Editorial.

Welcome to the final issue of the Australian Journal of Education for 2008. As I look over the range of content covered in this volume, I cannot help but ponder the extent to which the content of the journal reflects the issues of most concern to educators, policy-makers and the general public today.

Teacher quality is clearly high on the public agenda--how can we become smarter at recognising and rewarding it, and what policies are needed to enhance it? Ingvarson and Rowe set the agenda in Issue 1, and the momentum has grown through the year, with a consensus emerging that high-quality teaching needs to be rewarded much more than it is at this time. The difficult issue, of course, is how this can best be achieved. Tackling this issue is one of the key challenges for 2009.

The improvement of teacher quality will not occur simply because we become better at recognising it. It requires decisions to be made about the allocation of resources to schools. Dowling's article on school funding (Issue 2) makes it clear that the systems in place to determine the allocation of funds to schools are less than optimal, and some might say they are bordering on dysfunctional. Improving teacher quality is not just a matter of incentives, and Ohi (in Issue 1), Prosser (in Issue 2) and Ferfolja (in this issue) report on projects aimed at improving teacher effectiveness, through pre-service preparation and through continuing professional development.

School curriculum has had its share of attention, with Berlach and O'Neill examining the controversy over outcomes-based education in Western Australia (Issue 1).With the work of the National Curriculum Board to continue through 2009, we can expect national curriculum to be the source of further lively debate.

There has been a substantial focus on tertiary education, including the enduring dilemmas associated with selection (Edwards, in this issue), research quality (Watson; Issue 2) and assessment of higher-degree work (Holbrook, Bourke, Lovat and Fairbairn; Issue 1).There has been a tendency to assume that Australian tertiary institutions can avert the threat of reduced federal funding by dipping into the bottomless pit of overseas students' fee income, either by bringing the students to Australia, or by taking the courses overseas to the students. Yang, in this issue, reviews the vast 'market' that is China, and provides some timely warnings for those who might think that tapping that 'market' will be easy.

But what of those to whom all of this effort and concern is directed--the students? A significant portion of this volume has been devoted to furthering our understanding of the forces that drive them and the hurdles that they strive to overcome. McLeod, Heriot and Hunt, in Issue 2, documented the difficulties faced by school students with geographically mobile parents, and identified skills that can assist them to achieve adequate progress as they move from school to school. In this issue, Kabir paints a vivid portrait of the life of Muslim students in Australian ...