Exclusionary discipline is on the rise in Australian schools, as highlighted by recent research in Queensland and South Australia. This is highly concerning that suspension does not address the reasons underlying behaviour and can instead exacerbate those behaviours. For some students, these experiences devolve into ongoing cycles of repeated suspensions. In the long term, students …
If, like me, you weren’t glued to the Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee proceedings recently, you might have missed the announcement that Ministers of Education around the country are supporting the latest version of the national curriculum. In any other year this may have been unremarkable – but this year, one particular inclusion was …
The year ahead for Australian schools: escalating workloads, industrial action and COVID-19: On New Years’ Eve in 2020, teachers around Australia looked forward to leaving behind a difficult year of lockdowns and remote teaching, and starting a new, and hopefully better year afresh. However, on New Years’ Eve in 2021, teachers seem to have found …
Our two authors have told their stories of leaving university life to return to school over three blogs this year. You can read part one here and part two here. An introduction from Kimberley Let me take you for a moment into my Year 6 classroom. It’s the last morning of Term 4 and my …
Featured Symposium at AARE 2021: Elite private boys’ schooling, feminism and gender justice: reimagining research in a post #me too world On November 30 2021, while many of us were in paper sessions at the annual AARE conference, the findings of a review of workplace culture in parliament house were released. The review, led by …
Schools around Australia were forced into online delivery of physical education (PE) in Term 2, 2020, due to measures taken to suppress and restrict the spread of Covid-19. We looked at what really happened in classrooms. The results show us exactly how marginalised PE became. What we found in our research, ‘Just do some physical …
Pasi Salhberg is right, we need to prioritise wellbeing during the endless lockdowns many of us are enduring. But this message is only partially right, because wellbeing isn’t just what’s important ‘right now’, it should always be the most important thing in learning. Unfortunately, our schooling systems have never understood this. In fact, mass schooling …
This research might be about students with added learning needs but could easily apply to all students. The snap school lockdowns required to combat the Delta variant of Covid-19 disproportionately affect different cohorts of students and teachers. When the first school lockdowns were implemented in NSW in 2020, a group of researchers undertook a study …
A stop-start directive to return to schools has been going on for over a month and produced anxieties for teachers, students and their families. How can we respond to the confusion this has produced, particularly regarding Year 12 students? The argument mounted here is that there really is only one way to respond and that …
I am waiting for my daughter on the playground, amid the chaos of three o’clock, enormous backpacks hurtling over tiny shoulders, tenni balls are flying through the air and kids are running to their mums, Dads and baby brothers and sisters. Finally the one I am looking for is bounding towards me. Her arms go …