We need to stop blaming Indigenous students and families for low school achievement.
Neda Vanovac/AAP
Focusing on the opportunity to learn gap removes the emphasis from locating “the problem” in the person, and turns our attention to the differences in access to educational resources.
Remote schools often struggle to recruit and retain great teachers.
Alex Ellinghausen/AAP
Redesigning staffing policies will attract and retain high-quality teachers in the schools that need them most.
Asia literacy became official government policy in 2008.
Julian Smith/AAP
17% of the Australian population is now of various Asian backgrounds. School curriculum around Asia-Australia relations needs updating to reflect demograpic changes.
The progress a student makes in a year needs to be more important than test scores.
Julian Smith/AAP
Our enemy is complacency – blaming the post-codes, fixing the students not the system, and arguing for more resources to continue what is not working.
PA
But can they improve pupils’ behaviour?
Children need to learn how to sound out words they haven’t seen before.
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Many young children can give the false impression that they are learning to read, when in fact they are mostly guessing words from pictures or context. This test will help to identify these students.
New evidence-based methods of teaching and learning are being taken up very slowly.
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Despite significant reform agendas over the past decade, no real progress in outcomes has been achieved.
Gifted children can benefit from being grouped together in specialist schools or classes.
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Failing to provide an appropriate education for students who are gifted increases the risk of mental health issues, boredom, frustration, and behavioural problems.
Phonics helps teach children how to merge separate sounds together to make it one word.
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Phonics instruction gives children letter-sound knowledge, a skill that is essential for them to read unfamiliar words by themselves.
Making writing fun again.
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A prescriptive English curriculum is in danger of making writing boring for primary school children.
Emerging digital technologies are being used in thoughtful ways by teachers.
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We are now seeing technology being designed with education in mind, and it’s changing the way students’ learn and understand.
Wearing a skirt can prevent girls from participating in sports.
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Wearing a skirt at school can make girls less likely to participate in physical activity, and it’s time schools changed their uniform policies.
It takes more than PE lessons to keep kids healthy.
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If we want our children to stay healthy, we need to start making it a priority for schools.
Is school the most important part of education?
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We take a closer look at some of the common claims made this year to see if there is any truth to them.
A year of high expectations, yet little action.
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Gonski funding was scrapped and the vocational education sector got a new student loan system. Here’s what else happened in education this year…
How can we use data from international tests to improve student learning?
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Various forms of testing that reduce students’ knowledge, capacities and skills to a single number cannot of themselves help inform improvement.
Spending on vocational education has declined.
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While spending has grown for preschools, schools and universities, vocational education misses out.
On average year 3 girls perform higher than boys in reading, writing, grammar and punctuation, and spelling.
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The latest round of NAPLAN results show Australia’s school systems are not good at reducing the influence of a student’s background on their academic achievement.
Constant reforms in maths education aren’t helping Australia to improve its performance.
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Policy continuity is what is needed to improve Australian students’ maths capability.
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A proposal may give 10,000 free places a year to low-income students, but private schools may not be a better fit.