AARE election priorities

evidence based policy

Turning away from celebrity and towards genuine topic experts

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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.

Research-informed policy making is critical in education. Unlike policymaking in energy, international relations, or defence, everyone has been to school. This means that everyone feels some level of expertise when commenting on “what works” in education: how teachers should teach, what they should teach, and how students will learn best. Unfortunately, assumed knowledge is often inconsistent with evidence.

Effective policymaking must consider how research-informed insights from different disciplines informing education knit together. When drawing on assumed knowledge, however, we are susceptible to three errors in thinking. First, we overemphasise our own personal experiences. We may downplay students’ diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, experiences of belonging, neurodivergence, and so on. These differences matter if we are to ensure equitable school opportunities for all children.

Second, we are misled by sensationalist media narratives. Scanning 65,000 news articles over 25 years, Nicole Mockler at the University of Sydney found perpetual criticism of teachers. Yet, among the articles, there was little focus on school funding, teacher workloads, or other systemic issues. Crunching NAPLAN outcomes from 2008 to 2022, Sally Larsen at the University of New England found little statistical evidence to support ongoing media claims of declines in student achievement. 

Third, we are seduced by popular learning myths. One myth tells us that all students learn differently and so we should attend to their unique styles. Research tells us although processing speed and capacities may differ, the same basic cognitive patterns for all learners involve a combination of attention, working memory, encoding, and long-term memory. A second myth suggests that motivation only emerges after success. Research tells us that motivation and learning are mutually supportive. To avoid these errors in thinking, policymakers must turn to researchers with genuine expertise across these topics.

In recent policy discussions aimed at stemming the current teacher shortage, politicians from both sides of politics have decried a lack of evidence underpinning Initial Teacher Education programs. So too have a range of media commentators and think tanks. The Strong Beginnings report produced in mid-2023 recommended four reform areas, including the mandating of “core content” for ITE programs and performance metrics for providers. Ironically, however, little evidence of a problem in ITE quality or a connection to teacher shortages currently exists.

Performance metrics create perverse incentives

In research I recently conducted with other NSW Deans of Education, we mapped stakeholder responses to the Strong Beginnings reforms. We found little resistance to core content topics from higher education providers, regulatory authorities, employers, or teachers’ associations. But there was concern for generalisability and for ensuring other key topics – such as socioemotional development, bullying, creativity, and educational equity – are also represented. Stakeholders also highlighted evidence that Australian teachers are leaving the profession due to employment conditions, and that performance metrics often create perverse incentives working against their original aims. These findings are important, because they suggest that proposed policy solutions might not address the substantive problems that they are intended for. If policy decisions address ghost problems, and if they have unintended consequences, then they will fail to achieve success.

Importantly, when considering research-informed policy, policymakers must be willing to work with the very researchers who are producing research evidence. They must ask what different studies, theories, and disciplines informing education can and cannot tell us. To take cognitive load theory as a popular example, there is robust evidence that novice learners cannot hold too many things in mind at once. This evidence existed in cognitive science well before the emergence of cognitive load theory and has extensive research support. Building on this understanding, cognitive load theory makes important contributions in demonstrating that instructional design matters if we are to avoid cognitive overload. However, it cannot tell us about the more elaborative and generative activities that best support deep encoding. That research comes from elsewhere in cognitive science. It also cannot tell us our goals within specific disciplines. These are philosophical questions.  

We need fearless policymakers

To seek genuine solutions to wicked educational problems, we need fearless policymakers who are willing to consider evidence from the multiple disciplines and subdisciplines informing education. Then the need to marry these against the learning and developmental outcomes that we consider most important within Australian society. These include disciplinary knowledge, critical thinking, informed citizenry, and so on. We need policymakers who are thorough, who turn to researchers and teachers to understand the connection between research and application, and who do not rely solely on slick edu-celebrities or think tanks simply because it is expedient. We need policymakers who can change course in the face of compelling evidence.

There are edu-celebrities of every brand in education. They are for and against creativity, for and against various brands of explicit teaching, for and against phonics, for and against play-based learning. Some of these views are evidence-based, some are not. 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.  

Penny Van Bergen is an associate professor, psychology in education, in the School of Education, Macquarie University. She is former head of school and honorary professor at the University of Wollongong. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

evidence based policy

How can we advance research-informed policy?

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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.

The Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) is recommending five key education priorities for the next term of federal parliament. One of these recommendations is research informed policy. Education policy should be informed by rigorous and robust research and draw on the latest research findings to deliver high functioning and inclusive education.

