equity and educational outcomes

equity and educational outcomes in universities

Has the social licence of universities been lost?

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This is the fourth day in a series of posts on AARE education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about equity and educational outcomes – including in universities.

Higher education cannot be separated from global uncertainty and shifting geopolitics – Trump’s isolationism, China’s assertiveness, wars in Gaza and Ukraine, disruptions of Gen AI, climate change, and the spread of misinformation and the misogyny circulating through social media. Nation states are seeking to become more self-reliant in defence, supply chains, energy, AI and skills development. It could be expected higher education is central.  Academic freedom and universities being a critic and conscience are central to democracies.

Education added over $29 billion to the economy in 2022. International students in Australia contributed $25.5 billion and students studying online adding a further $3.5 billion. Education is, next to health and defence, the biggest investment by governments. But government investment in non-government schools is currently greater than in universities. Australia is characterised by increased socio-geographical educational inequality and segmented education funding favouring non government schools.  

Universities are forced to rely on international students

Australian universities are internationally viewed to be high quality and exceeding research outcomes. They are in the top four ranking of international student (others. being USA, UK, Canada). University sector’s sources of income are domestic students, industry (tied), research income (tied) with international students the only discretionary funds.  Universities have therefore been forced to rely on international students to fund domestic student growth and research. 

Bipartisan weaponisation of international students has occurred with policies incorrectly linking international students to migration and housing shortages. Restrictions, increased fees and slowing of visa approvals for international students and migration policies has impacted regional universities in particular with significant job losses eventuating while Gof 8 universities attract wealthy Chinese students .  

These factors have increased differentiation between research and teaching intensive universities. Furthermore, humanities and social science courses in regional universities which are cross subsidised by international students fees, are disappearing. Again this impacts on women who are concentrated in these fields.

The impact of Covid still felt

With Covid – we lost 20,000 academics and staff because the Coalition refused Jobseeker to universities. Recovery is being impacted by Labor’s EB awards seeking to reduce casualisation but with perverse effects. The  development of teaching-only positions has increased academic workloads. This will affect research output, with potential gendered effects in education.

Universities have multiple complex international research collaborations. Research is critical to innovation and educating a skilled workforce in all forms- technical, scientific and social benefits. 

R& D funding has reduced from 2.2% in 2014 to 1.69% in 2024. There is a critical need to join Horizons Europe which is major source of research funding in EU.

Whereas foreign Interference legislation focused on transparency particularly with China, Trump’s attack on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and China has led to loss of US funding in Australian- US research programs.  Australian universities need to maintain a strong DEI stance. 

The Accord final report (2024) commendably focused on increasing participation of  equity groups (rural. Regional and remote, Indigenous,) and improving support for regional universities. Unless international student policies change and public schools who teach over 80% of students in equity groups are fully funded immediately, increased equity participation and regional  aims will not be achieved. 

The Accord named governance issues: casualisation, high VC and management salaries, workload, lack of  academic in -put in governance decisionmaking, not implementing sexual harassment policies etc.  It is questionable whether Chancellors’ Council principles of good governance will make VCs more accountable! 

Disenchantment with university management

Academic workforce is extremely discontented with the system and disenchanted with university management—they feel undervalued as core workers. The university sector has been corporatised, managerialised, marketized, commercialised and now digitalised. Gen AI is impacting on teaching and research.  

Academics and students are concerned that the social license of the university and its core work of teaching, research and service for the public good have been lost. They seek a greater voice in decision making. 

Jill Blackmore AM PhD FASSA is Deakin Distinguished Professor in Education, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, former president of the Australian Association of University Professors and of AARE. She undertakes research from a feminist perspective of education policy and governance; school autonomy reform; gender equity reform; leadership and organisational change; international and intercultural education; gendered labour markets and employability, and teachers’ and academics’ work, health and wellbeing. Her focus is on sustainable, equitable, inclusive and safe educational organisations and workplaces.

equity and educational outcomes in universities

Inequality: How Australian schools churn it out

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Economic inequality in Australia is intensifying. We now live in a society that funnels money up to the already wealthy. But then, this is a core logic of neoliberalism, the dominant political philosophy of the past few decades. And all social policy is being refashioned in the name of offloading demands onto the market and slowly undermining democratic decision making. And schooling now plays its part in this process but then also has one of the most significant roles in Australia’s social policy mix. Mostly because it is through schooling that families get out of poverty. At least that is the egalitarian myth. 

