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Killer Apps for the Classroom? Developing Critical Perspectives on ClassDojo and the ‘Ed-tech’ Industry

Ben Williamson raises significant questions for teachers and school systems to consider when apps such as ClassDojo are permitted entry into our classroom…

The digital behaviour-monitoring app ClassDojo has become one of the most popular educational technologies in the world. Widely adopted by teachers of young children in Australia, Europe and North America since its initial launch in 2011, ClassDojo is now attracting critical attention from researchers and the media too. These critical perspectives are importantly illuminating how popular classroom technologies such as ClassDojo and the wider ‘ed-tech’ market are involved in reshaping the purposes and practices of education at an international scale. They are global, networked, demanding of teachers’ labour, and based on the extraction of digital information from schools—all raising significant questions for critical interrogation.

The purpose of engaging with ClassDojo critically is to challenge some of the taken-for-granted assumptions used to justify and promote the rollout and uptake of new edtech products and services in classrooms. Being critical does not necessarily imply militant judgement, but instead careful inquiry into the origins, purposes and implications of new technologies, their links to education policies, and the practices they shape in schools. What do these new technologies ultimately mean for education looking to the future?

Much contemporary education policy and practice tends to be fixated on research that solves problems and offers evidence of ‘what works’ (Biesta, Filippakou, Wainwright & Aldridge, 2019). One of the most important aims of educational research, however, is to identify problems:

Educational research that operates in a problem‐posing rather than a problem‐solving mode is … itself a form of education as it tries to change mindsets and common perceptions, tries to expose hidden assumptions, and tries to engage in ongoing conversations about what is valuable and worthwhile in education and society more generally. (Biesta et al, 2019, p.3)

A critical engagement with ClassDojo, then, is an educational opportunity to identify problems with the current expansion of the ed-tech industry, and to open up its underlying assumptions to debate about what is valuable and worthwhile in education.

We need to recognize that ClassDojo has huge support and vocal advocates in the teaching profession. The highly positive views and experiences of many teacher users of ClassDojo should be heard and reported—though as yet formal evidence remains lacking. At the same time, it is essential to ask critical questions of any educational product, fad, evidence or theory that is impacting on classroom practices at an international scale. Owing to its enormous popularity in schools, ClassDojo exemplifies a series of wider issues with expansion of the ed-tech industry.

Engineering ‘killer apps’

Educational technologies have a long history. In recent years, an ‘ed-tech’ market has grown rapidly (EdSurge, 2016), largely catalysed by commercial influence and investment from Silicon Valley (Selwyn, 2016). ClassDojo, as the product of a Silicon Valley company, exemplifies the changing landscape of ed-tech market expansion (Williamson, 2017a).

When it was originally launched, ClassDojo was a simple smartphone app for teachers to use to award ‘points’ to pupils for positive behaviours and good classroom discipline. Over time, however, it has gradually extended its functionality and expanded its company ambitions. ‘If we can shift what happens inside and around classrooms then you can change education at a huge scale,’ ClassDojo’s chief executive officer has publicly stated (Rodriguez, 2016).

Generously funded with investment from Silicon Valley venture capitalists (Lunden, 2019), ClassDojo has moved from being a behaviour monitoring app to a social media platform for schools and a communication infrastructure for teachers and parents to contact each other (Jackson, 2016). It provides ‘toolkits’ of resources for teachers, while as a social media platform, it allows teachers to share ‘class stories’ and offers streaming content in the form of several series of ‘Big Ideas’ animations on latest educational thinking. The company even recruits teachers to become product mentors, who then create YouTube tutorials and spread ClassDojo messaging on various social media channels. Most recently, ClassDojo extended into family life with a ‘Beyond School’ subscription model for parents to support behaviour at home.

As an individual product, ClassDojo’s function creep is illustrative of the current expansion of the ed-tech market to mediate as many educational tasks and relationships as possible. The ed-tech industry has circulated the idea that public schooling is broken—too much one-size-fits-all teaching and high-stakes testing leads to disengaged and stressed kids—and that their apps and analytics can fix it. Such a view has helped the ed-tech industry promote itself as the solution to public problems, and to begin inserting itself actively within the daily routines of schools.

Indeed, the ed-tech industry has been identifying problems with existing school practices and policies for years, as a way of building markets for their products and solutions. The quest for a ‘killer app’ is often based on hype and idealized ‘beliefs about technology’s potential’ as a ‘solution for education’ (Pinto, 2016, p.9). Supported by tech sector venture capital, ClassDojo is imprinted with the Silicon Valley assumption that complex social problems can be solved through technical innovation—while also driven by the financial imperative to ‘scale-up’ in order to deliver return on investment.

In this context, ClassDojo has positioned itself as a ‘technical fix’ for the ‘engineering problems’ of classroom behaviour, discipline and more. Behaviour monitoring, content distribution, parent communication, teacher tools, social networking, pedagogic thinking, even relationships between parents and their children have become ClassDojo-fied as part of its Silicon Valley-backed expansion. As such, the expansion of ed-tech products and markets represents the clear commercialisation of public education.

Strategic media management

An education media sector has proliferated in parallel with the ed-tech industry. In fact, some of the most influential publications are funded by the same sources of venture capital and philanthropy as ed-tech itself. Together, they are ‘crafting and repeating the narratives about “the future of education” that the industry and investors want told’ (Watters, 2018).

In this context, ClassDojo’s expansion is indicative of how globally-focused companies, most based in the US—and more specifically in Silicon Valley—are seeking to influence education systems around the world to fit their company assumptions and aspirations (Williamson, 2017b). This is assisted by a carefully managed public relations and media strategy. ClassDojo itself has been the subject of highly positive press coverage in the business, technology and education media (e.g. Forbes, TechCrunch, BusinessInsider, FastCompany, EdSurge), and the recipient of high-profile prizes (including the Forbes 30 Under 30 list 2012, the TechCrunch Crunchies 2015, and two FastCompany awards in 2016).

The positive media coverage and industry prizes have tracked the expansion of ClassDojo’s new features, and lent authority to its efforts to reshape activity in classrooms. Much less negative media coverage of ClassDojo has appeared (Williamson, 2018; Baron, 2019). Instead, the tech and business sectors’ own media machinery has successfully saturated press and social media channels with upbeat copy. The ClassDojo company itself expertly mobilises social media to attract more users—notably by promoting real-world uses of the app shared by teachers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram—which then attracts further investment.

As ClassDojo demonstrates, success as an influential education technology company is highly dependent on entrepreneurial business influence, investor attraction and media strategy. Quite simply, it exemplifies how the Silicon Valley business model of rounds of investment in constant function upgrades, relentless public relations (PR) and media exposure, and the scaling up of products and services to wider networks of users, has become a key underlying influence in shaping classroom practices at huge international scale. ClassDojo is not just a classroom technology, but an object of media attention that assists its market growth and profitability: in early 2019 it was valued at around US$400million (Lunden, 2019).

Proxy policy tools

The ed-tech industry has become so powerful that it is now actively shaping what happens in schools without the need for specific education policy. Indeed, it suggests that because education can be ‘fixed’ with technology, there is less need for government policy intervention into wider social structures or education systems. Ed-tech provides alternative policies for implementation. The uptake of positive psychology by ClassDojo and other companies is again illustrative of how ed-tech can do alternative policy work in schools.

Positive psychology emphasises the importance of individuals developing a positive mindset and resilience to solve problems, without attempting to confront any of the social, political and economic structures that currently shape the contexts in which children are growing up. As an applied version of positive psychology targeted at schools, SEL focuses on measurement and improvement of the individual rather than challenging austerity politics or persistent patterns of inequality or disadvantage. One especially strident critique of concepts such as grit and growth mindset, for example, claims they contribute ‘to an authoritarian politics, one where leaders expect the masses to stay on task’, whereas ‘democracy requires active citizens who think for themselves and, often enough, challenge authority’ (Tampio, 2016).

This semi-medicalised view of the individual pathologises children as needing psychological intervention and personality modifications to be successful and competitive in labour markets as well as personally resilient in the face of societal structures. ClassDojo is by no means alone in reproducing this new dominant view of the purpose and practices of education. It does, however, have the advantage of huge international penetration into schools, classrooms, and teachers’ practices, and acts as a powerful relay of individualised, depoliticised positive psychology and personality intervention into public education.

In this way, ClassDojo can be understood as a proxy policy tool—a way of disseminating new ideas into teachers’ practices at international scale, in ways that short-circuit the normal practices of national or regional policy-making and implementation. It has developed ‘a lifeline directly to classrooms. They can reach … students without bushwhacking through the red tape of school boards or superintendents’ (Dobo, 2016). As its head of research has noted, ‘We look for an idea that can be powerful and high-impact and is working in pockets, and work to bring it to scale more quickly … incorporated into the habits of classrooms’ (Newcomb, 2017).

Although government education policy is by no means uncontested, the displacement of education policymaking to the ed-tech sector—and its capacity to bypass official policy and administrative procedures—raises huge questions. What models of education are the ed-tech sector pursuing? Whose interests are served by its investments and products? Which individuals and companies are empowered to intervene in education systems, schools and classrooms? The ed-tech sector and its media partners and investors are empowering themselves as alternative policy centres in contemporary education, with direct access to teachers yet little to check or balance their rapid expansion.

Surveillance schools

With the steady increase in technologies of data collection in education, concerns have grown about surveillance becoming a normalised and naturalised aspect of schooling (Jarke & Breiter, 2019). Since its earliest days, ClassDojo has been the subject of scepticism regarding data protection and privacy. This is because its behavioural rewards feature acts as a system of digitally-mediated surveillance, with teachers incited to constantly record information about classroom discipline through awarding points for observed behaviours (Saroko, 2016).

A recent analysis of ClassDojo in Australian schools concluded it was inducting children into an uncritical culture of surveillance (Manolev, Sullivan & Slee, 2019). Not only does ClassDojo capture student behavioural information through the reward app. It also gathers photos, videos, digital portfolios of work, and permits messaging between teachers and parents. The company has slowly shifted from the behaviour app to become more like a social media platform for schools–even the rewards mechanism is similar to social media ‘liking.’ At a time of heightened media and public awareness of the social and political consequences of commercial surveillance through social media, even the business press has turned its critical attention to this research on ClassDojo (Baron, 2019).

Just as Facebook presents itself as a platform for building ‘communities’, ClassDojo’s founders and funders see it as the platform for building ‘amazing communities’ of children, teachers, schools and parents. The addition of ‘school-wide’ functionality makes it into the main communication mechanism for many schools, and a way for school leaders to have oversight of class data.

There are commercial imperatives and surveillance mechanisms behind the ‘community’ ideals of social media platforms. These communities are ultimately providers of data that can be monetised. The user base of Facebook, it has been specifically argued, ‘isn’t a community; this is a regime of one-sided, highly profitable surveillance, carried out on a scale that has made Facebook one of the largest companies in the world by market capitalisation’ (Tufekci, 2018).

As a platform of surveillance, ClassDojo has subtly worked its way into the central operating systems of schooling, shaping how teachers observe, think about, record and report student behaviour. In other words, it turns teachers into surveillance operatives, constantly gathering and recording student data within the platform. It is also reconfiguring how teachers and parents communicate, giving school leaders new ways of observing behavioural trends, and giving parents ‘real-time’ ability to track and watch their children in the classroom. It is shaping what a school ‘community’ should (ideally) be and how it can connect, with student surveillance based on the behaviour metrics of positive psychology at its core.

Platform education

ClassDojo’s growth and monetisation strategy is typical of the business model of contemporary ‘platform capitalism’. In the book Platform Capitalism, Srnicek (2017) defines platforms as digital systems that allow two or more groups to interact, as intermediaries between users, and as businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on. Some of the key characteristics of platforms are that they rely on ‘network effects’ of expanding numbers of users, the constant extraction of data from users as a source of value generation or monetisation, and the constant addition of new features and upgrades to keep users engaged on the platform.

Beyond their economic function, platforms may also be reshaping society and its public institutions. Platforms are ‘curators of public discourse’ since ‘their choices about what can appear, how it is organised, how it is monetised, what can be removed and why, and what the technical architecture allows and prohibits, are all real and substantive interventions into the contours of public discourse’ (Gillespie, 2010). So platforms act as intermediaries between users, exploit the value of expanding networks of users, and shape what is possible for those users to say and do.

Understood as a platform, ClassDojo has clearly inserted itself as an intermediary between teachers, students and parents, enabling new kinds of interaction that are framed by the reward points system or the home-school communication channels. One of ClassDojo’s most successful strategies is using social media to build a cascading network effect of subscribing teachers, and it is now seeking to build a profitable user-base of subscribing parents too. It also, like other social media platforms, ceaselessly introduces new features, content, and upgrades to keep its existing users engaged and active on the platform while enticing new customers to sign up. These network effects of rapidly growing users mean that the discourses and practices of schooling are influenced by ClassDojo as the platform itself shapes the language that teachers use and the practices they employ in the classroom.

Like many other social media platforms, ClassDojo is also seeking to generate profit from the sale of additional features. Commenting on its monetization strategy, ClassDojo chief executive said, ‘Your entertainment bundle is Netflix. Your music bundle is Spotify. What’s your education bundle?’ (Rodriguez, 2016). These ClassDojo education bundles have since materialised as pay-to-access features for parents. Its chief technology officer added, ‘It’s a huge distribution platform … to, in the long term, enable parents to be consumers for their child’s education’.

The direct-to-consumer model of paid-for additional content is typical of the shift in education towards platform monetisation models. It treats parents as consumers seeking advantage for their children through the purchase of ed-tech services. It also demonstrates how the logic of venture capital is playing an increasingly powerful role in shaping how education is perceived by parents. While education is bound by red tape, bureaucracy, mass-teaching pedagogies and standardised curricula, venture capitalists are funding models, like ClassDojo, that offer the convenience and immediacy of social media platforms.

Srnicek (2017) argues platform owners are becoming increasingly monopolistic owners of the main infrastructures of society. As an indispensable part of schooling amongst millions of teachers, the owners and investors of ClassDojo are claiming ownership of a significant part of the infrastructure of public education today. School communication increasingly flows through ClassDojo to penetrate family homes in real time. It has made student behavioural data into the central focus for interaction between teachers, leaders, parents and students. Teachers are using ClassDojo content, guidance and shared resources to shape what they teach and say in the classroom, and reproducing the particular educational vision of its Silicon Valley operators and investors. Venture capital funding is flowing to ClassDojo to enable it to scale even further across public education, creating network effects as new users are attracted to its services and contents too.

Having secured massive reach and a possible monopoly position as the social media platform for schools, ClassDojo is now acting to monetise the platform in order to secure its investors profit. In these ways, ClassDojo demonstrates how the political economy of platform capitalism has become a key part of contemporary public education. It is illustrative of an emerging model of ‘platform education’ where more and more functions of the school will be mediated by private ed-tech companies and social media business models.

Conclusion

This article has presented a critical perspective on ClassDojo as a way of identifying problems with the expansion of the ed-tech industry into public education. While recognising that many teachers welcome ClassDojo and find it a useful, inspiring and valuable addition to the classroom, we should also acknowledge that it is problematically tangled up in the commercialisation of education, the increasing influence of individualising positive psychology, the transformation of education policy, the normalisation of childhood surveillance and the reproduction of platform capitalism through the classroom.

The purpose of identifying these problems is to catalyse further conversation about the kind of education that is desirable for the future. As an exemplar ‘killer app’ for the classroom, ClassDojo, and the rest of the ed-tech market, is seeking to establish the future of education through restless expansion into classroom practices, school offices, and even family homes. In other words, the ed-tech industry is already inventing the future of public education by turning it into a set of engineering problems that can be fixed by Silicon Valley innovation and entrepreneurship.

