Footprints in Time is the name given to the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children, an initiative of the Australian Government. It shows how early childhood experiences can impact on later life and provides policy makers with information about ‘what matters’ and ‘what works’ for producing improved Indigenous outcomes.

This report provides recommendations intended to achieve improvements in both the content and delivery of initial teacher education courses in Australia. Executive summary The evidence is clear: enhancing the capability of teachers is vital to raising the overall quality of Australia’s school system and lifting student outcomes. Action to improve the quality of teachers in...

The audit objective was to assess whether Department of Education and Training and government schools are managing parent education costs economically, efficiently and effectively and in accordance with legislation and policies. It examined funding for the delivery of free instruction, departmental oversight of school approaches to parent payments and parent payment policies and practices.

While Australia has seen a steady decline in 15-year-olds’ reading literacy achievement over the past decade, Geoff Masters identifies promising signs at the primary level that this trend may soon be reversed. It is often possible to learn more about effective educational policies by studying countries in which there have been improvements in performance over...

Recurrent expenditure on school education in Australia is over $44 billion each year, around $36 billion of this provided by governments. These are considerable sums, more often than not expressed as a cost rather than an investment – especially when it doesn’t always seem to deliver noticeable improvements in student results.