The early years set the foundations for children’s development and learning trajectories in life. Early inequalities can put children on divergent paths, but Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policies can level opportunities from the start, with lasting economic and social benefits. Addressing gaps in participation in ECEC and strengthening its quality and inclusivity represent essential steps to support young children and families and reduce inequalities. Leveraging insights from recent research, the comparative report Reducing Inequalities by Investing in Early Childhood Education and Care discusses the drivers of inequalities in early childhood and the place of ECEC within the landscape of mitigating policies. It develops a policy roadmap for ECEC to better support equity and inclusion. This country note provides a country-specific overview of Australia.

Education at a Glance is the authoritative source for information on the state of education around the world. It provides data on the structure, finances and performance of education systems across OECD countries and a number of accession and partner countries. More than 100 charts and tables in this publication - as well as links to much more available on the educational database - provide key information on the output of educational institutions; the impact of learning across countries; access, participation and progression in education; the financial resources invested in education; and teachers, the learning environment and the organisation of schools. This country note provides a country-specific overview of Australia.

The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examines what students know in reading, mathematics and science, and what they can do with what they know. It provides the most comprehensive and rigorous international assessment of student learning outcomes to date. Results from PISA indicate the quality and equity of learning outcomes attained around the world, and allow educators and policy makers to learn from the policies and practices applied in other countries. This country note provides a country-specific overview of Australia.

The New South Wales (Australia) (hereafter NSW) Government is committed to an education system that prepares its learners for rewarding lives and lifelong learning. To help realise this goal, the NSW Department of Education (DoE) has initiated several reforms over the years that recognise the importance of the learning journey for students, teachers, and school leaders. The Local Schools Local Decisions (LSLD) reform was announced in August 2011 and aimed to increase the authority of local schools to make decisions about how they deliver education to students. In December 2020, it was announced that LSLD would be replaced by the School Success Model (SSM) reform which is a school improvement reform that aimed to deliver high quality, tiered school improvement support to all NSW public schools. The SSM set out to achieve a better balance of autonomy and accountability for student improvement across schools by formalising system targets and priorities, lifting capability and sharing evidence-led support through a new tailored school support framework. Realising successful educational change however is a long, complex, multifaceted process that, simply said, is hard to do – and the DoE reform journey is no exception to this. The DoE considered it important to build on lessons from past reforms and receive feedback from the education profession and other stakeholders to further enhance the design of its school improvement reform and determine the right enabling conditions for its successful implementation.

This country policy profile on education in Australia is part of the Education Policy Outlook series. Building on the first policy profile for Australia (2013), it offers a concise analysis of where the education system stands today and how this compares to other systems. The profile analyses the evolution of ongoing and emerging related policy efforts in Australia, including education responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. It also offers relevant international policy examples that may serve as possible inspiration as policy makers work to address Australia's key challenges and priorities. The report brings together over a decade's worth of policy analysis by the Education Policy Outlook, as well as recent OECD data, relevant thematic and country-specific work, and other international and national evidence. It also benefits from the Education Policy Outlook's ongoing comparative analysis of resilience and responsiveness in education policy.

The OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) is the first international large-scale survey that provides a voice to teachers and school principals, who complete questionnaires about issues such as the professional development they have received; their teaching beliefs and practices; the assessment of their work and the feedback and recognition they receive; and various other school leadership, management and workplace issues. This note presents findings based on the reports of lower secondary teachers and their school leaders in mainstream public and private schools in Australia.

The OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) is the first international large-scale survey that provides a voice to teachers and school principals, who complete questionnaires about issues such as the professional development they have received; their teaching beliefs and practices; the assessment of their work and the feedback and recognition they receive; and various other school leadership, management and workplace issues. This note presents findings based on the reports of lower secondary teachers and their school leaders in mainstream public and private schools in Australia.

Australia's overall performance in the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) ranges from average to very good. However, three million adults, representing one-fifth of the working age population, have low literacy and/or numeracy skills. Building Skills for All in Australia describes the characteristics of the low-skilled and discusses the consequences that low skills have on economic and social development for both individuals and Australian society. The review examines the strengths of the Australian skills system, highlighting the strong basic skills found in the migrant population, widespread proficiency in use of ICT and the positive role of workplaces in skills development. The study explores, moreover, the challenges facing the skills system and what can be done to enhance basic skills through education, training or other workplace measures. One of a series of studies on low basic skills, the review presents new analyses of PIAAC data and concludes with a series of policy recommendations. These include: increasing participation of women in STEM fields, addressing underperformance of post-secondary VET students and preventing drop-out, improving pre-apprenticeships, enhancing mathematics provision within secondary education and tackling poor access to childcare facilities for young mothers.

This short country note recaps some Background on the 2014 OECD Measuring Innovation in Education report, the main Key report findings on innovation in education, the Report approach to measuring educational system innovation, along with Australia's top five organisational education innovations for the 2003-2011 period and Australia's top five pedagogic education innovations for the same interval.

The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), was designed to provide insights into the availability of some of these key skills in society and how they are used at work and at home. The first survey of its kind, it directly measures proficiency in three information-processing skills: literacy, numeracy and problem-solving in technology-rich environments. This country note provides a country-specific overview of Australia.

