Wednesday, 14 November 2018
TAFE cuts
Tuesday, 13 November 2018
Eleven days to go in the state election.....
11 days to go - no plan, no detail on public schools. I won’t forget what you did when last in govt - $625 m school cuts; bitter dispute about schools agt, pushing performance pay & breaking promise to make teachers highest paid, cut literacy & numeracy coaches etc. etc.
Still nothing about preschools, TAFE, no commitment to state school funding.
Thursday, 8 November 2018
2 weeks to go until the state election
This week, we had a significant eight-year commitment from Victorian Labor to build new schools and co-located preschools if they are re-elected. Over the next four years, 24 schools would be built with an additional 55 schools to planned and completed in the following term of government. This is the sort of long-term planning and investment members expect and which our students and their families deserve.
Matthew Guy’s Liberals have made no such commitment to the future of public education.
When they were last in government, the Liberals did not plan effectively or allocate nearly enough funding. This meant that in 2016 there was not one new public school opened in Victoria, despite a booming school age population. We know from experience that, without a comprehensive plan for new schools, the Liberal party will cram extra students into existing classrooms, driving up class sizes, and overcrowding our existing schools.
We also know there will be 90,000 additional students in our schools over the next four years and we need the next state government to plan for and fund the necessary additional classrooms.
In recent weeks, Labor have announced almost 700 additional teaching positions as well as an extra 190 mental health positions in schools. The Liberals have not committed to any additional teachers or support staff.
Sunday, 4 November 2018
New Zealand leading again
The NZ Government will fund 600 dedicated staff in primary and secondary schools to support children with special learning needs such as dyslexia, autism, physical disabilities and behavioural problems.
The announcement is being described as a big and much-needed win by the education sector.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made the announcement in her speech to the Labour conference in Dunedin today.
She said they would work alongside teachers, parents and other professionals to give students individualised support.
Currently schools have special education needs co-ordinators but in many cases the role is just a few hours a week for an existing teacher and funding is allocated by the board of trustees.
The new group of learning support co-ordinators will be a dedicated full-time job by a registered teacher and the first tranche of 600 will be employed from as early as 2020.
The aim is to at least double that number in order to have one in every urban school and access to one for every rural school
Ardern called the announcement "a game-changer".
"If a child needs support and is not getting it, that's not fair, and I'm not prepared to tolerate it.
"So today I want to say to parents, to kids, to teachers, to aunties, to anyone who has asked for more support for those with additional needs – we've heard you."
The co-ordinators would not only help unlock the potential of thousands of children with learning needs, they would free up teachers so all children get more quality classroom time to learn.
"A big concern I hear regularly from teachers is the amount of time they spend trying to get support for children with additional needs.
"The new learning support co-ordinators are a win-win; kids with both high and moderate needs will get on-the-ground support, parents will have a specialised point of contact and teachers will have more time to teach."
The commitment to more staff will cost $217 million over four years will be from next year's Budget and comes on top of an extra $272.8 million in the 2018 Budget operational spending for learning support.
"That is a huge investment in our first year into supporting both our kids and our teachers," Ardern said.
"One in five New Zealand children has a disability or other learning and behavioural needs and it's been too hard, for too long, for them to get support at the right time."
Learning support had been neglected for more than a decade, Ardern said.
The Government has yet to work out which schools will be the first to get the 600 co-ordinators. That will be the subject of discussion with the sector.
New Zealand First MP and Associate Education Minister Tracey Martin has been leading the work to develop a new model for delivering learning support in schools.
She was at the Labour conference for the Prime Minister's announcement.
"These co-ordinators will be a specialised point of contact for parents with someone who understands their child's unique learning needs," Martin said.
"They'll also provide expert assistance for teachers. They will work alongside classroom teachers to ensure all students with needs – including disabilities, neurodiversity, behavioural issues and giftedness – get the support they should expect."
Ardern's speech was delivered in the Dunedin Town Hall, and is the first she has given as party leader, having taken over the leadership only seven weeks before the 2017 election.
She shared many of letters she has received as Prime Minister, including one from an aunt of a boy with special needs.
It said: "We as a whānau have tried with dead ends where ever we turn so I then turn to you Prime Minister and plead for your help, he is missing out on so much and it just isn't fair. Please help us find a solution for this young boy who deserves the best chance living with autism."
Ardern said the phrase that stood out to her was "best chance."
"You may have heard me talk about my goal to make New Zealand the best country in the world to be a child.
"We simply will not achieve that unless we ensure that every single child, no matter where they live, no matter their background or ethnicity, their ability or disability, has the best education possible."
NZEI president Lynda Stuart said the announcement signalled a positive start to the week of facilitation that the union and ministry were about to embark on and was a big win for children, teachers and principals.
"It's a constructive response from the Government to the fact that the number of children with complex needs is growing while the Learning Support Co-ordinator/Senco job is currently being done on top of or squeezed in around the day job of principals, deputy principals and classroom teachers.
