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This paper outlines the development of a new Indigenous research methodology: Indigenous Literature Re-view Methodology (ILRM). In the rejection of the idea that Western, dominant forms of research 'about' Indigenous peoples are most valid, ILRM was developed with aims to research in ways that give greater emphasis to Indigenous voices and knowledges, foregrounding Indigenous ways of being, doing and knowing. The advantages of ILRM include identifying themes as 'relevant' as opposed to 'common'. This method is based on relatedness, which is framed by Aboriginal ontology, axiology and epistemology, or ways of being, ways of doing and ways of knowing. Describing and employing ILRM to re-view Indigenous Australian boarding school literature, it was found there is a modest but robust body of research that has emerged in the past 20 years. Sixty-six written sources (i.e. journal articles, reports, theses and books) which were published in 2000 onwards and focussed on a topic of contemporary Indigenous boarding schooling were analysed. Sources that included a chapter or section on boarding as part of a publication focussed on other topics were not included in this re-view. Seven major themes emerged, including home, student experience, transitions, access, staff, health and evaluation. This paper focusses on the development and use of ILRM as an Indigenous methodology for researchers in Indigenous fields of study.

School-based research centres are growing in number and have potential to amplify school students' voices in research through activities within the school. This paper explores how one research centre in an independent school in Australia, in a financially and socially privileged context, is using tertiary-type structures (namely, an ethics committee, research journal and conference) to engage students in research activities and give them voice about research in their school. Writing as centre director and practitioner researcher in the school, I explore these activities which position research as a skill with potential to further students' academic capital, as well as their ability to challenge their understanding of privilege in the world. A core motivation for this paper is consideration of the transposition of structures designed for adults into the school context and exploring how students engage with these structures in order to have a voice as researchers and in research.

Play, which is both a context and process for children's learning, has become a pivotal pedagogical component in global early childhood education. The uptake of intentional teaching has contributed to the shift in understandings of play, from viewing play as a means of recreation and entertainment to a more socio-cultural perspective that advocates for educators' proactive and engaged roles in play. The recent update of the Early Years Learning Framework (2023) in Australia has included an emphasis on intentionality in play-based learning. However, there is little academic work on intentionality, and recent studies demonstrate educators' struggles in conceptualising their roles as intentional teachers. Drawing on the findings of a literature review, this discussion paper aims to conceptualise intentional teaching from two aspects: intentionality and decision-making. This paper argues that while educator and child intentionality are the starting point of intentional actions, the decision-making process enables educators to have ongoing intentionality behind their teaching practices. It concludes by advocating for a broader understanding of intentional teaching that focusses on the underlying thought processes behind educators' decisions and actions.

Research on violence in schools has been dominated by 'bullying' discourse and methodologies that place individualised pathos at the centre of problematic behaviours. This focus has resulted in the neglect of broader structures of power such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class in the violence enacted and encountered by young people. As a result, institutional solutions to school violence have often failed to acknowledge and respond to the ways that gender and sexuality might operate in the lives of young people, instead offering simplistic strategies to reduce ubiquitous forms of 'bullying'. Simultaneously, political discourses and research challenges further prohibit young people from contributing to targeted and critical interventions into the socio-cultural practices of gender- and sexuality-making in schools. As outsiders to these nuanced, complex, and dynamic spaces, university-based researchers often lack vocabulary and literacy, especially in relation to always-shifting meanings around gender and sexuality. In this paper, I argue for the need to actively include young people in research praxis to co-investigate school cultures of gender and sexuality using a Community-Led Research (CLR) approach. Reporting on work with ten student co-researchers that formed two groups in two schools in Australia, the paper details some of the ways that they impacted and benefitted the early phases of a three-year project, including through impacting methods, participant engagement, data analysis and the implementation of new strategies to improve school cultures of gender and sexuality. This article also illustrates some of the challenges and opportunities that CLR methodologies produce when working in less structured settings, including ethical and social challenges that emerge in iterative research praxis. Findings argue for the rights of young people to exert their hopes for their school cultures that relate to gender and sexuality, particularly through research-based empowerment. While often slower and more difficult, co-researching with young people can produce opportunities for transformation and change not only of research processes, but also of researchers and their communities.

