Two steps forward and one step back

My submission to Australia's Productivity Commission

Photo by Mette Køstner on Unsplash

---

Below is the text of my submission to the Productivity Commission following the publication of its interim report on the National School Reform Agreement.

I broadly welcome the interim report of the Productivity Commission. There is much that could be written about education in Australia and I am pleased that the Commission recognises initial teacher education as an area of concern.

I also wish to highlight that I am strongly in favour of producing a bank of lesson plans that teachers can draw from rather than have to create everything from scratch, addressing one of the contributing factors to teacher workload, a key concern of the interim report. However, the Grattan Institute is pursuing this agenda and so I will simply state that I endorse it. Instead, in this submission, I will restrict my comments to two main areas.

The first is a suggestion for collecting data that would shed more light on what is happening in real Australian classrooms and the second casts doubt on one of the approaches that is described favourably in the interim report.