The rise of ‘knowledge brokers’

The recommendation that policy is informed by research comes in the context of a  considerable increase of ‘knowledge brokers’ or ‘intermediary organisations’. This includes global organisations such as the OECD, the World Bank, and in Australia, the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) and Social Venture Australia’s Evidence For Learning.

Knowledge brokers often work in networks. For example, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) established the ‘Evidence for Education network’, and as part of this network, funded ‘Evidence for Learning’ (as owned by Social Venture Australia). Evidence for Learning distributes EEF’s ‘evidence based’ toolkits. It also served as a ‘pilot’ for the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO). The Australian Education Research Organisation works with other knowledge brokers, such as ‘The Centre for Evidence and Implementation (CEI)’ (as was demonstrated in the Strong Beginnings Report). Their role is to ‘broker’ knowledge, advance reform agendas, build ‘evidence’ to support particular agendas and influence policy. They often share similar reform agendas, such as an emphasis on ‘what works’.

A ‘knowledge broker’ is an important role because they can effectively leverage large-scale and systemic policy change, sometimes with questionable knowledge bases.

The risks of knowledge brokers

Knowledge brokers are typically non-state actors, although in the case of AERO we can see a blurring of this divide (AERO is funded by the government, but also builds revenue from goods and services, and is working towards private/philanthropic funding).

Researchers have pointed to particular strategies of knowledge brokers in influencing reforms, as seen from other contexts such as the United States. For example, in relation to school voucher programs in the US, these programs were principally based on ‘evidence’ that the voucher programs resulted in improved student academic performance. But this shifted when so-called ‘gold standard’ studies (randomized controlled trials) showed large, negative impacts.

When this occurred, the advocacy simply changed its messaging in order to emphasize other objectives of the program. This highlights the role that knowledge brokers can play in supporting or advocating as based upon particular ideological agendas.

Actors within these organisations often represent particular knowledge fields and expertise. For example, many are drawn from consultancy fields. It is rare for actors to be drawn from the education field, with the exception of teachers from Teach For Australia. They tend to represent ‘incentivist’ ways of thinking; that is, support agendas to increase profit-making and commercialisation in schools.

‘Purchasing’ evidence

A risk of ‘knowledge brokers’ is less transparency in terms of whom interests they are represented and obscuring vested interests (we often don’t know who is funding which organisation). A further potential risk is a declining role of traditional research (such as peer-reviewed research), although this is not always the case.

The risk of these organisations is that the role they perform is to ‘purchase’ evidence and provide legitimacy for reforms. They typically outsource goods and services for profit. Whilst many claim they are ‘neutral’ or ‘bipartisan’, this is to be questioned.

Of course we should be cautious of simultaneously romanticising university researchers. There have been cases where university researchers have been ‘purchased’ or paid off to support particular products (e.g. Coca-cola, cigarettes, the fossil fuels industry).

How can we advance research informed and evidence-based policy?

As academics, we could possibly learn from knowledge brokers.

Many of these organisations argue that education research is irrelevant, inaccessible, too jargonistic or abstract. And rather than feeling affronted by this, it is possible that academics endeavour to leverage it in order to better influence education policy.

It is true that academics may be guilty of only writing for academic audiences (e.g. prestigious academic journals). Our work may be difficult or costly to access. It may be written in inaccessible ways for time-poor policy makers. It is not about ‘dumbing down’ work but writing for different audiences.

Knowledge brokers are packaging their work in very appealing ways that prioritise time efficiency and accessibility. 

Bringing research to the public in high-impact ways

This is something for university researchers to take on, in terms of writing for the public and engaging with the public, in order to bring their research to the public in high-impact ways.

It may mean writing or speaking in different formats and for different mediums such as newspapers, blogs or social media, and responding to topical issues. 

In Australia, we are lucky to have highly respected education researchers. An article published in Higher Education Research and Development Journal, found that “most Australian universities are performing above the world average in educational research. Australian universities perform especially well on citation indicators, with more than 75% of universities performing above the world average.”

In this respect, we do 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.

We should also be critical when it comes to the reforms that these organisations are actively promoting and pushing. As evident in the most recent ‘Strong Beginnings’ report, which advocates for ‘brain science’, this is very much aligned with the thinking of think-tanks like Centre for Independent Studies and the Education Endowment Foundation. These actors tend to share advocacy strategies for particular reform agendas. 

