Category Archives: Education

The pandemic is magnifying existing pressures for universities but is also providing new possibilities. How universities respond will determine their future

The pandemic is magnifying existing pressures for universities but is also providing new possibilities. How universities respond will determine their future.

The role of education is to encourage moral and socially moral/ethical individuals who develop a robust sense of fairness, justice and empathy which will influence tolerance and acceptance.

One thing COVID-19 has done is shatter laborious bureaucratic reform processes that so often breed inertia rather than change. I marvel at how quickly education systems have adapted to the lockdown.

If we want our children to have a stake in our democracy and our society, we have to treat them as valued citizens and engage with their concerns. Not because of the leaders they might one day be, in our … Continue reading →

The shock of dealing with the realities of the coronavirus pandemic has  forced our prime minister to realise that schools are fundamental to our democracy and that teachers are on the front line of society and should be valued accordingly.

Education reform is well overdue. As the need to act with speed has seen governments jettison rusted-on assumptions and ideologies in areas such as employment, health and welfare – can school education be next? After all, there are just as … Continue reading →

One thing we used to tell beginning teachers was to never punish the whole class because a few students were misbehaving.

If you search for St. Kevin on the internet, you will find that the references to this Irish saint are vastly outnumbered by references to the Australian boys school that bears his name and that has been dragging that name … Continue reading →

New figures show that government (Commonwealth and State) funding increases massively favoured private schools over public schools between 2009-10 and 2017-18.

Data from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2018 show that Australia allocates more and better quality teacher and physical resources to high socio-economic status (SES) secondary schools than to low SES schools. The gaps are amongst … Continue reading →

The hand-wringing over the continuing decline in Australia’s PISA results misses the issue of whether students try their best on the tests. The OECD’s report on PISA 2018 shows that about three in four Australian students and two-thirds of students … Continue reading →

Two weeks ago I commented on the forthcoming Education Council of Ministers meeting and how it was apparently going to tackle our latest reported dive in student achievement. I declared that the chance of an enduring solution emerging from that … Continue reading →

It’s PISA time again and Australia’s student achievement levels continue to be miserable. The finger-pointing is in full swing…again. Someone should re-shoot ‘Groundhog Day’ around the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), with a cast of education ministers, their shadows, … Continue reading →

There seems to have been a long period of quiescence in higher education, with the interests of the top end of the university sector (identified as the G8) coinciding with the desire of successive governments to shift costs away from … Continue reading →

It seems that there is more to UK politics than Brexit: Britain’s Labour conference has passed a motion to effectively abolish private schools and redistribute their students and even their properties to the state sector. Are there implications of such … Continue reading →

In 1984 the number of international students in Australian was minimal and I found Australian University Vice Chancellors very sceptical about encouraging international students to study in Australia .They feared the displacement of Australian students. But in the Department of … Continue reading →

The status of Jean Blackburnas one of the finest contributors to Australia’s education policy is confirmed by the recently released biography by Craig Campbell and Debra Hayes covering her life and work. Above all, Jean Blackburn understood the interrelationship between … Continue reading →

This week the ABC kicked open the door to an overdue debate about school funding – a debate claimed to have been settled by Malcolm Turnbull two years ago. In a stunning interactive report on its website, Inga Ting and … Continue reading →

Skulduggery between the Morrison and Victorian Labor Government will defraud Victorian public schools of about $17 billion over ten years to 2028. The new funding agreement between the Commonwealth and Victorian Governments signed last month will mean that public schools … Continue reading →

The reputation of the NSW Government for fully implementing the Gonski funding model is totally unwarranted. The NSW Government took the opportunity of increased Commonwealth funding for public schools during 2013-2017 to cut its own inflation adjusted funding of public … Continue reading →