In 2014, the Australian Government established the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) to advise on how teacher education programmes could ensure new teachers were adequately prepared for the classroom. Following this, the Australian Government endorsed a key recommendation of the TEMAG Action Now: Classroom Ready Teachers report,…

Teaching the General Capability of Intercultural Understanding is an Australian government mandate, but an ongoing challenge for teachers, many of whom may have little or no experience dealing with the teaching of intercultural understanding and lack confidence to embed this focus in their classrooms. Hence, teacher preparation is a priority to…

Global policy development in schooling often looks to solutions that embrace technology and articulate a 'what works' approach to practice. This paper takes as a case study the Australian Government's "Through Growth to Achievement" report on achieving school excellence. It analyses the report through the lens of 'sublimes', which…

An abundance of research in Indigenous education has not resulted in significant systemic change in relation to Indigenous education in Australia. In this paper we examine convergence and divergence across the policy, practice and research realms with the aim of identifying key sites of opportunity for innovation and change. Through analysing how…

Play-based learning is an approach used in early childhood education that is well supported by research on its varieties and effectiveness for young children's learning. Play-based learning meets the developmental needs of young children, but new research presented in this paper suggests that teenagers learn through play too. The experience of 25…

Ideas and practices associated with inclusive education have featured prominently in the policies and reforms of successive Australian federal governments since the 1990s, yet there are limited historical analyses of these developments. This paper analyses federal and national inclusive education policies in Australia spanning from 1992 to the…

There is increasing recognition of the importance of university and school research partnerships for developing approaches to supporting student learning and wellbeing. However, this is a relatively under-explored area of research particularly in regional community contexts. Drawing on data from a 3-year study of learning and wellbeing in low SES…

Since contact, there has been a foundation of inhospitable interactions between the original sovereign peoples of the Australian continent and Eurpoean arrivals. Despite government policies appearing to shift from assimilative practices to reconciliation processes in the latter half of the 20th Century, ongoing interactions continue to be…

Relative age effects (RAEs), where older children within an age-based group have better academic, sporting, self-concept and mental health outcomes than their younger peers, have been demonstrated in multiple countries. Australian research has found self-concept and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder RAEs, but academic RAEs have not been…

Remote Education Tutors (RETs) are central to the delivery of distance schooling in Australia and are accountable for the face-to face supervision and educational support of students. They act as the government mandated adult supervisors of Australian primary and secondary school students enrolled in distance education, including geographically…

For more than three decades, Australian higher education policy has been guided by a national equity framework focussed on six underrepresented target groups: Indigenous Australians, people from low socioeconomic status backgrounds, people from regional and remote areas, people with disabilities, people from non-English speaking backgrounds, and…

Disadvantage in schooling is often constructed as a crisis in need of fixing. Global policy reforms tend to emphasise that solutions for disadvantage often lie beyond the capacity of the state, necessitating private/philanthropic intervention. This paper seeks to contribute to this line of analysis by investigating the rise of philanthropy in…

By the end of 2021, more than 168 million students across the globe had missed a year of face-to-face schooling due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In NSW, Australia, most students engaged in learning from home for eight weeks during 2020 and a further 14 weeks during 2021. This study provides robust empirical evidence on how two years of disruptions to…

Despite an expenditure of over $45 billion in the last decade aimed at meeting the "Closing the Gap" strategies, successive Federal and state governments have overseen a generation of Aboriginal students who have experienced a failure of promised improvements to their educational outcomes. Recent scholarship has highlighted the paucity…

Force majeure circumstances, such as those witnessed in the COVID-19 pandemic, have been used to justify new technologies of governance as policy-makers around the world began to realise the magnitude of the problem and its political implications. In Australia, the coronavirus crisis focussed attention on the vital role education plays in society…