Emma Rowe is an associate professor in the School of Education, Deakin University. She is a recipient of the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Grant (DECRA) 2021–2024 and was a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar (2020) at Indiana University. Her research is interested in policy and politics in education.

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The urgent need for connectedness

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This is the second day in a series of posts on education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about why we need connected solutions.

The middle years

For more than two decades I have conducted research in the field of young adolescent learning and teaching, with interests in student engagement and wellbeing; teacher self-efficacy; and professional learning.  During this time, policy-makers and systems have sporadically focussed on the middle years (Years 6/7-9/10) with specific initiatives, such as the 2015 implementation of the Junior Secondary Guiding Principles.

The impetus for the focused attention has ranged from responses to structural shifts, such as moving Year 7 into secondary schools, to concerns about the wellbeing of our middle years’ students across a range of academic, social and emotional indicators. The initiatives have been characterised by their transient and short-lived nature. They are often a reflection of political cycles,  which in turn impact the sustainability of reforms to achieve long-term transformation.

The most recent evidence provides an alarming insight into how we are travelling in the middle years. It is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2022 data.  PISA is an international comparative study of student performance, directed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It measures the cumulative education outcomes of 15-year-olds in 81 countries.

Lower than the OECD average

The findings reveal Australia’s mean index score is lower than the OECD average for: students’ sense of belonging; student-teacher relationships; disciplinary climate in mathematics classes; feeling safe at school; resistance to stress; curiosity; and perseverance. Exposure to bullying is higher than the OECD average. These scores occurred despite our investment in schooling that is just above the average of the OECD countries.

Students in various states and sectors also report variations across these indicators, highlighting the inconsistency of experiences around the nation. This is gravely concerning data. 

Furthermore, it aligns with persistent evidence of declining mental health and wellbeing of young adolescents over the last two decades. That has surged since the COVID pandemic, with the peak of onset coincidentally occurring at 15 years of age. 

Young people’s mental health and wellbeing is now a leading health concern. It accounts for 45% of disease globally in those aged 10–24 years.

It is clear that the middle years in the education life course requires urgent and sustained attention in Australian education.

The intention is there

The intention to improve middle years education is evident in the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration. It provides the vision for Australia to achieve a world class education system that encourages and supports every student. 

The middle years receive special attention in the Declaration which states: [T]he middle years are an important period of individual growth and learning when a balanced set of cognitive, social and emotional skills are developed.”

And: “[T]his is also a time when they are at the greatest risk of disengagement from learning.

“Through directly addressing each student’s range of needs, schools must focus on enhancing motivation and engagement”

The need for learning with positive student-teacher relationships, strong peer relationships and age-appropriate pedagogies are the salient factors to achieve effective engagement, with the promotion of student agency at the core. The implications of disengagement are profound, with students life chances diminished when appropriate climates for learning are not in place.

Moving in and moving out

In addition to age-appropriate teaching and learning, the Declaration explicitly calls for the improvement of transition into – and out of – the middle years. 

Transition from Year 6 into Year 7 has been identified as an area of concern for decades. The words ‘gap’ and ‘plunge’ are commonly used to describe the impact of ineffective transition. That leads to disengagement, lack of achievement and disillusionment in the middle years.

Some hope

The Flying Start Initiative in Queensland was a timely approach to ensure the efficacy of the introduction of a prep year and the shift of Year 7 into secondary schools.  It also included an intentional model of Junior Secondary Guiding Principles that explicitly shaped teaching and learning for the middle years. It included a focus on distinct identity and sense of belonging related to effective transition into Year 7.  While the standalone Principles has now been abandoned as explicit policy, many of the concepts have been embedded into practice. We can share some promising findings of the impact of intentionally shaping middle years pedagogy.

Our study tracked 317 Year 6 students in 18 Primary Schools into Year 7 in 11 Secondary Schools. We discovered that the intentional approach resulted in students’ sense of belonging at school remaining mostly stable and positive through the transition. It set them up for success and avoiding the gap that might negatively impact their engagement and success at school. However, there is little evidence about the effectiveness of transition out of the middle years, and the relevance and veracity of the senior school models which vary around our nation. 

