Author Helen Adam explores how the recently announced Australian Teaching and Learning Commission’s design will determine who will succeed, and who will not.
The Australian Teaching and Learning Commission represents Australia’s most significant opportunity in a generation to reshape literacy education. By bringing together ACARA, AITSL, AERO and Education Services Australia, alongside teacher standards reviews and national lesson plan banks, the commission could fundamentally transform teaching. But will this integration embed equity throughout, or entrench approaches that have left particular groups of children behind for decades?
Despite sustained focus on explicit instruction, deeply troubling patterns persist in Indigenous student outcomes. Research reveals Indigenous students experience disproportionately higher suspension and exclusion rates, with increases driven primarily during primary years. Meanwhile, studies examining gifted and talented programmes consistently find Indigenous students and those from Culturally and Racially Minoritised (CARM) backgrounds significantly underrepresented.
This creates a devastating double pattern: Indigenous and CARM children overrepresented in intervention and special education, while simultaneously underrepresented in programmes for high-achieving students. When the same groups consistently fall into these categories, we must ask whether the problem lies with children or with systems that fail to recognise diverse strengths, knowledge systems and ways of demonstrating capability.
What lesson plan banks might entrench
Lesson plan banks could support teachers – particularly early career educators. However, without deliberate design, these risk entrenching monocultural and linguistic assumptions that contribute to current inequities.
Consider which texts feature in ‘model’ lesson plans. Less than one per cent of books in many Australian classrooms authentically represent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. When lesson plans direct teachers towards particular texts as exemplars, whose stories get centred? Classic texts may offer literary merit, but many contain problematic representations requiring sophisticated critical literacy approaches.
Lesson plans developed for monolingual contexts can assume particular home resources, cultural knowledge and family structures – recommending activities that presume book access, English-speaking support and middle-class practices while marginalising rich literacy practices like oral storytelling, multilingual homes and cultural knowledge transmission.
Teachers possess critical expertise in adapting resources, but this requires time and recognition as core professional work. If lesson plans become standardised scripts prioritising fidelity over responsive adaptation, we deskill teachers while entrenching the cultural biases underpinning persistent inequities.
Teacher standards: the critical integration point
The teacher standards review presents perhaps the most structurally significant opportunity for systemic change. The recent AITSL addendum includes cultural responsiveness as required core content for ITE programmes – a significant step forward. However, it’s positioned as the fourth and final content area, after ‘The Brain and Learning’, ‘Effective Pedagogical Practices’ and ‘Classroom Management’. This sequencing risks positioning culturally responsive practice as something teachers add after mastering supposedly universal teaching techniques, rather than recognising it must be integrated throughout how we teach, plan lessons, manage classrooms and assess learning.
The commission provides a critical opportunity to ensure that when teacher standards are reviewed, culturally responsive practice becomes embedded throughout all professional capabilities. Teaching and planning standards could require building upon students’ cultural and linguistic assets. Assessment standards could value multiple culturally valid methods beyond standardised measures. Classroom management standards could require understanding how cultural backgrounds shape engagement rather than defaulting to deficit interpretations.
Such integration would fundamentally reshape both initial teacher education and ongoing professional learning. Rather than treating cultural responsiveness as supplementary content addressed after technical competence is established, ITE programmes would embed these capabilities throughout coursework on pedagogy, assessment and classroom practice. Professional learning would similarly support ongoing development as student populations change and teachers deepen cultural competence, coordinated through aligned standards, resources and research that demonstrates effective approaches.
What must be coordinated
The commission’s purpose is coordination between curriculum, teaching, assessment and research. But coordination towards what ends? If these elements align solely to explicit instruction measured through standardised assessments and delivered through prescribed lesson plans, we risk only perpetuating existing problems.
Meaningful coordination must recognise that evidence-based instruction works within broader contexts. High quality phonics, word and text level instruction, comprehension and writing instruction matter enormously and are robustly supported by research. But instruction cannot compensate for structural inequities: inadequate book access, texts that fail to mirror students’ identities, or the reality that children from well-resourced schools often receive more reading time and choice while disadvantaged peers often spend more time on isolated skills with limited actual reading.
Assessment that recognises capability
Assessment frameworks must value diverse ways of demonstrating learning, recognising that capability manifests differently across cultural contexts. When giftedness is defined solely through culturally loaded measures, we systematically fail to identify capability. Recent experimental evidence reveals the scale of this bias: culturally contextualising NAPLAN tests while maintaining identical difficulty improves scores by 0.24-0.30 standard deviations – the difference between meeting and exceeding national standards (Dobrescu et al., 2022). The issue is inbuilt cultural bias: questions requiring cultural knowledge unrelated to ability, resulting in scores reflecting test design rather than capability. Importantly, this study found that recognition and relevance scores increased significantly in contextualised tests – students reported seeing themselves and their communities in the assessment materials, a fundamental shift from feeling culturally invisible to culturally centred.
The evidence question
Randomised controlled trials have established foundational principles of effective reading instruction. But how evidence is defined within the commission structure will profoundly shape all other decisions. If evidence remains solely interpreted through RCTs whilst marginalising qualitative research, Indigenous methodologies and community knowledge systems, we predetermine which questions get asked, which solutions get funded and which practices get endorsed.
Quality research includes rigorous quantitative studies, Indigenous research methodologies centring cultural protocols, qualitative studies examining cultural contexts, and practitioner inquiry valuing teachers’ professional wisdom. The commission’s research function must value diverse evidence traditions that together provide a richer, more complete understanding of how children learn and what teaching approaches support diverse learners.
The present moment
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has made clear commitments to tackling inequity. The Better and Fairer Schools Agreement includes explicit equity targets. The Mparntwe Education Declaration commits to ensuring all young Australians achieve their potential regardless of background. The Teaching and Learning Commission provides structural architecture to operationalise these commitments – or to relegate them to aspirational statements while coordination prioritises standalone technical approaches that have demonstrably failed to close gaps.
We have the policy window, political commitment, and robust research showing what can be achieved through integrating quality instruction, equitable opportunity and authentic representation through culturally responsive practice. The question remains, will seize this once-in-a-generation opportunity or entrench the approaches that have produced the same disappointing results for the same children for decades.
About the author
Helen Adam is an Associate Professor at Edith Cowan University, President of the Primary English Teaching Association of Australia (PETAA), Churchill Fellow 2022, member of the First Nations Expert Reference Group for AERO and member of the Early Childhood Professorial Advocacy Council (ECPAC). She is the author of Creating Equitable Literacy Learning Environments: A Transformative Model published by Routledge, which examines how explicit literacy instruction can be implemented equitably across diverse contexts.
