Jo Earp

The Narragunnawali Awards are held every 2 years and celebrate outstanding reconciliation initiatives. With applications open for 2025, we catch up with Kim Calabrese, Principal of Winterfold Primary School, Western Australia – winners of the 2023 Schools award.

Purposeful school design can support student learning and wellbeing. Aspect Hills Shire School is a new autism-specific primary school that opened its doors to students last month. In this photo story, Principal Shane Morris takes Teacher readers on a tour of the new school and its design features.

A US study has explored the different reasons why pre-service teachers (PSTs) decided to pursue a teaching career. Researchers analysed roughly 2,800 essay responses and identified 10 ‘supertopics’. The most common supertopic, appearing in nearly 60% of essays, was ’altruism’, followed by ‘intrinsic motivation’. This infographic gives an overview of the results.

This episode of our School Assembly podcast is all about policies and processes. Which documents are the responsibility of the Foundation Principal? Is there a template that schools work from? Our Series 3 Notre Dame P-12 Principal Dan McShea joins us from Queensland to share some of the planning that goes on behind the scenes at a new school.

A national survey from Australian children’s charity The Smith Family has asked families about their hopes for their child’s school education. The top theme from responses was ‘good or improved academic achievement’, while 6% gave answers related to ‘affording resources and having access to opportunities’. Find out more in this infographic.

‘Do you want to be a teacher?’ Is this a question you’ve asked your own students? A new Australian study aimed at boosting the number of First Nations teachers has found that Aboriginal students would like someone to speak to them about teaching as a possible career.

What are the essential skills we need for learning and life, and how can teachers help students to develop them? The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) has been working with more than 30 countries to identify 5 essential skills and design a suite of free educator resources. Dr Claire Scoular shares more details in this expert Q&A.

For the last 6 months, Series 3 of our School Assembly podcast has been following Dan McShea, Foundation Principal of Notre Dame P-12 College on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The big day finally arrived, and in this episode Teacher Editor Jo Earp checks in with Dan on how that first day of the new school went.

One of the topics in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) student questionnaire is the quality of student-teacher relationships. This infographic looks at the responses of Australian students in the 2022 test cycle, by state and territory.

Over the last 5 years, staff at St Mary’s School in Geelong, Victoria, have had a focus on lifting student outcomes through evidence-based instruction. What started with Foundation phonics has now spread across the curriculum and year levels.