Emily Kowal
Emily Kowal is an education reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald, covering schools, students and the wider education system across New South Wales. Her work tracks the pressures that schools, parents and young people exert on each other, with a focus on how policy, school culture and digital life shape everyday experience.
Power struggles inside private and selective schools
Kowal’s reporting returns to the unequal power relationships inside fee‑charging and selective schools, showing how control and expectation play out in detail. In one major investigation into a Sydney private school, she documents tactics that reach into students’ personal choices, exposing the way strict behavioural and dress codes can become a form of institutional control. She pairs these accounts with pieces on how private schools are managing highly demanding parents, describing the “power struggle” that unfolds when families treat school rules as negotiable.
Coverage of selective school entrance tests and the chaos around disrupted digital exams extends that interest in high‑stakes competition, highlighting how technical failures and intense parental involvement collide in the pursuit of top school placements.
She also writes on gender quotas in selective school offers, treating them as a structural attempt to rebalance opportunity rather than a simple admissions tweak. Across these stories she combines parent and student testimony with responses from school authorities and testing providers, to show where policy meets lived experience.
Her attention to low‑fee independent schools adds another layer, contrasting elite institutions with rapidly growing campuses that operate with limited infrastructure yet surging enrolments. Pieces on schools with a single bus and no sewerage connection, but booming student numbers, sit alongside coverage of disciplined behaviour regimes and expectations of “respect” in large high schools.
Taken together, this body of work positions Kowal as a reporter who looks beyond headline rankings to the practical and cultural conditions under which families choose schools and schools respond to them.
Social media, online safety and school policy
Kowal treats social media as part of the education beat, not a separate technology story. She has reported on cases where students were banned from social platforms, only for their teachers to embrace those same tools for classroom communication and professional networking, capturing the tension between risk management and educational opportunity. She also covers parental campaigns to force schools to revise social media policies, portraying these pushes as warnings about “disaster waiting to happen” when online behaviour rules lag behind real‑world usage. Her short‑form investigation into digital predators operating within artificial intelligence environments and games such as Roblox extends that focus into the broader online ecosystem surrounding children, and earned recognition in young journalist awards.
Across these pieces she shows how schools, regulators and families grapple with emerging technologies, treating policy documents, platform bans and safety programs as central elements of the schooling experience.
Student choices, pathways and the cost of education
Another strand of Kowal’s work follows students’ subject selections and educational pathways, using data to show how choices shift as they move through high school. Her Herald analysis of senior subject enrolments, limited to courses with more than 500 students, maps how preferences evolve in the final year and what that means for university readiness and vocational options. She writes on the small group of students whose work is selected for Young Writers showcases, distilling what their essays share in common and what that reveals about assessment standards and academic excellence.
Coverage of behaviour and respect regimes in hundreds of schools, and expectations placed on students, sits alongside this analysis to show how school culture influences academic decisions.
Kowal also extends the education round into tertiary study by seeking out undergraduates to discuss the financial burden of degrees in fields such as law, arts, commerce and business.
In public calls for interviewees she emphasises the cost structures and lived financial pressures facing students, signalling an interest in how school leavers navigate university fees and day‑to‑day expenses. This combination of data‑driven subject analysis and first‑person accounts of study costs gives her coverage a continuous line from classroom choices to post‑school outcomes.
Teachers, wellbeing and the education workforce
Kowal engages closely with teacher wellbeing and the education workforce, treating staff shortages, burnout and satisfaction as core elements of the schooling story. As a speaker at the Sydney Morning Herald Schools Summit, she takes part in panels on workforce challenges and enhancing teacher satisfaction, as well as sessions on what is working in school wellbeing programs. Her reporting on new behaviour standards and respect regimes in large numbers of schools shows how these policies reshape teachers’ day‑to‑day work and expectations of classroom management.
Across her roles she connects policy discussion with what teachers encounter in classrooms and staff rooms, and situates workforce debates within broader questions of school culture and student wellbeing.
Across these themes, Kowal’s coverage is characterised by a mix of exclusive school‑level stories, short‑form investigations into digital risks, and data‑led analysis of enrolments and policies. She consistently grounds system‑level debates in specific schools, programs and families, making the implications of education decisions clear for those inside the sector.
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.
Charles Bliss
Charles Bliss is a features-led reporter at the Eastern Daily Press whose distinct focus is education told through human stories about schools, pupils and the adults who work with them. He writes about what it feels like to be in a classroom or school community, using specific events, characters and concrete activity to show how reading, creativity and wellbeing are encouraged in young people. His education coverage centres children and teachers rather than policy, turning visits, campaigns and workshops into narrative pieces with practical detail. He gives particular weight to wellbeing, mental health and sensory learning, linking health, psychology and horticulture through tangible examples. Alongside education he covers health, environment, behaviour, everyday guidance and local innovation, using plain explanation, step-by-step advice and narrative structure to show how people learn, adapt and look after each other in their communities.
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.