Funding incentives are widely used to steer universities towards meeting policy objectives, but they do not always produce the expected outcomes. The headline policy of Australia’s Job-ready Graduates (JRG) university policy was the change to student fees, lower for priority ‘job ready’ disciplines and higher for others, to steer student course choices towards national priorities. JRG also significantly changed funding arrangements from a university perspective, in ways that sometimes contrad...

You can teach a physicist to be an accountant, but not the reverse, our teachers often said. What this means is that skills developed in physics are transferable to a multitude of STEM disciplines. Yet a recent report from the Australian Institute of Physics reveals that Year 12 physics numbers are at an all-time low, …

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School belonging in regional, remote and rural (RRR) communities has been shown to be strong, despite geographic, social and structural factors that constrain access to resources and opportunities. This highlights the need to understand school belonging through a context-sensitive lens, which considers the entanglement of structural factors with the relational strengths of RRR communities. Drawing on focus groups and interviews with principals and staff across three regional schools in New So...

Universities champion evidence. We test it, weigh it, and share it with our students. Given this, it is hard to understand the vehement and almost anti-evidentiary disagreement with the science of learning from some corners.   Below I address ten “science of learning strawmen” in the hopes they might help researchers and teachers alike to sort …

The Murri School’s success demonstrates what is possible when Indigenous people lead education with self-determination.

This scoping review explored refugee-background students’ biographical perspectives, including their lived histories, experiences, and linguistic, cultural, and social capital, as enabling praxis in Australia’s English as an Additional Language/Dialect EAL/D classrooms. Guided by Arksey and O’Malley’s framework and PRISMA-ScR guidelines, 25 studies (010-2025) were systematically reviewed. Grounded in a praxis-oriented and intra-categorical understanding of diversity, this study conceptualises...

Come along to the AARE Pre-Conference, a dedicated day for postgrad and early career researchers ahead of AARE 2026. A great chance to connect, learn, and get inspired on your research journey. The day starts by grounding us in Country as the foundation of all research, then moves into multiple concurrent sessions including turning your thesis into publications, landing grants, and getting creative with research communication through an arts-based workshop. There's plenty of time to connect too, with a lively speed networking session where you can pick the brains of experienced researchers and get answers to the career questions you've been wondering. Whether you're just starting out, or a few years into your ECR journey, come along for a fun day of practical insights, great company, and a strong beginning to the AARE conference!

Rights-based universities: If the harm is racism, name it as racism, not as a cultural issue. And spread the load

In this paper, we replicate and reflect on the experience of using dialogue to engage with difficult Indigenous topics in a secondary English classroom. Although we are a group of three experienced teachers from diverse familial and professional backgrounds, we take on the role of secondary school English students enacting a metalogue on a difficult Indigenous topic. Specifically, we focus on the pamphlet circulated by the Australian Government to all households in 2023, which provided detail...

Accomodation options for the 2026 AARE conference website.

Join us for a discussion about Indigenous and First Nations sciences, aspects of common ground with contemporary Western Science, how both knowledge systems work together in current scientific practice for the benefit of all, and how educators can bring these knowledge systems together in their classrooms in ways that are appropriate and engaging for all students. This session we'll hear from Professor Joe Sambono, a Jingili man, zoologist and a science curriculum advisor, along with Dr Connie Cirkony, a Canadian non-Indigenous science educator and former biologist with expertise in science curriculum and pedagogy.

Psychologically-informed use of AI can help here – and we have a tremendous body of theory and research on which to draw.

This article brings Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics into critical conversation with the pedagogical practice of philosophy in schools, focusing particularly on Philosophy for Children (P4C). While P4C offers a rich pedagogical model for developing reasonableness through the Community of Inquiry (CoI), its account of the conditions under which understanding occurs remains somewhat underdeveloped. Although some scholars have situated P4C in relation to hermeneutics, this engagem...

