The Same Advice, Seven Different Answers: What Victoria Did Differently

Education has always been a contested space. Educational research rarely dictates a single course of action; more often, it establishes a range of defensible possibilities from which governments make choices. The current enthusiasm for explicit teaching is no exception. Every Australian jurisdiction has been exposed to substantially the same evidence base around explicit instruction, structured literacy and the science of learning (AERO 2024; Rosenshine 2012), yet the reforms emerging from that evidence look remarkably different.

What follows is a comparison of policy responses rather than classroom practice, and how governments have chosen to operationalise, encourage or prioritise the evidence. This is not only a matter of jurisdictions reading the same literature. AERO's 2025 annual report records that it worked directly with Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and the Northern Territory as each updated its pedagogical framework, providing what it describes as iterative feedback and targeted,evidence-based guidance (AERO 2026).

Across the states in policy documents:
Queensland has interpreted the evidence as strongest and clearest in reading, which is where it concentrated its efforts. The Reading Commitment mandates systematic synthetic phonics across every state school, backed by substantial investment and trialled across dozens of schools before statewide implementation (Department of Education, Queensland 2023; Queensland Government 2023). The evidence was taken seriously, but the scope of the policy response was narrow.

Queensland did not move directly from evidence to mandate, but trialled the reforms in a number of schools. The evidence from implementations was interpreted as sufficiently compelling to justify system-wide action in reading, choosing the scope of the state's education reform. Queensland illustrates not only the influence of evidence on policy, but the role of judgement in determining where the boundaries of that policy should sit. Innovation within the system is possible because variation is possible.

Tasmania took a specific and highly targeted interpretation of the evidence through its Lifting Literacy reforms, committing schools to structured literacy practices in response to persistent concerns about reading achievement (DECYP 2024). Like Queensland, the focus is on literacy rather than on redesigning teaching and learning as a whole. The policy rests on the argument that there is now sufficient evidence to justify greater consistency in how reading is taught.

The Northern Territory adopted a different perspective. Its Boosting Literacy and Numeracy Plan places explicit teaching at the centre of foundational reading and mathematics, linking instructional reform directly to some of the most significant achievement challenges in the country (Department of Education and Training, Northern Territory 2025). Rather than presenting explicit teaching as a philosophy for all learning, the plan positions it as a response to clearly identified needs in literacy and numeracy outcomes. In both cases, the reforms are substantial, but they remain anchored to particular educational outcomes rather than to the broader question of how all teaching should be organised.

South Australia operationalised the research differently. Before settling on a strategy, it undertook an extensive statewide consultation with students, educators, families, communities and external experts (Department for Education, South Australia 2023). The resulting Strategy for Public Education begins with a question of educational purpose. Learner agency, wellbeing, curiosity, creativity and metacognition are identified alongside achievement as outcomes worth pursuing, and explicit teaching is positioned within that broader conception of what public education is trying to achieve. The distinction is not only one of policy content but of process: a strategy built with diverse stakeholders rather than delivered to them.

Western Australia chose to implement a more standardised evaluation process rather than the instructional technique. Its Teaching for Impact framework asks teachers to draw on a range of evidence-based strategies, to determine which are most appropriate in particular contexts, and to evaluate their effects on engagement, wellbeing, progress and achievement (Department of Education, Western Australia n.d.). The framework assumes that evidence-informed practice requires both research and professional judgement, and that systems keep learning by examining the consequences of the choices they make.

New South Wales has framed and interpreted the evidence by embedding explicit teaching throughout professional learning, curriculum implementation and school improvement work. It has produced extensive guidance on what effective explicit instruction looks like in practice (NSW Department of Education 2024, 2025). Yet its policy language remains centred on adoption rather than retirement. NSW has embraced explicit teaching while continuing to support a broad range of disciplinary and curricular traditions.

This is visible in the recent renewal of Creative Arts syllabuses across Dance, Drama, Music and Visual Arts, which were developed through an explicitly evidence-informed process (NSW Education Standards Authority n.d.).

Victoria, by contrast, interpreted the evidence differently. It requires all government schools to fully embed the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model 2.0 by 2028 and states that implementation will, in some instances, involve "retiring approaches and practices that do not align with the VTLM 2.0" (Department of Education, Victoria 2026). This model places explicit teaching at its centre and alignment is measured against it - across every learning area, not only literacy. This is the point at which a reform can stop adding to a teacher's toolkit and start subtracting alternative approaches used contextually across schools, the same variation that let Queensland’s own reform exist as a trial before it became policy. AERO's own reporting lists VTLM 2.0 alongside the NSW statement on explicit teaching, Tasmania's pedagogical framework and the Northern Territory's model as jurisdictional adoptions of its model of learning and teaching (AERO 2026). The same advice, in other words, produced four different instruments - with Victoria foreshadowing retirement.

Some of the friction around these reforms may stem from the fact that many teachers do not experience explicit teaching as a new idea. Explanation, modelling, guided practice, feedback and checking for understanding have long been recognised as features of effective instruction (Rosenshine 2012), appearing in everything from teacher education programs to Hattie's Visible Learning work (Hattie 2023), school improvement frameworks and decades of professional practice. For many educators the debate is therefore not about whether these practices matter, but about whether they should be understood as an important part of teaching or as the defining feature of teaching itself.

Victoria's own teaching union has been direct about the implementation. In a unanimous resolution, the AEU's Joint Primary and Secondary Sector Council recorded that explicit teaching already occurs across Victorian classrooms every day, and noted that Victorian students lead the nation in Year 3 NAPLAN reading - an outcome, it argued, that would be impossible if teachers were not already teaching these skills competently (Australian Education Union Victorian Branch 2024). The union also maintains that the reform was announced without the consultation required under the Victorian Government Schools Agreement.

What the comparison across states demonstrates is that it is entirely possible to establish a firm floor without constructing a ceiling. AERO's own reporting captures the difference between these two routes. It records that its model, or work it influenced, has been shared with more than 118,000 teachers and school leaders through jurisdictional adoption, and separately that the model itself was downloaded 23,508 times from its website (AERO 2026). Most teachers encounter the model because a system adopted it, not because they sought it out. That is not a criticism of the model, it is a description of how this pedagogical reform is travelling. Systems can insist upon the practices no student should go without while still preserving space for schools to respond to local needs, distinctive communities and emerging challenges in different ways.

In Victoria, two separate claims have been treated as one. Explicit teaching is effective; therefore, the reasoning goes, alternative approaches must be less so and can be retired. The first is supported by a substantial and growing body of research, whereas the second is a policy choice - and one the evidence does not compel.

The students currently moving through Australian schools will enter a world less predictable, less stable and more complex than any previous generation has experienced. Their classrooms are also more diverse than any before them: the proportion of students receiving an educational adjustment for disability has risen from 18% a decade ago to more than one in four (ACARA 2025). It is a curious moment for Victoria to conclude that classrooms should all become more alike.

Lauren Martyn is a PhD candidate at Swinburne University, where her research examines how design processes can lead curriculum development in secondary schools. She teaches in Swinburne's School of Design and Architecture and draws on eighteen years of teaching across secondary, TAFE and university settings.