Common Interests, Narrow Foundations: The Politics of Evidence, Centralisation, and Foundational Learning in the Australian Capital Territory

This paper critically examines the Australian Capital Territory’s Literacy and Numeracy Education Expert Panel Final Report (ACT Education Directorate 2024) and its implementation through the Strong Foundations reform package. Using Bacchi’s (2009) What’s the Problem Represented to be? (WPR) framework, we show how the Report constructs inequity as a problem of system inconsistency and teacher inadequacy, while silencing the social and structural determinants of student outcomes. Drawing on discourse and citation analysis, we demonstrate how institutional actors such as the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) and Australian Council of Education Research (ACER), together with the language of ‘evidence’ and ‘what works,’ reinforce a closed circuit of authority privileging neuroscientific and technocratic solutions. These representations depoliticise inequality, legitimise recentralisation and position teachers and schools as deficient. We argue that such evidence-framed reforms advance surface-level consistency but risk entrenching inequity by overlooking socio-economic and cultural dimensions. WPR offers a valuable lens for exposing these dynamics and interrogating the politics of evidence in education policy.