"This announcement potentially enables schools to release highly capable people into these roles and improve inclusion for all students. Although the current teacher shortage will make finding an additional 600 teachers challenging, the creation of this role will help support teachers and school leaders and reduce their workload — so making the job of a teacher better supported and more appealing."
Neogtiations over the primary and principal collective agreements start tomorrow and the rolling strike is still proceeding the week starting 12 November.
Altogether Autism national manager Catherine Trezona was pleased the Government had listened and was cautiously optimistic a specialised role would help address concerns at the primary and secondary level because the current education system was currently failing the majority of families with autistic children.
"We've got so many instances of children that have been stood down because there's not the capacity or the capability to work with them effectively in the school. So that's not inclusive education. Really or autistic students are not being at all well looked after in the current education system."
Some students were being expelled and then being enrolled at other schools where they could only attend for a reduced number of hours due to a lack of teacher aide support, she said.
Trezona said the organisation was delighted it was going to be a specialised role and was keen to be involved in the training of the teachers to make sure they had the skills to address the really complex learning needs of autistic children.
The boost to learning support in the 2018 Budget had funded around 1000 extra places for students with complex needs so they could get specialist support such as speech therapy.
Teacher-aide funding received an extra $59.3 million.
About 2900 deaf and hard-of-hearing students and approximately 1500 low-vision students got more help, and around 1900 more children with high needs in early childhood education would now receive support each year.
From the NZ Herald
Monday, 29 October 2018
What passes for an education policy
It was telling that there was no press conference or media release about the Coalition’s plans to reintroduce special religious instruction into Victorian state schools.
This was a pitch aimed at religious conservatives, who are having a growing influence on Victorian Liberal Party politics, so it made perfect sense to unveil it at an Australian Christian Lobby event.
Taking to the stage of Crossways Baptist Church for the pre-election event in Melbourne’s east on Saturday, Opposition leader Matthew Guy told the captivated audience he’d bring back religious instruction during class time because "it’s very important".
But while it was welcome news to the crowd who had gathered at one of Australia’s largest Baptist churches, it was perhaps not a message the Coalition wanted to promote more broadly.
You see, the 30-minute classes in Victorian state schools have been controversial for the most part of a decade.
The move to an opt-in system led to a 42 per cent decline in enrolments in the religion classes.
Trouble struck a few years later in 2014 when volunteers from Access Ministries, the main provider of Christian religious instruction, distributed "biblezines" to students which described homosexuality as a sin.
You won't be seeing it at Glen Park Primary while I'm Principal there!
Friday, 26 October 2018
Tunnel Books
Hooray...over 2800 posts! WTF!
Wednesday, 24 October 2018
Helping disadvantaged children
What if we had an opportunity to double the size of the tourism industry, or to quadruple the size of the beef industry, or to boost the economy by more than any of the presently proposed tax switches?
What if we could do it while permanently improving the lives of disadvantaged young people?
We surely wouldn’t let it slip away.
Yet we do every day while we fail to address the gap in school achievement between between rural, regional and remote children and their city counterparts.
New estimates
In a report for UNSW Gonski Institute on Education launched on Monday, Jessie Zhang and I estimated the size of the gap. We also document its causes, and outline what the research in the United States and Europe tells us about ways to narrow it.
Over the past decade education research has undergone a transformation with the use of large-scale randomised controlled trials to determine what works.
It isn’t easy because correlations can be misleading. If, for instance, we discover that women who eat more fish during pregnancy tend to have children who perform better in primary school, we might be tempted to conclude its the Omega-3 fatty acids that do it.
It’s hard to work out what works
But women who eat a lot of fish tend to be wealthier. It might be that extra wealth – and the educational resources it affords – that are driving the better performance.
Who knows? Increasingly, the social scientists who construct randomised trials do.
Using techniques from pharmaceutical and other trials they are getting good at zeroing in actual causes and ignoring mere correlations.
What works the most, according to the US studies, are high-dose-small-group tutoring, balanced incentives for students, managed professional development for teachers, smaller class sizes, and a culture of high expectations.
Some of what works is as good as free
Some of these measures are expensive, some are almost free.
All have been shown to have a high return in the US.
There are good reasons to believe they could be highly effective in rural, regional and remote Australia.
It would be worthwhile conducting our own randomised controlled trials in our own cultural and educational environment to be sure.
The prize is big
In our report we translate the differences in school achievement to the differences in human capital and eventually lifetime earnings.
This puts the economic benefit of closing the urban-non urban gap at A$56 billion — about 3.3% of Gross Domestic Product.
Massive though that number is, it is both narrow and an underestimate. It focuses purely on how better skills can translate into better wages.
It doesn’t consider how the benefits of better skills can spread and multiply throughout the economy. Nor does it consider the benefit of revitalising country towns, or the benefits of better physical and mental health.
Bigger than we can measure
Most of all, it doesn’t capture the truth that bridging this achievement gap would provide a world of expanded opportunities for millions of young Australians, and give them the chance to live out their full potential.
Bridging the urban non-urban achievement gap between is easier said than done, but the potential benefits from it to both the economy and the lives of Australians who would become more able to achieve their full potential are too big to ignore.