‘Perhaps the most important realisation for any school community is that culture is never owned by leadership alone.’ In her first column for Teacher, Associate Principal Rachael Lehr explores how strong, positive school cultures are deliberately built through everyday actions and shared responsibility.

In our latest reader submission, Dr Aylie Davidson, Lecturer in Mathematics Education at Deakin University, explains that planning for learning necessitates intellectual and collaborative effort, and outlines what an effective planning meeting for maths looks like in practice.

As a school, establishing partnerships that tap into external resources and expertise can enhance student outcomes. At Findon Primary School, a partnership with CSIRO has engaged students with the aviation and aerospace industries and even supported the design of a whole-school STEM program. Find out more in this article. 

For some students, the difference between walking through the school gate or staying home is as simple – and as heavy – as a clean uniform. Not-for-profit Orange Sky Australia is now partnering with schools to install free, on-campus washing machines and dryers, guided by a simple belief: access to laundry should never be a barrier to education.

What do ‘friend’, ‘cost’ and ‘privacy’ have in common? They’re all past winners of Oxford’s Australian Children’s Word of the Year. Now we can add ‘vitamin’ to the list, with the latest research highlighting an increase in students writing about self-care. Find out what else made the shortlist, and about some of the changes in the rankings of the 100 highest-frequency words, in today’s article.

The Zayed Sustainability Prize is a global award that recognises organisations and high schools that are delivering practical, scalable solutions to some of the world’s most pressing sustainability challenges. Last week, the Prize announced the cohort of 2026 winners in a ceremony held during Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week. In today’s article, we learn more about the 6 winning high schools from 6 world regions.

Teacher editor Jo Earp finds out how the Aspect Learning Improvement Collaborative is using a mainstream learning framework developed by Dr Lyn Sharratt, adapted to suit an autism-specific education setting. We’ll hear from Lyn, Aspect Education's Deputy National Director Karilyn Gumley and principals Kaye Perry, Joanne Tisdell, and Michelle Zikmundovsky.

Teaching assistants (TAs) and other specialist support staff are important resources in a school. In this edition of Researching education: 5 further readings, we share 5 resources on this topic, including guidance reports designed specifically for leaders and a report on the role of Aboriginal Education Workers.

Joy Russell, a teacher at Scotch Oakburn College in Tasmania, organised a professional learning event all about financial literacy earlier this year. In today’s Q&A, she explains how it helped participants to build a strong support network, share practical ideas through connections with local business leaders, and take valuable lessons back to their own classrooms.

‘Instead of focusing on absence, we focus on presence now. We celebrate students turning up.’ In today’s episode, Dominique Russell is joined by Chantel Barnes, Principal at Glenora District School in rural Tasmania, to hear all about how they’ve flipped the script on attendance in the last 12 months by focusing on the language they use and sharing data with all members of the school community.