Our purpose for public education

Thank you to those of you who took part in our state-wide purpose of public education consultation.

Through many forums, surveys, meetings and written submissions, we heard from thousands of you – our students, parents, our staff, stakeholders, NGOs and people in the community who are passionate about our states public education system.

You can read the full consultation reports:

• summary of what we heard (PDF 202 KB)
• data analysis: student forums (PDF 1 MB)
• data analysis: state-wide consultation (PDF 4 MB)
• draft survey analysis (PDF 943 KB)

Our purpose statement

You can read the purpose statement in our strategy for public education in South Australia.

Areas of impact

The consultation highlighted key areas we, as a public education system, need to focus on to achieve our purpose.

These areas of impact describe the system level priority areas that will guide our decision making, effort and focus. These are the areas that SA’s public education system will measure and track our progress against.

The areas are all inter-related and strengthen each other.

You can read about the areas of impact in our strategy for public education in South Australia.

Timelines and next steps

We're reviewing all feedback and a strategic plan will be released in July 2023.

How was the draft purpose created?

Public education is embedded in its community and so we kicked off the conversation last year with student forums throughout the state and continued with staff and leaders of preschools and schools.

Chief Executive Martin Westwell discusses how we can shape the future of education in SA (7:39)

We’ve also had valuable feedback from parents, support organisations, associations and unions, government departments, universities, NGOs community members and have engaged with local, national and international experts.

The drafts are based on the many ideas received from everyone who took part in the consultation.

Why do we need a purpose statement?

The world is changing and the future we’re educating young people for will be different from today.

Our public education needs to adapt to this change to give our children and young people the best opportunity to thrive.

We need to be clear about what we’re trying to provide for our students so we can measure whether we’re achieving it.