The proposed Teaching and Learning Commission is the most significant structural reform to Australia’s national education architecture in a generation. Merging ACARA, AITSL, AERO, and Education Services Australia into a single body is not, in itself, a policy outcome. It is a design choice.
The working group established at the October 2025 Education Ministers Meeting is due to present its initial design proposal this month, alongside AITSL’s scoping report on the first review of teacher standards in 15 years (Ministers’ Media Centre, 2025). If, and once Ministers act, the architecture will be largely set for a decade or more. This is the moment to be clear about what the profession needs, not after the blueprint is locked in.
ASPA has consistently held that the intent behind the TLC is sound. The four agencies were established with different governance arrangements at different times for different purposes, all ostensibly to serve Australian students and an improved education system. Bringing their functions together under one national banner seems a sensible step to improve productivity and reduce fragmentation and duplication in the national machinery. Our school leaders deliver as part of this complex machinery, at the end of a systemically filtered chain, sometimes with limited agency to prioritise what matters most for their communities.
But consolidation is not automatically coherence. Merging four agencies under one roof could just as easily produce a larger, less agile bureaucracy. The Commission must be evaluated against four practical tests.
1. Leadership must not be an afterthought
There is a real risk that the NTLC defaults to a model that treats school leadership as an extension of classroom practice rather than a distinct professional domain. School principals manage complex organisations. Their work spans strategic planning, financial management, industrial relations, and crisis response, alongside instructional leadership.
The Commission must engage, champion and esteem school leaders. It must embed a leadership standards function to support principal preparation, development, agency, retention, and recognition. The Australian Professional Standard for Principals, untouched for over a decade, deserves the same attention being given to teacher standards.
2. Coherence, not homogeneity
The strongest argument for the Commission is that it can align what is currently fragmented. But alignment is not standardisation. Australia’s federal system produces genuine variation between jurisdictions. Some of that variation is wasteful duplication (teacher registration for example); some reflects productive adaptation to local context.
The Commission should pursue selective harmonisation: coordinating standards, curriculum, and evidence where consistency genuinely serves schools, while preserving the capacity of school leaders to adapt to the communities they serve. As Savage (2025) notes, the governance question is critical. Will the TLC privilege jurisdictional representation or independent expertise? This balance will determine whether the Commission enables professional leadership or consolidates bureaucratic control.
We have had decades of externally dictated priorities, with a commensurate, well documented toll on the professional educators leading our schools, resulting in a questionable national education report card. There is a great opportunity for an innovative NTLC governance design that signals renewed trust in our teachers and school leaders.
3. The workload test
Education bureaucracies inevitably generate compliance and reporting requirements that land on principals’ desks. TALIS 2024 found that Australian full-time lower secondary teachers work an average of 46.5 hours per week, well above the OECD average of 41 hours (OECD, 2025). For school leaders, these pressures are compounded by multiple, often duplicative, accountability frameworks.
A workload impact assessment should be built into the Commission’s governance from the outset. Any function the TLC takes on should be required to demonstrate that it will reduce, or at a minimum hold steady, the administrative load on schools.
4. Evidence that serves schools
AERO is arguably the most at-risk element in the merger. Its core function, translating research into practical guidance for schools, is the kind of work that gets absorbed into system-level reporting when housed inside a large agency. AERO’s direct-to-school evidence function must be strengthened, not diluted.
But the Commission also has an opportunity to embrace a broader conception of what counts as evidence and how it is generated. Too often, the national evidence infrastructure treats schools as sites where research findings are implemented, rather than as places where knowledge is actively produced. Many school leaders are already conducting sophisticated practical inquiry into what works in their communities, drawing on student data, professional observation, and iterative problem-solving. This practitioner knowledge is less celebrated in the formal evidence base.
The Commission should actively enable research-for-learning partnerships in which principals and researchers collaborate as equals to investigate questions that matter at the school level, not only questions defined by system priorities. Embedding collaborative research within the TLC would signal a welcome evolution from evidence delivered to schools to evidence generated with them.
Who is designing this, and for whom?
Beneath these four tests sits a more fundamental question about the design process itself.
Ministers stated in October that the process would “involve consultation with teachers, school leaders and school staff, First Nations people and unions” (Ministers’ Media Centre, 2025). But consultation is not participation in decision making. There is a material difference between offering feedback on a proposal already drafted and being in the room where the architecture is shaped.
Are there practising school leaders on this working group? If not, why not? The people who will operationalise whatever the Commission produces should not be downstream recipients of decisions made elsewhere.
The National Principals Reference Group, established in 2024 and comprising the heads of the national peak principal bodies across all sectors, already has a direct working relationship with the Minister, and to be fair has been closely engaged in consultations led by the Commonwealth Department of Education. Including a representative of this group in the working group finalising the Commission’s design would be a straightforward step, and a meaningful signal that governments value the profession’s expertise.
As both ASPA President and a non- executive Director of AITSL, I hold positions close to this reform. That dual perspective reinforces my conviction that this is a genuine opportunity, but only if the design and implementation centres the professionals who will be most affected. It will have a better chance of success, too.
Structural change is only as good as the principles embedded in its design. The Teaching and Learning Commission should be built to support and serve school communities, not to manage them.
Andy Mison is the President of the Australian Secondary Principals Association.