Commentary on education and academic life
Provocations, research-informed arguments and the occasional rant about schools, universities and the people working within them. Browse by subject below, or continue down the page for the latest writing.
Schooling & Education
Teaching, learning, assessment, school policy and the sometimes contradictory business of educational improvement.
Academic Life
Research, publishing, leadership and academic careers, from getting started to considering what we leave behind.
Latest articles
Finally, Someone Has Peer-Reviewed the Bullshit
There are moments in academic life when you come across a paper and wonder how nobody had written it before. Pat Thomsonhas recently published one of them. Her article, in the Journal of Education Policy, develops a five-level Policy Bullshit Index for assessing claims made in the name of evidence. Not weak evidence. Not limited evidence. Not the more refined…
Qualified, Deemed Suitable and Given a Number: Just What Every Parent Wants for Their Child
A few years ago, I was invited to a teacher-workforce symposium commissioned by the NSW Department of Education and run, as these things inevitably are, by a large management-consulting firm. Academics involved in teacher education had been assembled to help solve the persistent problem of attracting and retaining teachers. There was the usual discussion of…
The Trouble with ‘Useful’ Degrees
In a recent post, I argued that universities do not owe every doctoral graduate an academic job. Completing a PhD gives you the opportunity to compete for academic employment; it does not create an entitlement. Universities should be honest about the prospects, particularly when they train many more doctoral graduates than they will ever employ themselves.…
Ignore the Naysayers (2026 Update): Why Australia’s Education System is Stronger Than You Think
I wrote the first version of this in 2024, back when the doom was slightly quieter and nobody had yet stood at a podium to announce that the reading wars were over. Two years on, the catastrophe headlines have multiplied, the NAPLAN numbers have moved in genuinely mixed directions, and the overclaiming now comes from both…
Academia: Hard to Enter, Harder to Defend, Still Worth It!
There has been no shortage of articles lately warning people to think twice before pursuing an academic career. Most make entirely reasonable points. Academic jobs are difficult to secure, casual employment has become entrenched, permanent positions attract enormous fields of applicants, research funding is scarce, and Australian universities have developed the sort of reputation that now makes “governance…
The Wellbeing Industry Has Eaten Difficulty: We promised students comfort and called it care.
Somewhere right now, a Year 9 student is sitting in a beanbag in a softly lit room because quadratic equations made him feel overwhelmed. Someone will record the visit as a wellbeing intervention, the relevant box will be ticked, and everyone involved will have acted with entirely decent intentions. The student was distressed, a teacher…
Streaming Without Conviction: What schools call streaming is often just selective extraction
Schools are not nearly as uncomfortable with sorting students as they like to pretend. We talk about inclusion, belonging, mixed-ability learning, and meeting every student where they are, which are all noble enough ideas when they are taken seriously. At the same time, we run selective schools, opportunity classes, gifted pathways, accelerated streams, extension groups,…
Differentiation Is Not the Problem. Pretending It’s Easy Is.
Somewhere right now, a teacher is producing three versions of the same worksheet and calling it inclusive practice. There is the “support” version, where a few of the harder questions have quietly disappeared. There is the “extension” version, where the same questions have been given an extra verb, probably “evaluate”, because nothing says academic stretch…
How Many Standards Does It Take to Train a Teacher?
Education reform has a curious rhythm. A problem appears. A review is commissioned. A framework is introduced. The framework does not quite fix the problem, so a second framework arrives to strengthen it. Eventually, the system begins to resemble a geological formation: layers of policy sediment built up over time, each one deposited with the…
AI Is Not the Problem. Avoiding Effort Just Got Easier
One look at the headlines and you would think civilisation is either ending, ascending, or about to be permanently automated. Apparently, AI will destroy work, create infinite prosperity, democratise knowledge, eliminate expertise, replace teachers, save education, and possibly run the world sometime between Year 10 exams and the next university curriculum review. Not bad for…
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