Educational research has a responsibility to generate hard questions about such developments and ambitions. These are ‘ultimately public questions about the societal roles and responsibilities of educational research in relation to its ongoing ambitions towards the improvement in educational practice’ (Biesta et al, 2019, p. 3). Asking public questions about ed-tech and making research on it as publicly available as possible, in order to help inform educational improvement, is essential as education becomes increasingly subject to the private interests of ed-tech companies.

References

Baron, J. (2019) Classroom technology is indoctrinating students into a culture of surveillance. Forbes, 29 January: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessicabaron/2019/01/29/classroom-technology-is-indoctrinating-students-into-a-culture-of-surveillance/
Biesta, G., Filippakou, O., Wainwright, E. & Aldridge, D. (2019) Why educational research should not just solve problems, but should cause them as well. British Journal of Educational Research 45(1): 1-4.
Dobo, N. (2016) Organic adoption of one classroom technology leads to a seamless way to share other ideas. The Hechinger Report, 25 May: http://hechingerreport. org/organic-adoption-one-classroom-technology-leads-seamless-way-share-ideas/
EdSurge, (2016)
Following edtech money: How does money shape the U.S. K-12 edtech ecosystem?. EdSurge: https://www. edsurge.com/research/special-reports/state-of-edtech-2016/funding
Gillespie, T. (2010) The politics of ‘platforms’. New Media and Society 12(3): 347–364.
Jackson, A. (2016) A ‘very non-Silicon Valley’ startup is going viral among teachers and parents. Business Insider, 9 July: http://uk.businessinsider.com/ed-techstartup-classdojo-is-going-viral-2016-7
Jarke, J. & Breiter, A. (2019) Editorial: the datafication of education. Learning, Media and Technology 44(1): 1-6.
Lunden, I. (2019) ClassDojo, an app to help teachers and parents communicate better, raises $35M. TechCrunch, 28 February: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/28/classdojo-an-app-to-help-teachers-and-parents-communicate-better-raises-35m/
Manolev, J., Sullivan, A. & Slee, R. (2019) The datafication of discipline: ClassDojo, surveillance and a performative classroom culture. Learning, Media & Technology 44(1): 36-51.
Mead, S. (2013) Profile of ClassDojo founders Sam Chaudhary and Liam Don. Education Week, 11 June: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/sarameads_policy_notebook/2013/06/sam_chaudhary_and_liam_don_co-founders_classdojo.html
Newcomb, T. (2017) ClassDojo, Yale roll out new video series on mindfulness to help young students tame ‘the beast.’ The 74, 8 May: http://the74million.org/article/ classdojo-yale-roll-out-new-video-series-on-mindfulness-to-help-young-students-tamethe-beast
Pinto, L.E. (2016) Spectres of educational technology: ghost-busting as a curricular response. Antistasis 6(2): 8-11. https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/antistasis/article/view/24501
Rodriguez, S. (2016) ClassDojo wants to do for education what Netflix did for entertainment. Inc, 20 September: https://www.inc.com/salvador-rodriguez/classdojo-monetization-slack-classrooms.html
Selwyn, N. (2016) Is technology good for education? Cambridge: Polity.
Soroko, A. (2016) No child left alone: the ClassDojo app. Our Schools/Our Selves 25(3): 63–74.
Srnicek, N. (2017) Platform capitalism. Cambridge: Polity.
Tampio, N. (2016) Teaching ‘grit’ is bad for children, and bad for democracy. Aeon, 2 June: https://aeon.co/ideas/teaching-grit-is-bad-for-children-and-bad-for-democracy
Tufekci, Z. (2018) Why Zuckerberg’s 14-year apology tour hasn’t fixed Facebook. Wired, 16 April: https://www.wired.com/story/why-zuckerberg-15-year-apology-tour-hasnt-fixed-facebook/
Watters, A. (2018) Funding Edsurge and ‘the future of learning’. Hack Education, 29 December: http://funding.hackeducation.com/2018/12/29/edsurge
Williamson, B. & Piattoeva, N. (2019) Objectivity as standardization in data-scientific education policy, technology and governance. Learning, Media and Technology 44(1): 64-76.
Williamson, B. (2017a) Decoding ClassDojo: psycho-policy, social-emotional learning, and persuasive educational technologies. Learning, Media and Technology 42(4): 440-453.
Williamson, B. (2017b) Learning in the ‘platform society’: disassembling an educational data assemblage. Research in Education 98(1): 59-82.
Williamson, B. (2018) Comments on ClassDojo controversy. Code Acts in Education, 1 May: https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2018/05/01/comments-on-classdojo-controversy/
Williamson, B. (2019) Education for the robot economy. Code Acts in Education, 1 February: https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2019/02/01/education-for-the-robot-economy/

Ben Williams is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the Centre for Research in Digital Education and the Edinburgh Futures Institute, examining the intersections of digital technologies, science, and data with education policy and governance.

Ben’s current research focuses on two key themes. One is the expansion of educational data infrastructures to enable information to be collected from schools and universities, then analysed and circulated to various audiences. The second is the emergence of ‘intimate data’ relating to students’ psychological states, neural activity, and genetic profiles, and the implications for increasingly scientific ways of approaching educational policy and practice.

Ben previously published Big Data in Education: The digital future of learning, policy, and practice, maintain the research blog Code Acts in Education, and on Twitter Ben is @BenPatrickWill.

Why Exercise for Cognitive and Mental Health is Especially Important in the Senior Years

David Lubans, Angus Leahy, Jordan Smith and Narelle Eather make the case for continuing physical activity into the senior school years…

Introduction

You may not be surprised to read that physical activity declines dramatically during adolescence (Dumith et al., 2011) and less than 10% of senior school students are sufficiently active (Schranz et al., 2014). However, you may not know that evidence suggests low levels of physical activity among senior school students may contribute to poor mental health (North, 2015; Suetani et al., 2017).

These findings are particularly relevant to schools as 43% of young Australians report at least moderate levels of psychological distress (15% report high to very high levels of distress) (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018), and some suggest increasing time demands and pressure to excel in senior years as a reason for sacrificing time usually spent being active.

We conclude that there is a need for effective physical activity programs that are also time efficient. This is important because, although the NSW Department of Education policy recommends that students in Year 11 and 12 are provided with weekly access to a minimum of 150 minutes of physical activity each week (New South Wales Department of Education, 2017), very few senior school students actually receive this dose.

This is partly due to the misconception that allocating more time for study skills or revision over physical activity will improve academic performance. We argue that this view is ill-informed as there is a growing body of evidence that suggests students with higher levels of physical activity and aerobic fitness perform better on standardised academic tests and measures of cognitive function (Donnelly et al., 2016; Álvarez-Bueno et al., 2017).

What might we do?

Many teachers may be experiencing the benefits of high intensity interval training (HIIT) exercise through their out-of-school lives. Such approaches to exercise at school could also benefit your students at school and would fit within existing Departmental guidelines.

HIIT is a potent and time efficient method for improving physical health and mental health (Costigan et al., 2015; Logan et al., 2014) which typically consists of short, but intense bouts of activity interspersed with brief periods of rest or light activity. The main appeal of HIIT is that it can be completed in a shorter period of time in comparison to traditional moderate intensity aerobic exercise, whilst achieving similar and in some cases superior results. In our recent systematic review and meta-analysis (Costigan et al., 2015), we demonstrated that HIIT can improve cardio-respiratory fitness and reduce body mass index (BMI) in adolescents.

Although few studies have been conducted with adolescents, there is some evidence to suggest participation in HIIT can improve young people’s cognitive and mental health (Costigan et al., 2016; Moreau et al., 2017; Leahy et al., 2019). For example, in one of our earlier studies (Costigan et al., 2016), we demonstrated that engaging in weekly HIIT sessions had a consistently positive effect on students’ mood (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Mean feeling state scores reported by students before and after participating in HIIT (higher values represent better mood and the graphic represents difference in mood responses over 24 sessions)

Less than 100% effort can be good too

Many people associate HIIT with the ‘all out’ maximal (such as 100% of heart rate maximum) type of exercise tested by Michael Mosley in the BBC documentary ‘The Truth About Exercise’. This type of activity is unlikely to be palatable for adolescents or appropriate for delivery in the school setting. Alternatively, there is emerging evidence for the efficacy of less demanding HIIT protocols (for instance, 85% of heart rate maximum) that are still relatively brief (for example, 10 minutes) (Costigan et al., 2015).

Our Burn 2 Learn program

In partnership with the NSW Department of Education School Sport Unit, we developed the Burn 2 Learn (B2L) program for senior school students. Unlike previous HIIT programs that require complicated equipment, facilities and expert instructors, B2L has been designed to be ‘student-directed’ under the supervision of secondary school teachers using minimal resources. Our team has developed a full day professional learning workshop for teachers, which is accredited with the NSW Education Standards Authority at the ‘Highly Accomplished’ level. We have also designed curricular materials for teachers, HIIT task (Figure 2) and technique cards and a smartphone app to enhance participation among students.

To promote variety and enjoyment, we designed 11 different styles of HIIT workouts for students to choose from: Gym, Sport, Class, Quick, Hip-Hop, Combat, Brain, Rumble, Custom, Beach and Park.

Figure 2: Example Burn 2 Learn HIIT task card

The B2L program was designed using self-determination theory and is focused on enhancing students’ autonomous motivation for vigorous physical activity by satisfying their basic psychological needs for autonomy (feeling in control), competence (feeling capable) and relatedness (feeling connected with others) (Deci and Ryan, 1985). Teachers learn to facilitate the delivery of the B2L sessions using the SAAFE (Supportive, Active, Autonomous, Fair and Enjoyable) principles (Lubans et al., 2017) (Figure 3). Students’ need for autonomy is satisfied by providing them with opportunities for choice within sessions (e.g., type of activity, music playing, and training partner) and explaining the rationale for the program in an information seminar.

The introductory seminar reinforces the importance of exercise for cognitive health and academic performance. Competence is satisfied using positive and specific feedback from teachers, an explicit focus on effort over absolute performance (via heart rate feedback) and through the provision of resources designed to support the development of exercise skills. Finally, teachers are encouraged to adopt practices that support relatedness and group cohesion during HIIT sessions (for example, encouraging supportive behaviour among students such as ‘high fives’ and partner work) (Owen et al., 2014).

Figure 3: SAAFE principles for Burn 2 Learn session delivery

Positive results for teachers and students

In 2017, we conducted a pilot study to evaluate the B2L program in two high schools in the Hunter region (Leahy et al., 2019). We found that 2-3 HIIT sessions/week, each lasting ~10 minutes, increased students’ fitness and improved their well-being. Overall satisfaction of the program was high among students (4.0/5) and teachers (4.0/5). Students enjoyed the practical HIIT sessions, with ‘Sport HIIT’, ‘Class HIIT’ and ‘Gym HIIT’ the most popular types.

Teachers also expressed high levels of satisfaction with the professional development workshop (5.0/5) and were highly confident in their ability to facilitate the delivery of the program (5.0/5). Anecdotal discussions with teachers involved in B2L also highlighted the potential impact of HIIT on students’ behaviour in the classroom.

Today we had our best B2L session where all the students got in and had a go and that translated into the classroom immediately after, where I had my best theory lesson with that class. We were doing a textbook heavy lesson and the students appeared to be more focused providing me with quality answers. Even the students who normally muck up a bit were more on task today.

(Teacher responsible for delivering B2L)

Although our pilot study results were promising, it is important to replicate our findings in a larger cohort of students before making the B2L program available to all schools in NSW. We are currently conducting a cluster randomised controlled trial evaluation of the program in 20 secondary schools in NSW (~800 Grade 11 students). In this study we will test the effects of the B2L program on students’ cardiorespiratory fitness, muscular fitness, cognition and mental health. In addition, a subsample of students will: (i) provide hair samples to determine their accumulated exposure to chronic stress using cortisol testing and (ii) undergo multi-modal functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine changes in brain structure and function.

Next steps

A common criticism of school-based physical activity interventions is that they are rarely adopted and implemented by schools (Milat et al., 2013). With this in mind, we have designed the B2L program in partnership with the NSW Department of Education School Sport Unit and see support for ongoing provision of professional learning as essential to the success of such a statewide program.

Conclusions

Driven by pressures to perform well academically, students may choose to sacrifice physical activity for additional study time. Unfortunately, this may be having the opposite effect to that which they intended, as physical activity supports cognitive functioning and is a useful strategy for coping with stress generally.

Further, chronic stress undermines learning and can impair performance in high stakes examinations. Consequently, the senior school years would appear to be a particularly important time for adolescents to stay physically active. Programs such as B2L have the potential to bring physical and mental health benefits for young Australians. Importantly, such programs are achievable and can be delivered within existing school structures in the interests of all of your students’ health, well-being and learning.

References:

Álvarez-Bueno C, Pesce C, Cavero-Redondo I, et al. (2017) Academic achievement and physical activity: A meta-analysis. Pediatrics 140: e20171498.
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2018) National health survey: First results, 2017–18, Catelogue No. 4364.0.55.001. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Costigan SA, Eather N, Plotnikoff RC, et al. (2015) High intensity interval training for improving health-related fitness in adolescents: A systematic review and meta-analysis. British Journal of Sports Medicine 49: 1253-1261.
Costigan SA, Eather N, Plotnikoff RC, et al. (2016) High intensity interval training for cognitive and mental health in adolescents. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 48: 1985-1993.
Deci EL and Ryan RM. (1985) Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behaviour, New York: Plenum.
Donnelly JE, Hillman CH, Castelli D, et al. (2016) Physical activity, fitness, cognitive function, and academic achievement in children: A systematic review. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 48: 1223-1224.
Dumith SC, Gigante DP, Domingues MR, et al. (2011) Physical activity change during adolescence: A systematic review and a pooled analysis. International Journal of Epidemiology 40: 685-698.
Leahy AA, Eather N, Smith JJ, et al. (2019) Feasibility and preliminary efficacy of a teacher-facilitated high-intensity interval training intervention for older adolescents. Pediatric Exercise Science 31: 107-117.
Logan GR, Harris N, Duncan S, et al. (2014) A review of adolescent high-intensity interval training. Sports Medicine 44: 1071-1085.
Lubans DR, Lonsdale C, Cohen K, et al. (2017) Framework for the design and delivery of organized physical activity sessions for children and adolescents: Rationale and description of the ‘SAAFE’ teaching principles. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity 14.
Milat AJ, King L, Bauman AE, et al. (2013) The concept of scalability: Increasing the scale and potential adoption of health promotion interventions into policy and practice. Health Promotion International 28: 285-298.
Moreau D, Kirk IJ and Waldie KE. (2017) High-intensity training enhances executive function in children in a randomized, placebo-controlled trial. Elife 6: e25062.
New South Wales Department of Education. (2017) Sport and Physical Activity Policy. Available at:https://education.nsw.gov.au/policy-library/policies/sport-and-physical-activity-policy.
North BW. (2015) Under pressure: Senior students in high stakes assessment. School of Education, Faculty of Education and Arts. Sydney: University of New South Wales.
Owen KB, Smith J, Lubans DR, et al. (2014) Self-determined motivation and physical activity in children and adolescents: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Preventive Medicine 67: 270-279.
Schranz N, Olds T, Cliff D, et al. (2014) Results from Australia’s 2014 report card on physical activity for children and youth. Journal of Physical Activity and Health 11: S21-S25.
Suetani S, Mamun A, Williams GM, et al. (2017) Longitudinal association between physical activity engagement during adolescence and mental health outcomes in young adults: A 21-year birth cohort study. Journal of Psychiatric Research 94: 116-123.

