The key purpose of this report is to help construct narratives that are more effective in promoting policy change. The report presents alternative frames and stories to tell, ones that will help the public and policy makers act on the expert solutions that are needed to ensure all children and families thrive.

This paper explores the experiences of young early school leavers undertaking vocational education to illuminate broader issues of equity and access. We argue that to overcome many of the sector’s shortcomings, policymakers and provider communities must first affirm equity and access as central to the sector’s core business.

The following article is based on a speech given by Don Perlgut at a Federal Vocational Education and Training (VET) Policy Forum in Melbourne on 16 July 2018.

It is widely understood that Australia’s school performance (as measured by international test scores) has been falling. What’s less understood is that this headline buries a stark, unpalatable fact: our international test results show that kids at the bottom of the performance distribution are falling faster and further than kids at the top.

The global economic alignments of the present pose many political, moral and theoretical questions, but the central issue the essays in this collection address is: how do relatively poor people of the Australia–Pacific region survive in current precarious times?