A paradox concerning age exists in early childhood education (ECE) across many countries today, evident in the literature, curriculum, policy, funding, and provision. This paradox comprises two distinct approaches that call for either a specialised developmental approach to discrete age groups or a generic attitude concerning childhoods with no…

Teachers' views about teaching, learning and school experiences are important considerations in education. As the central participants in classroom interactions, students and teachers naturally have strong views about what it takes to manage learning and surrounding behaviours effectively. With this in mind and because we believe that ignoring the…

The aim of this work is to learn more about the Expert Review Group (ERG), a small but powerful team of bureaucrats in Western Australia's Department of Education whose role is to inspect the quality and standards of pre-K to year 12 government schools. Critical education policy analysis is utilised. Iterative understandings were developed through…

A culturally inclusive curriculum has increasingly been considered beneficial to all students. The national Australian Curriculum set out to be inclusive, containing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures cross-curriculum priority. Some education discourses can assume however that inclusion is an unproblematic good, and a…

Indigenous language endangerment is critical in Australia, with only 120 of 250 known languages remaining, and only 13 considered strong. A related issue is the gap in formal education outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people compared with other Australians, with the gap wider in remote regions. Little empirical research exists in…

This article explores the significance of context within the process of contemporary education reform and policy-making. It draws upon evidence from a comparative study of educational change and transformation in seven education systems: Australia, England, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Russia, and Singapore. The article focuses on school…

Policies aiming to improve educational outcomes are typically based on academic testing data. However, such data only reflect the performance of students who completed the tests. It is possible that students who were absent have shared characteristics. The proportion of students absent out of all eligible school students and whether they have…

In 2013 and 2014, the Australian Federal Government introduced the Gonski reforms and fee deregulation measures to reform the prevailing financing provisions for education sectors in Australia. The central proposition of the proposed new measures was to reduce the funding of public universities by the Federal Government. One likely consequence of…

This article is concerned with the learning style adopted by Asian students who come from a Confucian heritage culture (CHC) such countries as China, Vietnam, Singapore, Korea and Japan are considered countries with Confucian heritage culture (Phuong-Mai et al. 2005). These students are generally viewed as typically passive, unwilling to ask…

Of the school-level factors that have an impact on student learning, one of the most powerful appears to be the effectiveness of the individual teacher. The most effective teachers are, therefore, one of the most important tools schools and systems have at their disposal to lift the achievement of socio-economically disadvantaged students and…

Previous studies have shown that both student and school socioeconomic status (SES) are strongly associated with student outcomes, but less is known about how these relationships may vary for different students, schools and nations. In this study we use a large international dataset to examine how student SES, school SES and self-efficacy are…

This research paper is about the role of the principal in enabling teacher leadership for pedagogical innovations and school improvement studied in two Innovative Designs for Enhancing Achievements in Schools (IDEAS) schools in Singapore and Australia over a 3-year period from 2005 to 2007. The research reported is based on the developing…

Two developments have contributed to the convergence of views about the benefits of real-life and inquiry-based pedagogies in mathematics learning. First, the mathematics teaching community is increasingly focused on the learning of mathematics that involves the transfer of prior knowledge to novel problem-solving situations, a key element in…

The pressures facing universities today are manifold, and universities throughout the world have come to realise that they can no longer proceed as they have done in the past. In many nations universities are being forced to perform a delicate balancing act between promoting increased access to tertiary education, while at the same time dealing…