An education policy and research body has rebuked the government for its approach to sector funding, calling it "disjointed". Victoria University's Mitchell Institute, in its report Expenditure on Education and Training in Australia 2017, based its view on 2015-16 federal, state ...
More »NAPLAN National Report: Indigenous, LBOTE students most improved
In August we learned that there were NAPLAN triumphs and concerns: overall, reading and numeracy were up, yet writing had declined. Now, with ACARA's release of the 2017 NAPLAN National Report, long-term demographic trends have come to light. Since 2008, Indigenous ...
More »Problem children: the issues concerning today’s teens
“As a uni student who just moved out of home, being able to pay rent as well as survive without a job or parental help was my biggest stress ... the availability of jobs to uni students, especially new ones I ...
More »Opinion: the pressure-cooker lives of Singapore’s teachers
Twelve-hour days and big classes are realities that Singapore's teachers face daily. Such conditions create stressful work environments which impede their capacity to live up to their global reputation for teaching excellence. They are usually too exhausted to be the classroom innovators they ...
More »PIRLS results: Australia whipped by 13 countries, including Russia
It's been five years since the last – and Australia's inaugural – Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) results were released. Now, with the 2016 crop divulged, we've improved, but not by much. Just 16 per cent of the over ...
More »Study suggests need for greater media literacy
Although, in a given day, 80 per cent of children consumed news from at least one source, only 16 per cent of this cohort had learnt how to interpret this material at school over the past year. That's just one finding from the ...
More »Addressing ‘wicked problems’ in special education
A wicked problem, in academia, means a thorny one - one without an obvious solution. In the lead up to the International Day of People with a Disability, Dr David Armstrong has identified four of these in Western special education. ...
More »From housing commission to Harvard: an educator’s journey
It's a true rags to intellectual riches tale. Murat Dizdar, the son of Turkish immigrants, grew up in in a monolithic housing commission block in the inner-Sydney suburb of Glebe. He attended the elite selective public high school, Fort Street, which ...
More »Principal pleads for cutback in skills, increase in knowledge
Educational institutions prioritising teaching skills over knowledge is "seriously fuzzy thinking", says Elizabeth Stone. The principal of Queenwood School for Girls, an independent school in Sydney, presented her views on this at the launch of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. She's right in ...
More »Trial of high school ‘paradigm shift’ a triumph
Picture an entrepreneur. Maybe a rock star one like Mark Zuckerberg, or a more socially-conscious, local one like the guys from Who Gives a Crap. Then imagine the skills they drew on to scale their businesses, things like ambition, problem-solving, communication ...
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