Whether you're after a quick bite between sessions, your morning coffee or somewhere to enjoy dinner with colleagues, there are plenty of options close to the conference venue and across Brisbane.

“Explicit instruction” has become the key focus for Australian schooling policy for several years now. It is invoked with enough confidence by ministers, curriculum authorities and the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) that it can feel like a settled empirical fact rather than a contested truth claim.  What is less often noticed is that the …

The myth of ‘instant readiness’, the assumption that graduate-teachers arrive as classroom-ready and fully formed, pervades contemporary teacher education policy. This article interrogates that myth through a narrative inquiry into one graduate-teacher’s first year in a socio-economically disadvantaged primary school. Tracing four critical-incidents across the year, the analysis examines how policy discourses of ‘classroom-readiness’, operationalised through the Teacher Performance Assessment...

2026 AARE Conference In 2026, the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) invites delegates to consider the conference theme ‘Educational Research for Ethical Lives.’ In an era characterised by social, environmental, technological and political complexity, educational research plays an increasingly important role in illuminating, questioning and responding to the ethical responsibilities and challenges that lie at the heart

Australian classrooms are more disrupted and less welcoming than those in most comparable systems.  Australia holds up reasonably well in learning outcomes across the OECD’s PISA 2025 report – with averages of 509 in science, 491 in reading, 478 in mathematics, and 532 in computational problem solving–well above the OECD average. But the most concerning …

Compared to the rest of the world, Australian classrooms are more disrupted and less welcoming than those in most comparable systems.  Australia holds up reasonably well in learning outcomes across the OECD’s PISA 2025 report – with averages of 509 in science, 491 in reading, 478 in mathematics, and 532 in computational problem solving–well above …

The Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) has released a report about student behaviour in Australian classrooms. Titled “Classrooms in Crisis: Australian teacher views on student behaviour”, the report presents the results from a ten-question survey of 377 primary and secondary school teachers. The survey was adapted and abridged from a similar survey that has been …

The inclusion of students with disabilities in regular schools has led to the widespread employment of teacher assistants to support learning, participation, and engagement. Despite their increasing presence, the role of teacher assistants remains poorly defined, with ongoing ambiguity surrounding their scope of practice and expectations. This lack of clarity contributes to inconsistent deployment, role confusion, and tensions within professional relationships. This study investigated how sta...

Given the growing concern regarding new teacher supply and the increasing demands for cultivating classroom-ready teachers, there is a pressing need to explore factors associated with pre-service teachers’ wellbeing. Yet exploration of the relationships between pre-service teachers’ motivation, self-beliefs, mental health, and job-related outcomes has been scarce. This study investigates the associations among motivational factors (autonomous motivation, controlled motivation, and self-effica...

The new misogyny: Reluctant to ‘hear’ women, hold boys and men to account, or support and acknowledge women

This qualitative study explores how Australian teachers experience relational trust in their everyday school relationships, how these experiences influence their wellbeing (if at all), and the factors that they describe as fostering or hindering trust. Guided by a social capital lens, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 teachers, and the data were thematically analysed. The findings show that when relational trust was strong, namely the confidence teachers have in their colleagu...

NESA's policy shift on take-home assessments requires us to invest in teachers’ professional judgement on student writing

Recently, safeguarding children in early childhood has received widespread media coverage. This has shone a light on the critical work of early years teachers in supporting the learning, care and safety of young children. However, there has been limited exploration into what early years teachers actually do at the coalface to identify and support children with high levels of complex trauma. Drawing from a research project that examined early years teacher self-efficacy beliefs, this paper pro...

The European Conference on Educational Research 2026, brought together researchers from across the globe in beautiful Tampere, Finland, for a week of presentations, discussions, and opportunities to connect with like-minded people. As a PhD student at Adelaide University, my ECER experience began on Monday morning August 17 with the Emerging Researchers’ Conference (ERC), which forms …

Most academic staff in Australia are employed casually and on teaching-focused contracts, with little opportunity for research or advancement. This paper presents findings from a project undertaken at an Australian university and its pathway institution investigating casual academics’ experiences as peripheral members of the academy. Survey data from 59 casual academics and 13 follow-up interviews revealed several themes, including experiences of exclusion, lack of recognition and unpaid work...

