In the shadows of last year’s teacher strike in New South Wales, a number of people asked me how the Finnish education system would deal with the issues causing dissatisfaction for Australian teachers. It is an excellent question. It is ...

While many Australian schools have spent the last few decades admiring the old school tie, tightening standardisation and rubrics while chasing NAPLAN and ATAR scores, Finnish educators have been told to study best practices, and then try and improve on ...

The National Assessment Plan for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) has commenced today in Australian classrooms, with approximately one million students across years 3, 5, 7 and 9 expected to sit the test.  Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the national test ...

When English and Music teacher Michael Lawrence visited Finnish schools in 2017, many teachers asked him why Australia used a test like NAPLAN to assess students, particularly young ones. For them, education is all about learning, not testing. The ultimate ...

It’s not often a book comes along that encapsulates the myriad ways in which Australia’s school system has changed since its inception during the colonial era. But Alan Reid’s new book, Changing Australian Education: How policy is taking us backwards and ...

State governments have released the terms of reference for their review of NAPLAN. Heads of education in the Victorian, New South Wales and Queensland governments said the review – which will cost an estimated at $1 million – will identify what ...

Despite record investment in education, Australian students’ literacy and numeracy levels have been steadily declining. This podcast series speaks with some of Australia’s K-12 education leaders and asks the key question: What, if anything, are we doing wrong? In episode ...

The NAPLAN report card has been published and it confirms the findings of the snapshot released in August last year. While there were no statistically significant changes in any of the NAPLAN test domains when compared with 2017 results, ACARA ...

While certain experts think NAPLAN bizarre, parents and teachers, plausibly with more skin in the testing game, vociferously support it. Officeholders from the Australian Council of State School Organisations (ACSSO), the Australian Parents Council (APC), and the Isolated Children's Parents' Association of ...

When NAPLAN was launched in 2008, its aim was to boost student achievement through the annual administration of standardised tests. But the scheme's performance remains unimpressive, as the 2017 NAPLAN results have shown. Yet again, student scores in literacy and numeracy flatlined, as ...