Absent students miss more than just lesson content; they miss the opportunities to build the habits and skills to succeed at school and in life. New OECD research shows ‘school attendance problems are no longer a marginal issue; they have become a challenge affecting classrooms in nearly every country’.

A collaborative study involving Aboriginal Elders, families, educators and children across 3 urban schools in Perth, Western Australia, is working to deepen Aboriginal children’s understanding of, and pride in, who they are by strengthening their connections to culture, Country and kin. Professor Cheryl Kickett-Tucker from Curtin University tells us all about the Moombaki Cultural Learnings Project and the impact it is having on Aboriginal students.

Last month, the OECD released findings from the 2025 International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS). In today's episode, Dr Dan Cloney, Senior Research Fellow at ACER and Lead Researcher for IELS, unpacks some of the key findings from the study, explores what made the assessment design unique, and discusses why it's so important to ensure every child arrives at school with the strongest possible foundations.

The winner of the inaugural Global Schools Prize – an international US $500,000 prize presented to a school to scale their impact – has been announced as The Alsama Project from Lebanon. Find out more about the winner, and an Australian school that also made it all the way to the top 50, in today’s article.

Buy-now pay-later services, pocket money apps, online scams, gambling advertising and cryptocurrency are part of some students’ everyday lives. In today’s article, 2 mathematics teachers from Marryatville High School in South Australia share how they’ve applied some of their learning from a professional development partnership into their financial literacy electives for year 9 and 10. 

The results from the second cycle of the OECD’s Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS 2025) have just been released. Here we share more about the focus and innovative assessment design of IELS, and an overview of the findings on how children are faring at the very start of their learning journeys.

Although often associated with a new school year, transitions occur throughout the school day and across each term. Anna Brady – principal at autism-specific school Aspect Vern Barnett School – shares how each term begins with a deliberate re‑establishment of routines, expectations and supports, and the positive impact on students.

Our guest on today’s podcast is Kayla Borg from St Mary’s Primary School in Whittlesea, Victoria. She shares how she went about co‑designing a podcast lesson for her year 5 and 6 students in partnership with the eSmart team at the Alannah & Madeline Foundation, what her students learned from this experience, and why real‑world, student‑led digital learning can have such a powerful ripple effect across the entire school community.

To address staffing concerns and improve language provision in primary schools, an innovative program known as TCL (Teachers as Co-Learners) supports the provision of languages through daily allocation of 15-minute chunks during the school day, run by a classroom teacher with the support of a language assistant. 

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.