Of course, we will continue our exploration of students’ perspectives on learning, teaching, and schooling through the Barker Journey project. Our flagship study follows the same group of students over the course of a decade. As these students enter Year 10, there has been a noticeable shift in how they talk about their experiences of school. With growing maturity comes a greater willingness to reflect: students begin to speak more thoughtfully about challenge, responsibility and effort, and to recognise how these experiences shape them as learners. Their voices provide us with a rare and valuable opportunity to understand how young people experience schooling over time, and how community, relationships, challenge and support contribute to student flourishing. I look forward to the stories this next phase of the journey will bring, particularly as students take on greater independence in their learning. It is both exciting and sobering to realise that there are now just three years left on the clock for this project.

We are currently reviewing our Research Agenda, reflecting carefully on our domains of focus and the direction of our work. This is a process we return to regularly, ensuring that both what we research and how we go about it continue to serve learning and teaching in meaningful ways, within the Barker community and beyond it. There is something quietly energising about this moment of review. It marks a willingness to attend to what has emerged over time and to allow our research priorities to evolve in response. While it is too early to say much in detail, it is already clear that new domains have surfaced through the sustained work of the past few years. This reflects the Barker Institute’s growth and consolidation, with the Research Agenda becoming one of the ways this next phase of development will be made visible.

In and amongst all that will give shape to the year ahead, there are constants. We will, of course, publish our annual journal, Learning in Practice, a space in which staff are supported and encouraged to think carefully about their practice, to inquire with purpose, and to contribute to a growing culture of school-based research. The journal creates a tangible moment of reflection, offering time and structure for ideas to be tested, refined and shared, and for practitioner voice to be taken seriously. That work does not remain inward-looking. It is complemented by our ongoing engagement with colleagues in the Research-Invested Schools network here in Australia, as well as by sustained conversations with colleagues and friends further afield. These professional relationships extend and deepen the thinking begun in our own context, providing perspective, inviting challenge, and reminding us that educational research is strengthened through dialogue rather than conducted in isolation.

Taken together, these strands of work point to a year shaped by reflection, relationship and responsibility. Educational research in schools has much to offer, not only in responding to immediate questions of practice, but in contributing to longer-term conversations about belonging, justice and hope. As the year unfolds, the task before us is to remain attentive to students’ voices, to emerging questions, and to one another, trusting that careful, collaborative inquiry can continue to make a difference.

Dr Timothy Scott

Tim has held leadership roles in schools across Australia and abroad for 25 years, alongside teaching History and Modern Languages. His research focuses on intercultural learning and pedagogical translanguaging, refugee education, and student voice in improving educational practice. He is a lead researcher for the Barker Institute’s ongoing decade-long longitudinal study, The Barker Journey. Alongside his research work, Tim currently teaches History and IGCSE Global Perspectives. His PhD examined socio-political influences on contemporary German conceptions of history and archaeology.