The need for connected solutions – a longitudinal framework with efficient pit stops 

In this brief commentary I have focused on the middle years. This is my area of passion and research, and where the stakes are especially high. However, similar challenges exist in all phases across the life course, from early childhood education to tertiary education. The opportunity to seek enhancements for confluence in our schooling system reduces abrupt shifts that serve as pit stops and potentially detours between phases, which have become increasingly compartmentalised.  The possibility to explore greater connectedness and a longitudinal framework of success for our students is needed now. And it must be said, the mental health and wellbeing of our students must sit at the front of the class. Investing in a consistent and evidence-based approach is paramount to addressing the declining mental health and wellbeing of our young people.

Professor Donna Pendergast is the Director of Engagement in the Arts, Education and Law Group and former Dean and Head of the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University. Her research expertise is education transformation and efficacy.

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

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This is the second day in a series of posts on education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about why we need connected solutions.

The neologism ‘polycrisis’, a situation where several seemingly unrelated crises are occurring at once and where attempting to address one may have adverse effects on another, is currently receiving significant academic airplay. I was asked to write a short piece for AARE on the upcoming Federal election with a focus on ‘connected solutions’ and ‘building stronger alignment across sectors and policy portfolios’. It it seemed to be a relevant place to start in completing this task. However, it was soon apparent that if I followed the threads provided by various crises in and impacting on education this would become a very long piece. So instead, I have taken two projects I am currently working on, showing the interconnectedness between them, and indicating how they intersect with what, in my opinion, should be other policy priorities in the upcoming election.

Education crises: Teacher shortages and student attendance

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. Education policy is needed to address these crises. For example, policy is required to consider how to make hard to staff schools more attractive places to work, to ensure that the curriculum is inclusive of difference, where young people are exposed to both powerful knowledges and also see their own community knowledges valued, and to ensure that school funding is targeted to favour schools and communities most in need.

Many of these crises intersect with each other. I am involved in two different ARC discovery projects, one looking at school attendance and another teacher shortages in hard to staff schools. While these projects are with different teams and have a different focus, the findings are overlapping. This can be seen for example in how the teacher shortages affect young people’s engagement with school.

The emotional impact of losing a teacher

In one focus group interview with Grade 11 students at a hard to staff school in a high poverty urban area, they spoke of the emotional impact of having a teacher they liked and to whom they could relate at the school on a Friday and then suddenly disappearing on a Monday. This impacts on young people’s engagement with school. One student in the group stated that:

You just don’t feel comfortable at school anymore … yeah, we’re expecting teachers to leave now because it’s so common. 

And another from the same group:

It’s also a bit unmotivating because if the person that’s getting paid to do this doesn’t want to do it anymore, why would you want to go and do it as well? 

Addressing the teacher shortage then is necessary to address young people’s engagement with schooling. But addressing student attendance and teacher shortages needs to go beyond education policy.

Many of the issues facing schools cannot be solved without addressing other issues occurring outside the field of education. I will give just two examples here. The point is that what is needed is a consideration of how the policy landscape across different fields can be worked together to solve educational problems.

What are we doing about the housing crisis and its impact on education?

In interviews with school principals in both ARC projects the housing crisis, for instance, has been raised as a serious issue affecting schools. In relation to attendance, principals have spoken about how insecure housing has led to young people constantly moving house and changing schools, and often falling through the cracks when it comes to monitoring attendance. One stated about their local community:

There are no rentals.  People can’t afford it. We are averaging probably eight students, maybe in a week at the moment going to places where the rental is more affordable… biggest movement that I’ve seen in the community, since doing this job, and that’s the rental crisis. Most of the rent starts round about $500 a week, and for families who aren’t working, who are receiving Centrelink benefits, they can’t afford that… We’ve got homeless families on a waiting list for rental… It’s unreasonable to expect them to come to school because they can’t afford the bus fares.  It’s too far for them to walk

Hard to staff, hard to house

In the hard to staff schools, principals also spoke about the difficulties of securing appropriate housing for teachers in the local area. (See Scott Eacott’s AARE blog Housing: how to fix the teacher shortage – EduResearch Matters).  Many of the schools facing the biggest issue with attendance are also those that are the hardest to staff. Indeed, the lack of teachers, and the high turnover of staff have also been noted by principals in both projects as a factor that hinders student attendance. The housing crisis has become an issue in the current election, but we are not seeing the links being made to education, apart from the dubious association being made between international higher education students and the rental market.

What are we doing about toxic masculinity and its impact on schooling?

