There is intense public and political interest in how the Australian school system can be improved, but less focus on progress as the conceptual rationale that underpins this aim. This chapter is a chronological case study of the concept of progress within the network of local, national and international documents that constitute education policy in the Australian Capital Territory (1967–2023). This analysis illustrates tension between the linear temporal structure of progress utilised by education policy to rationalise new programs of action (Koselleck in J Modern Hist 61:650– 666, 1989), and the multiplicity of students, schools, teachers, and systems whose performance is behind, and therefore not contemporaneous with standard. In response to this disjunction the Australian education system has reconceptualised disadvantage as an internal characteristic of schools that can be improved through mechanisms such as the National Assessment Program–Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), and the National School Improvement Tool (ACER in National school improvement tool. Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, 2012). These institutional structures have been supplemented by an OECD (OECD in Future of education and skills 2030. The future we want, 2018) generated vocabulary that emphasises sustainability and well-being as the means of addressing the current, and future needs of all Australians. Despite the novelty of this approach, the ACT reports that the gap in performance between students from different backgrounds persists, a dynamic that undermines progress as the conceptual core of Australian schooling (ACT ED in Annual report, Australian Capital Territory. Education Directorate. Annual report, 2023).