David Lubans is a National Health and Medical Research Council Senior Research Fellow, Professor in the School of Education, and leads the ‘School-based Research’ theme within the Priority Research Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition at the University of Newcastle. He is internationally recognised for his expertise in school-based physical activity research.

Angus Leahy is a PhD student in the School of Education and Priority Research Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition at the University of Newcastle. His research focus is on physical activity, fitness, mental health, and cognition in the school setting.

Jordan Smith is a Lecturer in the School of Education, and co-deputy lead of the ‘School-based Research’ theme within the Priority Research Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition at the University of Newcastle.

Narelle Eather is a Senior Lecturer and researcher in the School of Education, Priority Research Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition at the University of Newcastle. Narelle’s research primary focuses on the development, implementation and evaluation of physical activity, fitness and sport interventions in school and community settings.

The Burn 2 Learn study is funded by the NHMRC and the NSW Department of Education. We would like to acknowledge Ross Morrison and James Boyer from the School Sport Unit and the other chief investigators on this study: Charles Hillman, Philip Morgan, Ronald Plotnikoff, Michael Nilsson and Chris Lonsdale.

Preparing for the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Education in Australia

Kalervo Gulson, Sam Sellar, Andrew Murphie and Simon Taylor argue we can act now to ensure the Australian experience of artificial intelligence in schools can be positive…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming a central part of contemporary life. However, AI is being introduced into education policy areas, specifically K-12 systems and schools, much faster than either research on its effects or regulation on its use.

In this article we will highlight some key areas relevant to education[i] including the connection between skills and AI, and possible ways to respond to, and prepare for, AI not only in schools but in broader society. We conclude with recommendations and links for helping students and citizens to learn more about AI.

AI broadly refers to autonomous computer systems that employ algorithmic networks to learn from patterns in large data sets in order to improve predictive abilities (Russell & Norvig, 2016; Walsh, 2016). The application of AI in combination with ‘big data’ promises new opportunities to solve complex and intractable social and political problems (Elish & boyd, 2017), but along with the opportunities AI brings there is a need for caution.

Education, skills and AI

There is consensus that automation that is part of Artificial Intelligence will substitute for some tasks and workers, although the nature and extent of this substitution varies. Furthermore, Hajkowicz et al. (2016) argue that to meet future workforce challenges Australian society will need to provide young people with the right skills for current and future demands, as well as providing workplace and lifelong learning to facilitate re-training.

In one of the first reports on AI in education, Luckin et al. (2016) warn against being seduced by new technology and argue for sustaining a strong focus on pedagogy. When it comes to what have been termed ‘21st century’ skills, Heckman (2011) emphasises the need for focus on ‘attentiveness, perseverance, impulse control, and sociability’ (p. 33).

Many frameworks of skills have been identified in the research literature and in national curricula. However, there appears to be some agreement regarding the broad categories of skills that are important, which include the kinds of cognitive skills that have traditionally been emphasised in formal education along with non-cognitive skills (both inter- and intrapersonal) and skills that enable people to interact effectively with information and communication technologies (ICT).

As Campolo et al. (2017) observe, the ‘[e]thical questions surrounding AI systems are wide-ranging, spanning creation, uses and outcomes’ (p. 30). In what follows we focus on: the ethical development and use of AI; preparing citizens for an AI world, which in this article can include students of all ages; and the application of AI in public policy areas like education.

Ethics and AI

It is important to broaden the types of professionals involved in developing AI (Campolo et al., 2017). Lack of diversity among developers will need to be addressed through strategies for improving the gender imbalance in STEM education (OECD, 2018). Luckin (2017) has also called for educationalists to work with AI developers, writing that ‘everyone needs to be involved in a discussion about what AI should and should not be designed to do’ (p. 121). As Campolo et al. (2017) observe, ‘training data, algorithms, and other design choices that shape AI systems may reflect and amplify existing cultural assumptions and inequalities’ (p. 4).

Education, health and other social policy areas are ‘high stakes’ domains for the implementation of AI and it will be important to take measures to avoid biases in decision-making in relation to determining capacity to learn, risk of disease, medical diagnoses and so on.

Regulation and data privacy

As machine learning and algorithms are increasingly embedded in the mediated infrastructure of everyday life, we will need mechanisms to increase transparency, regulation and algorithmic literacy, and also ways to monitor what algorithms are doing in practice and create effective accountability mechanisms (Ananny, 2016). This will include identifying areas of regulation that either need revising or creating.

As corporations provide and manage data systems in education (Williamson, 2017), key questions are: what happens to student, parent and other forms of data when it is used in systems, including who owns data?; and who has access (Zeide, 2017)?

Some suggestions point to the importance of individual ownership of data and opt-in rather than opt-out programs (Tene & Polonetsky, 2012). We might look at the use of Google Mail in schools as one example where opt-in could be trialled.

Use of AI in public agencies like schools

Much of the provision of automated systems is done under the proprietary knowledge of corporations and there has been a call for core public agencies, such as those responsible for criminal justice, healthcare, welfare, and education (for example, “high stakes” domains) ‘…[to] no longer use “black box” AI and algorithmic systems’ (Campolo et al., 2017, p. 1). What is meant by ‘black-box’ is that the workings of these systems is either secret (due to proprietary knowledge) or cannot be known, due to the ways in which calculations are made by some forms of Artificial Intelligence.

It is clear that as some decision-making becomes automated, there needs to be an acknowledgement of the narrowness that can emerge from automation if it lacks context. That is, system and school-based administrators ‘will need to rethink how they formulate goals and use data, while acknowledging the limits and risks of automated systems’ (Campolo et al., 2017, p. 13), especially the possibility of missing important contextual details that go into making complex social areas like education.

Additionally, educators have expressed concerns about the de-humanising effects of introducing robots into classrooms, as well as potentially encouraging authoritarian or dependent attitudes among children. There will be a need to consider whether new forms of AI-driven pedagogies may work at cross-purposes to curricula focused on human values, including the question of ethical uses of AI itself (Serholt et al., 2017).

Conclusion: What should we learn in an AI society?

Debate about how AI will reshape society in the next few decades focuses upon the question of whether technological change will be different this time, as compared to previous periods of significant disruption.

One of the most important things for those who work, teach and learn in schools is to become aware of how AI works, and what it can do and just as importantly cannot do. In the absence of all people becoming computer scientists, there are already attempts by national governments to provide avenues for citizens to become informed not just about what AI might mean for society, but to become informed about how AI works.

While anyone could do some of the well-known Coursera courses on AI, the Finnish government has provided an online course with the aim of teaching the basics of AI to 1% of the population, approximately 55,000 people[ii]. Anyone with access to the internet can enrol and complete this course, available here. In Australia, the NSW Department of Education has begun to commission reports, hold events and provide relevant resources, including an interesting free collection available here.

For educators and regulators alike, it is important to examine issues such as those outlined above whenever new proposals for automation and AI are put forward. It should not be assumed that AI providers or the creators of algorithms will do this work. The teaching profession and education authorities will need to invest resources and time into learning about, understanding and developing these new technologies together, preferably before they become too widespread in our education systems and schools.

References

Adamson, F., & Darling-Hammond, L. (2015). Policy pathways for twenty-first century skills. In P. Griffin & E. Care (Eds.), Assessment and teaching of 21st century skills: Methods and approach (pp. 293-310). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Ananny, M. (2016). Toward an ethics of algorithms: Convening, observation, probability, and timeliness. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 41(1), 93-117.

Campolo, A., Sanfilippo, M., Whittaker, R., & Crawford, K. (2017). AI Now 2017 report. New York: AI Now. Retrieved from https://ainowinstitute.org/AI_Now_2017_Report.pdf

Elish, M. C., & boyd, d. (2017). Situating methods in the magic of Big Data and AI. Communication Monographs, 1-24.

Hajkowicz, S., Reeson, A., Rudd, L., Bratanova, A., Hodgers, L., Mason, C., & Boughen, N. (2016). Tomorrow’s digitally enabled workforce: Megatrends and scenarios for jobs and employment in Australia over the coming twenty years. Brisbane: CSIRO. Retrieved from https://www.acs.org.au/content/dam/acs/acs-documents/16-0026_DATA61_REPORT_TomorrowsDigiallyEnabledWorkforce_WEB_160128.pdf

Heckman, J. J. (2011). The economics of inequality: The value of early childhood education. American Educator, 35, 31-47.

Luckin, R. (2017). The implications of Artificial Intelligence for teachers and schooling. In L. Loble, T. Creenaune, & J. Hayes (Eds.), Future frontiers: Education for an AI world (pp. 109-125). Melbourne: Melbourne University Press/ NSW Department of Education.

Luckin, R., Holmes, W., Griffiths, M., & Forcier, L. B. (2016). Intelligence unleashed: An argument for AI in education. Retrieved from https://www.pearson.com/content/dam/corporate/global/pearson-dot-com/files/innovation/Intelligence-Unleashed-Publication.pdf

OECD (2018). PISA 2015: Results in focus. Paris: OECD Publishing.

Russell, S., & Norvig, P. (2016). Artificial Intelligence: A modern approach (3rd ed.). Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited.

Serholt, S., Barendregt, W., Vasalou, A., Alves-Oliveira, P., Jones, A., Petisca, S., & Paiva, A. (2017). The case of classroom robots: teachers’ deliberations on the ethical tensions. AI & Society, 32(4), 613-631.

Tene, O., & Polonetsky, J. (2012). Big data for all: Privacy and user control in the age of analytics. Northwestern Journal of Technology, 11(5), 239-273.

Walsh, T. (2016). The singularity may never be near. arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.06462.

Williamson, B. (2017). Big data in education: The digital future of learning, policy and practice. London: SAGE Publishers.

Zeide, E. (2017). The structural consequences of big data-driven education. Big Data, 5(2), 164-172.

Kalervo N. Gulson is Professor of Education Policy in the School of Education, University of New South Wales.

Sam Sellar is Reader in Education Studies in the School of Childhood, Youth and Education Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University.

Andrew Murphie is Associate Professor in Media Studies in the School of Arts and Media, University of New South Wales.

Simon Taylor is a PhD candidate in Media Studies in the School of Arts and Media, University of New South Wales.

[i] This article is based on a report provided for the Gonski Institute of Education.
ttps://education.arts.unsw.edu.au/media/EDUCFile/Gonski_AIEd_Final_Aug2018_Formatted.pdf

[ii] https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612762/a-countrys-ambitious-plan-to-teach-anyone-the-basics-of-ai/?utm_medium=tr_social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=site_visitor.unpaid.engagement

‘Asians always do well’: Getting Behind the Stereotypes of ‘Ethnic Success’ in NSW

Christina Ho makes the case for improved understanding of the complex relationships between ethnicity, class and school achievement…

James Ruse tops the HSC’. ‘NAPLAN: Non-English speaking background students come out tops’.

These are some of the headlines demonstrating the so-called ‘ethnic advantage’ when it comes to schooling in NSW. Whether it’s NAPLAN results, HSC leader boards, or the composition of selective schools, children of migrants seem to enjoy extraordinary educational success. This paper takes a deeper look at the complex relationships between ethnicity, class and schooling in NSW, using data from the My School website. Students from language backgrounds other than English (LBOTE) comprise 30% of all students in NSW public schools. But this LBOTE category includes students who face enormous socio-educational disadvantage, as well as those highlighted in the media as schooling superstars. There is also evidence of self-segregation based on ethnicity and class. How can we use this information to better understand the diverse needs of NSW students?

The ‘ethnic advantage’

Every year, images of high achieving Asian-Australian students from selective schools feature in media coverage of HSC results. For example, James Ruse Agricultural High School in north-western Sydney has topped the HSC leader board for 21 years in a row.

Discussion of annual NAPLAN results also typically notes the strong results of students from LBOTE, who are now out-performing non-LBOTE students in many areas of the test (e.g. Tovey 2013; Gleeson 2016).

As the table below demonstrates, most selective schools are heavily dominated by LBOTE students, mostly from Asian backgrounds. They are also extremely socially advantaged.

Top Selective schools in Sydney (by HSC scores): Ethnicity and Socio-educational Advantage

These LBOTE figures represent a huge transformation over one generation. In the late 1980s, educational researchers were bemoaning the lack of NESB students in selective schools, which were overwhelmingly Anglo (Kalantzis and Cope 1988: 49).

Given the increase in migration from Asia around this time, it’s not surprising that Asian background students have become more numerous in our classrooms. But the growth in their numbers within selective schools in particular has led to the stereotype that Asians always do well in school.

Culturalist explanations are usually put forward: Chinese and other Asian cultures prize hard work and aspiration. Some put it down to Confucianism. Culturalist explanations are proposed by both admirers (‘they’re a model for the rest of us’) and critics (‘tiger mothers abuse their children by pushing them too hard’) (see Ho 2017).

Culturalist explanations have been around since the 1980s, when education researchers argued the existence of an ‘ethnic advantage’, challenging the previous association of disadvantage with LBOTE students. Birrell (1987) argued that family support and ‘ethnic’ valuing of education and upward mobility allowed LBOTE students to overcome any disadvantage related to migration. Bullivant (1988) explained high achievement in terms of the ‘migrant drive’ and ‘ethnic work ethic’.

The ‘ethnic advantage’ has been conveniently used to justify cuts to funding of ESL programs, which has declined steadily over the last 20 years (Creagh 2016: 279).

But: great variation within LBOTE

The category LBOTE includes any student who speaks – or whose parents speak – a language other than English at home. This means that it includes students from a wide range of English competency, from new arrivals who don’t speak English at all (and refugee children who have very little schooling), to children who are native English speakers, but whose parents speak another language.

LBOTE is a very broad category that is not disaggregated, so we can’t compare outcomes by English language proficiency or by specific ethnic group. In Australian educational data, ethnicity is only identified for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students (Lingard et al 2012: 319).

Researchers have noted that the LBOTE category hides great variation, with some students performing exceptionally well, and others at the opposite end of the spectrum. In fact, NAPLAN results show that variation among LBOTE students is greater than that among non-LBOTE students (Rice 2016; Creagh 2014; Lingard et al 2012). Similar results were found in earlier years with the category of ‘Non-English Speaking Background’ or NESB (Meade 1983).

But because on average, LBOTE students do not perform worse than Anglo-Australian students, and on some measures, perform better, there is now a stereotype of the high achieving LBOTE student, meaning that there are no equity issues that need to be addressed.

However, Creagh argues that the LBOTE data ‘are in fact hiding some of our most disadvantaged students’ (2014: 1). In particular, she shows that visa category has a dramatic impact on educational performance. Students of refugee background perform at the lower end of the national minimum standard, while those from skilled migrant backgrounds are well above average (Creagh 2014: 11-12).

While ESL (English as a Second Language) learners are included in LBOTE, their specific experience is lost in the focus on the average LBOTE outcomes, which look positive. Creagh argues that the ESL language learner has been ‘invisibilised’ (2016: 279). She summarises: ‘If a group of students who are not performing well on NAPLAN are rendered statistically invisible, then equity of educational outcome for this group is impossible (Creagh 2016: 285).

