Jo Earp

A growing number of school leaders across Australia are reporting problems with unfilled teacher vacancies. The Australian Education Union’s annual ‘State of our Schools Survey’ includes a question for principals on teacher shortages. In the latest survey, 9 out of 10 principals reported experiencing a shortage of teachers in the last year – more than triple the rate in 2015. Find out more in this infographic.

School Assembly is the podcast that explores what it takes to build a new school from the ground up. We’re following principal Jo Camozzato and her team at Bemin Secondary College, in the Melbourne suburb of Truganina, which opens its doors at the start of the 2024 school year. In this episode, we’re talking about planning.

A common goal for all schools is to continually improve practice and lift student outcomes. Precisely how leaders respond to this complex challenge is impacted by many internal and external contextual factors, including student needs and the expertise of the principal, teachers and support staff.

In our latest expert Q&A we talk to Kristy Osborne, a physicist, former pre-service teacher and Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) about the science concepts that primary students struggle with and why it’s important for teachers to identify and address student misconceptions early on.

School Assembly is the podcast that explores what it takes to build a new school from the ground up. It’s the first episode of Series 2, and we’re in the Melbourne suburb of Truganina to meet Jo Camozzato, principal of the new dual campus Bemin Secondary College, which opens its doors to students at the start of the 2024 school year.

In this episode I’m joined by Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report Director Manos Antoninis to discuss the 6 key messages in the major international study Technology in Education: A tool on whose terms?, including what governments, systems and schools should be thinking about when planning to bring technology into the classroom.

Our guest for this episode of The Research Files is Professor Anne Castles. She’s a Keynote speaker at ACER’s Research Conference next month, which is exploring how to improve continuity of learning in the first 12 years of a child’s life. We’ll be discussing some of the research on learning to read, and getting a taster of what delegates can expect from her presentation.

The new Fading Notes report explores the provision of music education in Australian primary teaching degrees. Researchers surveyed lecturers responsible for music education within Initial Teacher Education degrees, representing a student pool of more than 4,600 primary teaching students across 73% of universities delivering generalist primary teaching degrees. Topics included music training hours, and knowledge, skills and competency to teach. Here are some of the results.

A major international report released today calls for smartphones to be banned in schools, pointing to concerns about data privacy, cyberbullying, wellbeing and among children themselves. Here are the key messages from the UNESCO 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report on technology in education.

In our latest expert Q&A we talk to Greta Rollo, who leads the Primary Early Childhood and Inclusive Research team at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), and ACER Research Fellow Dr Kellie Picker, about the place of phonics in early reading instruction.