Category: Education

We are at an historic moment of apocalyptic threat to the survival of the Australian Catholic Church, the Catholic Bishops say. Among the institutions facing their greatest threat are Australia’s Catholic Schools. Here’s what’s happening. (more…)

Are we finally seeing the end of the Dawkins era? If so, what next? (more…)

The pandemic is magnifying existing pressures for universities but is also providing new possibilities. How universities respond will determine their future (more…)

The pandemic is magnifying existing pressures for universities but is also providing new possibilities. How universities respond will determine their future. (more…)

The role of education is to encourage moral and socially moral/ethical individuals who develop a robust sense of fairness, justice and empathy which will influence tolerance and acceptance.
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One thing COVID-19 has done is shatter laborious bureaucratic reform processes that so often breed inertia rather than change. I marvel at how quickly education systems have adapted to the lockdown. (more…)

If we want our children to have a stake in our democracy and our society, we have to treat them as valued citizens and engage with their concerns. Not because of the leaders they might one day be, in our own projection of what that means, but recognising their legitimacy and leadership as it stands today. (more…)

The shock of dealing with the realities of the coronavirus pandemic has  forced our prime minister to realise that schools are fundamental to our democracy and that teachers are on the front line of society and should be valued accordingly.

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Education reform is well overdue. As the need to act with speed has seen governments jettison rusted-on assumptions and ideologies in areas such as employment, health and welfare – can school education be next? After all, there are just as many education problems sitting in the too-hard basket, many of them extremely wicked and ignored by governments for decades.

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One thing we used to tell beginning teachers was to never punish the whole class because a few students were misbehaving. (more…)

If you search for St. Kevin on the internet, you will find that the references to this Irish saint are vastly outnumbered by references to the Australian boys school that bears his name and that has been dragging that name through the mud in recent times.

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New figures show that government (Commonwealth and State) funding increases massively favoured private schools over public schools between 2009-10 and 2017-18. (more…)

Data from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2018 show that Australia allocates more and better quality teacher and physical resources to high socio-economic status (SES) secondary schools than to low SES schools. The gaps are amongst the largest in the OECD. The highest performing OECD countries generally allocate resources more equitably between low and high SES secondary schools than Australia does. (more…)

The hand-wringing over the continuing decline in Australia’s PISA results misses the issue of whether students try their best on the tests. The OECD’s report on PISA 2018 shows that about three in four Australian students and two-thirds of students in OECD countries did not try their hardest on the tests. There are also wide differences between countries. It has potentially explosive implications for the validity of international comparisons of student achievement based on PISA. (more…)

Two weeks ago I commented on the forthcoming Education Council of Ministers meeting and how it was apparently going to tackle our latest reported dive in student achievement. I declared that the chance of an enduring solution emerging from that gathering amounted to fantasy. True to form, the ministers emerged from that meeting with strong statements, pious hopes and an ongoing commitment to … fantasy. (more…)

It’s PISA time again and Australia’s student achievement levels continue to be miserable. The finger-pointing is in full swing…again. Someone should re-shoot ‘Groundhog Day’ around the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), with a cast of education ministers, their shadows, a teacher unionist, journalists, the odd academic and crowd shots of everyone else with an opinion. It would be an easy script to learn – it has remained unchanged for well over a decade. (more…)

There seems to have been a long period of quiescence in higher education, with the interests of the top end of the university sector (identified as the G8) coinciding with the desire of successive governments to shift costs away from their regular budgets and on to overseas consumers. But some chickens have come home to roost concerning other interested parties, not least the wider public but also non-G8 universities and regional institutions promised a better deal by the LNP in its slim election policy portfolio. (more…)