Much has been written recently about the Netflix series Adolescence and the lessons it provides about online safety and the dangers of online activity promoting toxic forms of masculinity (see the excellent AARE blogs by Sam Schulz and Sarah McDonald What happens when the manosphere goes to university – EduResearch Matters and Stephanie Wescott and Steven Roberts What schools should do now the manosphere thinks it’s back in charge – EduResearch Matters.

My first book in 2001, and subsequent work with Bob Lingard, Wayne Martino and Amanda Keddie, all explored the relationship between dominant forms of masculinity and violence and the implications for schooling. In that work we indicated the problems that confronted female students and teachers in schools. We argued, as many are now, that schools needed to be working to challenge those forms of masculinity that are now finding fertile ground for breeding on the Internet. However, while the Internet has facilitated the spread of such masculinities, we need to recognise that the problem predates the newly identified ‘manosphere’ and that all policy domains have continually failed to make significant headway in relation to gender, especially when it comes to violence. It’s time for that to change.

During the course of our work on the attendance project a principal pointed us towards an article in the State’s only statewide newspaper, the Courier Mail. The article provided an account of life for teachers in one remote Queensland high School where:

15 per cent of staff at (the high school) had reported experiencing bullying, sexual harassment… staff members claimed there was a culture of workplace violence and sexual harassment which had led to an exodus of staff. (1st September, 2022).

The frustrated student

In an interview with a principal, on that same project, we were told about a grade 8 student who was living in a ‘domestic violence’ situation. The principal indicated that this student, who could ‘barely read’, sat in class feeling ‘frustrated’, ‘stupid’ and ‘inadequate’.  And then:

Someone says something to him, and he goes out and he thumps someone… this has happened multiple times

In the 2022 election, gender was firmly on the agenda. In the 2025 election it has been less so. However, given the ways in which politics are shaping up in the US with the rise of the new right and outright misogyny (alongside racism, homophobia and transphobia) establishing itself as an acceptable political discourse, and the ways in which these discourses travel, it should be a major agenda item.

Teachers, especially female and non-binary teachers, deserve this. Or they will not stay in the profession. Young people who are the target of violence in schools, especially for being ‘different’, will not attend or engage with school if we don’t. Young people growing up in home environments where violence is common practice, will have their education affected by that violence (although it should be noted that for some young people, school can be their only safe space). Addressing gender-based violence as a policy priority will be good for all and for education.

I hope politicians are reading AARE blogs in the lead up to the 20225 Federal election

What I wanted to come across in this piece, by way of example, is that schools are regularly having to deal with crises that are not of their own making (as indicated by Naomi Barnes in her AARE blog  Schooling now in a crisis: Inky darkness, crippling anxieties, overreactions, love, care and glorious beauty – EduResearch Matters. As such education policy needs to be joined up, connected, and there be real effort across policy sectors to build stronger alignment between different policy portfolios. As I was putting this piece together, I found myself continually revisiting the EduResarch Matters website, and it struck me that if politicians in different portfolios wanted to see how their responsibilities connected with education, there could be no better place to start than on this website.

Martin is a Capacity Building Professor in QUT’s School of Education. He is a former president of AARE. He researches in the area of social justice and education. 

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

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This is the fourth in a series of posts on AARE’s education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about boosting the teacher workforce. This post develops some of the themes we published earlier today on boosting the teacher workforce.

It is expensive to become a school teacher – for the individual and for government. It is a great calling, but why do relatively few stay for the longer term? There is no simple answer, and both researchers and policymakers must avoid the temptation of simple solutions. One touted solution is to reduce the burden on teachers by removing all the non-class duties that have built up over the years. This ‘busy work’ does create workload pressures and is cited as a reason teachers leave the profession.

Yet an important part of non-class time is researching and planning for time spent with students. This has always been part of teaching. Unfortunately, this work is often labelled ‘busy work’ alongside administration and compliance tasks. In accordance with this labelling, generative AI and pre-produced curriculum resources are increasingly harnessed to replace teachers’ own research and planning.

Teachers are ethically bound to adjust resources

These are ‘solutions’ that must be closely scrutinised, for teachers value research and planning. Research shows teachers feel obliged to make modifications because they know their students and are ethically bound to adjust resources to suit them. So, even if resources are purchased to save teachers’ time, teachers have to devote time anyway to ensure materials meet the needs of their students. This kind of assistance may not be the panacea to teacher workload that it is imagined to be.

