Welcome back to part two of this slow, frustrating waltz through the reasons Australian education feels like it’s running in place—polished reforms on the outside, same old problems underneath.
In Part 1, we looked at the front-line issues: the illusion of standardisation, content overload, research misused as doctrine, professional development that feels more like detention, and the overhyped tech that’s supposed to “transform learning” but mostly just burns bandwidth.
But that was just the topsoil. Now we dig into the roots.
In Part 2, we take on the quieter culprits—the structural and cultural anchors that keep dragging the system back to inertia. We’ll look at leadership instability, misaligned assessments, the chasm between policy and practice, the neglected role of student wellbeing, and the one no one wants to touch: cultural inertia.
These aren’t dashboard issues. They’re engine problems. Until we fix them, we’ll keep polishing the hood while the wheels fall off.
Six: Assessment Misalignment – Judging a Fish by Its Ability to Memorise a Rubric
We love to talk about 21st-century skills—creativity, critical thinking, collaboration. You’d think our students were all training to become policy analysts at the UN. But when it comes to assessment? It’s still largely 20th-century recall with a 21st-century branding kit.
NAPLAN, PAT, HSC, ATAR—it’s an alphabet soup of standardised, high-stakes tests designed to measure… well, mostly how well students sit still, follow instructions, and regurgitate information under pressure. That might make for efficient data collection, but it’s a poor proxy for meaningful learning. We say we want students to think deeply, then test them in ways that punish depth.
Here’s the kicker: teachers, understandably, teach to the test—because that’s what gets reported, ranked, and compared. This isn’t a moral failing; it’s a rational response to a warped incentive system. If you’re being judged by the scoreboard, you’re going to play to the scoreboard—even if it’s measuring the wrong game.
The OECD has highlighted this too: when assessment systems rely heavily on summative, standardised methods, “curricula tend to narrow, and instruction tends to be less engaging and more test-oriented” (OECD, 2013). That’s a polite way of saying assessments shape behaviour—and right now, they’re shaping it in the wrong direction.
The irony? Some of our brightest, most capable students struggle in traditional assessment models. These systems often fail to recognise their strengths or meet their needs. When that happens, it’s no surprise they disengage, act out, or withdraw altogether.
And don’t get me started on the performative complexity of rubrics—those “criteria grids” that look like tax forms, rewarding students for decoding bureaucratic language instead of engaging with real ideas. We pretend rubrics create objectivity, but their vague, slippery wording leaves everything wide open to subjective interpretation. It’s a system more concerned with appearing fair than actually being clear.
Until our assessments reflect what we truly value, we’ll keep getting students who learn to perform rather than learn to think. It’s not just the multiple-choice tests that miss the mark. Even our so-called open-ended tasks often reward compliance over creativity, and surface reasoning over deep understanding. We can’t pretend we’re cultivating critical thinkers while assessing them with checklists and model answers.
Seven: The Policy-Practice Chasm – Great on Paper, Dead on Arrival
Policy in education is a bit like IKEA furniture: it looks brilliant in the catalogue, but try assembling it in a real classroom and you’ll end up with three leftover screws, a busted shelf, and a vague sense of existential despair.
The people writing education policy often mean well, but meaning well doesn’t cut it when the distance between your policy desk and the Year 8 science lab is measured in light years. Classrooms aren’t case studies; they’re chaotic ecosystems, where success depends as much on relationships and timing as it does on strategy. Try implementing a national directive about “differentiation strategies” during a week when half your class has gastro, your Wi-Fi is down, and two students are having catastrophic meltdowns because they’re going to lose their social media in a few months.
This is the heart of the problem: policies are too often designed in sterile rooms, then dropped from 30,000 feet onto schools without a parachute. There’s rarely time—or will—for genuine consultation with those at the chalkface. Instead, teachers are presented with neatly packaged reforms tied to performance metrics and acronyms, with no time, tools, or trust to adapt them meaningfully.
And when it fails? The blame rolls downhill—toward the teachers and principals tasked with implementing policies that were never built for the terrain.
The Grattan Institute has been warning about this for years, noting that many education reforms in Australia lack “a coherent implementation plan and fail to take into account the day-to-day realities of schools” (Goss, 2017). Translation: we keep mistaking top-down enthusiasm for bottom-up effectiveness.
It’s not that policy is bad. It’s that policy without proximity—without deep, ongoing dialogue with those doing the work—is ineffective at best and destructive at worst. We don’t need more blueprints. We need better architects who’ve spent time on the construction site.
Until that changes, we’ll keep getting glossy PDFs full of great intentions (eh-em… Explicit Teaching)—and classrooms full of teachers quietly ignoring them, just trying to survive the week.
Eight: Revolving Doors and Spreadsheet Commanders – Leadership Instability and Bureaucratic Bloat
If teachers are the frontline, then school leaders are supposed to be the field captains—steady, strategic, grounded. But in too many schools, the captain’s chair is on wheels. Leadership turnover is rampant, and those who stick around spend half their time buried in compliance, not curriculum.
Let’s start with the revolving door. Principals in Australia have one of the highest stress loads of any profession (Riley, 2021). With constant pressure from above and below, high-stakes accountability, and the charming daily cocktail of HR disputes, angry parents, funding shortfalls, and systemic micromanagement, it’s no wonder so many burn out or bail out. A stable leadership team used to be a strength—now it’s a luxury.
