While the worst of the Covid pandemic is behind them, Australia’s schools still wrestle with familiar, stubborn issues that the lockdowns and their lingering impact have only exacerbated: widening achievement gaps linked to background and ability, a gap between teacher knowledge and practice, and accountability that misses what matters.
Indeed, Federal, State and Territory education departments, as well as service providers and schools themselves understand that fixing these is essential to ensure every student gets a high-quality education for a complex, fast-changing world.
On 20-22 August, these challenges will take centre stage at the 2025 Australian Catholic Education Conference being held in Cairns.
The conference, which will bring together more than 1,400 educators and leaders, will feature practical strategies to lift teaching practice, reduce student achievement gaps, and rethink how schools are evaluated. Delegates will also explore actionable insights designed to embed evidence-based teaching and sustainable school improvement initiatives that directly address the challenges facing Australian education.
Among the headline speakers is Professor Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at the UCL Institute of Education. In a varied career, he has taught in urban public schools, directed a large-scale testing program, served a number of roles in university administration, including Dean of a School of Education, and pursued a research program focused on supporting teachers to develop their use of assessment in support of learning.
In his keynote address, Professor Wiliam will explore why genuine school improvement must go beyond raising average achievement to focus on reducing disparities between students. He will also discuss why current school accountability measures often fail to reflect the true quality of education, what approaches have been tried so far, and how education systems can evolve to support lasting and equitable change.
The Educator spoke with Professor Wiliam ahead of the conference to discuss strategies for teachers and leaders to reduce achievement gaps, design fairer accountability, convert professional development into sustained practice, and lead cultures where innovation and evidence-based teaching flourish beyond lifting averages.
TE: Your keynote will explore how genuine educational improvement must go beyond raising average achievement and focus on reducing disparities between students, particularly those related to background, ability, or socio-economic status. Drawing from your research and what you’ve seen in schools, how can principals move beyond lifting averages to actually narrowing gaps between students of different backgrounds and abilities?
Anyone who has spent any time in classrooms knows that students differ in how much of what they experience in their classrooms they remember. Although we don’t like to admit it, part of the reason for this is that some students, even though they have done nothing to deserve it, get given brains that soak up school stuff, while others find retaining what they are taught more difficult, and we can’t do much about this. However, the way we teach often magnifies these differences unnecessarily. Problem-solving approaches work well with students who have already gained a level of mastery, but are less successful for novices, for whom worked examples tend to be better. Also, when checking for understanding, teachers often rely on responses only from the most confident students, so their decisions do not reflect the learning needs of the whole group. Some students will always find learning easier than others, but we can do a lot to make our teaching more inclusive.
TE: We’ve seen how school accountability often misses what really matters. In your view, what can principals do to create fairer, more meaningful ways to measure success?
School accountability measures tend to focus on what is easy to assess at low cost. We start out with the idea of making the important things measurable, and we end up making the measurable things important. While standardized measures such as those used in NAPLAN do provide important and useful information, school leaders need also to collect evidence about how other school priorities are being met. Standardized tests like those used in NAPLAN use multiple-choice and short-answer questions because then it is possible to get a reliable indicator of each student’s achievement over a limited range of content. Authentic tasks produce less reliable results for individual students—the student’s score depends on how well the particular task suited her or him—but the average score across a group of students will be quite reliable (for every student for whom the task was a good fit, there will be another for whom it was not). Schools should therefore be collecting evidence about students’ performance in the subjects not tested in NAPLAN, and in the NAPLAN subjects, schools need to collect evidence about non-tested aspects (such as mathematical investigations, and speaking and listening).
TE: You’ve highlighted a gap between what teachers know and what they can do in practice. How can school leaders help turn Professional Development into lasting/meaningful change?
There are two separate challenges in improving performance in something as complex as teaching. The first is that the kind of knowledge that expert teachers possess often cannot be put into words. We tend to think of the knowledge of expert teachers as something like the knowledge of how to solve quadratic equations—something we can explain how to do step-by-step. In reality, much of the knowledge of expert teachers is more like the knowledge of how to ride a bicycle—it has to be learned by each individual. We can support this by encouraging teachers to “learn by doing”—trying things out in the classroom, and then have them talk through their experiences with colleagues.
The second is that even when teachers know what to do, actually doing it is hard. Every teacher I have ever met knows the research on “wait time”—the amount of time a teacher allows a student to answer a question—and, more importantly, teachers have a pretty good idea that they do not wait long enough (average wait times are often less than a second, even though there is research that shows that waiting three seconds would improve student achievement). However, reminding teachers of the research on wait time has about as much impact on their practice as reminding smokers of the harmful effects of smoking; it doesn’t work because it’s not a knowledge problem. It’s a habit change problem. We need to support teachers in changing their current classroom habits—such getting responses from only the most confident students, or waiting less than a second after asking a question—even though these habits are what get teachers through the day. We need to give teachers choice about what aspects of their practice they develop, encourage them to adapt techniques to suit their own classroom, accept that change in habits is slow, provide teachers with support, but also to make them accountable for improving their practice.
TE: What leadership strategies do you think work best to build a school culture where innovation and evidence-based teaching become everyday practice?
While it is essential that teaching should be informed by research, I do not think that teaching will ever be an evidence-based profession, for the simple reason that classrooms are just too complex. First, things that work in one context do not always work in another. Perhaps the best example of this is class-size reduction programmes, which had a dramatic positive impact in the Tennessee “STAR” study, but was disastrous in California. Why? The Tennessee STAR study only needed an additional 50 teachers, but when class-size reduction was implemented across the whole of California, they didn’t have enough teachers, so they employed 200,000 unqualified teachers, who were, unsurprisingly, not as good as the existing teachers. The class-size effect made things better, but the teacher quality effect made things worse, and the teacher quality effect was stronger than the class-size effect, lowering overall achievement in hard-to-staff schools.
Second, most research studies do not specify the nature of the innovation in enough detail to allow others to emulate it. Even if we are told that collaborative or cooperative learning increases achievement, we need to know how these practices were implemented. For example, it turns out that cooperative learning is effective when there are group goals (students are working as a group, not just in a group) and individual accountability (so that each student is accountable for putting forward their best efforts). However, unless teachers understand and implement these essential requirements, then cooperative learning is likely to be less effective than whole-class teaching.
What this means in practice, I think, is that we have to stop thinking about teachers “following the evidence” and instead realize that when teachers take on research, they are creating new knowledge, albeit of a distinct and local kind. And because everything works somewhere, and nothing works everywhere, teachers need to be involved in a process of principled inquiry, where they collect evidence of the effects of their innovations, evaluate the impact, and then refine their approaches. Some teachers may wish to write up their efforts, and publish them, either in professional or even academic journals, but this should be optional. What should not be optional is that every teacher is engaged in a process of continuous improvement, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better.