In Australia coeducation dominates government schooling, with single-sex institutions usually being the preserve of selective government schools and private, often elite, institutions. For marginalised young people who 'drop out' or are forced to leave the coeducational mainstream system, flexible and/or non-traditional schools provide alternative pathways. Such schools are primarily coeducational. This paper draws upon data from two flexible/non-traditional schools in Australia that attempted to address the issues of educational disengagement via the provision of single-sex schooling: Fernvale Education Centre and Lorem School. The data are insightful with regard to these two very different gender and education paradigms and to their associated discourses about masculinity and femininity. The paper will identify the ways in which these schools both reproduce and challenge dominant constructions of gender within the context of responding to disenfranchised/disengaged young people.

This study uses ethnic capital theory to explore access to secondary mathematics education among linguistically diverse (LD) migrants in metropolitan and regional New South Wales, Australia. Administrative data from over 50,000 students who completed their Higher School Certificate in 2017 were analysed using multilevel logit regressions and marginal effects. The results indicate that, in Greater Sydney, all linguistically diverse first-generation youth took mathematics courses at higher rates than their peers. So did second-generation migrants from Asian backgrounds. Furthermore, considerably larger proportions of students who spoke East Asian, Indo-Aryan, or Arabic languages studied advanced mathematics. Even when only parents spoke these languages at home, their Australian-born children took advanced mathematics more often. Yet, these second-generation students were less overrepresented than those fluent in parental languages. The paper discusses the potential consequences of LD migrant concentration in Greater Sydney, stressing the importance of equitable mathematics education in metropolitan and regional areas.

The school-to-work transition is widely acknowledged as difficult, requiring meaningful support for young people to navigate successfully. This paper examines the reported experiences of six families navigating 23 home educated young people's transition from compulsory education to tertiary education and work. Data from semi-structured interviews with the parents were thematically analysed using Bourdieu's "habitus, capital," and "field." Findings indicate that the parents provided ample opportunity for self-exploration to encourage autonomy coupled with opportunity to explore and participate in the wider community, leading to a successful transition experience. The findings suggest that a contrasting, alternative career preparation method can be successful; one that values autonomy over the traditional approach which involves a scaffolded set of knowledge and skills. This study indicates that the transition can be successfully facilitated by providing young people with opportunity for autonomous self and career exploration in the community, without the standardised assistance provided through schools.

In Australia, the Teaching Performance Assessment (TPA) is a relatively new, mandatory hurdle which must be completed just prior to the graduation stage of initial teacher education (ITE) programmes. This high-stakes task is one of a growing number of requirements to come out of the standards and accountability regime as outlined in the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) document for accreditation for ITE programmes. We delve into the public commentary about the broader commission of preservice and graduate teacher quality in general and the TPA in particular. We draw on Bernstein's pedagogic identities and deductively apply this theory to explore this phenomenon. We use a data set of publicly available legacy media and social media tweets made over a ten-month period from August 2019 to May 2020 to reveal the focus, inherent bias and pedagogic identities promoted by these public discourses. The paper concludes with discussion about the implications of these drivers on the public perception of quality in ITE and on the status of teaching more broadly.

In this paper, I examine the tensions that a school principal experienced in reconciling performative priorities with equitable practices in a government secondary school in a low Socio-Economic Status suburb in Victoria, Australia. I use the notion of paradox to explore how the principal navigated contradictions and tensions. I aim to provide a more nuanced understanding of sense-making processes, agency, and capacity for action in the face of resource constraints, competing priorities and conflicting options in educational spaces. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's notions of 'striated spaces' and 'lines of flight', I discuss how the principal worked simultaneously within and against inadequate resourcing and performativity pressures to cater for the more complex needs of a group of marginalised students in his school. I highlight the tensions that arose from this work. These tensions remained mostly unresolved, setting in motion an ongoing cycle of compliance, compromise, contradictions, and contestation. The findings show the complex interactions between material realities, punitive modes of accountability, self-discipline, and subjectivity. I conclude by discussing the need for an equity-informed policy agenda driven by a positive mode of accountability to enable equitable practices in school leadership and management.

