I’m not going to start with a short personal story about how I’m stressed about exams. I’m not going to tell you, that I am terrified about life after school, because I don’t know how to do my taxes or claim insurance, but I can play the recorder, and turn a potato into a battery. I’m just going to say it. I am not confident or world-ready. The Australian Schooling System is not only failing our students, it is failing the country.
If you google “Education ranking Australia” you will be met with some uncomfortable results. In 2017, out of 41 high-income countries, Australia ranked 39 for quality education. This is a very troubling statistic and one that doesn’t seem to grab the headlines as it should. That isn’t the only article Google will give you. We have sat in the middle for decades, but other countries have continued to improve while we have remained stagnant, and thus falling behind.
These are big issues. It’s not that top marks in school are the make or break differential, but that the economic landscape of the future is changing at an incredibly fast rate. It is concerning that the rate of change in our education system will not match that of the rest of the world, and therefore my children will get left behind – unable to compete for jobs in a global environment.
If the core function of school is to prepare children for the future, then we need to do better. Because currently, students are not confident, nor world-ready.
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in more than 70 economies worldwide. And it shows that Australian scores in reading, maths, and science have significantly declined since 2000, while other countries have shown improvement.
And while there has been some media attention on falling international ranks, it is the decline in real scores that should hit the headlines. The decline was equivalent to more than half a year of schooling. Our students are falling behind: in mathematic studies, where we are three years behind students from Shanghai. In maths and science, an average Australian 15-year-old has the problem-solving abilities equivalent to an average 12-year-old Korean pupil.
With all due respect, Australian schooling has undergone major changes over the last decade, mainly through national policy reforms including an Australian Curriculum, and standardised national assessments
However, during this same decade, rapid economic, social, and technological change has generated new pressures and possibilities.
According to ABC NEWS; Despite significant reforms over the past decade, there is unfortunately very little sign of positive outcomes. For example, the percentage of Australian students successfully completing Year 12 is not improving. And State and federal school funding policies are still reproducing a status quo that entrenches sectoral division and elitism.
THE next generation of young workers is woefully unprepared for life after school, according to worrying new research. The reason is simple. And a lot of it falls on our schooling. We spent years learning to measure the angles of a triangle, but navigating taxes remains an unfamiliar nightmare. We memorised quotes from every Shakespearean tragedy ever written, but planning large-scale events is unfathomable.
The story we are being told is that if you study hard, get good grades, and land a spot at university, you will breeze through life, and into a decent job. But worrying research shows this is not the case — and it’s our generation of workers that will face a big struggle. STUDENTS are NOT EQUIPPED FOR LIFE AFTER SCHOOL. They are not confident / nor world-ready.
Concerning new research has found students are not adequately equipped to brave the workforce, due to an emphasis on numerically measured tests like NAPLAN and HSC.
The huge societal pressure, for high scores, is pressuring students into picking easy subjects. For example, students who are perfectly capable of doing extension mathematics, are doing the General course, as a means of scoring higher in the subject.
And to what benefit? The university dropout rate is higher than ever, with recent Federal Government figures showing that students packing in their degrees has reached its highest levels in a decade.
It has been estimated that 75% of the fastest-growing occupations require science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills and knowledge. Yet there are national declines in Australian participation in these subjects, as they become complex. The option is, do it ‘advanced, or not at all’. Many students would appreciate learning simple coding basics or managing their finance, yet they do not have the option.
But maybe we need to look closer at the deeper roots of the problem. While many factors may contribute to teacher quality, the overall academic level of those entering teaching degrees is an obvious and measurable component, which has been the focus of rigorous standards in many countries.
Teacher education degrees in Australia had the highest percentage of students entering with low ATAR scores, and the proportion of teacher education entrants with an ATAR of less than 50 nearly doubled between 2015 and 2019. We cannot expect above-average education with below-average teachers.
The real surprise is that no one thinks to simply pay teachers more money. Maybe the Australian Government is unaware this is the usual way of increasing job applications.
The reason high-scoring students clamour to work as doctors, or lawyers rather than embracing the excitement of teaching, is because such jobs generally pay better.
In some of the world’s highest-performing countries, entry to teaching is now as competitive as entry to courses such as engineering, science, law, and medicine. With only the top 30% recruited as future teachers.
Further raising concerns about the drop in ATARs required for teaching courses. In 2015, just 42 percent of Australian students embarking on a teaching course had an ATAR above 70. (Reverse? 58% below 70?)
The central purpose of school is to ensure children, are confident and world ready, upon finishing. The government seems to be suggesting that everyone’s intelligence is fixed; set in stone and measured perfectly by the HSC.
Why should everyone be forever categorised as a low, or high, achiever simply because of a mark they achieved as a teenager?
This is a shame because there are so many easy, and creatively productive ideas that could transform education.
Firstly, we need to ensure our junior years, specifically, kindergarten is well resourced and supported. Kindergarten students range from 4 to 6 years old, with large gaps between maturity levels and the ability to mentally process new information. We need to ensure these younger, less developed students are not at risk of falling behind. Differences by Year 3 tend to be continuations of differences apparent on entry to school when children have widely varying levels of cognitive, language, physical, social and emotional development.
Meeting this fifth challenge depends on better ways of identifying children at risk of being locked into trajectories of low achievement at the earliest possible ages and intervening intensively during the early years of school to address individual learning needs to give as many students as possible the chance of successful ongoing learning.
Later, in secondary school, students are told they need to commit to the full science, computing technologies, or maths course. Why not just engage student’s imagination by introducing coding and programming as separate classes.
Curricula departments across the nation seem more concerned with polishing their current offerings instead of standing back to consider which skills might best assist students to engage as future citizens. This is understandable, but it’s not a way to embrace the sort of transformative change we need. Perhaps even learning about superannuation at school may better help us navigate the modern world than understanding how the steady development of the Spartan navy allowed it to eventually claim victory in the Peloponnesian War.
A third challenge is to re-design the school curriculum to better prepare students for life and work in the 21st century. Today’s world is vastly different from that of 50 years ago. And the pace of change is accelerating, with increasing globalisation; advances in technology, and an array of increasingly complex social and environmental issues. The school curriculum must attempt to equip students for this significantly new world, because, many features of the current curriculum have been unchanged for decades. We continue to present disciplines largely in isolation from each other, place an emphasis on the mastery of large bodies of factual knowledge and treat learning as an individual rather than collective activity.
Finally, we need to make health in schools a top priority. Healthier students are better learners. We know that children’s health has direct and indirect effects on learning, including their scores in standardised tests like THE HSC and NAPLAN. Interestingly, a decline of youth wellbeing has happened at the same time as slipping PISA scores in Australia. A student who suffers from anxiety disorders, depression, sleep deprivation or suicidal behaviors are less likely to be successful in school. Improving children’s health and wellbeing in school and at home would immediately affect the quality of their being and learning in school.
To many people, the Australian schooling system seems fine. But that’s just it. Fine is not good enough. This system in bringing up the children who will rule the world of tomorrow. We need to care more about the ideas and information that is relevant to the future, rather than repeating the past. Improving education systems is not rocket science – in fact, it is more complicated than that.
This logic of “fixing schools” has been tried before. Einstein is claimed to have said: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” What he meant by this was that thinking outside the box is often a necessary way to fix complex human problems and come up with new ideas to do it better than before.
If Australia wants to build a strong and competitive economy, we need fewer front-page articles about budget cuts and more on reform and investment in education. We need to ensure the future generations are confident and world-ready because currently the