And into that vacuum steps the bureaucracy.
We now have an entire ecosystem of system-level managers, consultants, strategists, and performance officers—many of whom are excellent, experienced educators. But here’s the catch: the further up the chain decisions are made, the less they resemble what actually happens in a school. It’s like managing a fire brigade from a spreadsheet and wondering why the fires keep getting bigger.
Schools are increasingly accountable upward, not inward. Leaders spend their time preparing for audits, inputting data into systems designed for visibility, not insight, and filtering down policy memos that read like they were written by GenAI trained on grant applications. Meanwhile, the actual leading—coaching teachers, shaping culture, knowing students—gets pushed to the margins and often to external consultants.
This isn’t just frustrating. It’s ineffective.
Research from the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) shows that strong, stable school leadership is one of the most significant in-school factors for student outcomes. But stability is hard to come by when leaders are either chewed up by the job or parachuted in and out with every structural reshuffle.
We’ve created a system where the people closest to students have the least time to think strategically, and the people furthest away are producing policies about “instructional leadership” from a conference room in Canberra.
Nine: The Well-being Mirage – Burning Out to Measure Up
Here’s a bold educational truth that somehow still feels radical: students are not just brains on legs. But you wouldn’t know it from the way our systems operate.
We say we care about student well-being, but when it comes to actual priorities? It’s buried somewhere between “arrive on time” and “bring a fully charged device.” The reality is this: we can’t keep flogging academic outcomes like racehorses and then act surprised when kids collapse under the pressure.
From NAPLAN in Year 3 to ATAR in Year 12, students are being measured, sorted, and ranked before they’ve had a chance to figure out who they are. We want resilience, curiosity, and creativity, but we design schooling environments that feel more like competitive triathlons than places of growth. It’s wellness week on Monday and a high-stakes exam on Friday. That’s not balance—it’s branding.
The mental health stats back this up. According to Mission Australia’s 2023 Youth Survey, over one in three young people reported high levels of psychological distress—a figure that’s been climbing steadily. And yet, our systemic response is usually to offer mindfulness apps and a pastel-coloured poster that says “You Matter.”
This isn’t about going soft. It’s about understanding the neuroscience of learning: stress and anxiety narrow cognitive bandwidth. Students can’t learn effectively when their nervous system is in survival mode. Maslow comes before Bloom—every time.
We’re in a system that’s trying to produce “future-ready learners,” but forgets that readiness starts with emotional stability, connection, and a sense of purpose. If a student feels unsafe, unseen, or like a perpetual failure, they’re not going to be launching into deep inquiry—they’re going to be tuning out, acting out, or burning out.
We can’t fix this with another policy. We fix it by rehumanising school. Well-being isn’t fluff—it’s the soil learning grows in. And right now, too many kids are trying to grow in gravel.
Ten: Cultural Inertia – Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Chalkboard
After all the reviews, reforms, frameworks, strategies, pilots, resets, rollouts, and revolutions—here’s the secret: school still sucks. Different devices, same mindset.
This is cultural inertia—the tendency of institutions to keep doing things the way they’ve always been done, even if nobody can quite remember why. We still valorise compliance over curiosity. We still treat memorisation like a form of intelligence. We still worship the ATAR as if it’s a moral indicator, not a number generated by a statistical algorithm that most adults don’t actually understand.
We talk about “21st-century learning” as if it’s a fresh idea, but we’re already a quarter of the way through the 21st century—and somehow we’re still arguing about whether students should be allowed to sit in groups.
The problem isn’t just policy—it’s the habits, beliefs, and rituals baked into the daily life of schools. And don’t get me started on the factory model metaphor. We’ve all heard it, we all agree it’s outdated—and yet, we keep punching the clock, sorting kids by age, and delivering curriculum in identical portions like it’s educational meal prep.
Culture change is hard. It doesn’t come from a new strategy document. It comes from deep, slow work—questioning assumptions, challenging norms, and creating environments where teachers and students alike are allowed to experiment, reflect, and fail without fear of being flattened by a rubric.
Until we shift the underlying beliefs about what learning is, what teaching is, and what schools are for, all we’re doing is rearranging the deck chairs on the chalkboard.
So now we’ve laid it bare—ten reasons why the system stays stuck, no matter how many reviews, reforms, or rebrands we throw at it. We’ve covered the surface-level culprits and the deeper cultural drivers. The quick fixes and the hard truths.
If the first five issues were about structural clutter, these last five have been about something deeper: how we think about education, how we lead it, and what we actually value.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: none of these problems has a tech solution. None will be fixed with a pilot program, a new framework, or a glossy set of “strategic priorities.” Real change is: Slow. Messy. Human. It begins in culture and ends in trust.
If we want meaningful progress, we need to:
- Stop managing teachers like liabilities and start treating them like professionals.
- Stop pretending student well-being is separate from academic success.
- Stop assessing compliance and calling it learning.
- Stop outsourcing leadership to policy documents.
- And stop talking about transformation while clinging to traditions that no longer serve.
It’s time to stop tinkering with the system and start reimagining the purpose of school. And the good news? The people who can lead that reimagining are already here. They’re in classrooms. They just need space, support, and permission to do what they know works.
The system won’t fix itself. But it can be rebuilt—from the inside out.
Maximising Student Potential 