Portfolio — 10 April 2026

The Minister for Education, Mr Clare, released the first annual report card on the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement one year after all states and territories signed the accord [TA-260325-educat-7c505dcc4105]. The agreement represents the largest new Australian Government investment in public education, committing an additional $16.5 billion to public schools over the next decade and $50 billion in the decade that follows [TA-260325-educat-7c505dcc4105].

The funding is conditional on practical reforms — evidence-based teaching, phonics and numeracy checks, small group tutoring for struggling students, and measures addressing teacher recruitment and student health and wellbeing — rather than being provided as unconditional transfer.

The report card documents early reversals in three deteriorating trend lines. Senior high school completion rates had fallen from 84.8 per cent in 2017 to a low of 79.1 per cent in 2023 and have now begun recovering. School attendance rates, which dropped from 92.7 per cent in 2014 to 86.5 per cent in 2022, have also started to turn around.

Teacher recruitment — perhaps the most structurally significant indicator given the pipeline lag — has responded to policy attention: teaching degree enrolments fell 22 per cent between 2017 and 2023, but preliminary data now show a 6.3 per cent increase in domestic undergraduate university offers for teaching this year.

Mr Clare framed the data as early progress on a government priority while explicitly cautioning that substantially more work remains to embed the agreement's reforms and deliver sustained improvement across all metrics. The ministerial messaging is calibrated to claim momentum without overclaiming: the report card is positioned as a transparency instrument that will recur annually, making the improvement trajectory a standing accountability test for the agreement over its full ten-year arc.