While research into PhD programs and doctoral students' experiences has increased in recent years, fieldwork is overlooked as a source of learning and support. In education, the focus of this paper, fieldwork remains laced with notions of the anthropologist gathering data in a place that is not their own, which narrowly construct the role of the novice and their expectations around 'doing' research. To demonstrate the relevance of these issues and key ethical tensions that they underpin, we explored our recent PhD fieldwork experiences within classrooms in Australian and Zimbabwean schools. By analysing fieldnotes from our lived experiences, we identified similarities between conducting fieldwork 'out there' (in Zimbabwe) and 'at home' (in Australia). These similarities highlighted a multitude of roles and dynamics associated with the researcher presence, as well as the importance of balancing complex needs during fieldwork. Our analyses also revealed how daily in situ interactions with participants--and others--were crucial to the development of our identities and data gathering practices. We argue that ongoing efforts to demystify fieldwork experiences are critical for understanding that 'the field' is not simply 'out there' and offer practical suggestions for current and future doctoral students to consider.

Children's books play a central role in today's classrooms. Educators can use children's literature to promote children's social and cultural understandings and critical thinking skills. This is particularly important when extending children's knowledge and understandings of themselves, their identity and those who may differ culturally, socially or historically, thus supporting diversity and inclusion. Further, when diversity is considered, valued, and supported through Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP), outcomes for children from underrepresented backgrounds improve. This paper reports on a study conducted in four early learning settings in Western Australia investigating educators' practices when sharing diverse literature with young children. This study found in the majority of book sharing in these centres the cultures, backgrounds, life experiences and funds of knowledge of children from underrepresented backgrounds were invisible. Further, educators' practices were bereft of CRP and likely to demean and confuse those from underrepresented backgrounds and increase all children's misconceptions of others.

A multitude of educational programs attempt to facilitate young people's engagement with ideas and practices of active citizenship. For young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander or Indigenous people in Australia, such interventions are often subject to complex experiences of senses of belonging and non-belonging. This paper responds to calls from researchers to develop better understandings of young Indigenous people's own senses and practices of belonging and to better understand the ways in which these perspectives and practices are spatially influenced at the level of local communities, 'country' and cultural groupings, and within larger state, national or transnational settings. Their testimonies illustrate the tensions that young Indigenous people must navigate in a settler colony that has never truly recognised Indigenous sovereignty but show that sovereignty remains intact. Focus groups were conducted with 58 young Indigenous people in Melbourne and regional Victoria who were participating in an Indigenous youth leadership program designed to foster formal and informal active citizenship practices, and to nurture a strong, affirming sense of Indigenous identity. The testimonies of these participants provide valuable insights into educational sites as spaces in which young people experience a spectrum of weak to strong senses of belonging. They also provide insights into the possibilities of engaging the challenges faced by many young Indigenous people in educational settings, challenges that include race discordance and exclusion, deficit discourses and gaps and distances in educational practice. They highlight the need to recognise the aspirations of young Indigenous people and the capacities of colonial education systems to meet them, and the imperative to celebrate young Indigenous identities in meaningful, non-tokenistic ways.

This paper presents a critical exploration of a reported decline in student achievement in Australia (2000-2020). Declining student achievement is framed as symptomatic of broader dysfunction within the education system. The context of declining student achievement is articulated through a Bourdieusian being critical sociology of education. This is achieved using the concepts of illusion and educationalisation as they intersect with Australian schools, in which classroom teachers are given responsibility for solving social and economic ills. As such, due consideration of the goals and commitments to action in the Melbourne Declaration (Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA, 2008), and the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration (Education Council, 2019) is provided. Drawing from these formative documents, the 'stakes' that matter are examined highlighting the potential misalignment between equality of opportunity in ameliorating educational disadvantage and the priorities of modern educational discourse.