Unfortunately, schooling has gone missing again as a significant topic for the next federal election. It is not surprising because schooling has a set of very significant and difficult policy challenges that neither of the political parties wants to discuss. Briefly schooling now has the following policy troubles: falling student achievement compared to international standards, intensifying teacher shortage, a school leadership crisis with too few aspiring leaders, and increasing numbers of students not attending, disengaged and not completing schooling.

What we hear: Let’s just go harder

What is moot here is the response by those governing to this set of troubles. All we hear from governments and key knowledge brokers is let’s just go harder with the policy we have in place. But the key logics of Australia’s policy regime for schooling have weak evidence at best.

Most importantly though, Australian schooling is now one of the most unequal systems in the OECD and I want to argue that this set of troubles has at its centre, this inequality problem. But then the inequality problem for Australian schooling is: laminated over in policy debates; the very notion of equality is reframed inside of a neoliberal logic and now gets discussed in terms of ‘every child’ and not how schooling as system fails specific groups; and the strong correlation between SES status of school communities and student achievement is now treated as irrelevant, it’s not a topic for policy intervention and schools are evaluated as though they operate on a level playing field.  

Unfortunately, in response to these troubles, governments treat these issues separately, hide their own policy failures, and mostly blame schools and teachers. All we hear ad nauseum is that the policy is working and that teachers aren’t implementing the science. And the solutions are most often strategies to undermine the professional autonomy of teachers. Let’s mandate dumbed down teaching [explicit instruction (sic)], and give the stressed overworked teachers lesson plans, teach the students how to sit still, and force adoption of a phonics fundamentalism. 

What makes the machine

I argue that Australian schooling is now an inequality machine. I am using the metaphor of a machine to focus attention on an assemblage of elements that collectively shape and exercise power through schooling policy. In this case, the machine includes a government policy regime, various knowledge brokers, and the school systems. And to be more precise, schooling is a logic machine that is now driven by policy logics that have little to no evidence that they improve learning, and these logics rarely get a mention when governments discuss the policy challenges.

Four key policy logics

I note four key policy logics that drive the sector: a marketized version of school devolution, standardisation, NAPLAN and demands to implement a what works learning science [often referred to also as a Science of Teaching Paradigm SoT]. Each of these policy logics feeds the inequality machine!

Sham commitment

  • A marketised version of school devolution asserts a one-size-fits-all logic, and intensifies the residualisation of schools serving high poverty communities. As well, this policy logic promotes a sham commitment to parental choice given most parents can’t choose and hence must send their kids to the local public school. But public schooling is being actively undermined by the other 2 sectors and other policy logics. And even though the present government has finally ‘fixed’ the funding demands from Gonski, Australia ranks first among OECD countries in terms of government funding for private schools. 

Standardisation

  • Standardisation in Australian schooling contributes to educational inequality in several ways, including: narrowing the curriculum leading to disengagement and lower achievement among some students; undermines teacher professional autonomy and hence their ability to respond to the unique needs of their students, reducing the quality of instruction and student engagement, leads to fetishising a focus on raising test scores, rather than addressing underlying causes of educational inequality

Raising test scores narrows curriculum

  • The NAPLAN and the Myschool website contribute to the production of educational inequality by: placing a strong emphasis on raising test scores, which has led to a narrowing of curriculum and to teaching to the test, rather than addressing deeper learning or critical thinking skills; creates high-pressure environments that disadvantage some students; undermines alternative measures of good practice and drives teachers towards narrow, unproductive definitions of literacy and numeracy, at a time when Australia needs to be advancing as a highly developed knowledge economy.

Pushing a paradigm

  • Pushing a “Science of Teaching” paradigm contributes to educational inequality through: decontexualised truth claims about what works invariably neglects socio-economic factors such as poverty, racism, and lack of resources, which do have a significant impact on student achievement; the emphasis on standardised, evidence-based (sic) practices limits teachers’ capability to teach to the specific unique needs and interests of their students, particularly in disadvantaged communities; and tends to reinforce existing inequalities by failing to address systemic biases and barriers to learning.

