Category: Education

A much-ignored aspect of school results in Australia over the past decade or more is the sharp contrast between declining or stagnating scores on international and national tests for Years 9 and 10 and solid improvements in Year 12 results. How is it that trends in school outcomes only two or three Year levels apart are so different? (more…)

According to the OECD’s 2018 Education at a Glance report, one measure that places Australia in an extreme position internationally is its high proportion of private funding across the primary, secondary and tertiary education sectors. And Australia is certainly out on a limb when it comes to the public/private funding mix for private schools.  (more…)

When then minister Simon Birmingham accepted the recommendations of the Gonski 2 Education funding model it was a courageous attempt to redress the mistakes of the past. His replacement post Turnbull by Dan Tehan sent a message that the traditional powerful education lobbies are still well and truly the influential players. It doesn’t auger well for government schools which historically end up the greatest loser because their primary source of revenue, the states, cannot or won’t match the federal largesse and they don’t have the capacity of the non government sector to game the system.  (more…)

Times change, but the Australian system of planning and funding schools is in a time warp, being held back by vested interests from keeping pace with the demands upon it. (more…)

In the debate about selective schools personal stories and beliefs can drown out evidence, especially when that evidence challenges the status quo. So we hear plenty of anecdotes about the successes of selective school students, but relatively few about the students and schools they leave behind. (more…)

Simon Birmingham recently announced the government will invest an additional A$11.8 million in a successful preschool language learning program.

Some 300 languages are spoken in Australia. In the Greater Sydney area alone, nearly 40% of households speak a language other than English and many children of these households attend weekend community language learning.

But, in New South Wales for example, less than 10% of secondary students make it through to a final end of secondary school examination (Higher School Certificate) in an additional language. A report of Chinese learning shows of all the learners who start Chinese study 96% have dropped out by senior secondary level.

The additional funding for pre-secondary school language education is a step in the right direction to making Australia a more bilingual country. Starting early is the key to making sure students continue with their language education.   (more…)

The latest NCVER report shows that TAFE enrolments 2016-17 have fallen by 6.5% and government-funded VET programs by 5.9%, with the greatest fall in NSW of 6.8%.  This blog is a commentary on some of the reasons why this has occurred which focus on cuts to funding for the VET sector and poor public policy decisions.  If such enrolments continue to fall, the consequences for skilled employment in Australia, will be disastrous. (more…)

Who killed off the “Western Tradition” in our Universities? Its current neo-liberal champions and those who share their crocodile tears. (more…)

The ANU has touched off a debate which has ramifications across the whole university system, or at least that section of it with prestige high enough to attract philanthropists with deep pockets. (more…)

Thanks to Isaac Newton we know that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

And while Newton’s 3^rd Law specifically relates to objects and motion; it can equally apply to the spheres of culture and politics. (more…)

New figures show that government funding increases have massively favoured private schools over public schools across Australia since 2009. Total government funding per student in public schools was cut between 2009 and 2016 while large funding increases were provided to Catholic and Independent schools. Even during the Gonski funding period of 2013-2016, funding increases for private schools far outstripped the increase for public schools.  (more…)

The Holy Grail of teaching is not how children learn so much as when and why they learn, why they learn differently with the same teacher, or differently within the same class. The Age (26/5) reported:  “Schools have largely ignored data on their students published on the government’s  MySchool website, and one in four principals say the initiative has harmed their school.” (Two thirds said the effect was neutral.)  (more…)

Gonski’s “Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools” is timely but one would hope it will be supplemented by a closer look at the needs of lower achieving students for whom prospects in the next age, with the gap between rich and poor, becomes even more pronounced, are not encouraging. Gonski says:”The basics must be in place by the time you’re eight”, but there is more to this than a change of methodology. (more…)

That quite distinctly beautiful word “education” has its origins in the Latin educare – to draw out or bring forth. But we’re entitled to ask: bring forth and draw towards what? It is well established that the happiest (least discontented, least endangering) people across all cultures are those able to participate actively in their society, small or large; those who are as concerned with the common good as they are with their own survival or success. We are social creatures. We depend upon one another for our wellbeing and safety. Our self-respect depends on that flow of giving as well as receiving. Education, therefore, both explicit and as it is modelled and imbued through daily life, surely needs to support us to contribute “according to our abilities” – from childhood onwards. But this familiar humanist view of education needs to take into account also how we learn, especially in the formative years of childhood when the more hidden curricula that develop moral and emotional intelligence and drive human behaviour are too seldom privileged.  (more…)

The capacity to persuade is a vital currency: it fosters active civic participation and affords access to power in a democracy. Developing persuasiveness therefore has an important place in education. Yet not all forms of persuasion are equally commendable. Reasoned argument promotes integrity in a way that manipulative tactics like cajolery or disparagement do not. The NAPLAN persuasive writing test fails to give due weight to cogent argument, critical engagement with ideas or even meaningful use of language. In this regard, the NAPLAN persuasive writing test is gravely misaligned with worthy educational goals. (more…)

Australia seems to have spiralled over the past 20 or so years into some kind of nightmarish US-like exam-driven educational hell. Directed by those well-known educational experts – politicians. Overseen by test-creator so-called Think Tanks of Expertise aka “Institutes” – unrelated to any respectable university. Think of the acronyms and other terms bandied about – NAPLAN (Smoke-and-Mirrors might be a far better term). STEM. Phonics. Discipline. Uniforms. State versus Private. IQ (still a a most imprecise term in common use). Gonski. How can Australia get back its once proudly-assumed reputation for excellent education – for all. What can be gained by examining the philosophy and practice of a 19th century revolutionary and teacher in a relatively back-water feudal domain in the dying years of the Edo (aka Tokugawa) Era (1603-1868)? Well, a great deal, actually. Read on. (more…)

When they update the history of Australian school education the name Gonski, and the names of those he has worked with, deserve to be up there in lights. He’s done it again: an exhaustive investigation into what we need to do to improve school education. Will it all come to pass this time around? What can we expect?   (more…)

In the recent Batman by-election, the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria (CECV) headed by Executive Director, Stephen Elder, contacted voters directly through so-called  Robocalling to urge them to vote Labor. Since then, I have been asking myself two questions.  Why should the Catholic Education authority do this at all and, second, where did the funds come from…parents, taxpayers or the Church’s own coffers? (more…)

For those who don’t have a life and follow the school funding saga, the recent spat over Catholic school funding won’t come as any great surprise. Labor’s proposed extra $250 million commitment has attracted criticism, most recently from The Australian Council of State School Organisations. The analysis and criticism focuses on various interpretations of future funding plans, but the implications are much wider. To find out more, all we have to do is cast our eyes towards Goulburn in New South Wales. To see the future we only need to look back. (more…)

Almost a year ago we thought that peace had been declared in the school funding wars. True, the Turnbull government’s ‘Gonski’ school funding changes fall well short on many fronts but the government did try to bury the special deals that have dogged school funding for decades. After less than a year Labor has resurrected them in a planned gift of $250 million to Catholic schools in the first two years of a new Labor government. (more…)