Why Australia keeps falling short of our educational goals

In a big picture Australian education is an outlier – schools in states and territories are more regressive, divided and socially segregated than in most other rich countries. As a consequence, the current Australian school system is concentrating disadvantaged students in disadvantaged schools, with serious implications for overall student achievement. That is a structural failure.

The Gonski Institute for Education put together a small team of quite different experts. Among the authors are two former school principals, one from government schools and now a writer and another from non-government schools and now an academic, a former politician and NSW Minister of Education, and two education researchers and academics. The different experiences and perspectives the authors bring in this report have produced a picture of Australian school education that is sensitive to many different perspectives to this highly complex issue.

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