The highest LBOTE schools are disadvantaged

In fact, the schools most dominated by LBOTE students are almost invariably in disadvantaged areas. According to MySchool, there are 125 schools in Sydney that are 90%+ LBOTE. More than three quarters (76%) are public schools. Their median ICSEA (Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage) score is 992, compared to a median of 1054 for metropolitan Sydney (Author’s calculations based on MySchool data). This shows that these schools are socio-educationally disadvantaged. (i)

Most of the highest LBOTE schools in NSW are public schools in Western Sydney. The following postcodes have schools with a median LBOTE of over 90%.

Source: MySchool 2016, Census 2016

All of these high LBOTE schools are socio-educationally disadvantaged, according to their ICSEA scores. In particular, Fairfield and Cabramatta/Canley Vale are in the bottom 10% of ICSEA scores for metropolitan Sydney.

They are all also below average in terms of NAPLAN performance. This is measured by the NAPLAN Index, a composite score that equally combines the results of different cohorts and weights literacy-based domains equally with numeracy results. The overall average for the NAPIndex is 500 (Shepherd & Bonnor 2014). In metropolitan Sydney, NAPLAN Index scores range from 419 to 714, with a median score of 518. Auburn comes closest to this median, but all other areas in the table above are well below average.

I’ve also included the LBOTE figures for the overall postcode, to compare the ethnic profile of the schools with the communities they’re located in. In all cases, the schools have a higher LBOTE score than the postcode. This could indicate that Anglo-Australian families in these postcodes tend to be older, so don’t have school-aged kids, or if they do, they are avoiding their local schools. This mirrors international research that shows that education systems with school choice ‘have schools with higher levels of economic, ethnic, and ability segregation than the levels in the neighbourhoods in which children reside’ (Keels et al 2013: 242, see also Burgess et al 2005, Johnston et al 2006, Rangvid 2007).

What about Asian students in particular? It’s not possible to identify the experiences of particular ethnic groups within the LBOTE category. However, the 2011 Census tells us that the areas with the highest concentrations of speakers of Chinese, Vietnamese, Hindi and Tagalog (the most commonly spoken Asian languages in Australia) are: Parramatta, Liverpool, Blacktown, Fairfield and Hurstville. Apart from Hurstville, all are located in Western Sydney; and apart from Parramatta, all areas are below NSW average when it comes to weekly incomes.

While there are wealthier Asian migrant families found throughout Sydney and NSW, the areas with the highest concentration of Asian language speakers tend to be below average income areas. So the popular image of the Asian high achieving selective school student masks the reality that most Asian-Australian students do not attend highly advantaged schools.

Case study: Cabramatta/Canley Vale (postcode 2166)

Postcode 2166 is dominated by Asian migrants. The top three ancestries of residents were Vietnamese, Chinese and Cambodian in the 2016 census, together making up 59% of the residents. 65% of residents were born overseas, and 82% speak a language other than English at home.

It is a low income area. The median weekly personal income for people aged 15 years and over in 2166 was $408 (NSW average: $664).

Nine out of the eleven schools are public. One is Catholic and one is Buddhist.

The median LBOTE across the eleven schools is 94%. Interestingly, Pal Buddhist School has the lowest LBOTE (80%) while Sacred Heart Catholic School has the highest (99%). As mentioned, the LBOTE scores for schools are higher than those for the suburbs the schools are located in. Are Anglo-Australian families avoiding local schools in this area?

The median ICSEA is 931, well below the national average of 1000, and the Sydney average of 1054. Sixty percent of families come from the lowest quarter of socio-educational advantage. Only 4% came from the top quarter.

The median NAP Index for Cabramatta/Canley Vale schools is 494, well below the median of 518. However, three schools are above average in NAPLAN: Harrington Street Public School (which has an Opportunity Class), Sacred Heart Catholic School, and Canley Vale High School.

Schools in Canley Vale have attracted some public attention for improvement in NAPLAN results. In 2017, for the third year in a row, Canley Vale High School was included in the list of schools achieving above average NAPLAN results (Smith 2017). Meanwhile Canley Vale Public School won a 2016 Premier’s Award for Public Service for improving its students’ NAPLAN results (Fairfield City Champion 2016). These are remarkable achievements, given the level of disadvantage that characterises these school communities.

The NSW bigger picture: disadvantage & Indigenous communities

In NSW as a whole, the areas of greatest educational disadvantage are those with concentrations of Indigenous populations. The following table shows the ten most educationally disadvantaged areas in NSW, all of which have relatively large Indigenous communities.

The ‘whitest’ schools are highly advantaged

According to My School profiles, the lowest LBOTE schools in Sydney are either private schools on the North Shore or Eastern suburbs, or public schools located on the outer fringe of Sydney. The latter are predictable because these are overwhelmingly Anglo dominated areas, e.g. Windsor, Camden, Heathcote.

However, the schools on the North Shore and Eastern suburbs are located in often very multicultural suburbs, indicating that many Anglo-Australian students are travelling from other areas to attend these private schools, and also that local migrant families may be avoiding these schools.

In metropolitan Sydney there are 99 schools with a LBOTE score of 10% or under. Their median ICSEA score is 1074 (1108 for the private schools). Among the private schools, 44% of families come from the top quarter of socio-educational advantage, and the median NAP Index is 532.

My analysis mirrors that of the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre (BCEC) report, which shows that nine out of the ten most educationally advantaged areas in Australia are located in Sydney’s North Shore or Eastern suburbs (in addition to Camberwell in Victoria) (BCEC 2017: 70).

Top 10 advantaged areas in NSW

Case study: North Sydney/Kirribilli

North Sydney/Kirribilli is a wealthy harbour-front area housing eight schools, seven of which are private (North Sydney Public School is the only public school).

There is a dramatic contrast in the ethnic profiles of public and private schools in this area. The private schools have a median LBOTE of 11% (the lowest is Wenona at 7%). Meanwhile, North Sydney Public School is 46% LBOTE.

Predictably, the area’s schools are highly advantaged, with a median ICSEA of 1181. The most advantaged school is St Aloysius College, with an ICSEA score of 1234, and 91% of students coming from the most socio-educationally advantaged quartile.

Overall, 80% of students in this area’s schools come from the most advantaged quartile, and only 1% come from the lowest quartile of socio-educational advantage.

These schools NAPLAN performance is well above average. The median NAP Index for these schools is 561. Again St Aloysius is highest, at 604.

Given that this is a very wealthy area – with median weekly personal income ($1,418) more than double the NSW average ($664) – the levels of advantage within these schools is not surprising.

However, the relatively low LBOTE scores do not match the profile of these suburbs. According to the 2016 Census, 53% of residents in North Sydney and Kirribilli were born overseas, and 28% speak a non-English language at home. Eight percent are of Chinese ancestry. So the schools are much less culturally diverse than the suburbs in which they are located. This suggests that Anglo-Australians from other suburbs are sending their children to private schools in North Sydney in large numbers.

In the next suburb, Crows Nest is home to two selective schools, North Sydney Girls and Boys, which are more than 90% LBOTE. The comprehensive Cammeraygal High School is 44% LBOTE, similar to North Sydney Public School at 46%. These schools are disproportionately LBOTE, considering that the local area is only 28% LBOTE. There is a clear polarisation here, with LBOTE families disproportionately choosing public schools, and Anglo-Australian families disproportionately choosing private schools. In fact, the North Sydney area may well be one of the most ethnically polarised school areas in the country.

The pattern continues for the entire North Shore region. Across the North Shore, public and private schools are remarkably similar – they are all highly advantaged, and all high performing, even scoring identically on the NAP Index (555). The only difference is in terms of LBOTE, with public schools having more than twice as many LBOTE students as private ones, as the table below shows.

North Shore (postcodes 2060-2090)

Given there are no educational differences between public and private schools on the North Shore, at least according to NAPLAN scores, and there is very little difference in terms of social advantage, one has to wonder why there should be such

Conclusion

Despite the stereotype of the successful, over-achieving Asian student, in reality, being non-White in NSW is more likely to mean that you do not go to an advantaged school, and that you live in a below-average income area. Improvements in achievement in suburbs like Canley Vale are all the more impressive when seen in the context of disadvantage in these areas.

Conversely, those schools that are most dominated by Anglo-Australian students are split between schools in very Anglo-dominated suburbs, and schools in wealthy areas like the North Shore and Eastern suburbs. These schools are likely to be highly advantaged private schools, that ultimately act as bubbles of white privilege, despite their location within quite multicultural suburbs.

Selective schools are a conspicuous exception to this pattern. These high achieving, highly advantaged and high LBOTE schools have been largely responsible for the stereotype of the successful Asian student. While they provide a unique opportunity for a minority of high achieving students, they also contribute to the segregation and polarisation of our education system.

For example, if selective schools did not exist, we would arguably see more LBOTE students in elite private schools, helping them become more diverse and reflective of the diversity of the Australian population (but of course, not the socio-economic diversity, given their fees). MySchool figures show that in Melbourne, high performing private schools are much more culturally diverse than they are in Sydney. This is potentially because there are only four selective schools in Melbourne, which has contributed to a different cultural environment associated with elite schools.

And if selective schools did not exist, we wouldn’t have the best and brightest from suburbs all over Sydney abandoning their local schools to travel, sometimes across town, to attend selective schools. This would boost the performance of local schools as well as providing the social, financial and educational resources to those schools that come from having highly educated and aspirational families within the community.

So, the next time you see a media story about a successful Asian selective school student topping the state in Maths or Economics, remember that for every one of those types of students there are hundreds of other LBOTE students who are attending a disadvantaged school in a poor neighbourhood, and of course, everyone in between. And ultimately, the face of educational advantage in NSW is most likely to be white, in a wealthy suburb, and wearing a private school uniform.

This kind of polarisation in our education system is bad for kids’ education, and unhealthy for our society.

References:

ACARA (2017) ‘What does the ICSEA value mean?’ https://acaraweb.blob.core.windows.net/resources/About_icsea_2014.pdf

Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre (2017) Educate Australia Fair? Education Inequality in Australia, Bankwest and Curtin University.

Birrell, R. (1987) ‘The educational achievement of non-English speaking background students and the politics of the community languages movement’. The Economics of Immigration: Proceedings of a conference at the Australian National University 22-23 April 1987. L. Baker and P. Miller. Canberra, Australian Government Publishing Service.

Bullivant, B. M. (1988) ‘The ethnic success ethic challenges conventional wisdom about immigrant disadvantages in Australia’, Australian Journal of Education 32(2): 223-243.

Burgess, S., et al. (2005) ‘Parallel lives? Ethnic segregation in schools and neighbourhoods’, Urban Studies, 42(7): 1027-1056.

Creagh, S. (2016) ‘A critical analysis of the Language Background Other Than English (LBOTE) category in the Australian national testing system: A Foucauldian perspective’, Journal of Education Policy 31(3): 275-289.

Fairfield City Champion (2016) ‘Canley Vale Public School win Premier’s Award’, Fairfield City Champion, November 3, http://www.fairfieldchampion.com.au/story/4266531/canley-vale-public-school-win-premiers-award/)

Gleeson, A. (2016) ‘NAPLAN: Migrant students are outclassing Aussie kids in literacy and numeracy’, The Daily Telegraph December 13, http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/naplan-migrant-students-are-outclassing-aussie-kids-in-literacy-and-numeracy/news-story/ca5260a9f89458dfc835725cff3a05fe

Ho, C. (2017) ‘The new meritocracy or over-schooled robots? Public attitudes on Asian–Australian education cultures’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1315855

Johnston, R., et al. (2006) ‘School and residential segregation: An analysis of variations across England’s Local Education Authorities’. Regional Studies, 40(9): 973-990.

Kalantzis, M. and B. Cope (1988) ‘Why we need multicultural education: A review of the ‘ethnic disadvantage’ debate’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 9(1): 39-57.

Keels, M., Burdick-Will, J., and Keene, S., (2013) ‘The effects of gentrification on neighborhood public schools’, City and Community, 12 (3), 238-259.

Meade, P. (1983) ‘The educational experience of Sydney high school students: A comparative study of migrant students of non-English-speaking origin and students whose parents were born in an English-speaking country’, Report No. 3, Canberra, Australian Government Publishing Service.

Rangvid, B. S., (2007) ‘Living and learning separately? Ethnic segregation of school children in Copenhagen’. Urban Studies, 44 (7), 1329-1354.

Rice, S. (2016) ‘NAPLAN results reveal little change in literacy and numeracy performance – here are some key takeaway findings’, The Conversation December 13, https://theconversation.com/naplan-results-reveal-little-change-in-literacy-and-numeracy-performance-here-are-some-key-takeaway-findings-70208

Shepherd, B. & Bonnor, C. (2014) Equity in Australian Schooling: An Update, Prepared for the “Need to Succeed” Symposium 23 October, http://apo.org.au/system/files/41866/apo-nid41866-47061.pdf

Smith, A. (2017) ‘My School: the NAPLAN big improvers revealed’, The Sydney Morning Herald, March 8, http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/my-school-the-naplan-big-improvers-revealed-20170306-gus4wx.html

Tovey, J. (2013) ‘NAPLAN: non-English language background students in year 7 come out tops in NSW’, The Sydney Morning Herald December 13, http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/naplan-nonenglish-language-background-students-in-year-7-come-out-tops-in-nsw-20131213-2zc1n.html

About the author

Dr Christina Ho is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. She currently researches diversity and inequality in education in Australia. Her publications include ‘“For those who’ve come across the seas”: Australian multicultural theory, policy and practice’ and ‘Beyond the Hijab Debates: New conversations on gender, race and religion’.This paper was prepared for the Multicultural Education and Social Inclusion Conference, NSW Teachers Federation, 21 July 2017. To access a recording of Christine’s presentation click here.

(i)The MySchool website reports an ICSEA score for each school in Australia. These scores reflect parental education and occupation, the geographical location of the school and proportion of Indigenous students (ACARA 2017).

More Than ‘On-the-Job’ Skills: Why Your Students Will Need University Qualified TAFE Teachers

Pat Forward explains the importance of degree-level teaching qualifications to TAFE teachers…

Many K-12 teachers have family and personal connections with Technical and Further Education (TAFE). We rely daily on the technical expertise of TAFE graduates for much of the infrastructure and services we depend upon in our local communities. But TAFE does so much more than this for secondary school students, and for many others in society. We are sometimes less aware of what TAFE is really like and of who our TAFE colleagues are. Many of our students go on to become TAFE students, and this paper aims to examine the importance of TAFE teacher qualifications for TAFE teachers – and therefore for teachers in NSW public schools.

Over the past three decades, the impact of Competency Based Training (CBT) and Training Packages has had significant consequences for the TAFE teaching profession. The gradual implementation of the Certificate IV in Training and Education (CIV TAE) as the minimum, and then eventually the only, qualification requirement for teachers has undermined teachers’ professional status, and significantly eroded the workforce. As well, arguments for essential teaching conditions, such as time for preparation, assessment and collaboration has been made much harder by standards which diminish the importance of teaching qualifications in TAFE.

It is increasingly important, in the current debates around the future of TAFEs as anchor institutions in the sector, that we focus not just on funding and resourcing of the sector as a whole, but on the crucial importance of the TAFE teaching workforce. Support for degree-level teaching qualification for TAFE teachers, and a process of TAFE teacher registration, as defined against standards agreed with the teaching profession and the Australian Education Union (AEU) and embedded in qualifications, provide a powerful way forward for the sector.

How we got here

In the face of an aggressive and bipartisan market reform and privatisation agenda, the focus of much of the work of TAFE teachers over the past twenty years has been campaigning for increased government funding, and for the development of public policy which would elevate the significance of public education and public education institutions.