Teachers are crucial to bridging the theory-praxis divide in science education by utilising evidence-based teaching practices to improve outcomes for their learners. However, the perspectives of primary teachers have seldom been considered beyond the confines of specific professional development programs. This paper aims to explore Australian primary teachers' beliefs about how primary science education could be improved. A sample of 165 primary educators responded to an open-ended digital survey prompt. The results showed that teachers viewed themselves and their colleagues as central to the improvement of primary science education as evidenced by the most prominent themes of Professional Development (47.27%), Funding-Resources (37.58%), Classroom Practice (21.82%) and Personal-Teacher Improvement (21.21%). Curiously, university did not feature strongly, suggesting the participants may hold neutral views regarding the impact of universities on primary science education. The findings should serve as a catalyst for future research and engagement with primary teachers. Universities could expand their roles in building relationships with and providing accessible professional development to a group of primary teachers who, quite rightly, view themselves as key to improving primary science education.

Scholars in critical masculinities studies argue that we need men involved and engaged in gender equity movements for gender justice to be realised. Yet we need to know more about how different groups of men are understanding gender equity and what the barriers might be. Amidst significant media interest in elite private boys' schooling and its possible (re)production of sexist cultures, this paper explores how 13 men who attended such schools in Australia between the 1970s and the 2000s understand gender justice, revealing a diversity of positions and practices across the different generational groups. We argue the men's engagements with gender justice are shaped by a broad 'curriculum of privilege' including school and non-school based experiences that mediates their lives. Further research with both elite boys' schools and their alumni is needed to better understand generational change in their engagements with gender justice.

This paper explores young people's understandings of gender and investigates their gender-based experiences in high schools in Australia. The discussion is based on qualitative research including focus groups and interviews with 47 recent high school leavers from diverse linguistic, socioeconomic, religious, ethnic, gender and sexuality backgrounds, who attended a broad range of high school types in New South Wales (NSW). We found that young people are critically engaging in gender issues and are often challenging binary gender and associated inequitable practices in schools and beyond. They are taking a leading role in educating adults about gender--that is, they are 'teaching up', as young people conceptualised it, to their families and teachers about gender, gender-related issues and doing gender differently in contemporary times. Their views on gender are often in contrast to those institutional views that currently prevail in NSW schools, which often still reflect stereotypes that perpetuate gender inequalities.

Although gender expansive views are increasingly evident amongst young people, segregation according to binary notions of gender underpins the organisational structures of single-sex secondary schools. While claims of educational benefits are common, particularly for girls, gender is difficult to disentangle from socioeconomic advantage and other factors. Evidence suggests that such schools contribute to homogenised and limiting notions of gender. While some schools are moving towards desegregation in response to parental demand, little is known from the perspectives of young people in non-elite schools who have experienced segregated schooling. This paper turns to the accounts of 14 recent school leavers in NSW to consider the underpinning logics of segregated schooling, including the imbrication and erasure of socioeconomic dis/advantage, cultural, social, and locational factors that complicate claims about segregated schooling. Affective intensities of single-sex schooling are traced through micronarratives that touch on relations with peers, teachers, school spaces and practices, learning experiences, and their implications for gendered subjectivities and gender justice. Their accounts suggest that student experiences of segregated schooling are ambivalent and do not support claims of educational advantage and that configurations of single-sex schooling may be anachronistic for these times.