AI-generated and off-the-shelf resources are never able to anticipate the diverse needs of real students. Teachers know they have to use their professional discretion to fine-tune even the best of supplied resources. The understanding of students’ needs that guides curriculum adjustment is built on rapport with students. This social-emotional work is vital to teachers’ (and students’) wellbeing. It is undermined when teachers are made to use resources without scope for interpretation.

Teachers’ interpretive work with curriculum and resources is highly skilled and intensely difficult. The interpretive process not only calls for fine-grained attunement to students’ needs, but the curriculum and resources always need to be related back to broader knowledge and skills. For instance, maths curriculum is a sort of shorthand for certain mathematical skills and knowledge. Teachers have to unpack the knowledge and skills implicit in curriculum and resources to make learning come to life. This creative work taps into teachers’ own interests and expertise and is one of the sources of joy in planning.

Teachers’ interpretive work is nearly invisible to the casual observer

Teachers’ interpretive work (to serve diverse students, and to unpack knowledge and skills) is nearly invisible to the casual observer. However, it is critical to ensuring official curriculum is converted to quality learning. Early evidence suggests that standardising curriculum resources – that is, to replace this work with off-the-shelf resources – increases the dissatisfaction of teachers. Teachers need to interpret curriculum rather than recite it. They deeply value the work of lesson planning and preparation in their roles. Maybe it is the invisibility of this work that prompts people outside education to undervalue it?

To help education ministers and bureaucrats in their well-intentioned efforts to improve the lives of teachers and make the profession more attractive, researchers need to clarify the professional need to interpret and plan for quality learning. We need research that can explain the links between planning and performing in classrooms, and how teachers’ work satisfaction is implicated. 

We also need policy makers who are capable of a nuanced response to the needs of teachers, who are open to the complexities of teachers’ work and with that, wary of simple solutions.

Steven Hodge is director of the Griffith Institute for Educational Research (GIER). His research focuses on the relationship between curriculum development and the work of educators. Emily Ross is deputy director of Teaching and Learning and Director of Primary Programs in the School of Education at The University of Queensland. Emily’s curriculum interpretation and implementation research has shaped government policy in Queensland and Australia

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

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This is the third in a series of posts on AARE’s education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about boosting the teacher workforce.

Vocational education and training (VET) is a large and important education sector in Australia. VET supports the learning of a significant number of Australians, with 5.1 million enrolments in 2023. Our economy is transforming rapidly, impacting the knowledge and skills needed by the Australian workforce. VET is the educational powerhouse that supplies the bulk of these needs. The importance of VET cannot be denied, but there is a problem: it is getting harder to recruit teachers. Despite some commentary to the contrary, the overwhelming evidence is that across the sector, providers are finding it difficult to secure and retain teachers.

There are multiple factors in play in the VET teacher supply challenge. One is that VET teaching often pays less than what could be earned in industry. Given cost of living pressures, this is a significant factor in the supply problem. Another is that the nature of the sector requires varying kinds of teacher, from industry experts doing ad hoc teaching and assessment through to career teachers in various modes of employment. The diversity of VET teaching roles means that any response to the supply challenge must be nuanced.

Too much for some, too little for others

The diversity of roles also means the current entry-level qualification – a level 4 Certificate – is too basic for dedicated VET teachers. At the same time too involved for industry people on brief teaching stints. As a result, the qualification to become a VET teacher is a long-standing sore point for the system that undermines teacher satisfaction and system quality, while creating a barrier for some types of teacher.

A more subtle factor in the teacher supply challenge is that the VET system uses an approach to course design that sidelines and can even conflict with teachers’ industry expertise. VET teachers need substantial industry expertise. For instance, if I learn hairdressing, then it can only be from someone who is or was a hairdresser. And system rules require teachers who are not currently practising in industry to maintain their links with and currency. These rules mean VET teachers are always industry experts.

However, when an industry expert opts to become a VET teacher, they are obliged to base their educational work on standardised descriptions of industry tasks and roles. These descriptions (called ‘competencies’ in the system) guide resource production and lesson planning. The competencies are a good idea in principle. The reality is they follow a format not natural to many industry experts and may become outdated quickly.

The problem of unnatural format is important because industry expertise is always quite specific, whereas the format for the statements is one-size-fits-all across everything from creative industries to electrotechnology to enrolled nursing. As a result, the many nuances of industry skills and knowledge are not always communicated adequately in the documents. It makes industry experts teaching from them uncomfortable.