Teaching qualifications have always been critical for TAFE teachers. They prepare TAFE teachers for the challenging and complex work which they undertake every day. They allow teachers to develop and extend the skills and knowledge they have acquired in their vocation, and they establish a pathway for the future to enable continuous professional development and growth. Teaching qualifications are essential in an education institution which provides opportunities for a broad range of students across the full spectrum of Australian society – from young people at school to those seeking to re-enter the workforce after retrenchment or redundancy. Teaching qualifications are the symbols of skills acquired and knowledge learnt, and they are the currency which any professional is entitled to use in order to improve their prospects of obtaining a stable career and a vocation. It has always been supremely ironic that a sector whose currency is qualifications has worked so hard to deny its core teaching workforce access to appropriate, high-level teaching qualifications.

Education versus training

The reforms to TAFE introduced through the National Training Reform Agenda (NTRA) in the late 1980s and early 1990s saw Competency Based Training and eventually Training Packages replace the much more sophisticated approach to vocational and general education which occurred in the sector following the 1974 Kangan Report.

The struggle in the sector between education and training, and between the idea of teachers and industry trainers was part of an on-going attempt to diminish the role of teachers and education, and to replace it with the much more instrumental notion of an industry-driven or industry-led system, which prepared people narrowly for a job.

Initially, TAFE recruited teachers directly from industry as well as from schools, with teacher qualifications supplementing industry qualifications and experience following initial employment. This contrasted starkly with the schools sector’s robust teaching qualification as a requirement of entry to the profession, and where content expertise was enmeshed in the teaching qualification.

New TAFE teachers were often older and more experienced than new school teachers, and they came from a range of different backgrounds, including areas where there had been little or no emphasis on academic study. In some senses, TAFE teachers often have similar educational histories as their students, and this has an impact on the conception and design of qualifications.

Who is TAFE for?

TAFE has been the object of ongoing market reform since the mid to late 1980s. The effect has been to systematically place the needs of employers and the economy ahead of the educational needs of students. The broader social purposes of TAFE colleges, and the role that they have played for generations in regional, rural and remote communities have been undermined as a result of the reforms and attempts to privatise the sector.

The sector has been fragmented, with decreased government funding, increasing reliance on fee for service activity and increased student fees and charges.

The TAFE teaching workforce, at the core of the public TAFE system, has been undermined, and its professional status eroded. Teacher training and professional development have been underfunded or ignored, and employers in the sector have actively discouraged teacher education. The minimalist CIV TAE, universally rejected by teachers in the sector, but supported by governments, has undermined substantial teacher training. Universities have largely withdrawn from the delivery of TAFE and vocational education teaching degrees because there is simply no longer a market for them.

Lowering standards

The ascendancy of the CIV TAE, and the demise of degree-level teaching qualifications in TAFE has also had an effect on research into TAFE and vocational education. The funding link between research and teaching at university means that with so few TAFE teaching degrees now offered, there is almost no funding for independent research.

The main focus in the marketised vocational education sector has been on teachers needing to be responsive to customers in a market, rather than on the theory and practice of teaching and the social contexts in which teaching takes place. The CIV TAE Training Package was “industry’s” attempt to specify what it thought teachers should have. Reforms have taken place without considering the knowledge, skills and capacities teachers need to have, and indeed in many cases, already have.

The CIV TAE has now become the de facto minimum (and in many cases the only) qualification for people teaching, training and assessing in Registered Training Organisations (RTO), including all TAFE institutes in Australia. This is in part because all organisations wishing to “deliver” accredited training need to be registered, and teachers and trainers are required to hold the CIV TAE, or demonstrate equivalent competencies, or work under the direct supervision of a person who holds these competencies, regardless of whatever other teaching qualifications they hold. In some states, the CIV TAE is the only qualification requirement.

What does it take to teach at TAFE?

There is a paucity of information about the TAFE and vocational education teaching workforce. For a range of reasons, it has proved difficult to collect any reliable data about the workforce, and this compounds the problem of workforce planning into the future. The TAFE and vocational education sector have very high levels of casual employment, significantly higher than most other sections of the workforce.

The sector has struggled to establish and maintain an identity as a discrete sector. Schools have broadened their focus at the senior end into vocational education through VET in schools, and many universities have entered the vocational education market.

The practice of teaching at TAFE needs to be better understood, and studied. Independent research into the practice would better inform the needs of the teaching workforce. Throughout the last twenty years, TAFE teaching itself has been defined residually, that is not teaching at schools, and not teaching at universities.

This has diminished the work that TAFE teachers do, and the preparation and support that they need to become dual professionals, both experts in teaching and experts in their industry areas. In many ways, it is this that defines TAFE teachers above all else: their teaching and industry expertise. However, it is this also which has made them vulnerable to the undermining of the core element of their identity as teachers.

A way forward

A sustained re-investment in teaching qualifications, and a plan which draws on the experience and expertise of those in the sector and in industry, could provide education in a staged and manageable way to teachers once they have entered TAFE with their industry qualifications and experience.

Ongoing professional development, and genuine programs in industry, developed in close co-operation with industry itself, could maintain and build the specialist industry knowledge which TAFE teachers are so well known for.

Qualifications which prepare TAFE teachers must be underpinned by skills and knowledge in specific industry areas, but critically, TAFE teaching also requires teaching expertise, the capacity to develop teaching strategies, based on knowledge of individuals learning styles, on pedagogy, on what impact disadvantage has on individuals, and on how hard it is to learn if students have low levels of literacy and numeracy.

TAFE teaching is about industry skills and knowledge, but it is equally about understanding students, and providing encouragement and resources and knowledge beyond the just-in-time demands of resource-poor training.

The following principles could guide a future plan to ensure high quality, professional TAFE teaching qualification:

Teacher education must include integrated formal off-the-job and informal on-the-job dimensions, to allow teachers time to critically reflect on their practice and theory with other teachers at a similar stage and with more experienced teachers;
Teaching qualifications should have embedded standards (agreed with the profession) which are the aims of the qualification – the things teachers should achieve during their study and practice;
The design of TAFE teacher education programmes should include the practice of teaching and theories of teaching, learning and assessment (including theory and practice associated with the specialist or industry area); and both of these should be approached critically and creatively;
Recognition of prior learning needs to be transparent and widely facilitated to prevent teachers undertaking irrelevant learning;
There needs to be a clearer recognition of high-level teaching capability in vocational education, and this must be embodied in a process of registration;
Any strategy to improve the qualification profile and professional development of TAFE teachers needs to acknowledge the reality that, for many, initial and additional study will need to be undertaken while the teacher is employed.

TAFE is a critical part of Australia’s public education system, and we must ensure public school students and their communities have a strong and high quality TAFE system. A well-qualified TAFE teaching workforce is central to this.

Pat Forward is the Federal TAFE President for the Australian Education Union.

The Making of a Teacher: Why NAPLAN is not Good Enough for Us

Richard Gill has directed the finest Australian Operas. He looks back on his time as a teacher and considers NAPLAN’s place in education today…

It might be expected that I will write about the efficacy of Music Education in the lives of children. I have written thousands and thousands of words on this subject and am always happy to do so.

However, I am now at that stage of my life where I think we have to see things as they really are.

Getting real

Quality Schools, the title of the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools, or, “Gonski 2.0”, contains a sentence which says:

Australia has an excellent education system but our plateauing or declining results highlight that while strong levels of investment are important, it’s more important to ensure that funding is being used on evidence-based initiatives that are proven to boost student results.

First, we do not have an excellent education system. If we did, we would not be plateauing (such a politically correct euphemism for failing).

Why do we need to boost results? Is schooling about results? It is hard to believe that in 2018, in a world so rich with wonderful things, all we can think about in a school is results.

How insulting this is to teachers. Is that why you teach? To get results which can be measured by others?

We cannot love what we do not know

As I work to improve our music education system, I am only too well aware of forces that seemingly conspire at every turn to frustrate the creative teacher and reward narrow ‘results’.

I was drawn to teaching because I loved reading novels, poetry and plays and loved music. I still do love all these things. I am also aware that I owe debts to people who helped me directly or indirectly.

We cannot care about those things we do not love or know, and so we need, in this country, to let our teachers know that there are some of us out there who do care about you, who do share the concept of a love of learning for its own sake, who don’t give a damn about a NAPLAN score, and who will go to the barricades for you and fight for the right for you to teach children properly.

Section 582, 1958

Allow me to introduce Mrs. Holder…

Mrs. Holder, a Lecturer in English, stood at the front of our section, Section 582 at the then Alexander Mackie Teachers’ College on a frosty September morning in 1958 and uttered the immortal words which I have never forgotten:

Plan, teach, test.

Section 582, listen to me very carefully. If you don’t plan you can’t teach and if you can’t teach you can’t test and if you can’t test you have no idea what the children know. Remember – plan, teach test.

Plan, teach, test

At the age of sixteen, I was the youngest member of my section, having passed the Leaving Certificate in 1957 with Bs in English, Ancient History and Modern History and an A in French. Notice the lack of Maths and Science!

I had applied to go to the then New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music to train as a High School Music Teacher, but my complete lack of Theory and Harmony led the examining panel to suggest to me that were I to complete Sixth Grade Theory and Sixth Grade piano in that year I would be awarded a scholarship in 1959. They were as good as their word and in 1959 I made it to The Con.

In between times I had accepted a Teachers’ College Scholarship to Mackie as one couldn’t be certain of anything, and failure at tertiary level was real. No appeals, no show cause, no “I had a nose-bleed in the exam”; just fail!

So it was that as the appointments to primary schools for practise teaching period were posted, I was sent to Eastwood Primary School.

It was decided that I should be given a very difficult class of all boys, a 5D, and from day one with this class and their brilliant teacher, Mr. Peter Black, my life changed. Mrs. Holder was my supervisor so I planned, taught and tested to insanity.

I still have my three exercise books of lesson preparations with a comment given to me by Mr. Black on every lesson.

I could hardly wait to get to school each day and every day was a joy.

NAPLAN? … Anyone? … No?

So what has all of this to do with the iniquitous NAPLAN?

Even as a very young student teacher it was patently clear to me that the individual classroom teachers had an amazingly detailed knowledge of their pupils.

Morning teas and lunches in the staff room, apart from the usual banter, were often detailed discussions about children and their progress, or lack of it, indicating to me that a classroom teacher was, in fact, constantly assessing and evaluating her or his students indirectly without having to write reams of pointless information.

If a parent wanted to know something about a child, an interview was arranged with the teacher.

While there were often fireworks, some parents believing that their children were direct descendants of Einstein and the Virgin Mary, with all the attendant virtues, most parents were content with the reports which the classroom teacher could provide orally with an astonishing level of detail and depth of knowledge of the child in question.

Know thy students

On the matter of syllabus and curriculum, there were documents available for teachers to use which most of the teachers with whom I worked chose to consult rarely or chiefly ignore.

I think this was because they knew what levels their children were attaining in all areas and had realistic expectations of what they could do. In short, they created their own curricula.

The bright classes were well above average in every discipline, and a class such as mine, the fabulous 5D, was working at its own level. There was no point in doing activities or teaching concepts out of reach of the children.

On one memorable afternoon, I was given a spectacular lesson in over-reach by Mr Black.

I had spent the entire one-hour lunch break creating a solar system on the blackboard, labelling the planets, tables of figures and the like. It was a visual triumph. There was more coloured chalk in this masterpiece than Leonardo had ever dreamed of.

I gave the lesson during which I had the feeling that the kids couldn’t have cared less. At the end of the lesson Mr. Black asked me to wait behind after school to discuss what I had done.

During the discussion he said:

“These kids don’t have a concept of 10, let alone a concept of millions. The figures you gave them were meaningless to them. They have nothing to relate to and you gave them no real insights.

The use of coloured chalk, however, was very effective. See you tomorrow.”

I was shattered but knew that I had given a really dud lesson. At the same time, I was really grateful for the frank advice. Mrs. Holder, who had also sat in on the lesson, agreed and rammed home the point:

“You planned nicely but irrelevantly. You taught nothing, they learned nothing and therefore you couldn’t test them. Better luck next time.”

I still have those comments in my practice teaching exercise book lesson plans.

What worked about these times?

The points I am making are:

these teachers were fundamentally autonomous;
they devised their own curricula and syllabuses to suit their classes;
they collaborated with each other and shared ideas;
teaching was not competitive and there was no Federal interference;
they enjoyed their work, in the main, and the word ‘stress’ was unknown;
they knew the strengths, weaknesses and potentials of their charges;
they tested officially only twice a year;
a school report was a short one-page affair;
no one, and in some cases not even parents, knew their charges better than the teacher.

While many of these points would still apply today, NAPLAN has destroyed collegiality, created competition, created stressed-out parents, teachers, Principals and students and, above all, has promoted a continually sliding scale of under-achievement nationally.

NAPLAN is not diagnostic. Never has been and never will be.

If the robots are permitted to take over marking students’ writing, the next idea will probably be to hire a robot to teach our children too. Creepy!

Looking to our future

No one, but no one, knows Primary school children better than the classroom teachers. Parents who think that a NAPLAN result is an indicator of a child’s abilities, capacities or potential are seriously deluded. All a parent has to do is make an appointment to see a teacher, who can give the best diagnostic information about the child.

As I travel the country teaching classes and doing workshops, I always ask teachers and Principals what they think of NAPLAN. I haven’t yet met a Primary school teacher who has a good word to say about NAPLAN. Some Principals tell me they are frightened to speak about NAPLAN because they feel they have to toe a party line.

Recently, I was giving a workshop in which my ten minute attack on NAPLAN was greeted with enthusiastic applause from the assembled teachers. At the end of the workshop a very timid teacher came up to me, looked around the room several times before whispering “Thank you for that. We are not allowed say anything about NAPLAN to anyone or we will get into trouble.”

She looked once more around the room and then fled.

I hadn’t realised until that moment that we were living in a totalitarian state.

NAPLAN is not good enough for us

Surely teachers should be encouraged to have all sorts of views about all sorts of subjects without imposing any views on their students, but encouraging them also to have views and ideas and to have all of these views without fear.

It seems to me we go to school for two reasons and two reasons only: to learn how to learn together, and to learn how to think for ourselves. NAPLAN encourages neither of those precepts. The stranglehold of literacy and numeracy has hijacked all serious learning and enquiry.

Literacy and numeracy are NOT disciplines or subjects. They are states or conditions at which one arrives as a result of being well educated.

Schools which abandon their Arts disciplines in favour of more time given to literacy and numeracy are betraying their children, insulting their teachers, depriving their children’s minds of genuine creative growth, limiting their imaginations and training them to be all the same.

Music, Art, Dance, Drama and so on are essential in the life of a child. It is through endless hours of play, fantasy, imaginative games, songs, dances, painting and the like that children begin to make sense of the world. Stories, nursery rhymes, nonsense rhymes, acting out little scenes, together with the other activities already mentioned, are the stuff and lifeblood of education. Children engaged in these activities learn to love learning.

This attitude to education is recognised in countries which seem to perform consistently well in all areas of learning. Have we anything to learn from them? Or are we too busy testing First Grade children?

Why are we so obsessed with assessment? Why the absence of commensurate treatment following this relentless ‘diagnosis’?

Why aren’t we as a nation totally devoted in our education programs to those disciplines which promote creative and imaginative thinking, and lead children down the genuine path to literacy and numeracy?

Hope

I’ve seen in this country some brilliant creative teaching which fired up the minds of the children in an extraordinary way. It was inspiring at every level and something every teacher could do.

