School improvement

In this Teacher Awards 2024 winners’ profile, we chat with the executive team at Cessnock High School in NSW. Winners of our Leadership Award for Driving School Improvement, we hear about how they’ve transformed school culture and improved academic achievement.

We’re joined by Professor David Hopkins ahead of his keynote at ACER’s Research Conference 2025, titled ‘Unleashing Greatness – A Strategy for School Improvement’. Our conversation zeros in on one of the 8 steps of his strategy, instructional leadership, and includes practical pointers and plenty to reflect on in relation to your own context and practice.

A new book from Associate Professor John Munro shares high-impact strategies that can be the focus of improving high-level outcomes for gifted and talented students in school. In this exclusive extract for Teacher readers, we share a snippet from Chapter 5, Twice-exceptional students.

In this episode of School Improvement Editor Jo Earp is joined by Jake Compton, Director of Academic Culture and a teacher in the Senior School at Canterbury College, which has been working with academics at the UQ Learning Lab since 2020. We’ll be talking about some of the projects, how they’ve evolved over the years, and the challenges along the way.

In this reader submission, Dr Nicholas Jackson shares the findings and implications from his recent PhD thesis which involved students training teachers how to use specialist 3D design software and providing guidance and advice on effective ways of teaching of learning with this software.

At Alawa Primary School in the Northern Territory, a culture has been built where the feedback that is provided in student perception surveys is prioritised by staff, and students know and understand the value of their feedback that is collected twice a year.

How effectively are you acting on feedback given to you by students? In this episode of School Improvement, we speak with Dr Ilana Finefter-Rosenbluh about her recent research into the impact of student perception surveys on teachers’ practice, and she shares some strategies teachers and schools can employ in order to improve their practice in this area.

Readers often get in touch with Teacher to share how their school is making a difference to student outcomes. New South Wales educator Mary Semaan contacted us recently to talk about how the teaching and leadership team at Al Sadiq College has been working to improve primary students’ writing skills.

In this episode of School Improvement, we’re taking you to Ireland where research has been conducted looking at engaging students in the school self-evaluation process in a meaningful way. Shivaun O’Brien from Dublin City University joins us to unpack the impetus for the research and to talk us through some of the findings.

In Leading Improvement in Mathematics Teaching and Learning, Emeritus Professor Peter Sullivan curates high-impact teaching strategies and practices to help school leaders achieve improvement goals. This extract for Teacher’s bookshelf is on choosing classroom tasks.