Defending AERO: Evidence-Informed Teaching Isn’t Oppression, It's Empowering

A recent critique of the Australian Education Research Organisation mischaracterises both the nature of evidence-Informed practice and AERO’s role in supporting teachers with it.

The Australian Education Research Organisation is a publicly funded, independent body established to promote excellence and equity through evidence-informed education. But this week it was criticised for allegedly promoting rigid, top-down, “neoliberal” pedagogies and undermining teacher autonomy. This is a response to that charge.

AERO’s Role: Transparency, Rigour, and Consultation

So what is AERO and why should teachers and educators listen to them? AERO’s credibility is grounded in its clear and transparent standards for evaluating educational research. The organisation’s Standards of Evidence framework outlines four levels of confidence, ranging from hypothesised effects to replicated causal impact in similar contexts, enabling educators and policymakers to gauge the strength of evidence behind any given approach. These standards prioritise both rigour (methodological strength) and relevance (contextual fit), helping bridge the gap between research and practice.

All research should be evaluated and critiqued and AERO’s work is held to a particularly high standard in that respect, informed by systematic reviews, causal research designs, and expert synthesis. This makes it not only more trustworthy but also more actionable. Teachers, leaders, and policymakers can use AERO’s evidence tools to make better-informed decisions and design evaluations that meet high confidence thresholds. AERO’ research agenda is shaped by demand, impact, and feasibility, not ideology. Research is commissioned through rigorous consultation with teachers, researchers, and policymakers, and is subject to both internal and external review.

This consultative approach was evident in AERO's 2020 national focus groups, which showed a strong appetite among educators for trustworthy, accessible, and actionable research, especially in areas like teaching strategies, curriculum design, and cognitive load. Teachers consistently emphasised the need for evidence to be translated into clear, practical formats such as videos, lesson templates, and case studies.

Dwyer et al. suggest that AERO’s work is adopted by policymakers without scrutiny. But the fact that AERO’s recommendations are being embedded in initial teacher education is not evidence of blind acceptance, it’s an acknowledgement of their strength. The “Core Content” they criticise is built on consensus findings from decades of cognitive science and supported by organisations like the OECD and UNESCO.

More to the point: if the authors disagree with the research AERO draws on, they should engage with it directly. Broad claims that cognitive load theory is “controversial” because it doesn’t account for affect or culture miss the point entirely. CLT is a theory about how novices learn new information, not about the whole ecology of schooling. Suggesting this makes it invalid is like criticising Newton’s laws for failing to account for depression in astronauts.

Misunderstanding Evidence-Informed Practice

In their recent article, Dwyer et al charge that these resources are prescriptive and invoke another article which even deems them “oppressive”. This is unfair. Like the work of the EEF in the UK, AERO synthesises high-quality research to inform teachers’ professional judgment not constrain them.

This distinction between informing and constraining is crucial: evidence-informed guidance provides teachers with a reliable foundation of what works under specific conditions, but still requires professional expertise to adapt, implement, and modify approaches based on contextual factors like student needs, classroom dynamics, and curriculum requirements.

Far from reducing teachers to "passive technicians," understanding cognitive principles actually empowers their professional autonomy by giving them the knowledge base to make more sophisticated pedagogical decisions. A teacher who understands cognitive load theory can better judge when to provide worked examples versus independent practice, when to introduce complexity, and how to scaffold learning effectively, decisions that require considerable skill and judgment.

Good evidence liberates teachers from the anxiety of not knowing whether their methods work, replacing guesswork with confidence grounded in understanding how learning actually happens.

“Neoliberalism” is not an argument against cognitive science

Invoking 'neoliberalism' as a critique of cognitive science is both conceptually muddled and rhetorically lazy. Cognitive load theory, retrieval practice, and explicit instruction are not ‘market-driven constructs’, they are the result of decades of empirical work grounded in psychology and learning science. To suggest that instructional clarity or structured guidance is inherently ‘neoliberal’ is to mistake method for ideology.

The implicit argument seems to be that systematic, evidence-based approaches to teaching are inherently “oppressive”, while maintaining ineffective practices somehow serves social justice. This is precisely backwards: clinging to outdated educational theories that demonstrably fail disadvantaged students is what serves elite interests, allowing privileged children whose families provide academic support at home to succeed regardless of school quality, while less advantaged students suffer the consequences of ineffective instruction.