Teachers need to stand up and be counted and we need to rid this country of an iniquitous and destructive assessment system. I am not suggesting for one minute that children shouldn’t be tested; remember Mrs. Holder’s wise advice: plan, teach, test. Simply that, in very early education testing is the job of the teacher, not some outside authority who has no real idea of your classroom.

Recently, I attended a Kindergarten assembly at which each child had a specific sentence to read. What was brilliant was that the teacher had devised the sentences according to each child’s ability so that each child was successful in the eyes of the school community.

Why is this brilliant? Because it meant that the teacher was very well aware of what his children could do and he didn’t need an outside authority to help him.

Let’s all aim for a NAPLAN-free future and a return to teacher autonomy accompanied by appropriate fiscal remuneration for all good teachers.

Life is short and art is long. The minds, souls, hearts and imaginations of our children are immeasurable, priceless, invaluable and bursting with ideas. I want to hear those ideas so I can learn something too.

Richard Gill AO, founding Music Director and Conductor Emeritus of Victorian Opera, is one of Australia’s most admired conductors and music educators. He has been Artistic Director of the Education Program for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Artistic Director of OzOpera, Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra, and Artistic Advisor for the Musica Viva Education program. He is the Founder and Director of the National Music Teacher Mentoring Program, Music Director of the Sydney Chamber Choir and the inaugural King & Wood Mallesons Conservatorium Chair in Music Education, at the Conservatorium High School, Sydney.

“Perhaps it’s just as well that Leonard Bernstein is dead. Otherwise he’d probably have to relinquish his great reputation as a musical educator – or at least share it with Sydney’s Richard Gill.”

John Carmody, The Sun Herald

Professional Standards: Threats and Possibilities

Tom Alegounarias suggests that teachers should be aware of moves towards deregulation masquerading as progressive public policy…

While the world needs an effective teaching profession more than ever before, the essential elements of teaching’s professional standing are being discarded in key jurisdictions around the world. It is worth reflecting on how quickly and effectively Australian policy for supporting the teaching profession has evolved, and the implications for continuing reform, in the global context.

In his significant November 2000 Report for the NSW government on the quality of teaching – Quality Matters[i], Dr Gregor Ramsey dubbed teaching the first profession, the profession of professions. He noted that teaching is the professional practice most necessary for building other professions. All others – doctors, dentists, actuaries, pass through our hands on their way to professional status.

teaching is the professional practice most necessary for building other professions. All others – doctors, dentists, actuaries, pass through our hands on their way to professional status.

Dr Ramsey did not and could not have meant that teaching pre-dates other professions, as the idea that teaching is and should in all circumstances be a profession was still being debated, even among teachers, well into the 1970s. By the time of Dr Ramsey’s report there was no question of the importance of professional status among teachers. The point of his report was to describe the elements of professional structures and cultures that would secure the professional status of teaching into the future.

That report was the first of a series of policy and legislative advances that have arguably provided Australia with the most coherent regulatory and policy frame for supporting teaching in the world.

Cutting a long story very short, Ramsey’s work led to the establishment of the NSW Institute of Teachers and a Professional Standards Framework which was ultimately adapted and adopted to become the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) Australian Professional Standards for Teachers[ii].

Of course, no important policy flower is ever cultivated in isolation, and this work was nurtured by professional bodies from around Australia, including important contributions by teacher unions, and boosted by federalist government activism, of both the cooperative and competitive sort.

Moreover, in places like Scotland a form of minimum standard for registration as a teacher had been in place since 1965[iii]. In the United States the work of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards was implementing a formal recognition process for outstanding teachers[iv]. The Australian Council for Educational Research played a key part in bringing many ideas to Australia[v] and academic researchers were drawn to the space between theory and application that Professional Standards represent.

So the provenance of success is myriad, and I don’t intend to claim exceptional standing when I note that in 2000 I was the CEO of the NSW Institute of Teachers as this particular policy approach was set in legislation for the first time anywhere in Australia or the world. This policy which was transcribed into AITSL’s charter shortly after AITSL was established is generally still supported across the profession, including by the teacher unions that were subsequently excluded from AITSL’s governance arrangements – but only after the standards charter was adopted nationally.

policy approach was set in legislation for the first time anywhere in Australia or the world

As a result, I do claim some insight into the policy pressures, sectional perspectives and conceptual breakthroughs that originally resulted in the particular form of the policy. And the relevance here is what insight this might provide for dealing with the current reaction against professional standing for teachers in places like England and parts of the United States.

Unfolding the standards

I won’t describe here every element of the Australian Standards Framework and associated policies that make it both unique and significant, but a couple of dimensions are worth noting.

One is the availability of accreditation as an outstanding teacher – either at Highly Accomplished or Lead Teacher. This places outstanding teaching in a context of professional growth with all other teachers. Outstanding teachers and leaders evolve their practice on the basis of knowledge gained as students and in practice, not independently from collegial experience.

The Framework also includes requirements for Initial Teacher Education graduates. The capacity to be accredited or registered at Proficient Teacher level, and subsequently at Highly Accomplished or Lead is built on knowledge gained through a recognised university degree, complemented subsequently by prastice and further development.

The Standards were developed by practicing teachers. A range of representative bodies including teacher unions nominated individuals that dedicated months of time to developing drafts that were subsequently independently validated by teachers in different contexts. Teachers themselves exercise judgment as to who meets the standards, within a strict system of oversight, run largely by accredited teachers. Outstanding teachers, for example, are selected from among those that are regarded by their peers, including principals, as indeed being outstanding practitioners, and who are already active in providing leadership and support in their schools and classrooms.

The integration of graduate qualifications with effective and outstanding teaching in a single framework represents teachers’ expectations of themselves as a coherent profession.

The Standards are a reference point for determining professional standing. In exercising consistent judgment against these high standards teachers are issuing an assurance to the community that systems are in place for every student to be taught by a high quality teacher. The Standards describe this expectation. Judgments against the Standards enact it. This is the essence of a profession. It is independent from but related to employment practices. Employers, that is, schools or systems, can and should be able to exercise judgment in selecting individuals to employ as teachers.

This is the essence of a profession

The point of a profession is that this choice is exercised within the accreditation processes designed to protect the interests of the community and the status of the practitioners.

This is important and virtuous public policy, and the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers make it happen.

Slipping standards

But it would be wrong to present the Australian situation as a heralding of inexorable progress, with variations emerging on recognisable principles in similar jurisdictions. In fact, in many places around the world, the policy dynamic for quality teaching is in the opposite direction.

In these places there is an emphasis on deregulating qualifications and aligning the right to be called a teacher directly and simply with employment status.

In 2010, England abolished its General Teaching Council. Now, if you Google Unqualified Teacher England, you will see endless pages of advertisements placed by schools. In the United States the Global Financial Crisis caused a reversal of previous gains in requiring minimum qualifications for teaching in many states.

In Sweden and Norway, there is what appears a reluctance to even describe what constitutes quality teaching, beyond broad ethical statements, for fear of undermining the individual’s autonomy, leaving the formal status of teacher to be a simple function of employment and tradition.

From a policy development perspective, these conflicting approaches from relatively similar socio-economic environments is not a surprise. The two approaches to regulating teaching reflect a deeper set of values being applied to a common challenge.

The challenge is to lift educational attainment. There is increasing awareness among governments of the importance of education to a jurisdiction’s relative competitiveness and prosperity.

In a global economy with easily shifting capital flows, the relative advantage of developed economies is in the quality of the ‘human capital’ which might attract services and creative industry investment. This makes the quality of education a primary social and economic policy lever. The single most direct policy lever for improving educational attainment is teaching.

We teachers may want to emphasise complex contextual factors that influence our effectiveness, but for decades now the story has been a simple one among legislators – lift teaching to lift educational outcomes to lift investment.

The broad approaches to achieving this objective represent archetypal public policy values. The deregulatory approach has been the most common frame for policy reform of the past 30 years.

Put crudely, it places trust in the judgments of individuals pursuing their perspective, with dispersed and localised accountabilities. Having been, over these decades, a focus of political contestation, it is perhaps better understood than the regulatory approach represented by formal standards.

The regulatory standards approach draws on principles of collective, or at least organised and shared, responsibility and faith in technical expertise. In the case of teaching it also relies on government recognising that expertise.

A true profession

The principles represented by a regulatory Standards approach go to what constitutes a profession in the first place. The history of professions draws on collective protection of standards on an ethical basis. The idea and history of professions is also closely tied with the establishment and growth of universities.

It is also arguable that professional status and formal professional standards draw intrinsically from principles of evidence and observation and order that are inherent in modernity and even enlightenment thinking. Faith in the role of professional judgment and expertise is the shared method in matters requiring expert judgment, whether that be law, engineering or accounting. And in each of these there are statements of practice that act as a common reference point for validating that judgment.

It is not possible to have a profession without common and agreed standards of practice. Not necessarily as prescriptions, but as bases for connecting judgments and therefore being in professional practice.

When the current teaching Standards approach was being developed in the early 2000s in NSW it represented a new perspective on teaching for legislators. As they considered what was then and for them a completely new way of thinking about teaching, some ‘first principle’ arguments came to the surface.

Those most opposed to Standards for teachers argued exactly that teaching was not a profession. It was either an ethical vocation or a form of paid public exposition. They also argued that creating a Standards and Accreditation framework would give teachers the sort of power over labour supply that only ‘real’ professions can be trusted to exercise. While those opposed were a minority, in bureaucratic and legislative circles there were regular murmurings intoning Dracula and blood-banks.

There were two arguments that the deregulators brought up as practical examples of why teaching should not be regarded as a profession.

The first was that the quality of initial teacher education did not warrant it, that individuals emerge from degrees without the uniformity of quality that a true profession would insist on. In professions the relationship between the practice and the theoretical base is tight and individual members of the profession are vigilant to ensure that quality is upheld.

The second argument was that teachers resist recognising and celebrating outstanding quality from among their members, which a true profession uses to drive both status and improvement. The solution from their perspective to addressing the challenge of quality teaching was: Part 1, Deregulate entry so that teaching qualifications as such are not required for appointment as a teacher; Part 2, Instigate a system of performance pay linked directly either to principal/employer judgment, or to outcomes data.

Maintaining high standards…

Deregulators highlighted the advantages of such an approach above the Professional Standards approach. Getting teachers to agree on a set of Standards that would also make sense to the broader public would be impossible they said; and a deregulated approach would be a lot cheaper to maintain.

I am hoping that at this stage of the article the reader will recognise the currency of those arguments in recent public debate.

Abolishing licensing or registration requirements for being a teacher and implementing crude performance pay systems are common reflexive responses to perceived crises in education internationally.

The arguments most often emanate from outside education[vi].

Education policy sways with the winds generated by the bigger debates on how to run a modern society and economy.

It’s the market versus the government, again.

The contest of ideas on how to promote teaching is not over, including in Australia, and arguments made against Professional Standards have not been defeated. While the Chicago School has disciples they will be vigilant on professional teaching Standards, waiting for data.

The areas of vulnerability first identified by de-regulators with regard to Professional Standards are still demanding attention. Accreditation of teachers at the higher levels of Highly Accomplished and Lead is advanced in NSW, where forms of financial recognition are either in place or about to be introduced across all school sectors. But some states are not committed, and internationally only the most secure (but effective) jurisdictions, like Singapore, have taken up the challenge. To hold off the performance pay push accreditation processes for Highly Accomplished and Lead must maintain the quality in professional judgment demonstrated so far. But it must also accelerate the rate of recognition of outstanding teachers. Being resistant or even lethargic in identifying and rewarding quality teaching is akin to issuing an invitation to deregulators to come on in and have a go.

The most active area of policy work since the establishment of the Standards has been Initial Teacher Education. The previous Federal Government’s introduction of unlimited funded undergraduate places has complicated efforts to ensure that all graduates meet the appropriate standards, in all disciplines. It is not in fact clear in what circumstances and in what ways Initial Teacher Education qualifications can be regarded as professional degrees, or generalist degrees. That is not a comment on the quality of those qualifications, but on the distance we still need to travel towards professional coherence with initial teacher education. An authentic webbing of the work of teacher educators and teachers has not yet been achieved and must be a priority.

An authentic webbing of the work of teacher educators and teachers has not yet been achieved and must be a priority

The policy reversals for the teaching Standards project in some important jurisdictions is best understood as a deregulatory public policy approach being applied to teaching, rather than an evolution of educational policy thinking.

The deregulation option was there when the Professional Standards Framework was first being formed in NSW, and it is still available to any policy maker who loses faith in the value of accrediting teachers against Standards.

What is at stake is the status of teaching as a profession.

[i] https://www.det.nsw.edu.au/teachrev/reports/reports.pdf

[ii] https://www.aitsl.edu.au/australian-professional-standards-for-teachers

[iii] http://www.gtcs.org.uk/about-gtcs/who-we-are/history-of-GTCS.aspx

[iv] http://www.nbpts.org/national-board-certification

[v] http://research.acer.edu.au/teaching_standards

[vi] https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeleef/2013/10/24/a-key-reason-why-american-students-do-poorly

Tom Alegounarias is the Chair of the NSW Education Standards Authority.

Preschool: Two Years are Better Than One

Stacey Fox makes the case for improved access to high quality preschool education and professional learning …

A child’s brain develops more in their first five years than it will for the rest of their life. During this time, vital foundations are laid that will equip children to be capable and confident learners, to have good executive function and emotional regulation, build positive relationships with others, and participate in society throughout their lives. Quality early education plays a key role in supporting children’s development. Australia needs well-trained and well-supported educators and quality early education services to ensure all children can start school with the foundations they need to thrive.

Universal access to two years of a high quality preschool (or kindergarten) program is one of the best ways to amplify children’s learning and development, and to lift educational achievement in Australia. Providing two years of high quality preschool programs, delivered by skilled and well-supported early childhood educators, gives every child in Australia the opportunity to reach their potential and can be a real contributor to Australia’s social and economic prosperity into the future.

High quality preschool programs improve children’s early cognitive and social and emotional skills, strengthening their readiness for school. These early gains are sustained, as the impact of high quality preschool continues to be evident in primary school academic assessments, social and emotional well-being in adolescence, and high school graduation rates.

Since the introduction of Universal Access to preschool in 2009, Australia has made progress in the proportion of children enrolled in a preschool program in the year before school. But most of our peer countries in the OECD already provide at least two years of preschool and have done so for decades. Countries in our region are rapidly ramping up access to two years of preschool, framing this as a necessary investment in human capital and future productivity.

Countries in our region are rapidly ramping up access to two years of preschool

Investing in an additional year of preschool is the next big policy opportunity for Australia.

Link between early childhood development and school outcomes

Each year, at least 62,000 children start school experiencing significant vulnerabilities in key areas of development (Australian Early Development Census 2016). This is 22 per cent of all children, more than one in five. Around half of those children are vulnerable in multiple areas.

Children from low socio-economic backgrounds are much more likely to experience developmental vulnerability (Figure 1), but there are children across the community, and in every classroom, who are struggling. Half of all children who are developmentally vulnerable are in the bottom two income quintiles (their family incomes are in the lowest 40%), and the other half are in the middle and upper quintiles.

Figure 1: Developmental vulnerability (measured by the AEDC) by community socio-economic status (measured by SEIFA)(Australian Early Development Census 2016) Click on Image below to download.

Reducing the number of children who start school significantly behind their peers is a key strategy for boosting educational performance, ensuring young people are equipped with the range of skills and capabilities they will need for a lifetime of learning, and improving the well-being and lifetime outcomes for children.

Young children are learning and developing an enormous range of critical foundational skills in the years before they start school. These key areas of early childhood development – physical health and well-being, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive skills, and communication skills and general knowledge – have been shown to predict children’s later outcomes in health, well-being and academic success.

