Education

  I’m all for more opinions and opinion-givers. There’s a dearth of both in today’s media and I reckon we’d be better off if lots of voices and ideas were heard. While divergent views may not be extinct, anything that lies outside of the ‘tame lane’ on the information superhighway is endangered. However, the line has to be drawn somewhere when encouraging ‘out there’ thinking as opposed to just plain idiocy and I think I’ve found an example that lies on the latter’s turf. I refer to an article entitled ‘Our brightest kids are being left to fend for themselves’ by Cynthia Fenton which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 8 May 2018. In her article, Ms Fenton aligns herself strongly with the NAPLAN testing regime and cites students’ waning performances across the board as an area for concern. But she offers us all some hope with this bottler………. If we were serious about our education, Australian kids would be NAPLAN-ing four times a year. How do you start to mak...

Funding for Australian schools has for over a decade assumed the shape of a football to be kicked purposefully around by state and national teams until it is barely recognisable. There’s nothing new in this but Trevor Cobbald’s recent study (dated 2.6.2018) highlights a current state of play that no-one should cheer about. The rationale behind the Gonski funding model in the first place was that schools (and their students) should be financed equitably. It wouldn’t matter where the school was, who the students were or what ‘system’ the school was a party to. Every school would be funded to a minimum resource benchmark. The logistics of this funding model are complex but, at the dummy levels of understanding that I employ, it meant that both the federal and state governments would contribute to achieve the shared goal which, you guessed it, was one of financial resource equity. It’s really as simple as that. The federal government has come under some deserve...