Launched last week by Tom Mahoney, a Deakin University PhD candidate and VCE teacher, the letter has attracted more than 450 signatures at the time of publishing, with this figure said to be growing by around 100 per day.

Pressure has been mounting on the Federal Government to make public the findings from an independent KPMG review into AERO’s effectiveness – a review it commissioned last year that sought to evaluate whether the organisation was meeting its aims and to inform its future development.

Despite a Freedom of Information (FOI) request and a Senate order requiring the report to be tabled, it is understood that education ministers have yet to agree to its release.

Mahoney told EducationHQ he penned the open letter because he wanted to provide an avenue for those academics, educators and community members who contributed to the review to have their voices heard in the collective call for transparency.

“…by withholding the report, their voices have been silenced in many ways … they’re not able to speak publicly about what they have contributed in the report…” the education researcher said.

Mahoney did not write a submission for the review, but says if he did he wouldn’t be able to speak about it.

“…I know that people that have contributed had to sign non-disclosure agreements.”

The academic says he was also prompted to take action given the significant amount of public funds that went into the review, and the transparency that ought to surround taxpayer-funded organisations like AERO.

“AERO itself has received quite a substantial amount of public funding over the six years of its inception, so approximately $65 million, plus the KPMG evaluation report … which is more taxpayer-funded money of approximately half a million dollars.

“All that money has been going into an educational organisation over the past six years, and the public has every right to have some public transparency in relation to the effectiveness of the organisation itself,” he argued.

In April, Alex Bacalja, a senior education lecturer at The University of Melbourne, submitted a FOI request to the Department of Education seeking access to the KPMG report.

His request was refused in July, with three legal exemptions reportedly cited: Commonwealth-State relations, deliberative processes, and business information. 

“In other words, the Department argued the report was too sensitive to release,” he wrote in an AARE article.

Bacalja reported that AERO had also objected to the report’s release on the grounds it would undermine trust in the quality of its evidence and would prompt educators to stop using its resources.

He said AERO flagged other concerns, including the potential for serious reputational harm, reduced participation in its research studies and damage to candid stakeholder engagement.

Yet the open letter maintains that “public accountability should be a hallmark of educational institutions, and AERO is no exception”.

“…AERO prides itself on transparency, declaring publicly to ‘welcome scrutiny to enhance the integrity’ of their work.

“The organisation itself is literally requesting evaluation of their work, where scrutiny is seen as a valuable asset to enable their vision for excellence and equity in Australian education.

“If the reasons for the FOI denial are indeed due to fears surrounding public scrutiny of AERO’s work, this does not align with their espoused values as an organisation and as such do not justify a desire to withhold the report,” the letter reads.

Other moves are currently being made “further up the chain” to try and action the report’s release as well, Mahoney indicated.

Many education academics have been critical of AERO’s work and influence on policy and practice in Australian schools, calling into question whether the ‘evidence-based practice’ it shares is really just a “new avenue for government to further intrude into the classroom”.

Yet others say this stance is deeply flawed and confused.

Concerns about top-down explict teaching mandates across some school systems abound, with one expert in the science of learning warning the drive for consistency risks reducing teaching to a rigid performance of approved moves and is stripping intellectual rigour from the profession. 

Some educators and education academics have praised AERO for its clear guidance and accessible translation of research-based evidence on educational practices, saying it is “useful to teachers in a way that much education research is not”.

Earlier this year, AERO’s CEO Dr Jenny Donovan took aim at those in academia who openly criticise practices that align with what we know works best in the classroom.

“It’s kind of a mystifying position to me. I don’t really understand it,” the former high school teacher told EducationHQ at the time.

Since its establishment in 2021, AERO has advocated for a system-wide shift to explicit teaching “because that’s what the evidence is most strongly behind”.

There remains a misguided idea about explicit instruction in academic circles especially, Donovan said.

“I think it can be ideological for some people, there is a rhetorical line about explicit teaching being ‘traditional’ or ‘basic’ or that it ‘turns children into automatons’ or de-professionalises teachers...

“But I actually think that is often a view held by people who don’t understand what we mean when we’re talking about explicit teaching – they’ve got an idea that it harks back to the 19th century or something.”

Mahoney says signatories on the open letter are coming from both those that strongly support AERO’s work and those that are alarmed by it. The support so far as been very encouraging, he says. 

“And [they are] coming from all across Australia, from all different sectors and all different areas ... I think it goes to show how important it is that we value transparency and that it’s not simply about whether you’re critical of AERO or not.”

Rather, the letter is really about holding our education institutions to the same standards that we expect of our schools, Mahoney says.

“We expect schools and school leaders and teachers to be accountable. And we regularly publish information on the effectiveness of schools and the education system.

“And so, we should expect the same for education institutions and organisations that also receive large amounts of taxpayer money.”

AERO has been contacted for comment.