This policy profile on education in Australia is part of the Education Policy Outlook series, which present comparative analysis of education policies and reforms across OECD countries. Building on the substantial comparative and sectorial policy knowledge base available within the OECD, it develops a comparative outlook on education policy by providing: a) analysis of individual countries' educational context, challenges and policies (education policy profiles) and of international trends and b) comparative insight on policies and reforms on selected topics.

This case study describes the policy-making process in Australia leading to the public release of information on every school in Australia through the My School website. Policy lessons are described to provide insight for OECD member countries which may be grappling with similar issues in developing school accountability systems, particularly those working within federal-state contexts. While some of the lessons from this policy development and implementation process relate specifically to Australia's circumstances, there are general policy prescriptions of broader interest to other countries seeking to improve school education through measurement and reporting of key factors of school operations and performance.

This book provides, for Australia, an independent analysis of major issues facing its educational evaluation and assessment framework, current policy initiatives, and possible future approaches. It shows how student assessment, teacher appraisal, school evaluation and system evaluation can bring about real gains in performance across Australia's school system.

The introductory section of this report provides a brief overview of the Australian VET system followed by a short description of the three case studies selected for the study. As these form the main focus of the report they are described and discussed in more depth in later sections. The three cases were selected by Australian officials, in collaboration with the OECD/CERI Secretariat. The three case studies are: a) research and statistics in VET with a focus on the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER); b) raising the status of VET; and c) the Australian Flexible Learning Framework.

Learning for Jobs is an OECD study of vocational education and training designed to help countries make their VET systems more responsive to labour market needs. It expands the evidence base, identifies a set of policy options and develop tools to appraise VET policy initiatives. The Australian VET system has many strengths including strong engagement of employers, a well established national qualification system, extensive VET data and research. The system is flexible and allows for a fair degree of local autonomy and experimentation. But at the same time there are a number of challenges, including a lack of clarity and potentially duplication in the respective roles of Commonwealth, states and territories in planning and delivering VET, a lack of clear and simple rules for entitlement to funding, difficulties in providing a reliable foundation in skills forecasts, some gaps in the data base, somewhat complicated and cumbersome training packages and an ageing teacher and trainer workforce.

The report provides an overview of school leadership developments and issues in Australia, as a contribution to the OECD's Improving School Leadership Activity. It discusses the national context of schooling, the features of the school system, school governance and leardership, the attractiveness of school leaders' roles, and professional learning of school leaders in the country.

In this report we provide a snapshot of how Australia goes about addressing the training and assessment needs of adults with low basic skills. We identify key challenges for adult basic education, and report on national,state and territory government language, literacy and numeracy initiatives (including government-funded training programmes and projects). We then provide an account of the nature of vocational and community-based training provision, and assessment policies and processes. Following this, we discuss formative assessment and innovative teaching practices, and materials and resources designed to provide assessment guidance. We also provide a description of the nature of the adult language and literacy workforce and opportunities for professional development. We end by drawing some conclusions.

For this case study, two secondary schools were identified where implementation of the first two KLA syllabuses (Science; Health and Physical Education) was progressing and where there was commitment to the principles underlying the syllabuses. One government and one non-government school were invited to participate and agreed to do so. The non-government school is one of the schools of the Brisbane Catholic Education Office, a part of the Brisbane Diocese. It was expected that these case studies would reveal both a degree of sophistication by teachers in managing school-based assessment and in using classroom assessment formatively due to the within-school effects of the school-based processes adopted for the Senior certificate in years 11-12. But, it was also expected that they would reveal some difficulties in implementing new syllabuses for years 8-10 where assessment is focussed on providing for each student a detailed profile of ‘milestones reached along a learning journey' (level or stage) rather than an overall summary of the ‘relative quality of achievement on course completion' (grade or rating).

Responsibility for attracting, developing and retaining effective teachers in the federation of Australia is widely distributed. Besides separate government school systems in each of the six States and two Territories, a diverse and growing non-government school sector comprising several Catholic and independent education systems and individual schools enrols close to one third of all school-age students. While the Commonwealth government does not itself operate a school system, it provides substantial financial support to both government and non-government schools, together with a wide array of national programmes. Initial and post-graduate teacher education is largely the responsibility of the 43 higher education institutions, including the 38 universities, that receive Commonwealth operating grants.

This review covers children from birth to compulsory school age and includes the transition period into primary schooling. In order to examine thoroughly what children experience in the first years of life, the review has adopted a broad, holistic approach to study early childhood policy and provision. To that end, consideration has been given to the roles of families, communities and other environmental influences on children's early learning and development. Particular emphasis has been laid on aspects concerning quality, access and equity, with an emphasis on policy development in the following areas: regulations; staffing; programme content and implementation; family engagement and support; funding and financing.

The thematic review places young people's transition to work within a lifelong learning framework. The transition from initial education to work is only one of many transitions that young people will need to make throughout their lives. It is of critical importance, though, since the process by which young people move from education to work can influence the extent to which the benefits of education are retained, and opportunities for new learning are opened up. From this perspective, improving the transition to work means more than getting young people into jobs -- it also requires helping them to become effective learners throughout their adult lives.

As in many other OECD Member countries, Australian tertiary education has in recent years experienced substantial growth and rapid change. It is well on the way to becoming a mass system, with access and participation at some stage of the life cycle beyond adolescence a common expectation. Whether this takes the form of direct entry following completion of secondary schooling or, as is now so often the case, a return to study after employment or bringing up a family -- or both -- higher education is no longer the preserve of a small minority.