School uniforms are proliferating as a staple in figurations created of successful students around the world. In Australia the uniform as compulsory formal school wear is a growing phenomenon in both public and private education sectors. School uniforms have often been adopted as unproblematic, by schools, parents, policymakers, and students themselves. It remains unclear from the previous limited and often contradictory research, precisely how uniforms materially affect student academic and social outcomes. Research that considers how students themselves not just perceive but "feel" about their uniforms is scarce. I focus on the affective response of students to their school uniforms at one government co-educational selective science high school. A PhEmaterialist approach deprivileges human agency, accounting for matter as dynamic, affective and of consequence in activities, performances, and events. The school uniform as matter is explored as a dynamic and powerful affective force in education and is situated as an integral part of a school's iteration of binary gender differentiations. Uniforms matter twofold, as a conception that materializes what matters and the differential affect on the bodies that wear them. Bodies respond affectively to the uniform with a sense of comfort or discomfort, consciously and unconsciously. Bodies that do not fit easily with the required uniform hurt as students undergo everyday activities at school. This paper considers the affect of the uniform, with a filmic response from one high achieving 'smart' girl through a fine-grain analysis of her feelings of belonging and dis/comfort "with" and through her school uniform.

Legal attendance requirements and national declarations establish a social contract between the State and its citizens for the provision of schooling. Any shortage of teachers compromises the ability of the State to meet its contractable obligations. The sovereignty of the social contract is complex as no single body has ultimate responsibility for housing the teaching workforce, but everyone has a stake in it. Empirically focused on the largest school system in the southern hemisphere, the New South Wales public education system (Australia), this paper demonstrates that 90.8% of teaching positions, over 50,000 full-time equivalent posts, are in Local Government Areas where the median rent and house sales price are severely unaffordable on a top-of-the-scale teacher salary. With the system requiring additional teachers to meet increasing enrolments, and housing costs outstripping salaries, many schools not traditionally considered difficult to staff are becoming, if not already, inaccessible for teachers.

Access to higher education remains elusive for many young people despite substantial investment in outreach interventions, most of which target students in underrepresented equity groups. This paper explores an alternative approach to widening participation in Australia that focuses on teacher professional development to support student aspirations. We examine school teachers' responses to a course designed to develop their conceptual understanding of aspirations and provide a framework for developing aspirations-related initiatives with their students and colleagues. The course pilot was evaluated drawing on surveys (N = 49) and interviews (N = 21). Teachers reported that they gained the following: (1) access to robust evidence of factors affecting aspirations; (2) relevant theoretical perspectives to conceptualise aspirations in new ways; and (3) insights on practical strategies with which they might nurture student pathways to higher education. To support widening participation in higher education, we argue that the scope of current outreach initiatives offered by universities must broaden to capitalise on the untapped potential of teachers.

Global pressure on universities to compete for research rankings has escalated research expectations and intensified a performativity culture for early career researchers (ECRs). However, there are limited examples in the literature of ECRs advocating for their career and research trajectories. In response to this issue, ECRs in one Australian regional university initiated the Teacher Education ECR Action and Advocacy Group (TEECRAA). This research, reported in this paper, aimed to understand how TEECRAA contributed to the career and research trajectories of these ECRs and their advocacy regarding ECR-specific policy in their higher education context. Framed by tenets of policy network theory and policy communities, this study draws on documents developed by the TEECRAA group using content and thematic analysis to investigate their activities and experiences. Findings highlighted that ECRs were able to set research and career goals, prioritise opportunities for professional learning, create resources to support their research profiles, and develop a network of support. ECRs also increased their contributions to policy and practice by engaging in strategic action that promotes ECR visibility and advocates for their needs. This contribution, however, requires the development of a network-like interaction between ECRs and university leaders with a commitment from the university to work in partnership with ECRs for mutual benefit.

This paper examines the openings for educational change enabled by framing inequality through the concept of rights, considering how variations of this framing have emerged historically and in current debates. Taking as our starting point the 1970 publication Rights and Inequality in Australian Education, we suggest that it is important to pay attention to the ways in which rights gain force within social action and through demands made by differently constituted publics. In the 1960s and 1970s, a right to educational equality garnered greater recognition, prompting moves towards needs-based funding and curriculum diversification, led by the Commonwealth Schools Commission. These moves were responsive to social movements that helped to shape new publics. In a second and more politically conservative moment, rights and inequality were increasingly separated in policies influenced by neoliberalism. We argue that the strategies currently adopted by Indigenous scholar-activists are promoting a return to a rights-based perspective, which is distinctive in casting inequality as ontological and epistemic violence.