The rates of change pose a real problem

The second problem is becoming a big issue in VET because the rate of change in some industries is outpacing the process for writing the competencies. Research suggests that some of these statements can be out of date by the time they are released, while others are only current for a short time. Teachers are put in a difficult position when faced with out-of-date information. The rules of the system say they must teach exactly what is in the statements, but teachers cannot in good conscience teach what is no longer industry practice.

The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations is responsible for the VET sector and over the last few years has undertaken a VET Qualification Reform process intended to tackle these and other issues. A new era is promised that may lead to a system that allows for rich design principles and curricula. But VET teachers must be central to the creation and maintenance of such a system.

Regardless of which party or parties come to power this election, the reform process must be followed through to the point where teachers given scope to put their expertise to good use. In this way, a declining workforce can be invigorated. 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!


Steven Hodge is Director of the Griffith Institute for Educational Research (GIER), a large, multidisciplinary community of education researchers. Steven’s research focuses on the relationship between curriculum development and the work of educators. Much of his empirical research has been in the areas of adult and vocational education, concerned with how occupational knowledge and skills are represented in curriculum and how that curriculum is translated for learning.

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

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This is the second in a series of posts on education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about boosting the teacher workforce.

If we’re genuine about addressing the teacher shortage and retaining the excellent teachers we already have in the system – not just recruiting more of the ‘best and brightest’ so we can burn them out – we could start by making the decision to stop infantilizing teachers. 

For example, it’s common to read about “teachers being left to fend for themselves” in the classroom because of a lack of standardised curriculum resources that would do the thinking for them and take the load off. It’s a line that dates to a Grattan Institute report from 2022 that’s been taken up with great enthusiasm by some sections of the media (like here and here, and here for the glorious metaphor of “rudderless teachers”, this time attributed to the current Minister himself). 

Part of the problem is the disconnect between what the work of the teacher is and what most of the population thinks the work of the teacher is. 

We might think that because we went to school, and/or have kids who go to school, that we know what teachers do: the job is to show up at the front of the class from 9am to 3pm every day for a scant 40 weeks a year. Right? 

Wrong. That would work if teaching was a performance (although even then they’d presumably need to do a little rehearsal?). But it’s not.

Conditions for learning

The actual job of the teacher is to create the conditions for learning. For everyone in the class – that’s usually 25 to 30 individuals at a time.  To do that effectively, you need to know every one of those students. You need to understand what they bring into the classroom. What they already know. What they’re passionate about. What their strengths are. What they need to work on. Whether they had breakfast this morning. And so on. This is not a newfangled idea: it’s based on decades of research across both psychology and sociology of education. 

And that’s what’s wrong with the relentless messaging about how great it would be if all teachers used standardised lesson plans and resources – the so-called “low variance” approach. I’d argue that it’s very last century, but the truth is that the idea of a one-size-fits-all school experience doesn’t just belong in the 20thcentury, it belongs in the dark ages. Anyone who thinks we can standardise our way to an education system that will prepare our young people for the turbulent times they’re going to navigate, hasn’t been paying attention for at least 20 years.  

Kids need access to powerful knowledge

And the same is true for the baseless idea that knowledge somehow gets magically transmitted from the brain of the teacher to the brains of students. Kids need access to powerful knowledge, there’s no doubt about that. And they need teachers who can help them learn it, provide feedback along the way when they get things wrong, and drive them to expand and improve in their learning. But we won’t get there with scripted or standardised lessons that spray the classroom with ‘knowledge’ (let’s call it ‘content’) in the hope that some of it will stick. 

It’s time to recognise that teachers have specialised, professional knowledge that goes beyond what you might have imagined  while sitting in a classroom for 13 years. Just like doctors, physiotherapists, lawyers and IT specialists have specialised knowledge that is, effectively, what we pay them for.  The difference is that we expect (and hope) that our brain surgeon knows more about brain surgery than we do, while we seem quite comfortable subjecting teachers’ knowledge to some kind of pub test. 

Teachers are human

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.

Respect matters. Valuing what teachers actually know and do, and recognising that it’s complex and that laypeople (and that includes politicians) might not necessarily understand its intricacies would be a pathway to reinstating trust in the teaching profession. And that might just be the perfect place to start in supporting a vital profession in crisis. 

Nicole Mockler is professor of education at the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney and Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Education, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on education policy, teachers’ work, and education and the media. 

five ticks in circles and a finger pointing to a target.

Breakthrough: what we should do to build our teacher workforce

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This is the first in a series of posts on education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about boosting the teacher workforce.