Children who do not have the opportunity to fully develop these foundational skills can struggle significantly in their transition to school, throughout their education and with their movement into the workforce.

The case for two years of preschool

Attending the right amount of a high quality preschool program is one of the few proven strategies for lifting outcomes for all children. Its effectiveness is borne out in Australian and international research (AIHW 2015; Barnett et al. 2013; Goldfeld et al. 2016; Zaslow et al. 2010), with leading Australian child development researchers concluding that “preschool attendance was consistently associated with the lowest odds of developmental vulnerability” (Figure 2).The impact of preschool is seen across the socio-economic spectrum (Figure 3). Please click on the images to download

Figure 2: Preschool attendance and development vulnerability (Goldfeld et al. 2016)

Figure 3: Impact of preschool by socio-economic status (Goldfield et al. 2016)

The potential impact of preschool is, however, influenced by:

The quality of the preschool program and the learning environment children experience;
The ‘dose’ of preschool that children have access to; how many hours, over how many years, they attend preschool programs.
Key findings from the international research literature are that:
Starting early and staying in for longer is beneficial for many children – studies from Europe, the US and UK show consistent benefits from two rather than one year of preschool.
Disadvantaged children benefit the most – a range of studies highlight substantially greater impacts on cognitive and social and emotional outcomes for more disadvantaged children.
The quality of programs matters – low and medium quality programs deliver very little short or long-term impacts, but the impact of high quality programs persists over time.
Preschool programs improve cognitive as well as social and emotional outcomes – research on the long-term impacts of preschool highlights the interaction of academic and social and emotional skills on lifetime education and employment.

Starting preschool at age 3 and attending for two years appears to have the greatest impact on child outcomes. For disadvantaged children in particular, one year of preschool is not an adequate dose for closing achievement gaps that are already present at age 4. For example:

Analysis of the impact of preschool on PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS consistently identify that students who attended more years of preschool receive higher scores (an average of 33 points higher) in these key international benchmarking tests (Mostafa & Green 2012; Mullis et al. 2012; Mullis et al. 2016).
The landmark Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) study found that, at age 16, students who had spent longer in preschool (between two or three years) obtained higher total scores in secondary examinations, better grades in English and in Mathematics, and participated in more subjects/exams in secondary (Taggart et al. 2015).
The Abbott Pre-K preschool program, a high-quality program delivered to around a quarter of children in New Jersey, also found that two years of preschool, starting at age 3, had much larger persistent effects on achievement in Grade 4 than one year (Figure 4). The strong impacts of this program are attributed to the provision of support for professional learning and continuous quality improvement mechanisms (Barnett et al. 2013, p. 19).

Two years of preschool is good for schools too

High levels of developmental vulnerability in a classroom, or significant variation in children’s underpinning skills and knowledge, make a teacher’s role even more complex and places additional pressure on schools to adequately meet the needs of all children in their community.

Children experiencing developmental vulnerability are likely to need significantly greater support in the classroom. This may range from physical challenges, like difficulty undoing buttons, managing lunch routines and sitting still, to challenges following instructions, communicating with other children and managing emotions. Teachers must utilise sophisticated teaching and learning strategies to develop and extend each child’s learning, but this can be very challenging when children start school with very different capabilities.

It appears that for many students, the achievement gap evident at the start of school continues to grow as they progress through school (Goss & Sonnermann 2016; Lamb et al. 2015).

Research shows that “all children in a classroom tend to learn more during a given year if the average skill level in the classroom at the year’s start is higher” (Bartik 2014, p. 56). The overall improvement in attainment in classrooms where a smaller proportion of children experience developmental vulnerabilities is likely to come both from peer effects, the influence children have on each other’s learning, as well as from the enhanced capacity of the teacher to direct adequate time and resources to the students who require additional assistance (Burke & Sass 2011; Henry & Rickman 2007; Neidell & Waldfogel 2010).

Universal access to high quality preschool for all children is one of the most effective strategies to help children start school on a more equal footing.

School and community stories taken from the Australian Early Development Census show how schools are working in partnership with early education and care services to reduce developmental vulnerability in their community (AEDC 2017).

Early childhood educators change children’s trajectories

There is growing community recognition and government support for the important role of teachers, and the importance of providing appropriate training and support to enable effective, high-impact teaching. However, this recognition has not been equally extended to early childhood educators, who – in spite of their pivotal influence during a fundamental stage in children’s learning and development – are often still regarded as child-minders rather than educators.

The evidence is very clear that preschool programs achieve substantial and sustained impacts on children’s development and well-being, but that they need to be high quality to do so. Highly skilled and well supported educators are essential for high quality learning environments.

The quality of a learning environment in early education settings is, to a large extent, determined by the capacity of educators to provide responsive interactions and to construct a learning program that engages and extends children in developmentally appropriate ways (Cascio & Whitmore Schanzenbach 2013; Yoshikawa et al. 2013). This requires an in-depth understanding of early cognitive and social development, and a sophisticated approach to designing learning opportunities that progressively develop and extend a broad range of complex, fundamental skills – while working with large groups of young, energetic children.

All educators need high-quality initial qualifications and effective placements in collegiate, supportive environments that allow educators to develop and test new skills. Effective leadership, access to professional learning opportunities, positive work environments and appropriate remuneration all enhance the capacity of educators to deliver high quality learning environments for children.

The early education and care system does not provide the same pay and conditions for its educators as those enjoyed by school teachers, and early childhood educators often experience isolation, high levels of churn, low pay, restrictive working conditions and limited access to professional learning.

In order to have a positive impact on children’s long-term outcomes, and to change the trajectories of children experiencing developmental vulnerability, early education must be high quality – and it will be necessary for Australia to invest in its early years workforce.

Introducing an additional year of a preschool program, targeted at 3 year olds, will require a workforce strategy, to boost the number of early childhood educators, and resources to support existing educators to deliver a high quality preschool program that engages and meets the needs of 3 year olds.

To be high quality, preschool programs for 3 year olds need to be developmentally appropriate, designed around the way 3 year olds learn best – through exploration and inquiry, free and guided play, rich engagement and conversation with educators, opportunities to practise and master new skills, and positive relationships with peers and educators.

It is important that a preschool program for 3 year olds should not be a ‘pushed down’ curriculum or ‘sped up’ learning experience, and should not simply replicate the 4 year old preschool program.

a preschool program for 3 year olds should not be a ‘pushed down’ curriculum or ‘sped up’ learning experience

Some of the ways a preschool program can be developmentally appropriate for 3 year olds include:

Approaches to programming that give children the opportunity for emerging skills to be practised and mastered, with the support and encouragement of educators;
Smaller group learning experiences that don’t place unfair demands on 3 year olds’ listening skills and capacity to be actively engaged in the group experience;
Reflecting 3 year olds’ developing ability to wait, be patient and share with others in the design of activities, for example, by giving each child their own resource and gradually building their capacity to work collaboratively;
Learning experiences designed around the attention span of 3 year olds, including planning fewer but richer and more engaging experiences that will capture children’s interest, sustain their attention, and build their ability to focus over time;
Supporting 3 year olds’ flourishing expressive and receptive language, helping them tune into the rhythms of language, and building their confidence as communicators through responsive conversation;
Exploring basic numeracy concepts such as counting, sorting, classifying, comparing and patterning;
Identifying opportunities for play-based exploration of basic science concepts, supported by questioning, hypothesising and scaffolding children’s everyday experiences;
Outdoor play that helps 3 year olds to progressively develop new skills, build their strength, confidence and coordination.

Yoshikawa et al. (2013) suggest that professional learning models that provide ongoing reflective coaching for educators, combined with assessments of child progress that are used to inform and individualise instruction, best allow educators to monitor the progress of each child in the classroom and modify their content and approach accordingly.

The path to two years of preschool in Australia

For nearly two thirds of Australian 3 year olds, participation in early education and care is the norm (Figure 5). However, only a small proportion of 3 year olds are enrolled in a program led by an early childhood teacher, not all are attending for the number of hours per week they need to, and the children most likely to miss out are the ones who will benefit most. There is no national policy or funding to support access to a preschool program for all 3 year olds (although some states support some cohorts of children experiencing disadvantage to attend preschool).

only a small proportion of 3 year olds are enrolled in a program led by an early childhood teacher

Figure 5: Proportion of 3 year olds attending any early education and care, 2015 (ABS 2016; Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision 2015)

There is a clear opportunity to leverage high current participation rates by 3 year olds, existing investment in early education and care, the ongoing roll-out and future components of the National Quality Framework, and the existing National Partnership Agreement between the Commonwealth and states and territories that provides preschool in the year before school, up for re-negotiation this year.

It is both appropriate and feasible to build on the platform provided by the existing service system – including long day care and sessional preschools – to provide universal access to preschool in the two years before formal schooling begins.

Consideration should also be given to how best meet the needs of the approximately 5 per cent of children experiencing multiple and complex forms of disadvantage (including children known to the child protection system) who require much more intensive provision of the highest quality early education.

To capitalise on the opportunity to lift children’s academic and life outcomes through an additional year of preschool, the challenge is to:

Ensure all 3 year olds already attending early education and care services receive an adequate ‘dose’ of sufficiently high quality preschool; and
Ensure the children currently missing out due to financial and non-financial barriers have the opportunity to participate.

At the same time, we need to continue the work already underway across the country to lift the quality and impact of early education and care in Australia, including through delivering world-class pre-service education for teachers and other educators, developing and skilling up leaders in the early childhood sector, and using evidence and data more effectively.

References:

ABS (2016), Preschool Education, Australia, 2015, Canberra, http://abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4240.0Main+Features12015?OpenDocument.

AEDC (2017), Community Stories, Australian Government Department of Education and Training, http://www.aedc.gov.au/resources/community-stories .

AIHW (2015), Literature Review of the Impact Of Early Childhood Education and Care on Learning and Development: Working Paper, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Canberra.

Australian Early Development Census (2016), National Report 2015: A Snapshot of Early Childhood Development in Australia, Australian Government Department of Education and Training, Canberra.

Barnett, S., Jung, K., Youn, M-J. & Frede, E. (2013), Abbott Preschool Program Longitudinal Effects Study: Fifth Grade Follow-Up, National Institute for Early Education Research, New Jersey.

Bartik, T. (2014), From Preschool to Prosperity: The Economic Payoff to Early Childhood Education, WE Focus Series, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, Kalamazoo.

Burke, M. & Sass, T. (2011), Classroom Peer Effects and Student Achievement, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Boston.

Cascio, E & Whitmore Schanzenbach, D 2013, The Impacts of Expanding Access to High-Quality Preschool Education, Brookings Institute, Washington DC.

Goldfeld, S., O’Connor, E., O’Connor, M., Sayers, M., Moore, T., Kvalsvig, A. & Brinkman, S. (2016), ‘The Role of Preschool in Promoting Children’s Healthy Development: Evidence From an Australian Population Cohort’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, vol. 35, pp. 40-8.

Goss, P. & Sonnermann, J. (2016), Widening Gaps: What NAPLAN Tells us About Student Progress, Grattan Institute, Melbourne.

Henry, G.T. & Rickman, D.K. (2007), ‘Do peers influence children’s skill development in preschool?’, Economics of Education Review, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 100-12.

Lamb, S., Jackson, J., Walstab, A. & Huo, S. (2015), Educational Opportunity in Australia 2015: Who Succeeds and who Misses Out, Centre for International Research on Education Systems, for the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University, Melbourne, http://www.mitchellinstitute.org.au/reports/educational-opportunity-in-australia-2015-who-succeeds-and-who-misses-out/ .

Mostafa, T. & Green, A. (2012), Measuring the Impact of Universal Pre-School Education and Care on Literacy Performance Scores, Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies and Societies, London.

Mullis, I., Martin, M., Foy, P. & Drucker, K. (2012), PIRLS 2011 International Results in Reading, IMSS & PIRLS International Study Center, Boston College and International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, Massachussets, viewed 27 July 2016, http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/pirls2011/downloads/P11_IR_FullBook.pdf.

Mullis, I., Martin, M., Foy, P. & Hooper, M. (2016), TIMSS 2015 International Results in Mathematics, TIMSS and PIRLS International Study Centre, Lynch School of Education, Boston College, Boston, http://timss2015.org/wp-content/uploads/filebase/full%20pdfs/T15-International-Results-in-Mathematics.pdf.

Neidell, M. & Waldfogel, J. (2010), ‘Cognitive and Noncognitive Peer Effects in Early Education’, The Review of Economics and Statistics, vol. 92, no. 3, pp. 562-76.

Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision (2015), Report on Government Services 2015: Part 3 Early Childhood Education and Care – Attachment, Productivity Commission, Canberra.

Taggart, B., Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P. & Siraj, I. (2015), Effective Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education Project (Eppse 3-16+): How Pre-School Influences Children and Young People’s Attainment and Developmental Outcomes Over Time, Department for Education, London.

Yoshikawa, H., Weiland, C., Brooks-Gunn, J., Burchinal, M., Espinosa, L.M., Gormley, W.T., Ludwig, J., Magnuson, K., Phillips, D. & Zaslow, M. (2013), Investing in Our Future: The Evidence Base on Preschool Education, Society for Research in Child Development and Foundation for Child Development.

Zaslow, M., Anderson, R., Redd, Z., Wessel, J., Tarullo, L. & Burchinal, M. (2010), Quality Thresholds, Features, and Dosage in Early Care and Education: Secondary Data Analyses of Child Outcomes, Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Washington.

Dr Stacey Fox is Acting Policy Program Director at the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University. The Mitchell Institute is committed to an education system that equips all young people to be creative, entrepreneurial, resilient and capable learners, and works from early childhood through to tertiary education. Stacey primarily works in the Mitchell Institute’s early childhood research and policy stream. She recently co-authored, with Myra Geddes from Goodstart Early Learning, a significant report on two years of preschool, Preschool – Two Years are Better Than One: Developing a Universal Preschool Program for Australian 3 Year Olds – Evidence, Policy and Implementation. http://www.mitchellinstitute.org.au/author/staceyfox/

This article was first published in Professional Voice, Vol. 11, Issue 3 Summer 2017 https://www.aeuvic.asn.au/news-media/professional-voice

Next Big Thing in Education: Small Data

Pasi Sahlberg and Jonathan Hasak

First published in Washington Post, 9 May 2016

One thing that distinguishes schools in the U.S. from schools around the world is how data walls, which typically reflect standardized test results, decorate hallways and teacher lounges. Green, yellow, and red colors indicate levels of performance of students and classrooms. For serious reformers, this is the type of transparency that reveals more data about schools and is seen as part of the solution to how to conduct effective school improvement. These data sets, however, often don’t spark insight about teaching and learning in classrooms; they are based on analytics and statistics, not on emotions and relationships that drive learning in schools. They also report outputs and outcomes, not the impacts of learning on the lives and minds of learners.

These data sets, however, often don’t spark insight about teaching and learning in classrooms

After The No Child Left Behind Act became law in 2001, education legislation in the U.S. required all students in grades 3 to 8 each year and once in high school to be tested in reading and mathematics using external standardized tests. On top of that states had their own testing requirements to hold schools and teachers accountable. As a result, various teacher evaluation procedures emerged in response to data from these tests. Yet for all of these good intentions, there is now more data available than can reasonably be consumed and yet there has been no significant improvement in outcomes.

there is now more data available than can reasonably be consumed

If you are a leader of any modern education system, you probably care a lot about collecting, analyzing, storing, and communicating massive amounts of information about your schools, teachers, and students based on these data sets. This information is “Big Data,” a term that first appeared around 2000, which refers to data sets that are so large and complex that processing them by conventional data processing applications isn’t possible. Two decades ago the type of data education management systems processed were input factors of education system, such as student enrolments, teacher characteristics, or education expenditures handled by education department’s statistical officer. Today, however, Big Data covers a range of indicators about teaching and learning processes, and increasingly reports on student achievement trends over time.

