Dear Ministers,

We are a collective of education academics, teachers and school leaders who are concerned that the $420,951.74 publicly funded review conducted by KPMG, under your request to evaluate the effectiveness of the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO), has not been released to the public.

AERO has been a key driver in recent reforms to educational policy across Australia, providing policy advice and disseminating research evidence to education departments, teachers and school leaders nationwide since its establishment in 2020. It is vital that the public be provided with an evaluation of its effectiveness in achieving its aims during this time.

The KPMG report in question has since been completed and supplied to you in April of 2026 but is yet to be released. A recent request under the Freedom of Information (FOI) act for the report was denied on the basis that it might undermine confidence in AERO’s work.

Yet 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.

Considering also the substantial public investment of at least $65 million in taxpayer money since its inception, taxpayers have a right to access evaluations of organisations that receive a substantial amount of public funding. They also have a right to access the KPMG report, which was also paid for by taxpayer money.

Public accountability should be a hallmark of educational institutions, and AERO is no exception.

We believe that the KPMG report on the effectiveness of AERO’s contributions to Australian education must be released immediately, to gain public trust and ensure the integrity of educational organisations operating in Australia.

Whilst some of us are critical of AERO, concerned with its potential to narrow acceptable perspectives of education and its contribution to the imposition of mandated practices across several jurisdictions in Australia, not all of us are so.

Some of us appreciate that AERO has been a helpful source of information and advice for many, supporting teachers and school leaders with access to research and ideas to complement their work in schools and in the classroom.

Regardless of individual position, we all value the transparency of publicly funded organisations receiving taxpayer money and the importance of publicly available evidence concerning their effectiveness.

We the undersigned, collectively call upon all state and territory education ministers to agree to the report’s release immediately (and well before the establishment of a national Teaching and Learning Commission) to both allow an authentic public evaluation of AERO’s outputs and to safeguard the integrity of current and future educational policy reform.

Thank you.