In this paper, we examine engagement with 'the rural context' in Australian education research, focussing on the implications of the signifier 'rural'--in terms of its inclusion or absence. A review of Australian research literature in rural education indicates that the term 'rural' and its synonyms are more often used to denote assumptions of a generalised and predetermined 'context' for research than to think about its meaning. We present our findings here and discuss the implications of the signifier 'rural' in the Australian research literature to argue that while educational policy-makers must attempt to think differently about the 'problem of the rural', the field itself also needs to more fully develop the capacity to do this.

Developing students' reading and numeracy skills remain key goals of contemporary schooling. In Australia, the National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests have assessed these skills since 2008. Previous research found a significant gender gap in favour of females for the NAPLAN writing test, yet no study has examined whether gender gaps exist for reading and numeracy or their developmental pattern across the school years. Given the educational and public interest in NAPLAN and its considerable costs, it is important to understand what these tests reveal about student outcomes. The paper presents the first investigation of patterns of male and female student achievement on the NAPLAN reading and numeracy tests from 2008 to 2021. It applies the equivalent year level technique to explain the pedagogical significance of NAPLAN achievement and compares the findings with the writing gender gap to present a fuller picture of male and female achievement.

This paper examines the psychometric properties of an existing school-based Parent Opinion Survey (POS) in order to investigate its validity as a measure of parent sentiments which may (eventually) be used to better inform the decision making of school leaders. The study focusses on the POS administered by all Victorian public schools at the time of this study, and uses Rasch analysis to identify a subset of items which form a psychometrically robust, unidimensional measure of parent sentiment. We propose that 13 items identified through this analysis could lay the foundation for providing policy makers who currently manage the distribution and collation of this survey, as well as school leaders, with a more reliable and valid overarching POS Scale score. Such an approach could better inform and support the home-school partnership that forms a crucial part of the Victorian Framework for Improving Student Outcomes (FISO) school improvement continuum.

As the university student body becomes more diversified and students' lives less linear, student retention carries increased importance for universities, including the conversion of deferrers and the re-enrolment of leave-taking students. This paper is based on a broader research project which explored national patterns of deferral and leave of absence in Australia and the policies and strategies for re-engaging the students who defer or take leave. Through a mixed research design, the study explores the extent to which students are positioned at the centre of deferral and leave of absence policy, informed by relationship marketing concepts. This study suggests that many universities have moved towards greater consideration of student perspectives and individualised approaches to building a trustworthy and supportive relationship with deferral and leave-taking students, based on data analytics of individual students' information and circumstances. Despite such efforts, there remain both limitations and tensions within these approaches.

Acknowledging Australian Indigenous cultural diversity involves respecting local Indigenous knowledge and perspectives. This can be difficult for teachers who do not know about Indigenous people and their knowledge. The Differentiated Indigenous Pedagogies project evaluated digitally available information describing Indigenous in this paper, 'Indigenous' will be used when referring to First Nations and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, pedagogies, policies, and institutional contexts in Australia apart from references used which use other terminology. The authors acknowledge the contested nature of terminology and use the term 'Indigenous' as it is consistent with the title of the research project on which this article is based pedagogies in the Northern Territory. The purpose was to consolidate findings to increase positive intercultural actions in the wider education community. An important aspect of the project is addressing gaps in western, non-Indigenous teacher knowledge pertinent to the diversity within Indigenous language groups and regions. Through searching for available Indigenous pedagogies as a teacher might, we found information differs in description and levels of relationality. Pedagogies are presented in numerous ways which complicates teachers' cultural understandings. Common themes from search results and Indigenist educational research are used to define ways teachers can actively engage in more respectful, relational, and reconciliatory ways to develop a differentiated approach for themselves to use when working with Indigenous pedagogies.

