There are still many children who live in a world where even the most basic of school infrastructure does not exist. In her latest column, Julia Gillard shares how the Global Partnership for Education is helping to get infrastructure and supplies to schools in conflict-affected countries – from classroom furniture in Yemen to handwashing stations in Sierra Leone.

The increasing number of children enrolled into primary schools globally show there is great progress being made to improve the quality of education, Julia Gillard writes. Despite these achievements, there is still one group being left behind from all this progress: children with disabilities.

Quality early grade reading is a key focus for the Global Partnership for Education. In her latest Teacher column, Julia Gillard explains how hundreds of millions of children around the world are denied the opportunity to learn to read, and shares how a focus on improving reading standards in Nepal is changing lives for the better.

School improvement is most likely when an entire school has a shared improvement agenda and is committed to learning how to improve. Professor Geoff Masters AO discusses a five-step improvement cycle.

One of the biggest challenges we face in improving quality and equity in our schools is to better address the learning needs of the many children who, on entry to school, are at risk of being locked into trajectories of long-term low achievement, writes Professor Geoff Masters AO.

A willingness to acknowledge and learn from failure is essential for all progress, writes Professor Geoff Masters AO.

In her first column of the year, Julia Gillard discusses a new national mental health initiative from Beyond Blue. The program spans mental health promotion, prevention, early intervention and also provides a critical incident response service in the event of a suicide.

A regular school day for a school girl in Malawi looks vastly different to what her peers experience in Australia, as Julia Gillard witnessed firsthand during a trip to south-east Africa.

Teacher content draws on the wealth of knowledge and expertise that exists within the education community. This month, we’ve had the opportunity to speak with several experts in education on a range of different topics, and in today’s podcast, we take you through some of the highlights.

‘[My former students] were proclaiming that “Station Eleven is becoming real!”.’ Here, Ben Tiffen shares how Emily St John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel is an opportunity for teachers to choose a study text drawing on students’ recent experiences.