Today’s centre of high performance in school education is East Asia. Four of the world's five highest-performing systems are Hong Kong, Korea, Shanghai and Singapore, according to OECD’s 2009 PISA assessments of students. In Shanghai, the average 15-year old mathematics student is performing at a level two to three years above his or her counterpart...

Improving teacher effectiveness would have a greater impact on economic growth than any other reform before Australian governments, this paper argues. The improvement in student learning could lift Australian students to the top of international performance tables. An increase in teacher effectiveness of 10% would lift Australia’s education systems into the highest performing group of...

Although all Australian schools have systems of evaluation and development in place, they clearly aren’t working. Teachers believe that the systems are broken, according to this report.

With the recent release of the Federal Government’s ‘My School’ website, this report discusses how to measure school performance accurately, and the importance of incorporating these performance measures into managing each level of school education systems. ‘My School’ publishes school performance scores for each school as the average of their students’ NAPLAN results, comparing them...

In Policy Research Paper 26, the authors explore the meaning and relevance of community and social capital drawing on a wide range of disciplines, in particular economics. The review suggests four key principles for measuring community strength and social capital: * distinguish between the structure (size, density) of community networks and their content (norms of...