Our learning support and mentoring programs in 90 Australian communities directly help children in need achieve their goals through education.
View all programs Educational inequality: what the evidence tells us
Pre-pandemic we could already say that the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students was not narrowing at all. We were doing nothing to address that, and I think this is the problem.
Leading educational researcher, Dr Sue Thomson, reflects on educational inequality in Australia and what works to best assist children experiencing disadvantage who are struggling to succeed in their learning.
Dr Thomson is retiring from her role as Deputy CEO (Research) at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), where she has spent her career building the evidence base on what works to shift the dial on educational inequality caused by poverty and disadvantage. She is also a long-term sponsor of students on our flagship Learning for Life educational support program.
Of The Smith Family’s trial of in-home, online Catch-Up Learning tutoring she says; “I think that program has shown itself to be useful and I think the key to it is the attention, the one on one attention that's given to the students and the close learning opportunities. And I think that what we can learn from that is that that's what disadvantaged students in particular need and what they're not getting.”
“So, if there could be something we would learn from, that it would be that the interventions need to come early and that they need to be on a one-on-one basis.
