research-informed policy

evidence based policy

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.

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.