2022 Education Horizons School Survey Report

1,005 Teachers, School Leaders, Managers and Technical Staff from 460+ schools around Australia shared their views on the challenges of 2021 – and their priorities for 2022.

It gives me great pleasure to present the third Voice of Australian Educators survey report.

It is hard to imagine a more challenging period to launch our Education Horizons schools survey! As we enter 2022, we face continued and ever-changing uncertainty as a result of the global pandemic. The full impact of this disruption on our students, educators, leaders, families and communities remains to be seen. What has been remarkable though is the absolute focus of educators on wellbeing before and during COVID-19.

Schools have shown resilience managing COVID-19 uncertainty and in particular their response to returning to face-to-face learning during 2021 with a focus to address student engagement with learning in the transition back to the classroom.

This is perhaps the most interesting result of this third survey report – the absolute consistency of message coming from Australian educators

• Leaders remain primarily focused on the wellbeing of their staff and students. Education leaders are focused on driving consistent implementation of best practice pedagogy for all students under their care.
• Teachers are still looking for the holy grail of less red tape, more time, better insights and tools for deeper wellbeing and learning engagement with each student.
• And as we ask more and more of our information systems during remote learning periods, IT teams remain focused on security and consistency across a growing number of integrated systems and applications.

While the challenges of navigating disrupted classrooms and remote learning have emerged significantly in the last two years, the Voice of Australian Educators suggests these are contextual challenges. The core underlying focus and challenge for Australian Educators remains the same.

My key conclusion from these responses is that the message about what Educators need to succeed every day has not changed.

The challenge remains for those of us who work with schools to find new ways to help educators, leaders, families and students connect better for learning.

This means using information to know and understand each learner, every day. It means helping busy school communities capture, access, communicate, report and analyse essential information about each member of their school community in real time. And it means using this information to shape the deeper human connections that make up our wellbeing and our learning.

As we move into 2022, we look forward to supporting schools in addressing their critical priorities, including:

• Ensuring the wellbeing of staff and students
• Consistently embedding best-practice pedagogy across the school
• Improving teacher workflow to reduce workload
• Streamlining administrative tasks
• Improving the integration between existing systems

I welcome you to review this report here.