I have written plenty about explicit instruction, cognitive load theory and the increasingly ubiquitous “science of learning”. My position is pretty simple: Explicit instruction is effective. Cognitive load theory tells us important things about how people learn. Systematic phonics has a substantial evidence base. Teachers should know this, and it should influence what happens in classrooms. What I have been less convinced of, and I’ve been quite clear on this, is the leap from this research tells us something useful to the evidence has spoken, and this is now what everyone needs to do.
That distinction is important because the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) was established as a national evidence body to generate, synthesise and disseminate research about what works in education. In principle, this is a common-sense idea. I’ve argued that teachers don’t have the time or inclination to read academic research, so an organisation that interprets and presents research evidence to teachers is, in theory, an excellent idea. But, and this is a big But, if you are going to tell everybody else what the evidence says, you need to show your work.
I don’t want to rehash what I’ve said before or make AERO the target of renewed frustration, but a recent piece from Adam Voigt, Is AERO the Fount of Educational Wisdom … or Just Bubbles of Nothing? enticed me to return to this issue. Voigt raises wide-ranging concerns about AERO, not all of which I find equally convincing. But I am not particularly interested in trying to establish guilt through networks of philanthropists, nor do I think comparing a handful of international education systems tells us much about the causal effects of particular pedagogies. If I am going to criticise an organisation like AERO for overstating what evidence can tell us, I should probably resist doing the same. However, one issue in Voigt’s argument deserves considerably more attention, and the credit for bringing it to light belongs to Dr Alex Bacalja, whose investigation and request exposed an uncomfortable contradiction for the national evidence body.
In 2025, the Commonwealth commissioned KPMG to conduct an independent performance evaluation of AERO. The review was completed and provided to education ministers in 2026…..
Oh, you were expecting more out of this paragraph?
So was I!
You would think that when a publicly funded national evidence organisation is independently evaluated using public money, the resulting evaluation would be made public, but, in this case, you would be wrong. The report remains unpublished. More damaging, documents released after Dr Bacalja’s FoI request indicate that AERO itself objected to releasing the report, arguing that publication could undermine confidence in the quality of its evidence, cause educators to stop using its resources, and cause serious reputational harm.
Read that again.
Yes, you read it correctly – both times. Australia’s national education evidence body argued that releasing independent evidence about its own performance might undermine confidence in the evidence it produces. What began as a Freedom of Information request has become a broader question about public accountability. And rightly so.
There may be entirely legitimate material in the report that should remain confidential. I have not seen the report, so I have no idea whether those arguments are reasonable in relation to some or all of it. And that, inconveniently, is precisely the problem.
None of us knows what the review says.
It may conclude that AERO is doing an excellent job. Or it might recommend some changes. It may identify weaknesses. The report may just be another mediocre consultancy report that isn’t worth the paper it is printed on. Until it is released, we have no idea.
Yet while the evaluation remains unavailable, the policy authority surrounding “evidence-based teaching” has continued to grow. The Better and Fairer Schools Agreement ties additional Commonwealth funding to agreed reforms, and the Commonwealth’s own reporting identifies evidence-based teaching and professional learning as central elements of the reform program. Education Minister Jason Clare has explicitly described explicit teaching as part of the evidence-based teaching being implemented across states and territories. This is where the issue becomes much bigger than one unpublished consultancy report.
Advice changes character when it acquires institutional power.
There is a meaningful difference between an organisation publishing a useful explainer saying, “Here is what our synthesis of the research suggests”, and that organisation’s conception of evidence becoming embedded in system frameworks, professional learning, curriculum resources and national reform agreements. The first is advice. The second begins to shape orthodoxy. While that doesn’t make the advice wrong, it should raise the standard of accountability.
The stronger AERO’s influence becomes, the stronger the case for transparency should be. An evidence base should not simply be another participant in education’s endless contestation of ideas. Its authority derives from the claim that it does something different: identifying, evaluating, and translating evidence more rigorously than the rest of us can manage on our own. While that may not be the only valuable function, it is an unusually powerful one.
