Why Australian Education Feels Stuck – A Two-Part Reality Check

Spend enough time around Australian education policy and you’ll notice a pattern: constant reform, endless reviews, shiny new acronyms—and yet, the results barely move. If anything, they’re sliding in the wrong direction. It’s like watching someone rearrange deck chairs on a ship that’s slowly turning in circles.

We’ve been told the next initiative will fix it. National curriculum. Standards. Devices. Data. Pedagogy backed by effect sizes to three decimal points. But despite the noise, many classrooms still look and feel the same: overworked teachers, disengaged students, and a system trying to fix structural cracks with PDF templates and motivational posters.

This two-part series unpacks Ten Reasons Why the System Feels Stuck. Not in abstract terms, but from the ground up—where teachers live, students learn (or don’t), and where the lofty intentions of policy crash into the concrete walls of reality.

In Part 1, we’ll examine the more visible culprits. In Part 2, we dig deeper into the beliefs, incentives, and habits that quietly maintain the system.

Part 1: The Visible Problems – Five Fixes That Aren’t Fixing Anything

Let’s start with what’s easy to spot: the surface-level reforms that make a lot of noise but not much impact. You’ll hear these issues in staffrooms, PD days, and during planning meetings when someone says, “Hey, maybe this new program will actually work.”

In this first half, we look at:

1. The false promise of standardisation
2. The curriculum that tries to teach everything and ends up teaching nothing
3. The religion of “evidence-based” teaching—minus the nuance
4. Professional development that confuses compliance with growth
5. And the overuse of technology that promised transformation and delivered distraction

These are the symptoms. In Part 2, we’ll look at the disease:

1. The Mirage of Standardisation

First, consider the drive towards standardisation. In theory, a national curriculum and standardised testing should provide a level playing field. But here’s the rub – education is inherently nuanced and contextual. The assumption that a one-size-fits-all model can cater to the vast diversity of student needs and learning environments is, at best, optimistic and at worst, misguided.

Standardisation often leads to teaching to the test, stifling creativity and critical thinking – crucial skills in today’s world. Are we merely churning out test-takers rather than thinkers? Are we so focused on hitting benchmarks that we miss the bigger picture? Have you seen the definitive research that purports that explicit teaching is, without a doubt, the best teaching strategy we have to improve outcomes?

Instead of levelling the playing field, standardisation often leads to teaching to the test, narrowing curriculum focus, and stifling creativity. The problem is we are producing test-takers, not thinkers!

Two: Death by Dot Point – The Curriculum Overload

If standardisation is the mirage, curriculum overload is the desert. Somewhere along the way, we confused “rigour” with “quantity” and built a syllabus that reads less like a coherent learning journey and more like a to-do list for a nervous breakdown.

Teachers aren’t teaching anymore—they’re time travellers trying to fit 300 years of content into a 10-week term. Shakespeare, sustainability, algebra, respectful relationships, coding, colonisation, data literacy, consent education, and now AI ethics—tick, tick, tick. And heaven help you if you miss a cross-curriculum priority or dare to dwell on something too long… Your students might Fall Behind!

The result? Teaching becomes a frantic race to cover content rather than ensure understanding. We say we want critical thinkers, but we give students no time to think critically. Lessons skim the surface like flat stones on a lake—just enough to say we did it, not enough to make a ripple.

The curriculum is bloated and chaotic, choking out any chance for deep learning. It’s a long-recognised problem we keep burying under shiny new initiatives. Teachers are sprinting on treadmills, exhausted but stationary. Students? They’re rushed past content like tourists on a blur-filled bus ride—no time to think, no chance to remember.

Three: Weaponising “Evidence-Based” – When Research Becomes Religion

There’s a difference between being informed by evidence and being shackled to it. The current obsession with evidence-based practice has turned into something dangerously close to dogma. Education policymakers chant it like a mantra as if invoking the phrase is enough to fix decades of systemic drift. Spoiler alert: it’s not!

Let’s be clear— evidence matters. But how we use it matters more. Too often, findings from meta-analyses like Hattie’s are stripped of context and declared universal truths—applied wholesale to classrooms that are anything but uniform. We treat effect sizes like divine measurements handed down from Mount Research. The classroom isn’t a controlled lab. It’s a living organism—messy, unpredictable, shaped by personalities, backgrounds, hormones, and whatever TikTok trend exploded that morning. When we impose research without adaptation, we ignore the complexity of actual learning—and the real people doing it.

