Ask a teacher why some students disengage in the middle years and you will hear many answers: family circumstances, social media, a lack of motivation, the challenges of adolescence. What you will hear less often is this: the school system itself is built in a way that makes disengagement almost inevitable for a large proportion of students. That is the central argument of Geoff Masters’ important book.
Masters — CEO of the Australian Council for Educational Research — focuses on what he calls the “machinery” of schooling: the structures that sit around and above individual teachers and schools, over which teachers have limited control. This machinery includes the curriculum, standardised tests, and the systems used to assess and report student learning. His argument is that four specific features of this machinery function as built-in obstacles to learning for a substantial proportion of students, particularly those who enter each year behind their peers.
The evidence is striking. Within any given year level, the least advanced students are six or more years of learning behind the most advanced — yet the curriculum expects teachers to teach the same content to everyone at the same time. Students advance from one year to the next not because they have mastered what they were taught but because time has elapsed, meaning many carry unresolved gaps into the next year’s work, which is already beyond their reach. Success is then measured not against individual progress but against year-level expectations that some students began the year with no realistic prospect of meeting. And the A to E grades used to communicate all of this tell students nothing about their growth — only their ranking, which many correctly interpret as a verdict on their fixed ability rather than a record of their learning.
The cumulative effect is a system that progressively sorts children and leaves many behind — and that communicates that verdict to them, repeatedly, from a young age. For any student who has spent years receiving low grades against expectations they were never positioned to meet, disengagement is not a mystery. It is a rational response to a system that has, in practice, already moved on without them.
Masters proposes transformation rather than tinkering: a curriculum redesigned to support teaching at each student’s actual level of readiness, progression based on demonstrated mastery rather than elapsed time, assessment that measures individual growth from starting point to finishing point, and reporting that tells a student and their family where they are in their long-term learning journey. At the centre of his vision is the concept of growth — the idea that every student’s progress matters and that the measure of a good school is not how many students reach a fixed standard but how much every student learns.
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