Is government a good 'parent' to foster kids?
Australian Governments have an opportunity to make a huge positive difference in the lives of the young people who grow up in its care. All that is needed is one simple change.
Recent articles in Education
5 May 2025
Truth, citizenship and the failure of Australian education
Australian schools excel at training students to meet external benchmarks, but fail miserably at cultivating critical minds.
2 May 2025
Yale, Ben-Gvir and banning Palestinian groups
Universities are in a bind. As institutions of learning and teaching, knowledge learnt and taught should, or at the very least could, be put into practice.
30 April 2025
The election and the social determinants of health
The Social Determinants of Health are the conditions in which we work, live, and play. We, as a society, choose these conditions and/or choose not to change them. They play at least as important a role in health outcomes as access to care.
25 April 2025
A school debate that didn’t happen
The likelihood that Australia’s public schools will be fully funded hasn’t eased growing discomfort about our failed hybrid public/private system.
24 April 2025
Feeding the beast: The use of private consultants by public universities and its implications for tertiary education
Global consulting partnerships are not only reshaping public sector organisations along corporate lines and hollowing out government expertise in the process, but they have also been responsible for a significant decline in tertiary education quality and standards, including billions of dollars in wasteful expenditure on non-core business.
22 April 2025
If I were minister for school education…
There will be no quick or easy way to redesign the existing school system.
17 April 2025
Australia’s innovation system needs new partners
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
15 April 2025
Managing overseas student policy is key to keeping migration numbers in check. If I was immigration minister, Part 2
Ever since Scott Morrison told overseas students to go home at the start of the pandemic and then stomped on the student visa accelerator once the pandemic ended, overseas student numbers have increased and policy has been fraught with constant changes to reduce the inflow of students.
14 April 2025
Why cap the number of university students from abroad?
Having been unable to pass legislation, the Albanese Labor Government (as it likes to be called) decided in 2024 to use the “slow student visa process” to reduce international student numbers because of the problems they cause in taking houses and jobs from Australians.
10 April 2025
How Australian education was captured by arms dealers
Australian universities, technical institutes and schools are becoming militarised. The power of defence industry money combined with government policy and public underfunding of education have created an avalanche of defence funding and profound influence over our education system and the people who emerge from it.
6 April 2025
Over the rainbow
The Albanese Government is entitled to proclaim that the agreements they have now reached with every state and territory will put all public schools on a path to full and fair funding.
3 April 2025
Peter Slezak's speech to the University of Technology Sydney rally on 26 March
Remarks made by UNSW academic Peter Slezak at a rally at UTS on 26 March, have attracted considerable negative coverage in the Murdoch media. [The Australian and The Daily Telegraph] Pearls And Irritations is carrying the full text of the speech so that readers can make up their own minds.
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Universal early learning and the three-day guarantee
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Be alert and alarmed: Campus silencing on Palestine
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Anti-Palestinian discrimination in NSW public schools
