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In 2015, an influential article argued that five big challenges must be addressed before real progress could be made towards improving the quality and equity of Australian education. Six years - and a global pandemic - later, experts from education research and practice revisit those challenges in an exciting webinar series. One of the biggest challenges facing educators is to find better ways to meet the learning needs of the many students who fall behind in our schools. The latest findings from PISA show that roughly one-in-five 15-year-olds are failing to achieve the international baseline proficiency level in reading literacy, and about the same proportion in mathematical literacy. This is Australia’s 'long tail of underachievement'. Little progress has been made over the past six years in addressing this tail of underachievement; if progress had been made, they would be reflected in differences between PISA 2015 and PISA 2018 results. In addition, there is some early evidence that the pandemic has made it worse. As a nation, we cannot afford to have large numbers of young people marginalised in this way. This webinar will draw from data from PISA and TIMSS to look at socioeconomically disadvantaged students in Australia – the students who disproportionately constitute the 'tail of underachievement'. If we are to hope to achieve a 'stage-not-age'-based school system, we need to make sure all learners experience a level playing field, otherwise we are at risk of enshrining what has been called the 'soft bigotry of low expectations'. In this session, ACER's Dr Sue Thomson - manager of PISA in Australia - is joined by The Smith Family's Head of Research and Advocacy Anne Hampshire and Victorian secondary teacher Steven Kolber to look at Australia's 'long tail' of underachievement.