The following does not contain typos: disengaged 24-year-olds cost taxpayers $69 billion over a lifetime. This is one of the major findings of the Mitchell Institute’s new report, Counting the costs of lost opportunity in Australian education. The Institute, based ...
More »Boosting poor PISA results starts in preschool: ACER
The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a standardised literacy, numeracy and science test of 15-year-olds across 72 countries, conducted by the OECD. Yet it doesn’t measure rote learning. Rather, it tests whether kids can apply their knowledge to real-life scenarios. For Aussie students, this task has proved difficult. Like ...
More »Opinion: early-childhood instruction needed to improve TIMSS rankings
The release of the Trends in International Maths and Science Study international rankings for Year 4 and Year 8 has produced a plethora of hand wringing about how badly Australia is doing. In amidst the claims that the data proves school funding ...
More »Opinion: Formal schooling can wait
Over recent decades, in many countries across the world, there has been increasing concern about the disparity in life expectations between children born into relative affluence and those born into more disadvantaged circumstances. This is true between nations, of course, ...
More »Latest Tas school start age proposal will ‘confuse parents’: Labor
Kids in Tasmania can now attend school from age 4½, but they don’t have to, the Tasmanian Government announced last week. The government's move from its previous position – mandatory school at age 4½ – comes after much pressure from political opponents and advocacy groups. ...
More »‘Talking Eds’, Episode 12: Childcare scams funding terrorism, #LetThemStay and old age myths
In a packed program this week, Loren from Early Learning Review talks about how childcare rorting might be funding terrorism, James from Education Review and Campus Review discusses the #LetThemStay movement among academics and Dallas Bastian from Aged Care Insite ...
More »Early-learning groups say they know why NAPLAN flatlined
It’s turned out to be a bad investment: “record” government school funding hasn’t yielded concordantly higher numeracy and literacy results, as NAPLAN 2016 revealed last week. This year, reading and numeracy increased by minuscule increments in NAPLAN testing, whilst writing ...
More »Study backs tough measures to keep kids in school
A University of Melbourne study has backed tough government measures to
More »Play School teaches kids about Twitter
Play School presenter Matt Passmore tweeted, blogged, texted, emailed and checked his
More »Early childcare gets a tick
Parents who fear sending their babies to childcare too early can rest easier, according to Charles Sturt University research.
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