Five minutes with outgoing ACER boss Geoff Masters

Australian educators would likely be familiar with Geoff Masters’ byline. As the Chief Executive of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) for the past 26 years and a senior executive for another decade before that, he has been sharing his wealth of wisdom for many years.

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Established in 1930, ACER is the nation’s oldest and largest education research institute and aims to improve learning across the lifespan. With offices across the globe, ACER undertakes research and provides resources to the education sector to aid and enhance decision-making.

School News spoke with Professor Masters to find out some of the critical lessons he has learned during his time at ACER and what he’d like to see in the future.

Memorable projects and learning

“As the head of ACER, I have been in a position to lead and make personal contributions to the organisation’s mission… and contribute to the rethinking and reform of processes for assessing student learning,” explains Masters.

Independent from governments, ACER has been able to cross state lines. Some of Masters’ projects have included a major review of the school curriculum in New South Wales; developing a School Improvement Tool in collaboration with the Queensland Department of Education and devising a Principal Performance Improvement Tool with the West Australian Department.

However, one of Professor Masters’ most significant moments came in 2019, when he was invited by the US National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) to lead an international study. The project centred on five jurisdictions that performed at unusually high levels in global surveys of student achievement: British Columbia, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong, and South Korea.

“A key learning from this study was that these high-performing school systems have not sought to be more prescriptive about what and how teachers should teach. Instead, they have generally reconstructed their curricula to be less prescriptive and have given teachers more autonomy to design local curricula and to decide on teaching methods and resources.” Professor Geoff Masters

Masters explains that the study highlighted specific reforms these jurisdictions had implemented that likely contributed to their unusually high performances. These reforms included:

• changes to the school curriculum
• assessment/examination processes
• teacher preparation and development
• supports for students
• leadership practices,
• and collaborations with external organisations.

“These five jurisdictions have recognised the powerful influence that the ‘systems’ within which teachers and schools work have in shaping day-to-day teaching and learning. Most have given teachers and schools greater autonomy while working to transform their broader learning systems,” explained Masters.       

Current Challenges

The education sector – and the world at large – has seen many changes over the three decades Masters has been at ACER. He explains that there are two significant challenges school systems are currently grappling with: firstly, how to better prepare young people for the future and secondly, how to ensure that every student learns successfully and achieves their potential.

“All recognise that these two challenges are not being met as well as they could and should be,” says Masters. “Most school curricula continue to be dominated by facts and routines to be memorised and reproduced in tests and examinations and are not sufficiently focused on developing students’ deeper conceptual understandings and skills in critical and creative thinking, problem-solving, and collaborating.” But changes are being made, he points out. “Almost all school systems are adopting more holistic approaches to student learning and development, including   greater focus on students’ social and emotional learning.”

“At the same time, all school systems recognise that current ways of organising learning leave many students behind. Across the world, too many students are being taught what they are not yet ready to learn because they lack essential prerequisites, and too many other students are being taught what they already know and so are not being stretched and extended,” Masters adds.

“Because learning at school is so strongly time-based, schools often function as highly effective student sorting mechanisms. In response, many school systems are attempting to provide greater flexibility in when and where learning occurs.” Geoff Masters

Future Learnings

Professor Masters will be stepping down as ACER CEO at the end of August, but he is not leaving without strong hopes for the future.

“My work over the past three decades, including my study of school systems globally, has left me deeply concerned about the number of young people who do not learn successfully at school. Many fall further behind the longer they are in school as what they are taught becomes increasingly beyond their reach.”

“Many take from their experience of school the erroneous conclusion that they are naturally poor learners. As a result, many disengage, leading to increased levels of non-attendance and poor behaviour. And those who are most disadvantaged by how schooling is organised tend to be those already experiencing disadvantage.” Geoff Masters

Masters explains that a common response is to address symptoms of this problem—for example, to develop special programs for First Nations students or students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds or to work directly on poor student behaviour.

“It is less common to question how the organisation of schooling itself is contributing to this problem, including the fact that advancement from one curriculum to the next is based not on mastery but on elapsed time,” he argues. “Almost universally, students are required to move to the next year’s curriculum regardless of how well they have mastered the previous year’s curriculum or how well prepared they are for what they are about to be taught. This results in many students struggling, falling further behind, and eventually disengaging.”

“Questions that I would like to see addressed in the future are:

• How can learning systems be redesigned to give every student the time they require for success?
• How can systems be designed to better identify the points individuals have reached in their learning and to target teaching accordingly?
• How can every student be provided with appropriate stretch challenges to promote their further learning?
• How can learning success be redefined to recognise the progress a student makes, regardless of their starting point?
• How can a system that holds time constant and allows students’ attainments to vary be replaced by one that holds learning expectations constant and allows time to vary?

These are urgent educational questions that I intend to continue to pursue with schools and school systems globally. “

Professor Masters’ contributions to education have been widely recognised. He is the recipient of the Australian College of Educators’ Medal and has been appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO).