Charles Bliss
Charles Bliss is a features-led reporter at the Eastern Daily Press who covers education through human stories about schools, pupils and the adults who work with them. His pieces focus on what it feels like to be in a classroom or school community, often using specific events and characters to show how reading, creativity and wellbeing are encouraged in young people. Alongside education, he draws in themes from health, environment and everyday life, so that coverage of learning sits alongside stories about how people live, work and care for their surroundings.
Education stories through people and events
In his education coverage, Bliss centres his reporting on the experience of children and teachers rather than on policy or institutional process. A feature on a bestselling children’s author visiting a school to inspire young readers uses the visit itself as a frame to show how schools try to build a culture of reading among pupils, highlighting the excitement and aspiration that come with meeting a working writer. He treats these events as more than diary items, using them to show the practical steps schools take to widen horizons, from author talks to reading campaigns and creative workshops. That emphasis on concrete activity and personal encounter distinguishes his work from more transactional coverage of exam results or funding announcements.
Wellbeing and sensory learning
Bliss gives particular weight to wellbeing and mental health in and around education, including how school environments can be designed to support pupils and staff. In a piece exploring the health benefits of sensory gardens, he shows how carefully designed outdoor spaces can help people manage poor mental health, blending expert insight with clear explanation of how these gardens work in practice. The article connects ideas from health, psychology and horticulture, but stays grounded in specific settings and users, which suits stories about schools, special educational needs and inclusive practice.
This approach turns abstract notions of wellbeing into tangible examples that can be recognised in classrooms, playgrounds and school grounds.
Environment, behaviour and everyday guidance
Several of Bliss’s features take an environmental or behavioural hook and render it as practical guidance, a style that feeds back into his education coverage. In a piece on whether it is time to curb cats’ roaming and protect songbirds, he builds the story around everyday dilemmas faced by pet owners and neighbours, then offers a set of specific actions such as adjusting feeding routines, creating safe outdoor enclosures and using collar covers to reduce hunting. The structure – a clear question, explanation of the issue, followed by step-by-step advice – mirrors formats that can be used for school-focused pieces on topics like attendance, online safety or classroom behaviour.
By writing service-oriented features that still read as narrative journalism, he offers readers both context and a clear sense of what they can do next.
Local innovation and community life
Bliss’s portfolio also includes stories about local innovation and community initiatives, which broaden the frame around education and show how learning runs through business and civic life.
A feature on a start-up aiming to change how the fashion industry works looks at the company’s origins, the technology involved and its environmental implications, but it is written in a way that explains complex processes in plain terms and links them back to local people and jobs. That attention to new ideas, and to how global industries touch daily life in the region, provides useful context for education pieces about skills, training and the future of work.
It positions schools and colleges as part of a wider ecosystem of creativity and enterprise rather than as institutions standing alone.
Across these strands, Bliss works as a general features specialist whose core interest is how people learn, adapt and look after each other in their communities.
His education stories sit comfortably alongside coverage of health, environment and regional life, and he tends to approach each topic through a mix of narrative detail and practical explanation. The result is reporting that treats education not as an isolated beat but as a thread running through family life, public health and local innovation.
4 more education journalists.
Bridie Short
Bridie Short reports on how learning environments shape young people’s experiences and their engagement with wider issues. She writes about education for Lynn News, a local news publication with a focus on community stories. Her coverage centres on classrooms and other learning settings, with attention to the people and events that define daily life there. She has written about drama students paying homage to the climate emergency with a performance, framing their creative response as part of their educational experience and blending arts coverage with an education lens. Her education reporting sits within a broader community news agenda, linking school and college stories to general news. Her pieces are grounded in concrete events and activities, showing what students and staff are doing rather than focusing on abstract policy.
Catherine Strohfeldt
Catherine Strohfeldt reports how education policy, money and behaviour collide in Queensland classrooms and childcare services, focusing on what government decisions mean for students, families and teachers day to day. She is an education reporter at Brisbane Times covering schools, universities and early learning alongside related state policy. She often starts with a single school, subject or provider to explain shifts in funding, discipline and workforce conditions, treating suspension statistics, surveys and on-the-ground accounts as complementary evidence. Her work links school fees, capital funding and teacher pay deals to who can access which schools and on what terms. Her beat extends into childcare chains in crisis and university leadership and governance. She also covers Queensland government, planning and environmental issues, showing how housing, health and coastal decisions reshape the communities in her education reporting.
Conor Duffy
Conor Duffy stands out for linking education policy to the daily lives of students, parents and teachers, treating the classroom as part of a wider social system. He is the ABC’s national education and parenting reporter. His beat spans schools, universities and family life. He covers education policy, test scores, rankings, funding, teacher workload, behaviour, school refusal, student wellbeing and parenting stress. He reports on NAPLAN, university rankings, the Job Ready Graduates legislation and the cost of humanities degrees. He also covers privacy and school data. His reporting combines hard data, policy detail and personal stories. He has also done foreign, environment and investigative work for the ABC, including as North America correspondent, and has worked across Lateline, 7.30 and AM.
Darcy Fitzgerald
Darcy Fitzgerald stands out for reporting the school system from inside the classroom outwards. He is a national education reporter within the News Corp Australia network, writing across The Advertiser, Herald Sun, Courier-Mail and Daily Telegraph. A former teacher, he covers schools and education with classroom dynamics in view, and he treats teachers, students and families as the starting point for stories. His beat includes school-related issues and trends across jurisdictions, school structures, academic results, shifts in schooling models, and the practical costs and realities of schooling for families. He has also written on the decline of single-sex schooling, co-education, school holiday care, fees, eligibility rules and subsidy settings. His reporting is grounded in classroom experience and aims at system-wide coverage that still stays tied to specific school communities.