Andy Mison, President of the Australian Secondary Principals’ Association, says real education reform depends on strengthening agency for students, teachers and leaders across every level of the system.
The 2026 ASPA National Summit, held at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra on 24 and 25 March, brought together school leaders, researchers, system leaders, policymakers, community partners and young people under a single, deliberate theme: Agency for Equity and Excellence: Shaping Policy through Partnership.
Delegates worked through three interconnected themes: Flourishing Students, Strengthening Leaders and Transforming Systems, reflecting ASPA’s conviction that lasting improvement in Australian education must be pursued simultaneously at every level. Students cannot flourish if the leaders around them are unsupported. Leaders cannot lead with coherence if the systems around them are fragmented. And none of it holds together if those systems are not oriented toward the same goals.
Agency emerged as the galvanising idea of the summit. Not consultation after the decision has already been made, but the capacity to be present and constructively influential when the decisions that shape our schools and our students are actually being designed.
There is a quality of listening that we are not yet doing consistently well. Young people were clear. They want transparency about where their choices lead, learning that feels genuinely relevant to their lives, and a voice in the small decisions, not just the ones adults think are significant. Flourishing is broader than attainment, and students with genuine agency are more likely to be engaged, more likely to attend and more likely to build the dispositions that endure beyond school.
A persistent gap exists between aspiration and capacity. Leaders want to respond to what students name as important, but funding, staffing and compliance demands limit what is possible. This is a systems design problem requiring action at the system level. Students and school leaders alike pointed to the same priorities for stronger relationships, more flexible learning structures, meaningful pathways, and schools that treat young people as active partners rather than passive recipients.
Agency for students depends, in the first instance, on agency for teachers. A teacher working under sustained overload, without adequate support or meaningful input into decisions shaping their practice, is not well placed to create those conditions for the young people in front of them. The evidence is now unambiguous. TALIS 2024, the AITSL Australian Teacher Workforce Data and the ACU Principal Health and Wellbeing Survey have reached the same conclusion through different methodologies. Three independent sources. The same picture. Australia is not adequately caring for the workforce that makes everything else possible.
Teachers need to be trusted as professionals. Policy designed without genuine practitioner input and handed down for implementation is corrosive to the profession. Policy designed with teachers and school leaders, rather than for them, produces better outcomes. This is not a claim about sentiment. It is a design principle.
Principals are simultaneously the recipients of system policy and the people responsible for translating it into the life of a school community, carrying the expectations of students, families, staff, systems and governments, often without the authority and resources to meet all of them. Leader agency should not be contingent on individual bravery. Systems must value the expertise of leaders to act in the interest of students in the local context, and activate networks that support, sustain and protect colleagues to do what is good, not merely what is easy.
This means genuine involvement in policy design from the beginning, not advisory groups that receive decisions for endorsement. The growing burden of compliance, risk management and administrative load reduces the time available for teaching and learning. Deteriorating working conditions cannot become the accepted norm. Naming them is necessary. Acting on them is urgent.
The proposed National Teaching and Learning Commission, the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement and the review of the Australian Professional Standard for Principals are all live sites of decision-making right now. The profession has a clear stake in each. The National Principals’ Reference Group has a seat at the working group developing the Commission’s design. That is real. It matters. And it needs to be the beginning of something more sustained, not an exception. Equity reform takes 10 to 20 years, not a three-year election cycle. Bipartisan commitment, and structures that make practitioner voice a condition of policy quality rather than an optional feature, are what the system needs.
Agency for students means the right to be active partners in their own learning, not passive recipients of a system designed around them. Agency for teachers means the professional trust and working conditions that allow them to do the work they trained to do. Agency for school leaders means the structural presence and practical authority to shape the decisions that determine what is possible in their schools.
These are not separate agendas. They are the same agenda at different levels of the system. Progress at any one level depends on progress at all three. ASPA will carry this conviction into its advocacy work, and into its representation at every national forum where these questions are being decided. The profession has something essential to contribute.