This paper reports on a study that explored the user-driven inter-organisational professional learning that teachers from two education systems collectively engaged in via social media. A dedicated Facebook group was established to enable Australian early childhood teachers (sector one) and primary school teachers (sector two) to engage in collaborations that would support children's transition to school. Using an Activity Theory framework, findings showed that the site was mainly used by early childhood teachers to seek peer support in meeting reporting requirements, and that school teachers rarely posted. As such, the capacity of the Facebook group to support inter-organisational cross-sector collaboration and learning was challenged as determined by the most active participants within the site, while reinforcing the group's capacity to support 'just in time' intra-organisational professional learning. This highlights a need for further research to explore the ways and means by which social media may best facilitate cross-sector collaboration between education systems, such as a more focussed and integrated use of social media during face-to-face cross-sector professional learning.

Increasing the numbers of Indigenous people enrolled in research higher degrees in Australia is important for building the Indigenous academic workforce, broadening the scope of knowledge production in academic institutions and ensuring effective research outcomes for Indigenous Australians. While the numbers of Indigenous research higher degree students are increasing, universities still have a lot to do to bring that number up to parity. In this paper, we explore the value of a pre-doctoral program developed for Indigenous people interested in doing a PhD that provides them the information they need to inform their choices about undertaking a doctoral project. As the only program of this kind in Australia, this research contributes to the emerging literature on the factors that have an influence on why Indigenous people choose to undertake PhD programs and the effectiveness of initiatives to support their pathway to higher degree research. The research outcomes build on the evidence base for improving initiatives across the university sector, highlighting the need for tailored, Indigenous-led pre-doctoral support programs for Indigenous students, the value of cohort experiences and the importance of universities that value Indigenous people and their knowledge systems.

By the end of 2021, more than 168 million students across the globe had missed a year of face-to-face schooling due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In NSW, Australia, most students engaged in learning from home for eight weeks during 2020 and a further 14 weeks during 2021. This study provides robust empirical evidence on how two years of disruptions to schooling affected student learning. Drawing on matched data for 3,827 Year 3 and 4 students from 101 NSW government schools, this paper compares student achievement growth in mathematics and reading for 2019 (pre-pandemic) and 2021 (second year of the pandemic) student cohorts. While overall there was no significant difference between cohorts, when analysed by socio-educational advantage, we were surprised to find that students in the lowest band achieved approximately three months' additional growth in mathematics. Arguably, grave concerns about the potentially dire impact of COVID-19 on the learning of disadvantaged students were met by investments that made a difference. We argue that targeted funding and system-wide initiatives to support more equitable outcomes should remain a priority after the pandemic if Australia is to meet its aspirations for excellence and equity.

Menstrual management is recognized as a critical issue for young people internationally. Relatively little published research explores issues pertaining to menstruation in school education. This paper is based on the results of an Australian survey of 5007 young women aged 13-25, which examined their experiences of menstruation and dysmenorrhea. It focuses specifically on participant qualitative responses to the question, "What do you think schools could do to better support girls during their period?" Six key themes were identified across responses. These related to sanitation; pain management; removing stigma; adequate breaks; and being considerate. The findings reported herein highlight some of the challenges menstruating young people encounter at school and give voice to their needs; these have important implications for school improvement in this area.

Driven by the focus on standardised assessment and performance-driven accountability, a considerable body of literature has documented differences in students' academic achievement across school sectors, both internationally and in Australia. However, few studies have to date explored the potential mechanisms underlying such differences, particularly through the lens of school climate and student engagement. And despite extensive literature on school climate and student engagement, including their relationships with achievement, the differences in these patterns across school sectors remain under-studied. In this paper, we leverage nationally representative data from a large-scale longitudinal survey in Australia with linked administrative data on student achievement to reveal different patterns of school climate and student engagement across government, Catholic and independent sectors. Employing multivariable regression analyses, we identify unique school climate and student engagement facets that are associated with improved achievement in each of these sectors, offering important pointers for educational policies.