When critics reflexively label cognitive science as “neoliberal”, they're essentially arguing that those disadvantaged students should be denied access to effective instruction in the name of ideological purity. It's a particularly pernicious form of educational gatekeeping that uses political rhetoric to defend academic territory rather than advance student outcomes.

The Politics of Educational Failure

The whole language reading movement provides a real-world example of how this ideologically-driven pedagogy systematically failed the most disadvantaged students. For years, systematic phonics instruction was dismissed by many education academics as neoliberal and "drill and kill" (it still is), when we now have a substantial body of evidence that it actually levels the playing field by providing all students with the foundational skills they need to decode text.

But this did not prevent unproven methods being rolled out in many states. In California for example, after implementing whole language approaches in the 1990s, reading scores plummeted so severely that the state ranked near the bottom nationally in reading proficiency. But the impact wasn't evenly distributed. Middle-class families unconsciously compensated for these pedagogical failures through bedtime stories, vocabulary-rich conversations, and tutoring when problems emerged. Their children succeeded despite poor reading instruction in school, not because of it. Disadvantaged students, whose families lacked the resources to provide intensive reading support at home, bore the full brunt of ineffective classroom instruction, creating achievement gaps that persisted throughout their educational careers.

The bitter irony is that whole language advocates positioned themselves as champions of equity and social justice while implementing practices that systematically disadvantaged the very students they claimed to serve. They dismissed phonics as mechanistic and oppressive, apparently believing that struggling readers would somehow intuit the alphabetic code through exposure to ‘authentic’ literature. This misguided view of learning may have felt equitable, but it’s better seen as a form of educational malpractice that tragically hit hardest in high-poverty schools.

When cognitive science advocates finally led a return to evidence-based reading instruction through initiatives like the National Reading Panel, the greatest beneficiaries were precisely those disadvantaged students whom whole language advocates claimed to champion. Systematic phonics instruction didn't constrain creativity or critical thinking, it provided the foundational skills that made higher-order literacy possible.

Empowering Teachers with Evidence

What many critics of bodies like AERO and the EEF in the UK fail to understand is the strength of feeling from generations of actual classroom teachers who feel they were ill-prepared to teach with outdated approaches like Piaget's stage theory or unfalsifiable, vague constructs like Vygotsky's zone of proximal development to arm them. Many teachers encounter cognitive science and the actionable, practical strategies it invokes, many years into their career and wonder why they were never taught it as trainee teachers. This is precisely why AERO's evidence-based approach represents such a profound shift toward professional empowerment.

Thousands of teachers and school leaders are benefitting from the kinds of guidance offered from bodies like the AERO, the EEF and Ochre but it’s concerning that for many of them, this is the first time they are hearing this important evidence on how learning happens. Teachers who spent years struggling with classroom management and student failure, wondering why their "developmentally appropriate" activities weren't working, or trying to implement discovery learning approaches that left students confused and frustrated, often experience a revelation when they encounter the clarity of cognitive load theory, systematic synthetic phonics or explicit instruction. Strategies grounded in how the brain processes, retrieves and encodes information rather than misguided notions about natural development.

Teaching is a probabilistic enterprise and some strategies are more likely to work under certain circumstances. There is nothing ‘empowering’ about promoting pedagogical relativism in the name of nuance.

For me, AERO provides what the profession has long lacked: a trusted, independent, and publicly accountable source of credible, cumulative educational research. Its commitment to quality, its consultative processes, and its refusal to pander to ideological fashions make it a public good worth defending.

True professional empowerment comes not from pedagogical relativism or the freedom to choose any approach regardless of effectiveness, but from having access to reliable, research-grounded strategies that consistently help students learn. When teachers understand how working memory functions, why explicit instruction benefits novice learners, or how retrieval practice strengthens retention, they gain genuine agency and the ability to make informed decisions based on decades of cognitive science rather than educational fashion. AERO's synthesis of this research doesn't constrain teacher creativity; it provides the foundational knowledge that makes creative teaching more effective. The real oppression lies in leaving teachers to discover through trial and error what cognitive science could have taught them from day one.

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KPMG are collecting contributions to the Independent Performance Evaluation of AERO here. Please do take the time to give an honest appraisal.