Victoria Ellis
Victoria Ellis reports on how education, community programs and Indigenous knowledge shape everyday life in remote and regional areas for the ABC. Her coverage follows the way schools, training schemes and local initiatives intersect with land, language and family, rather than treating education as a standalone policy beat. The work is grounded in on-the-ground reporting from desert communities, with a consistent focus on who holds control over institutions and how that affects young people.
Community-controlled schooling and youth engagement
Ellis covers the governance and accountability of schools serving remote communities, paying close attention to who makes decisions and how that changes life in the classroom. In her reporting on a Northern Territory school returning to community control after a period under statutory management, she traces the shift in authority back to local families and leaders and looks at what that means for students, staff and culture.
She is interested in the detail of how statutory arrangements work in practice and in the tensions between central oversight and community expectations for their school.
Her education stories regularly highlight programs designed to keep children engaged in learning rather than only the consequences when they disengage.
In coverage of an alternative engagement program run by an Aboriginal corporation, she shows how students who attend and behave well at school are rewarded with learning activities outside the classroom that connect schooling with country. She explains how such schemes are structured, who runs them and how they are measured, while still foregrounding the experience of the students involved. Across these pieces, she treats education as a community project involving parents, elders and local organisations, not only teachers and bureaucrats.
Indigenous knowledge, land and learning
A distinct strand of Ellis’s work sits at the intersection of Indigenous knowledge, land management and education. When she reports on the dedication of a vast Indigenous Protected Area in the central desert, she is as interested in the young people present at the ceremony as in the size of the area itself.
Her stories show how land management decisions are embedded in family life, ceremony and the transmission of responsibility to the next generation, and how those activities are organised through ranger programs and local organisations.
She brings the same approach to pieces on Indigenous trackers passing on desert skills through structured training. In radio and audio reporting on a program developing bilingual resources for learning how to track animals under a Warlpiri knowledge system, she follows rangers, knowledge holders, educators and language experts as they build a training package together.
The focus is on how traditional skills are formalised into teaching materials without losing their cultural grounding, and on the collaborative work required to translate oral knowledge into written and recorded resources. These stories make clear that, for Ellis, education includes the ways people learn to read country, not just what happens in school buildings.
Regional health, family stories and local bulletins
Ellis also reports on health and social services in regional communities, often through the lens of individual journeys that reveal systemic pressures. In one recent current affairs piece she follows an Indigenous man through residential rehabilitation, using his experience of overwhelming demand on services to illustrate gaps in support across Central Australia.
The story connects personal recovery, access to culturally safe care and the broader push for people to “take ownership of their future”, showing how health systems and community expectations meet in practice.
Family stories feature prominently in her rural reporting. In a feature on sisters travelling thousands of kilometres across desert and sea for equestrian sports, she uses their commitment to riding to open up questions about distance, cost and the emotional ties that hold families together in remote areas.
The reporting balances description of the sport with detail about travel, schooling and family life, keeping the focus on the relationship between the sisters as much as on competition results.
Alongside individual features, Ellis produces and contributes to local news briefings and rural programs for the ABC.
In daily or regular bulletins for regions including Alice Springs and Katherine, she curates short updates on court matters, community events, services and policy decisions affecting regional communities. On rural programs, she helps deliver stories that connect listeners with the people behind land management, agriculture, community initiatives and education projects.
Across formats, her work is concise, grounded in specific examples and consistently centred on how decisions and programs play out in the lives of people living in remote and regional Australia.
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.