Governments rave on about evidence based practice but Australian schooling policy has four key logics that have weak evidence at best that they improve students learning. And there is a strong case that these logics, operating as a set, are in large part responsible for Australia’s appalling claim to be one of the most unequal schooling systems in the OECD.

This inequality machine is now well ensconced  and teflon coated and there are many snouts in the trough, making money from sustaining a failing policy regime. Is it possible that Australian schooling could become a machine for equality? Some ideas:

  • A royal commission into inequality in Australian schooling
  • Scrap or rebuild AERO from the ground up and through the adoption of a ‘good social science’ and not a scientism that fetishes measuring as the only way to reform.
  • Rebuild the ‘educational’ intelligence of federal and state governments and hence undermine the reliance of policy brokers (grifters?)
  • Weaken policy borrowing from the UK and the USA who have both shown the weakness of their own schooling systems of late
  • Recalibrate the policy regime, away from a neoliberalisng marketizing logic to one that rebuilds school and teacher professional autonomy
  • Cease blaming schools, teachers and students for policy failure

Robert Hattam is emeritus professor of educational justice at the University of South Australia. His research interests include social justice critical pedagogy, school reform, educational policy and culturally responsive schools.

equity and educational outcomes in universities

Learning from a crisis – building back better

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This is the fourth day in a series of posts on AARE education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about equity and educational outcomes.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was living a learning crisis . . .Even worse, the crisis was not equally distributed: the most disadvantaged children and youth had the worst access to schooling, highest dropout rates, and the largest learning deficits. . . .But it is possible to counter those shocks, and to turn crisis into opportunity. . . . As the school system stabilises, countries can use the focus and innovativeness of the recovery period to “build back better.” World Bank. 

From early on in the COVID-19 pandemic there were calls not to go back to ‘business as usual’ (BAU) in education but to ‘build back better’ once school lockdowns ended.

Five years on, these calls are even more urgent. Australia faces high levels of school refusal and youth mental health concerns. Some of these concerns are attributed to COVID school lockdowns. And inequities are deepening; and as environmental crises cause disruptions to education and schooling more and more often – it can feel like the call to build back better was not heard.

Crises offer valuable lessons

Experiences during a crisis offer valuable lessons for improving educational equity. In our book  – which called for rebuilding more equitable education systems after crises like COVD-19 – we provide extensive evidence for some key lessons related to learners’:

·  material needs

·  emotional wellbeing, and

·  access to learning.

Of course, these three aspects are linked, with the learner’s family, learning contexts, education systems and structural dimensions that shape everyday life during and beyond the pandemic. All of these dimensions form a web of interconnected factors that affect educational equity. We address each dimension in turn below emphasising the ongoing impact of these factors on learners. Systems leaders can choose to focus efforts on these dimensions to improve equity in education.

Material needs

The economic pressure of COVID-19 lockdowns placed extraordinary financial stress on many families. It highlighted that material basics are essential for enhancing educational equity.

·         Breakfast clubs and free school lunches are an essential support that helps to mitigate food poverty and help prepare students for learning. Rather than the BAU of ad hoc food provision that relies on insecure funding, schools need a systematic strategy to provide healthy food in non-stigmatising ways.

·         Overcrowded and insecure housing has negative impacts on learning. Ultimately, housing is also an educational equity issue.

·         Student access to their own digital hardware and software, and to reliable internet connection, is a crucial enabler of learning. Addressing the digital divide is a core component of achieving educational equity.

Emotional wellbeing 

The pandemic made visible the essential (but previously undervalued) work of educational providers for supporting student wellbeing (see Chapters 2 and 5 of our book). Working towards enhanced educational equity requires recognition of this role, especially for already disenfranchised and traumatised children and young people.

·         The effects of crisis-related trauma on emotional wellbeing can continue for years after the event and create a ‘shadow pandemic’. Funding for ongoing collaboration between families, education, allied health services, and other agencies is vital. 

·         Students who rely heavily on schools for wellbeing and safety need additional support. This includes students who may not be safe at home due to violence, abuse, or neglect.

Access to learning 

Despite the seeming intractability of educational inequity, there have been promising signs  of commitment to change and actual improvement in the 21st century. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant setback to these advances.

·         The achievement gap between more disadvantaged and more privileged students widened through the pandemic. Targeted, substantial support is needed to ensure inequitable learning losses do not have deep and long-term consequences.

