All over the country families are trying to cope with the consequences of helping educate their children at home. The immediate short-term problems are trying to keep children engaged in learning activities provided by teachers, but already medium-term challenges are casting terrifying shadows. Centre-stage is the inequality around digital access which affects all of us …

Reading is a critical skill to have for school and life success and there are multiple suggestions as to how to teach it effectively and quickly in schools – but what happens in home schooling? Little is known about how Australian home educators teach reading to their own children, but early evidence suggests parents have …

Australia’s traditional middle class is feeling anxious about its ability to pass on class status to their children. Competition has grown for jobs, housing, and places in desirable schools. Our research reveals transformations in Australia’s middle class which can be seen through the lens of education, and in particular, competitive relations in schooling markets. Neoliberal …

A new way to think about homeschoolers: accidentals and deliberates When you think about a homeschooler, what pops into your head?  Is it a fundamentalist Christian, reflexively avoiding the secular world that is perceived as dangerous?  Perhaps it’s a hot-housed, overachieving wunderkind whose music or sport makes attendance at school impossible?  Is it a child …

Amid all the concerns about closing schools and setting up online learning In Australia it is important to note that Australia is actually a world leader in school distance education. Indeed, distance learning is not only achievable for Australian students, but very normal for many students around our large island continent. In rural and remote …

We should see significant changes for children with disabilities in NSW schools if the recently released recommendations by the NSW parliamentary inquiry into the education of children with disabilities are acted upon. These changes will significantly improve the lives of children with disabilities. The impact on families of NSW children with disabilities, their school communities, …

The sport and politics of teacher bashing, and in particular teacher union bashing, has a long and inglorious history in the Australian media. Whether this is connected to an anti-intellectual bias in Australian society, the glorification of sport and the physical as opposed to the intellect, is unclear. However research suggests that mainstream media plays …

When we write we want to produce a text that can be easily read by our intended audience. For me that means I move back and forth from the computer keyboard to pen and paper to phone, to my tablet. I use most of these just about every day as I create the various pieces …

We were extremely disturbed by the increasing reports of children with disability across Australia being abused and discriminated against, and by what we saw as a systemic exclusion of children with disability from education. As researchers in education and while working in schools in NSW, we have experienced first hand the issues and challenges facing …

Schools are workplaces as well as places of learning. All those who work in them have the right to feel safe. Clearly, not all teachers feel safe. The interim report of the Senate Education and Employment References Committee: The issue of increasing disruption in Australian school classrooms and the submissions to it provide evidence for …