ATARmaxxing drives many young Queenslanders to enrol in academically demanding, high-scaling subjects regardless of aptitude or passion.

Creativity is understood to be a vital attribute for success in an increasingly globalised and digitalised world. Educators play an important role in facilitating children’s creativity development through their considered choices of learning activities and pedagogy. For 21st century learners, the incorporation of digital technologies into the learning environment is also of rising importance. This study used observations of five children (4–8 years old) in Perth, Western Australia using digit...

AARE History and Education SIG invites you to join the 'Partners for the Past' Seminar Series, focusing on partnerships which enrich history education.

Trust: prioritising transparent conversation over secretive rumour — these are the practices that will change the culture

Trust: prioritising transparent conversation over secretive rumour — these are the practices that will change the culture

Trust: prioritising transparent conversation over secretive rumour — these are the practices that will change the culture

Trust: prioritising transparent conversation over secretive rumour — these are the practices that will change the culture

Despite having the largest caregiving responsibilities for children outside of families, schools are settings in which egregious forms of harm to children have occurred. As further allegations of non-recent and contemporary abuse of children in schools come to light, principals must decide whether to publicly acknowledge this harm and grapple with the complexities of how to do so. We examine what the research literature, recent public inquiries, and child safety policy reveal about the acknow...

Literacy: Just as we do in schools, ITE programs can benefit from a collective commitment and improve outcomes

Setting priorities is crucial for optimising research in resource-constrained environments, so we identify higher education (HE) research priorities at one regional Australian university. Employing constructivism, we conducted a three-round modified-Delphi with an expert panel (n = 64) using online questionnaires. Analysis included descriptive statistics (quantitative items), and content/theme analysis (qualitative). We collected 37 panellist-identified priorities (Round 1): the top three wer...

Teachers choose to pursue a career in teaching for various reasons which might influence the extent to which they feel satisfied with their job. The relationship between teacher career motivation and teacher job satisfaction has been tested in some previous studies, but the findings have been inconsistent. In this study, we revisited this relationship by drawing on the Teaching and Learning International Survey 2018 data and adopting multilevel structural equation modelling as the main data a...

ICAC: when we characterise the debate about public institutions as a market issue, we lose focus on key aspects of public institutions.

Young people in Australia are experiencing concerning levels of mental ill-health, with more than one in five reporting high psychological distress. As educators responsible for supporting students’ social and emotional wellbeing, Year Coordinators face frequent exposure to student distress alongside heavy teaching demands, placing them at heightened risk of compassion fatigue. Yet rather than acknowledging the structural forces that intensify this risk, compassion fatigue is often framed as ...

Safe schools: If you work in a school, tensions about gender and sexuality are an everyday reality. Understanding why matters

Explore social, political, environmental and cultural themes through this immersive experience, which invites participants to deepen their understanding of the land on which QUT stands. Light refreshments will be provided.

Amid concerns about declining engagement in writing and a persistent focus on skills-based instruction, this study explores how multimodal texts can support both curriculum-aligned and serendipitous writing experiences in early years and primary classrooms. Drawing on a qualitative case study design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight early years and primary teachers across diverse geographical contexts in Queensland, Australia. Findings reveal that while multimodal texts we...

Teacher shortage: A chronic shortage needn't be permanent if school leaders are appropriately resourced to respond

Thank you to Dr Aaron Teo, Dr Ryan Al-Natour, Dr Nashid Nigar, Dr Mei French, Dr Hannah Soong, and Associate Professor Michael Mu in collaboration with the Research Development Coordinator, Associate Professor Joel Windle who contributed to the submission.

NAPLAN: media and public often gravitate towards the most dramatic story and draw simplistic conclusions about Australian education.