Stairways to Heaven? Seeking Evaluative Reasoning in Publicly Available Evaluation Reports from the Australian Education Sector 2014–2024

The Australian government spends millions of dollars funding new programs every year. Taxpayers, policy makers, school leaders, teachers, and students need to know whether these programs are good. Legislation ensures they are evaluated, but do those evaluations report what good looks like, how good these programs are, and for whom? This research sought an answer to that question by analysing publicly available educational evaluations using a new conceptual framework that integrated the logic of evaluation and evaluative reasoning. Both are essential to making a credible, valid, and defensible claim about how good something is: the logic of evaluation makes the judgement legitimate, and evaluative reasoning justifies it. We examined 37 reports using our framework using an adapted systematic quantitative analysis method. Only four provided a legitimate and justified evaluative judgement; the rest we categorised as research – not evaluation. Based on our findings, we propose an updated conceptual framework we called the stairways to heaven which clarifies the steps for evaluation in comparison with research. The evaluation stairway clarifies the logic, justifications, and their relationship, integrating current resources for evaluation practice. It can be used by evaluators, evaluation commissioners, and users to clarify when evaluation is needed and get actually evaluative evaluations that connect values and data to decision-making to drive positive social change.