·         Students learn best through active, face-to-face teaching by a qualified professional with whom they have positive relationships. Wholehearted government and community support for the teaching profession is essential for student learning.

Building back better 

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted potential innovations in the education sector that could improve equitable access to learning. These include enhanced digital learning, stronger home-school connections, targeted ‘catch up’ learning programs, and increased respect for the work of teachers. 

Smoother interagency collaboration was also a feature of the pandemic. Schools and school systems, welfare agencies, and charities and other non-government services overcame barriers that usually make such collaboration difficult. This helped to quickly identify students who most needed targeted support.   

Innovative approaches to income support provided in the early stages of COVID-19 demonstrated that it is possible to lift families and children out of poverty. Ultimately educational equity will be served best by a more equitable society. No matter how hard schools work they cannot overcome the impact of entrenched poverty.

Unfortunately, back to BAU means that many valuable innovations, programs, platforms and policies that were implemented during COVID-19 have disappeared. As a result, educational inequities are becoming even more entrenched. But it is not too late to learn from the pandemic – and to systematically and sustainably introduce approaches that proved to make our education, and our society, more equitable.

Acknowledgements 

This blog piece is based on a book that was authored by Emily Rudling, Sherridan Emery, Becky Shelley, Kitty te Riele, Jess Woodroffe and Natalie Brown.

Kitty te Riele is professor of education in the Peter Underwood Centre at the University of Tasmania. Sherridan Emery is a research fellow in the Peter Underwood Centre at the University of Tasmania. Emily Rudling is a research ellow in the Peter Underwood Centre at the University of Tasmania.

equity and educational outcomes in universities

Equity: Now’s the time to tackle child poverty

election priorities, equity and educational outcomes, , ,

This is the fourth day in a series of posts on AARE education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about equity and educational outcomes.

Fifty years ago the federal Commission of Inquiry into Poverty published its main report – usually called the Henderson Report. At the time, some 17.5% of Australia’s children under the age of 15 were estimated to be living below the poverty line. In 2025 this figure has barely shifted. There are no official tallies of child poverty in Australia, but UNICEF, ACOSS, the Valuing Child Initiative, the Australia Institute and the Paul Ramsay Foundation and their various academic partners agree that the 2025 child poverty figure is still around 17%. Just as it was fifty years ago, about one in six children in Australia currently live in poverty. This is a national disgrace. 

The reasons for the child poverty plateau are very complex. Ending poverty is not just about increasing family incomes, although that is crucial. It also involves a raft of changes across state and federal jurisdictions in health, housing, employment, welfare, transport and regional development, to name just some.  Education, particularly schooling, is part of the problem. It is also part of the solution, as the Henderson Report made clear. 

A significant and persistent gap

Of course, some things have changed in education since the Henderson Report and the subsequent Fitzgerald report (1976) on poverty and education. Take school retention.

A combination of factors, including the collapse of the youth labour market, public policies which made it difficult for young people to leave school early, the constructive efforts of educators, combined mean that more young people now stay at school for longer. Retention to Year 12  sat at around 35% in the late 1970s compared to around 80% now. But being at school for longer has not translated into better life chances for everyone. Australia has a significant and persistent gap in educational outcomes.

PISA results show that disadvantaged  students are much more likely to lag behind their peers. Here, disadvantaged refers to students who are ‘low socioeconomic status’, located in regional and remote areas or are First Nations.  Girls are also again falling behind their male peers in maths and science, according to the TIMMS tests. It is not surprising that in 2020, a Mitchell Institute report card on the agreed goals set out in the Mparntwe Declaration argued that gaps in achievement could largely be attributed to students’ postcodes and family resources.   

Time to take a hard look at the problem

Given the enduring relationship between poverty, place, First Nations and schooling  –  these were the focus of some of the very first funded Commonwealth equity programmes – it is surely time for us to take a hard look at the problem. We need to step away from political arithmetic and federal-states horse-trading about the distribution of money and the establishment of performance frameworks. These are necessary but hardly sufficient to tackle a national schooling system which does very well for some children but not others. We need to focus directly on children in poverty and their schools. 

But is any political party brave enough to put child poverty and schooling back on the agenda? Could we revisit Henderson? Should we have a fifty year anniversary stock-take of our successes and our ongoing problems? What if we had another review? 

