In the months before the pandemic gripped the world, the NSW Productivity Commission released a presciently titled discussion paper, Kickstarting the Productivity Conversation. Its recently released followup White Paper sets out its plan for rebooting the economy. Lifting school results is part of the plan. The Commission acknowledges the ‘pandemic has shown how quickly schools, …
Are our schools making the kids we think we should? The tussle between politics and education continues and Latham is just the blunt end of what is now the assumed modus operandi of school policy in Australia. Many readers of this blog no doubt will have noticed a fair amount of public educational discussion about NSW’s …
Premier Gladys Berejiklian has been describing the NSW curriculum review as a signal to go “back to basics” despite Professor Geoff Masters, who headed up the review, insisting it is more about decluttering the curriculum. To educators like me the phrase “back to basics” has signalled different education reforms over the years, which begs the …
The Mparntwe Declaration was released at the end of last year. I do not use the official full title of the document on purpose. I do this as a final hurrah to 2019, the Year of Indigenous Languages and I do this because, as was pointed out, this was the first time a national education …
In this blog I’d like to bring together three different lines of educational analysis to show how our …
Large numbers of educators, community activists, and social movements are rightly deeply involved in the struggles for a …
There is a problem in some Australian secondary schools right now. ‘Endgame’ assessments such as the Higher School Certificate (HSC) in NSW and the requirements of an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) to gain entrance to university, place restrictions on the kinds of teaching and learning that goes on in classrooms. Some teachers are frustrated …
The past decade has seen think tanks operate in sophisticated ways to influence the development of Australian schooling …
Educational inequality in Australia is persistent. One in four young Australians are now being left behind according to …