Despite the outpouring of data, international organizations continue to build regional and global data banks. Whether it’s the United Nations, the World Bank, the European Commission, or the OECD today’s international reformers are collecting and handling more data about human development than before. Beyond government agencies, there are global education and consulting enterprises like Pearson and McKinsey that see business opportunities in Big Data markets.

Among the best known today is the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which measures reading, mathematical, and scientific literacy of 15-year-olds around the world. OECD now also administers an Education GPS, or a global positioning system, that aims to tell policymakers where their education systems place in a global grid and how to move to desired destinations. OECD has clearly become a world leader in the Big Data movement in education.

pundits and policymakers often forget that Big Data, at best, only reveals correlations between variables in education, not causality

Despite all this new information and benefits that come with it, there are clear handicaps in how Big Data has been used in education reforms. In fact, pundits and policymakers often forget that Big Data, at best, only reveals correlations between variables in education, not causality. As any introduction to statistics course will tell you, correlation does not imply causation. Data from PISA, for example, suggests that the “highest performing education systems are those that combine quality with equity.” What we need to keep in mind is that this statement expresses that student achievement (quality) and equity (strength of the relationship between student achievement and family background) of these outcomes in education systems happens at the same time. It doesn’t mean, however, that one variable would cause the other. Correlation is a valuable part of evidence in education policymaking but it must be proved to be real and then all possible causative relationships must be carefully explored.

The problem is that education policymakers around the world are now reforming their education systems through correlations based on Big Data from their own national student assessments systems and international education data bases without adequately understanding the details that make a difference in schools. A doctoral thesis in the University of Cambridge, for example, recently concluded that most OECD countries that take part in the PISA survey have made changes in their education policies based primarily on PISA data in order to improve their performance in future PISA tests. But are changes based on Big Data really well suited for improving teaching and learning in schools and classrooms?

We believe that it is becoming evident that Big Data alone won’t be able to fix education systems. Decision-makers need to gain a better understanding of what good teaching is and how it leads to better learning in schools. This is where information about details, relationships and narratives in schools become important. These are what Martin Lindstrom calls Small Data: small clues that uncover huge trends. In education, these small clues are often hidden in the invisible fabric of schools. Understanding this fabric must become a priority for improving education.

information about details, relationships and narratives in schools become important

To be sure, there is not one right way to gather Small Data in education. Perhaps the most important next step is to realize the limitations of current big data-driven policies and practices. Too strong reliance on externally collected data may be misleading in policy-making. This is an example of what small data look like in practice:

Reduced census-based national student assessments to the necessary minimum and transfer saved resources to enhance the quality of formative assessments in schools and teacher education on other alternative assessment methods. Evidence shows that formative and other school-based assessments are much more likely to improve quality of education than conventional standardized tests.
Strengthened collective autonomy of schools by giving teachers more independence from bureaucracy and investing in teamwork in schools. This would enhance social capital that is proved to be critical aspects of building trust within education and enhancing student learning.
Empower students by involving them in assessing and reflecting their own learning and then incorporating that information into collective human judgment about teaching and learning (supported by national big data). Because there are different ways students can be smart in schools, no one way of measuring student achievement will reveal success. Students’ voices about their own growth may be those tiny clues that can uncover important trends of improving learning.

Edwards Deming once said that, “without data you are another person with an opinion.” But Deming couldn’t have imagined the size and speed of data systems we have today. Automation that relies on continuously gathered data is now changing our daily lives. Drivers today don’t need to know how to use maps anymore when they can use smart navigators that find them the best routes; airline pilots spend more time flying on autopilot than by hand. Similar trends are happening in education systems with countless reformers trying to “disrupt” schools as they are.

Edwards Deming once said that, “without data you are another person with an opinion.” But Deming couldn’t have imagined the size and speed of data systems we have today

Big Data has certainly proved useful for global education reform by informing us about correlations that occurred in the past. But to improve teaching and learning, it behooves reformers to pay more attention to small data – to the diversity and beauty that exists in every classroom – and the causation they reveal in the present. If we don’t start leading through small data we might find out soon enough that we are being led by big data and spurious correlations.

Jonathan Hasak, based in Boston, is working to change public policies to better support youth who are disconnected from the labor market and disengaged from school. Follow him on twitter @JonathanHasak

Available online at Pasi Sahlberg Blog: : http://pasisahlberg.com/next-big-thing-education-small-data/

Public and Proud: Reclaiming the Essence of Public Schooling in Australia

Alan Reid

A large achievement gap between rich and poor blights Australian education – and the gap appears to be widening. Australia is near the bottom of OECD countries in terms of equity in education.

A major cause of the gap is that successive governments have diminished the strength of public education and, in so doing, increased the social stratification of Australian schools.

This trend has major social and economic consequences for all of us. If these are to be addressed, governments need to properly fund public schools. However, adequate funding is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to strengthen public schools. Accompanying the decline in funding to public schools has been a trend to privatise them, which is diluting some of the important features of public education.

basing strategies on agreed understandings about the essence of being public

I will argue that both the decline in funding and the trend to privatise public schools need to be tackled simultaneously by basing strategies on agreed understandings about the essence of being public.

The neglect of public schooling

The policy neglect of public schools can be traced back to the introduction of systematic federal funding to private schools in the 1970s. If the public funding of private schools had been organised around a needs-based model as was originally intended by the Whitlam government, it could have ended very differently. But it wasn’t. Starting with the Fraser government, funding policies began to neglect the concept of need and foreground the principle of entitlement.

The entitlement principle resulted in increasing amounts of public money going to private schools, with a consequent expansion of that sector at the expense of public education. Increasingly public education has come to be seen as a safety net provision for those who cannot afford private education, rather than as a public good.

Over time, the total amount of funding from Commonwealth, State and Territory governments closed the gap between the per capita funding of students in the public and private sectors. The most recent MySchool data shows that when like schools are compared in these sectors many private schools are receiving amounts close to that of public schools.

Add in the income from fees, and the average per capita income that many private schools have to spend on teaching, resources and facilities exceeds that of public schools, sometimes by a considerable amount.

Increased funding has enabled private schools to enhance their market appeal through such means as improving facilities and creating smaller classes – which in turn attract aspirational parents. It has led to a steady drift of students from the public system almost entirely comprising those from higher socio-economic status backgrounds.

The consequences for Australian education

The public education system now carries over 80 per cent of all students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds. Of course this pattern is uneven across the public system which is itself becoming increasingly fragmented with differences between schools in terms of resources and student backgrounds.

Such developments have a number of serious consequences for Australian education, including that they widen resource disparities between schools, reduce educational outcomes particularly for students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds, and diminish the social and cultural mix of schools and thus the capacity of schools to promote social and intercultural understanding.

There is an urgent need to change the current inequitable approach to funding schools so that there is a fairer distribution of funds based on need. In particular, additional public money must be directed to the most disadvantaged schools, most (but not all) of which are in the public system.

Funding is not the only issue for public schools

But funding is not the only issue. Increased funding to private schools has occurred in a policy environment which promotes choice in an education market. In this environment public education has come to be seen by policy makers as a safety net provision for those who cannot afford private education, rather than as a public good.

What are the dimensions of public education that must be protected and enhanced?

This is compounded by the call for public schools to win back ‘custom’ by taking on the trappings of private schools. The problem is that those schools which do so inevitably have to jettison some of the characteristics that are so central to public education.

So, while a fairer funding model is needed to reverse the drift to private schools, it is not enough on its own. A new funding model may reduce disparities in resources between schools and sectors as a whole, but it will do nothing about the creeping privatisation of public education. A strategy is needed to address both these issues simultaneously.

The problem is that public discussion about education is being conducted in the absence of agreed understandings about what constitutes the essence of public education. Without such understandings education policy and practice can actually work to dilute those features of public education which make it such an important part of Australian democracy.

So, an important precursor to changing current policy directions is to refresh the foundation principles upon which our great system of public education has been built. By offering a common language for public discussion, an agreed framework for public education would achieve a number of outcomes.

Why an agreed framework is essential

First, it would emphasise the individual and public benefits which derive from public education. In so doing it would promote the idea that public education is the schooling system of first choice, rather than a safety net for those who can’t afford private education.

promote the idea that public education is the schooling system of first choice

Second, it would provide a powerful public justification for the importance of a well-resourced public education system for Australian society, and would demonstrate the damaging effects of policies which produce large resource disparities between schools.

Third, it would identify those characteristics of public education about which our society can be most proud, and which must not be lost. These could constitute public benchmarks against which to judge many aspects of policy and practice, including what is expected of private schools for receiving public money.

In short, the first step in addressing the drift away from public schools and the associated stratification of the Australian schooling system lies not in the current trend of making public schools more private, but rather in (re)emphasising their public characteristics. What are the dimensions of public education that must be protected and enhanced?

Three fundamental dimensions of a framework for Australian public education

In a recent paper for the Australian Government Primary Principals Association (AGPPA), I argue that there are at least three fundamental dimensions of a framework for public education which must work together – to neglect one of them is to weaken the whole. They are:

Public education as a public good

This dimension relates to ‘ownership’. In this usage, public education is the same as a public utility: owned by the state, funded from taxes provided by the public, and managed by the state on the public’s behalf. The idea of public education as a public good is a powerful dimension that must be protected in contemporary Australia. From this perspective, public education should be understood not as a commodity to be used solely for the benefit of individuals, but as a community resource to which everyone has rights of access and which is non-exclusionary.

a community resource to which everyone has rights of access and which is non-exclusionary

The key principles of public schools as public goods are that they are free, compulsory and secular. Each of these principles are under threat today and must be protected and promoted, for without them the idea of universal public education can only be a mirage.

Public education for the common good

The lack of focus on the public purposes of public education has created the conditions within which the idea of public education as a safety net has been able to flourish. A rejuvenated understanding of public education therefore demands attention being paid to its role in advancing the common good. It is the second dimension of a framework for public education.

There are at least two key aspects to consider. The first is to create and maintain a system of education which itself models a commitment to the common good. This includes ensuring that education is available free to all on a comparatively equal playing field on a non-exclusionary basis, and has policy and practices which are consistent with, and promote, the common good IN education. The second aspect relates to the role of public education FOR the common good. This involves public schools developing the skills, dispositions and understandings of children and young people, such that they can engage – respectfully and thoughtfully – with others in deliberation about the common good in the broader society.

There are a number of implications for understanding public education – teaching and learning, culture, structure, organisation, funding and governance – through the lens of its common good purposes. In particular, it injects specific meaning into some important characteristics of public education such as quality, links with local community, collaboration, innovation, equity, diversity and cohesion, and democracy. These characteristics look very different in and through policy and practice when they are understood through a more ‘privatising’ lens.

Well-resourced public schools in every community

If dimensions 1 and 2 provide a philosophical framework for public education, they are meaningless unless public schools are adequately resourced. Thus, the third dimension of a three pronged understanding of public education is that governments have an obligation to provide and maintain well-resourced quality public schools, available to all, in every community in Australia.

The foundation premise of this dimension is that in a democratic society education should be available to all on equal terms so that each child can develop to her/ his full potential. Properly resourced public schools are the starting point for the achievement of this goal.

It therefore follows that our society should make every effort to ensure that the differences between schools in such basic areas as equipment, teacher quality, buildings, class-sizes and so on are reduced. And yet at the moment, the schools with the greatest challenges are given the least amount of resources to deal with them. In the main these are public schools.

The approach to funding schools in Australia has magnified rather than reduced resource differentials, and contributed to creating totally unacceptable educational outcomes. Australia has developed a funding model which is complex, arbitrary, inequitable and dysfunctional. It privileges choice for some, at the expense of quality and equity for all. But given the self-interest at play in the education debate, how is it possible to engineer an approach which turns this around?

The Gonski review provided a once-in-a-generation opportunity to return to the principle of needs-based funding. The fact that the government has effectively rejected the major intent of the review does not mean it was wasted. Future governments may reconsider, and if so would do well to adopt a version of the Gonski model which retains its strengths, and removes weaknesses such as the ‘no losers’ policy which was imposed on the review by the previous government.

Each of these three dimensions needs to be fleshed out through public discussion, resulting in a rich description of what is valued in public education which can then be used as the benchmark against which policies and practices are developed, enacted and evaluated.

Every community in Australia deserves a high quality public school

Public education is a precious community resource which is so essential to the life and well-being of our democratic society, and to the individuals and communities that live in it. The framework above demonstrates the folly of under-resourcing public education, and treating it as a safety net. It underlines the need for a different starting assumption for public policy: that every local community in Australia must contain well-resourced, socially-mixed, secular public schools which belong to a public system, provide a quality education, and are free and open to all.

every local community in Australia must contain well-resourced, socially-mixed, secular public schools which belong to a public system

It has never been as important as now for the whole community to support, nurture and strengthen our public schools and to celebrate the contribution they make to the common good.

Professor Alan Reid is a Research Professor in the School of Education at the University of South Australia.

This article is based on a major report he has written for the Australian Government Primary Principals Association (AGPPA) on the past, present and future of public education. The report, which will be sent to every government primary school in Australia, can currently be accessed online at: https://app.box.com/s/8gb8s45n84g1ma7p8ubynudybf1ocowc

To contact Alan Reid email: alan.reid@unisa.edu.au

Engineering ‘killer apps’

Strategic media management

Trending topics

Proxy policy tools

Surveillance schools

Platform education

Conclusion

Introduction

What might we do?

Less than 100% effort can be good too

Our Burn 2 Learn program

Positive results for teachers and students

Next steps

Conclusions

Education, skills and AI

Ethics and AI

Regulation and data privacy

Use of AI in public agencies like schools

Conclusion: What should we learn in an AI society?

References

The ‘ethnic advantage’

Top Selective schools in Sydney (by HSC scores): Ethnicity and Socio-educational Advantage

But: great variation within LBOTE

The highest LBOTE schools are disadvantaged

Case study: Cabramatta/Canley Vale (postcode 2166)

The NSW bigger picture: disadvantage & Indigenous communities

The ‘whitest’ schools are highly advantaged

Top 10 advantaged areas in NSW

Case study: North Sydney/Kirribilli

North Shore (postcodes 2060-2090)

Conclusion

References:

About the author

How we got here

Education versus training

Who is TAFE for?

Lowering standards

What does it take to teach at TAFE?

A way forward

Getting real

We cannot love what we do not know

Section 582, 1958

Plan, teach, test

NAPLAN? … Anyone? … No?

Know thy students

What worked about these times?

Looking to our future

NAPLAN is not good enough for us

Hope

Unfolding the standards

Slipping standards

A true profession

Maintaining high standards…

Link between early childhood development and school outcomes

The case for two years of preschool

Two years of preschool is good for schools too

Early childhood educators change children’s trajectories

The path to two years of preschool in Australia

The neglect of public schooling

The consequences for Australian education

Funding is not the only issue for public schools

What are the dimensions of public education that must be protected and enhanced?

Why an agreed framework is essential

Three fundamental dimensions of a framework for Australian public education

Public education as a public good

Public education for the common good

Well-resourced public schools in every community

Every community in Australia deserves a high quality public school

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