Towards a national review of child poverty and education

Let’s imagine that there is a 2025 review of poverty and schooling. Yes, it’s a stretch, but bear with me. My imaginary review terms of reference include the following seven points:

1. Poverty is concentrated in particular locations and schools.

Via the real estate market, school location is inseparable from neighbourhood concentrations of wealth and poverty and the associated uneven distribution of achievement. It is entirely different to be and work in a school where one in fifty children are living in poverty compared to being in a school where it is one in three. Or one in two. Wealth, educational success, life chances and geography are knotted together. 

2. Context matters – school mix matters

No school serving a community left in poverty is exactly the same. Take the school serving a community made up largely of the working poor. Parents work multiple precarious jobs all hours of the day and night to put food on the table. Another school serves communities where combinations of public housing policy and private rental markets lead to high numbers of very recent refugees. How about the school in a regional town with a dwindling population where families who can afford to do so have their children board in town while the rest go local. Or the school in a public housing estate where a significant proportion of residents are dependent on income support. And so on. None of these schools are the same.  “Thisness” matters.

3. Difficulty getting staff

Many schools serving communities in poverty have difficulty getting staff and the staff they do get are often highly mobile. Teacher shortages are not evenly distributed. “Are you going to be here next term Miss/Sir” is a question anyone who has worked in a school  with staffing churn hates to hear. Staffing churn works strongly against improving student learning and well-being. Children living in poverty need sustained relationships with the very best teachers we have. But it seems that ensuring a well-qualified teacher for every child remains a pipe dream. Getting the right teachers to the right places at the right time is a crucial system task. 

4. Schools serving communities left in poverty have to do more with less.

Schools in economically struggling neighbourhoods have less income – they can rarely ask their communities for additional money so they have to exist on their government allocation. They have the same time and staff budgets as their more comfortable counter-parts. Yet everyday they have to deal with more and more diverse and complex needs and issues.

5. Children need to be at school to learn

Getting students through the school gate is vital but not enough. Being an absent presence in class is not a substitute for being engaged. Finding ways to help children want to attend and participate in their learning is a necessary first step to closing the educational gap.  

6. Children do not leave their problems at the school gate

Schools serving communities left in poverty need support from other public agencies. They have higher concentrations of troubled and troubling students. But their local and regional health, mental health, psychology and welfare services are often stretched thin, because they too are doing more than they are resourced to cover.  And in rural and remote areas professional services are generally based far away and school needs do not always fit neatly with scheduled visits. 

7. The best educational resources are teachers

The best educational resource that children and young people left in poverty have are their teachers. When they have time and are well supported teachers in disadvantaged schools can rise to the challenge. Knowledgeable teachers with rich pedagogical repertoires and the innovative practices they have quietly developed have made a difference in some schools in some places and at some times. These examples are a resource for systemic change. But this reservoir of skilled professional practice is rarely acknowledged. Teachers in schools serving communities left poor too often find themselves being told how to do their jobs by people who have never been in their shoes.  

Policy amnesia rules – not OK

These are seven policy basics. These seven basics do not cover the full extent of what schools serving communities left poor have to overcome to make headway against the odds. They are only a beginning. Getting back to these policy basics is not making excuses for failure. To the contrary, they recognise everyday educational realities. And shamefully, these seven basics have largely slipped away from federal policies. Policy amnesia rules – not OK. 

The fiftieth anniversary of the Henderson report is not only a time to remember. We are also well overdue for a rethink. We can begin by acknowledging that addressing child poverty means that some schools and their teachers must do ground-breaking work. And they need support. 

So this is my challenge for those currently standing for election, an election where poverty seems to be off the agenda. We need a bold new vision for addressing the long tail of educational underachievement and child poverty. We need the courage and curiosity to inquire, to review, to face up to the equity challenge. One in six Australian children needs your commitment to do better. 

Pat Thomson PhD PSM FAcSS(UK) is part time professor of education at the University of South Australia and the University of Nottingham. She was for twenty years a school leader of disadvantaged state schools in South Australia – she is a life member of the South Australian Secondary Principals Association. Her research and publications are directed to making schooling better for more children and young people: She focuses on school change, arts and creative education, alternative education and leaders’ work. She also publishes patter, a blog about academic writing.  She is outraged that the issues addressed in her first academic book Schooling the rustbelt kids (2002) are still so pertinent.