Gonski 2.0 funding fraud

Prime Minister Turnbull will push for a radical overhaul of the Australian curriculum after endorsing a blueprint by businessman David Gonski to fix the country's lagging school system.

The Gonski 2.0 plan will transform the school system to assess and reward personal progress, not just standard academic benchmarks. It challenges the Commonwealth, states and territories to ditch their "industrial model of schooling" in favour of a more modern and individual approach.

He concluded three in 10 primary schools were "cruising": maintaining middling results but doing little to garner improvement. Stronger students were "not being stretched to achieve in the top levels of proficiency in mathematics, reading and science".

The rigidity of the national curriculum was a handbrake on the system, serving up "a fixed year-level diet of knowledge, skill and understanding", Mr Gonski said.

"Teaching curriculum based on year or age levels rather than levels of progress leaves some students behind and fails to extend others, limiting the opportunity to maximise learning growth for all students," the report found.Under-achieving students would focus Mr Gonski also called for an "urgent" review of what students are taught in years 11 and 12, greater autonomy for school principals and measures to boost the social status of teachers.

Mr Gonski's report conceded there would likely be "a need to reduce teaching contact time to enable this to occur". Senator Birmingham said the point was "not [to] increase the workload on teachers but to make sure that those teachers are able to use their time as effectively as possible".

An urgent review of year 11 and 12 curricula, which vary from state to state, was needed in part to counter the undue focus placed on getting students into university, Mr Gonski argued.

This could "crowd out broader educational outcomes," he wrote, while the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) played "a disproportionate role as a yardstick for overall school performance".

Mr Gonski said a more flexible senior curriculum, including apprenticeships or work experience, should be considered, as well as potentially splitting senior grades from the rest of high school.

Senator Birmingham said the senior secondary years needed to prepare students "for the range of different pathways people will take after school, of which university is but one".

Among the other recommendations - all of which have been agreed to in-principle by the federal government - is the creation of an independent institute to assess educational evidence, a body which has already been promised by Labor.

For instance, there was emerging evidence to support what the report called the "de-privatisation of teaching", which involved moving away from a model where teachers would stand alone at the front of the classroom and took sole responsibility for their pupils, towards greater collaboration.

The review also urged freeing school principals from the shackles of administration and handing them more autonomy over teaching practices - and more professional development for teachers.

@tanya_plibersek on Gonski 2.0: The government has redesigned needs-based funding to say that kids in public schools only need 20 per cent of the schooling resource standard. How can that be fair?  

IT ISN’T!

The Turnbull Government is worsening inequality in our schools. They will fund public schools below the agreed resourcing standard and fund private schools above the agreed standard.

Turnbull government needs to:

1. Reverse $1.9 billion cut from public schools & disability cuts.

2. Fund all schools at 100% of agreed schooling resource standard.

3. Establish a public schools capital fund.

4. Remove 20% public school funding cap.

From the AEU

President of the Australian Education Union, @CHaythorpeAEU: We'll be very interested to see how the Turnbull government responds to these recommendations in the context of their $1.9 billion cuts to the public school system.

From Shorten

.@billshortenmp on the budget: You cannot take the Liberals seriously on education funding. 

'If they want to be taken seriously on education they have to reverse the cuts to schools.' 

We are ranked 25th in the world for maths. If we finished 25th on the Olympic medal tally, there would be a national outcry and Turnbull would be throwing the kitchen sink at fixing it.