The phrase “AERO says” carries weight because what follows that phrase is assumed to have passed through a process of evidentiary scrutiny. Teachers are not going to analyse every cited paper, inspect its methodology, examine competing reviews and determine whether the conclusion is proportionate to the underlying research. That is why the evidence intermediary exists in the first place. It asks educators to trust the quality of its synthesis. Trust is therefore not an incidental feature of AERO’s work; it is the foundation on which the entire organisation stands.
But trust in an evidence institution cannot simply mean, blindly trust us. It has to lean into transparency, so that researchers and teacher educators with the time and expertise to consider the evidence, examine the course material and judge the quality of the claim can weigh in and support the claims or refute them, once again, openly and transparently.
This is where the situation becomes so uncomfortable. AERO expects educators to trust its judgement about evidence. But if the argument against publishing an independent assessment of AERO includes the possibility that doing so might reduce that trust, then cause and effect have been reversed. Transparency is not something an evidence institution should offer only when it reinforces confidence. Transparency is the reason confidence is warranted in the first place.
There is a broader issue here about how “evidence-based” education has developed in Australia. I have no problem with evidence being used to constrain bad ideas. Some practices are poorly supported. Some are demonstrably ineffective. Some educational fashions have survived far longer than they deserved because nobody demanded much evidence for them at all. The answer cannot be to retreat into a version of teacher autonomy where every classroom becomes its own epistemological republic and professional judgement exempts us from justifying our decisions. However, the alternative is not to replace professional judgement with institutional judgement and then gift the institution the word evidence.
Evidence still has to be interpreted. Choices still have to be made about what counts as meaningful evidence, which outcomes matter, how findings transfer across contexts and when a general principle should give way to the needs of particular learners. Anyone who has read serious educational research knows how rarely those decisions produce the kind of certainty currently being pedalled.
This is why I have become increasingly frustrated by the declarations that “the science is settled” or that we finally know “what works”. We can establish quite a lot through research. And a lot of that is useful. But evidence should narrow the range of defensible choices; it very rarely reduces that range to one, especially in education. When an organisation becomes the national arbiter helping governments decide where those boundaries lie, scrutiny should be welcomed, not suppressed.
This is why the unpublished KPMG review matters regardless of what it contains. The argument for releasing it is not that critics of AERO deserve ammunition. It is that supporters and critics alike should be able to see evidence of how effectively a national evidence body is performing.
If the report vindicates AERO, release it.
If it identifies problems, release it and address them.
If parts genuinely cannot be made public, redact those parts and explain why.
What is much harder to defend is the proposition that confidence in an evidence organisation might best be preserved by preventing people from seeing evidence about the organisation itself.
I wrote recently about Pat Thomson’s brilliant Policy Bullshit Index, which asks whether the confidence attached to a policy claim is actually warranted by the evidence supporting it. One of the things I liked most about her framework was its insistence that calling bullshit requires work. You have to inspect the evidence, trace the claims and show where the argument exceeds what the research can reasonably carry.
The same standard should apply here.
I don’t know whether AERO is getting everything right. Neither does Adam Voigt. Neither do its most enthusiastic defenders. That is why independent evaluation matters.
AERO may be right about some things. Maybe explicit instruction deserves the prominence it has been given. Its evidence syntheses may withstand every serious methodological challenge thrown at them. The KPMG report may say exactly that.
If so, publish it.
If not, publish it anyway.
An organisation whose authority rests on telling everyone else to follow the evidence should not get to decide that evidence about its own performance is somehow different.
That is not accountability. It is institutional immunity dressed up as evidence.
Organised by Tom Mahoney, the open letter calls on Australian education ministers to release the independent KPMG evaluation of AERO, with appropriate redactions where genuinely necessary.