And let’s not pretend the research is always neutral. Much of it is produced in systems incentivised to deliver clarity, not complexity. The temptation to flatten findings into simple rankings of “what works best” is strong, but deeply misleading. As I’ve noted before, it reduces teachers to technicians rather than professionals with judgement and craft.

Take Direct Instruction. Backed by research, yes—but when mandated across every context, it becomes pedagogy by prescription. You can’t out-evidence a disengaged Year 9 class that’s just come back from double PE and lunch in 36-degree heat.

As Dylan Wiliam puts it, “Everything works somewhere, and nothing works everywhere.” Evidence-based practice shouldn’t mean replacing teacher judgment—it should mean supporting it. Otherwise, we’re just swapping one ideology for another, and pretending we’ve upgraded.

Four: Professional Development or Professional Detention?

At some point, professional development stopped being about developing professionals and became a euphemism for “sit, listen, tick this box.” It’s less about growth and more about surveillance. You can almost hear the faint click of a spreadsheet being filled out somewhere as teachers log their hours in online modules like prisoners doing time.

Let’s be clear: teachers want to grow, and we, as society, want them to. They want to be challenged. They want to sharpen their craft. However, the system gives them a one-size-fits-all PD that feels more like a punishment than an opportunity. Think of slide decks on differentiation delivered in rooms where no one had differentiated anything in decades. Think mandated training on the latest instructional fad, often led by someone who hasn’t seen the inside of a classroom since overhead projectors were cutting edge.

Most of what’s served up as PD is generic, decontextualised, and driven by compliance. It doesn’t respond to the realities of school communities—it responds to whatever priority happens to be trending in policy circles. It’s pedagogy by PowerPoint.

And while the research is clear—professional learning needs to be sustained, embedded, and job-embedded (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017)—the reality is we’re still doing fly-in-fly-out workshops with no follow-up, no coaching, and no accountability for actual implementation.

We say teachers are the most important in-school factor for student achievement, then treat their development like a checkbox on a compliance form. You can’t improve a workforce by patronising it. You improve it by trusting it, challenging it, and investing in it—not managing it like a liability.

Five: The Technology Trap – Click Here to Improve Learning?

No change in education has been more visible—or more misleading—than the tidal wave of technology. Laptops, tablets, digital platforms, virtual classrooms, AI tutors, gamified everything.

But here’s the inconvenient truth: visibility ≠ impact. Just because LED screens light up a classroom doesn’t mean learning is happening. Often, it just means students are watching YouTube on the sly while the teacher fumbles with the Wi-Fi password.

Technology, like every other tool in education, is only as good as the pedagogy behind it. And that’s where we’ve fallen for the Silicon Valley fairy tale. We’ve been sold devices as silver bullets. Every tech initiative arrives dressed in the language of transformation: “revolutionising engagement,” “personalising learning,” “preparing students for the 21st-century workforce.” In reality? Half the time it just replaces one form of disengagement (boredom) with another (distraction).

A 2019 OECD report found that “students who use computers moderately at school tend to have somewhat better learning outcomes than students who use computers rarely”—but students who use computers very frequently perform worse (OECD, 2015). Translation? A little tech can help. A lot makes things worse.

Interactive whiteboards became expensive projection screens. Learning management systems became compliance platforms. And AI in education? We’re now being promised that robots will mark, write feedback, scaffold learning and detect student emotions. Maybe. But if we haven’t figured out how to use a laptop properly in a Year 8 English class, I’m not sure I trust HAL 9000 to manage student wellbeing.

The real issue is that we treat tech as the driver, not the passenger. It becomes the centrepiece of school improvement plans—because it looks impressive in a grant application and sounds good at parent information night. But the best tech integration is boring. Invisible. Seamless. Pedagogically sound. Which is why it rarely gets the spotlight. If we want technology to enhance learning, we need to stop treating it like a magic trick and start treating it like plumbing—essential, practical, and invisible.

So Far, So Familiar… But Not Hopeless

If the first five reasons feel like old news, that’s because they are. These are the problems we’ve been pointing out for years—maybe even decades. And yet, here they are – still clogging up staff meetings and strategic plans, repackaged as new priorities every three years.

The truth is, we’re not failing for lack of effort—we’re failing from too much surface-level effort and not enough structural honesty.

But the deeper dysfunction? That’s where it gets interesting.

In Part 2, we move beyond the surface and into the guts of the machine: leadership churn, broken assessment logic, policy-practice disconnection, well-being lip service, and the cultural inertia we pretend isn’t there. Buckle up.