Want to fix the teacher shortage? Start by giving teachers time to do their jobs 

Teachers aren’t leaving the profession because they’ve stopped caring. They’re leaving because they’re burnt out. Each day, they’re pulled in multiple directions, constantly interrupted, and overwhelmed by a stack of disjointed tasks. 

We call this time poverty, and it’s not a personal failing, it’s a systemic failing. The way teachers’ time is governed in schools is unsustainable. Unless this becomes an election priority, the workforce crisis will only deepen.

The cascade of constant demands

Using ‘time use’ data from our ARC Linkage project, we found that regardless of how positively a teacher began their day, they almost always ended it feeling rushed and overwhelmed by the volume of tasks they were managing. 

Importantly, teachers weren’t reporting this experience as an isolated bad day. It was their everyday reality. Teachers across all demographics, including school type and location, reported the same thing: they simply don’t have enough time to meet the demands placed on them.

The structure of the school day magnifies this problem. Teachers’ time is tightly managed, divided into timetabled periods, quick transitions between classes and subjects, and a series of fixed duties and meetings. 

No flexibility

There’s no flexibility to absorb the unexpected. 

A single disruption, like a behaviour incident, an unscheduled parent meeting, or an unexpected playground duty, can derail the rest of their day. We call this the cascade effect. When one task is delayed it pushes everything else – particularly those tasks that require focused attention like lesson planning, marking, and parent emails – into the evening.

The more these disruptions happen, the less time teachers have to do the work that professionally sustains them: the creative, relational, and intellectually rich parts of the job. Instead, their days become cycles of triage, where the goal is simply survival.

A problem of governance 

Time poverty in teaching is an effect of how teachers’ work is governed. Over the past decades, education systems have layered administrative tasks, performative accountability, and compliance mechanisms on top of the core business of teaching. This intensification reflects a model of governance that values documentation, oversight, and metric-driven performance.

It also shifts how time is experienced. We know the typical school day is increasingly fragmented, filled with interruptions, triaged priorities, high-stakes decision making and cognitively complex multitasking. Teachers often internalise these pressures, interpreting exhaustion as normal and equating busyness with professional commitment. In this way, overwork becomes not just expected, but legitimised.

Crucially, this culture of overwork is not experienced equally. It is deeply gendered. Women, who make up the majority of the teaching workforce, often shoulder the emotional labour of schooling alongside caregiving responsibilities at home. Many of the women we interviewed in our research described feeling torn between the expectations of their roles as teachers and their roles as caregivers. They feel they are never quite able to do enough in either space. 

While other professions have embraced flexibility and remote work, teaching necessarily requires a teacher in the classroom, working face-to-face with students. This physical presence is vital, not only for effective instruction, but also for the relational and pastoral dimensions of teaching that support student wellbeing. But the issue lies in how time is managed around this need. Teachers are still expected to be constantly available beyond the school day, even when they’re unwell. Many report having to prepare detailed lesson plans and resources for relief staff while sick or caring for others. In fact, some told us that they couldn’t take a day off because their students’ needs were too complex to entrust to someone else.

Physical presence

Teachers can never switch off from being available. They can never switch off from the emotional labour of caring for their students. 

Very few teachers reported they slept well at night, despite their exhaustion. This inflexible model of care-driven self-sacrifice is unsustainable. It also places a disproportionate burden on women, and continues to push them out of the profession.

Make teachers’ time a policy priority

It might be tempting to address the challenge of time poverty by offering quick fixes, like AI lesson planning. But this time dividend approach misses the point. Teachers value their lesson planning time. What they don’t value is being pulled into another initiative that draws them away from their core purpose.

Teachers don’t just need fewer hours. They need fewer heavy hours, with less disruption, less triaging, more predictability. That means giving teachers time not only to plan and teach, but to recover, reflect, and connect with students and colleagues in meaningful ways. It also means providing appropriate welfare support in schools to assist with student wellbeing. 

As we head into this election, all parties must treat teacher time as a policy priority. 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. That means investing in time-conscious governance that not only reduces administrative burden but also values teacher autonomy, prioritises their wellbeing, and respects their need for a life beyond the classroom.

Anna Hogan is associate professor in the School of Education, Queensland University of Technology. Her research interests broadly focus on education marketisation, and related issues of privatisation and commercialisation. Her current research projects include: philanthropy in Australian public schools, teacher and school leader time poverty and the role of commercial curriculum resources on teachers’ work.