools serving communities in poverty have difficulty getting staff and the staff they do get are often highly mobile. Teacher shortages are not evenly distributed. “Are you going to be here next term Miss/Sir” is a question anyone who has worked in a school  with staffing churn hates to hear. Staffing churn works strongly against improving student learning and well-being. Children living in poverty need sustained relationships with the very best teachers we have. But it seems that ensuring a well-qualified teacher for every child remains a pipe dream. Getting the right teachers to the right places at the right time is a crucial system task. 

4. Schools serving communities left in poverty have to do more with less.

Schools in economically struggling neighbourhoods have less income – they can rarely ask their communities for additional money so they have to exist on their government allocation. They have the same time and staff budgets as their more comfortable counter-parts. Yet everyday they have to deal with more and more diverse and complex needs and issues.

5. Children need to be at school to learn

Getting students through the school gate is vital but not enough. Being an absent presence in class is not a substitute for being engaged. Finding ways to help children want to attend and participate in their learning is a necessary first step to closing the educational gap.  

6. Children do not leave their problems at the school gate

Schools serving communities left in poverty need support from other public agencies. They have higher concentrations of troubled and troubling students. But their local and regional health, mental health, psychology and welfare services are often stretched thin, because they too are doing more than they are resourced to cover.  And in rural and remote areas professional services are generally based far away and school needs do not always fit neatly with scheduled visits. 

7. The best educational resources are teachers

The best educational resource that children and young people left in poverty have are their teachers. When they have time and are well supported teachers in disadvantaged schools can rise to the challenge. Knowledgeable teachers with rich pedagogical repertoires and the innovative practices they have quietly developed have made a difference in some schools in some places and at some times. These examples are a resource for systemic change. But this reservoir of skilled professional practice is rarely acknowledged. Teachers in schools serving communities left poor too often find themselves being told how to do their jobs by people who have never been in their shoes.  

Policy amnesia rules – not OK

These are seven policy basics. These seven basics do not cover the full extent of what schools serving communities left poor have to overcome to make headway against the odds. They are only a beginning. Getting back to these policy basics is not making excuses for failure. To the contrary, they recognise everyday educational realities. And shamefully, these seven basics have largely slipped away from federal policies. Policy amnesia rules – not OK. 

The fiftieth anniversary of the Henderson report is not only a time to remember. We are also well overdue for a rethink. We can begin by acknowledging that addressing child poverty means that some schools and their teachers must do ground-breaking work. And they need support. 

So this is my challenge for those currently standing for election, an election where poverty seems to be off the agenda. We need a bold new vision for addressing the long tail of educational underachievement and child poverty. We need the courage and curiosity to inquire, to review, to face up to the equity challenge. One in six Australian children needs your commitment to do better. 

Pat Thomson PhD PSM FAcSS(UK) is part time professor of education at the University of South Australia and the University of Nottingham. She was for twenty years a school leader of disadvantaged state schools in South Australia – she is a life member of the South Australian Secondary Principals Association. Her research and publications are directed to making schooling better for more children and young people: She focuses on school change, arts and creative education, alternative education and leaders’ work. She also publishes patter, a blog about academic writing.  She is outraged that the issues addressed in her first academic book Schooling the rustbelt kids (2002) are still so pertinent.  

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Here’s how to ensure a healthy future for universities

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This is the third day in our series of posts on AARE’s education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about research-informed policy.

If you regularly read the news, you can be forgiven for thinking these are far from halcyon days for Australian universities. Their relationships with governments and public appear increasingly fraught. Few people are happy with them: not their students, not governments and not their own staff. There are lots of opinions about what it is that these institutions should and should not do. If there is one thing that seems to unite both major political parties, it is that something needs to be done about university governance, quality of education and the number of international students enrolled each year.

That Australian universities are subject to so much criticism can seem puzzling when looking from afar. It is hard to escape the fact that the country’s universities are in robust shape compared to many places around the world. It is not hype to say Australia has one of the better higher education systems around. Most students have been consistently happy with the quality of education as measured by the national Student Experience Survey. Many staff working in universities are remunerated highly compared with their peers internationally. On a per capita basis, Australia performs well in terms of the quantity and quality of the research.

Longstanding and significant issues

While some of the complaints about universities are probably misplaced and outside observers are right to point to many successes, there are also longstanging and significant issues that both sides of politics will need to address sooner or later if Australia is to continue to have healthy universities.

Domestic students are paying more and student debt is a problem. The previous government’s policy to increase the cost of humanities, communications and human movement degrees is starting to bite. Combine the cost of an undergrad Arts degree and a professional master’s qualification, such as in Law, and high debts become the norm rather than an outlier. The days of $100,000 HELP debts are well and truly here. The problem for any future government is that this is a very expensive problem to fix when there are many calls on the federal budget.

A tough ask

A straight reversal of the Job-ready Graduates changes that increased fees would be north of one billion dollars a year, every year, from now on. The last time we had such a large single year increase in student funding was at the height of the demand driven system in 2011-12, when universities could enrol as many students as they liked. In inflation adjusted dollars there was a similar sized increase in funding in 2011-12 that brought around 50,000 extra students into the system. Reversing the Job-ready Graduates policies would bring in no new students for roughly the same cost to the public purse. A tough ask for any government is an issue the recent Universities Accord did not offer a full answer to solve.

It is not just student debt that is an issue hard to fix but also hard to continue ignoring. Australian universities do a large proportion of the country’s research. As a proportion of GDP in recent years, spend on research in higher education institutions has been second only to Canada of our major peer countries. Yet the majority of these funds do not come from public grants or research contracts, they are from what are often termed ‘general university funds’, which usually means funds from international student revenue.

A virtuous circle

For a long time, many people have argued this was a ‘virtuous circle’ where universities invested in research with the fee income from international students, which led to better international rankings, which in turn attracted international students, which funded more research. This bounty did not just go towards research: it also helped replace capital stock and facilities, support programs and generally ‘grow the pie’. But to argue this is sustainable in the long term is optimistic at best. As Covid showed, the fortunes of international education can change fast.

Which is all part of the reason many universities are nervous about where policies to cap international education might lead. Australia has had fee-paying international students for many decades, though their numbers remained small until recently. One in twenty enrolments in the late 1980s was an international student. Within two decades, one in four students in Australian higher education was an ‘overseas student’ as they were once called. At its peak a decade later, one in three, making the country one of the most internationalised in the world in terms of its student make-up. Capping international student numbers at current levels might be sustainable, assuming that demand holds over the longer term.

Safe and sunny

Viewed as safe and sunny, Australia has benefitted from being an English-speaking nation with a high-quality education system in the neighbourhood of many Asian countries where international study is popular. At times there has been the added incentive of generous post-study immigration policies. If Australia seeks to send signals that we do not welcome students or our education quality is seen to be slipping, the future might not be so sunny. The major source countries of China and India are building their domestic systems. China has invested vast sums in educating its population.

No matter who forms government after May 3, these issues – student debt, sustainable research funding and setting for international education are only going to become more fraught. There might be a lot of misplaced complaints about universities, but there are real policy issues that are going to require attention.

Gwilym Croucher is associate professor and the deputy director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne.