The latest QTAC report is out, advertising (let’s face it) the ways that all general senior subjects in Queensland were variously scaled up or scaled down for students who completed school in 2023.
It’s as ‘league table’ as Queensland gets these days, with these published rankings used 1) by students to aid in their subject selection, 2) by schools to convince students to pursue high ranking subjects, and 3) by nefarious ATAR calculators that rub crystal balls and give students predictions based on assignments that they have not yet completed (!).
Just as arts educators suspected, arts offerings have fared (even) worse than previously. I’ll spare you my own analysis, but when paired with elective class numbers around the state, we see a glib picture. An old colleague has had to collapse Music into a composite Year 10, 11, 12 class this year. Other schools have been forced to reduce the number of senior arts subjects offered. I know at least two local schools that have tiny groups of Year 12 Music students working unaccompanied in the library without a Music teacher.
I keep getting this blinking error light
The QTAC report reminded me to revisit 2022’s ABC News article, penned at a time when arts advocates had sprung to life to defend extant syllabus offerings. By Sally Eeles’ assessment, kids were abandoning senior arts offerings “in droves in the belief they will secure higher ATAR with science-based subjects”.
That same year (2022), we saw invigorated lobbying and proactive steps by arts professional organisations. Drama Queensland, for instance, was on the front foot, seeking urgent meetings with QTAC to “ensure that we take active and informed steps forward to ensure a productive redevelopment of Drama curriculum provides the best possible opportunity for our students to succeed, against other subjects equally”.
Arts educators need to think bigger. Woes of inter-subject scaling are both no-one’s fault, and everyone’s fault, but QTAC and QCAA need to hear together from arts bodies and scholars. It’s time to descale the arts machine.
A bitter taste
To anyone outside of formal learning right now, I ask: When was the last time you did a two-hour, individual handwritten test in order to best demonstrate your understanding of something? And when was the last time you did that to demonstrate criticality, creativity, teamwork, sociality, tech-savviness, or any other 21st century skill (as identified by QCAA)?
To be blunt (and I stress, I am just talking as an individual artist-teacher-researcher!), the Queensland system has been characterised as cruel, unusual, biased, inauthentic, bland, and sad.
Watch out, though!
Watch out, though!
Where arts educators fail to react sufficiently to the status quo, we inadvertently subscribe to the hidden curriculum that shouts:
“Standardise me!”: The overt move towards STEM-at-all-costs through a neoliberal drive for standardisation—as demonstrated through the observations of Theo Clark (2022) and Morgan Rogers Wilson (2019)—has driven recent Queensland education imperatives. Education-as-meeting-quantified-objectives is entirely unhelpful for children, their parents, and their support dogs.
“Paint me into a corner!”: Queensland syllabi are so fixated on cognition over experience that arts learning culminates in written tests that are more-than-symptomatic of David Perkins’ aboutitis.
“Stop collaborating!”: Teamwork is deemed risky in high stakes testing environments, causing individual efforts to be reduced to quantified evaluations of individual students’ products uploaded to a (team-created) portal to be assessed by (teams of) assessors. It’s skewiff! Does any post-school worker reading this not lean on teamwork to produce work outcomes? Let’s team up.
“Creativity is great in theory!”: I hear so much about the importance of creativity and 21st century skills—and we all get it!—but I invite you to scan the latest Queensland senior syllabi and arrive at your own conclusions. Move beyond the corporatised rationales, and delve into the assessment practices. State-mandated creativity is great in theory, but it would be even better in practice.
A double shot
It is all well and good to blame statutory bodies and commissions on matters of zeitgeist, but there are two final shots to serve.
Firstly, the Queensland Government’s Creative Together roadmap for arts, culture and creativity falls far short of helpful policy orientation. The 30-page document fails entirely to mention ‘schools’, ‘teaching’, ‘learning’, or ‘students’. It mentions ‘education’ in the most generic sense, as you might expect for a public document, with phrases such as “arts in education has been linked to increased self-esteem, increased positive behaviour and enhanced academic achievement” (p. 10), and “strengthening the links between communities and other sectors, such as education and tourism” (p.16).
We might as well be watching an episode of ABC’s Utopia. Who does the government propose should be charged with identifying, fostering, and developing this magically appearing creativity in the young people (who will be the workers by the time this roadmap reaches its glorious endpoint around the Brisbane Olympics in 2032)? Are we to continue subscribing to the Romantic myth that creativity somehow drops on these children in their sleep?
Secondly, arts educators need to turn inwards. It’s a dark storm. Let’s look back—like never before—at arts curricula and pedagogy to ensure more relevance, robustness, and remarkability. It looks like we will need to do this despite vague/vanilla, mandated curriculum imperatives. Welcome to (yet another) era of pedagogical evolution. As any trumpeter will tell you, thankfully, we’ve got the chops!
Milking it, for all it’s worth
If syllabi, statutory bodies, and governments fail to recognise the importance of arts learning all the way through to adulthood, we need to keep evaluating arts learning itself.
To be honest, the quasi-science of ‘arts makes your brain stronger’ advocacy is becoming tired, and the vocational education slant could be dangerous. Arts educators know that arts learners are not just in our classrooms to become professional artists, just as they are not in German to become Germans, or in Biology to become biologists. In arts classrooms, children are with us to become adults who thrive in a world of uncertainty through creativity, collaboration, and criticality.
Well, at least, they should be. As I said, it’s time to descale the arts machine.
Andrew Pennay is an award-winning music teacher. He is currently undertaking doctoral studies in songwriting pedagogy at QUT. Andrew has taught in primary, secondary, and tertiary arts contexts for 25 years, and has presented to teachers and music education researchers nationally and internationally.
The NSW Year 7 to 10 Music syllabus is the most important in Australia. The NSW government last reviewed and renewed it in 2003, so the recent publishing of a new version, to be taught from 2026, was a once-in-a-generation opportunity,to create a world-leading syllabus embracing latest research and drawing on the most engaging and beneficial teaching practices from around the globe.
It fell far short.
It’s not terrible. There are some good things about it. It doesn’t prioritise one musical culture over any others, any more. The first draft, released over a year ago, still prioritised classical music. Its published Aim is as noble as in 2003, mentioning ambitions for teaching and learning music such as “active engagement”, “enjoyment”, and (this is my favourite) to “develop a lifelong sense of wonder and curiosity about and engagement with music”.
There is a definite de-centring of The Score as the “text” for music. Inthis work-ready world that feels about-time, given that the “text” for music is sound passing through time. And most musical engagement nowadays happens through streaming services, with music jammed live, produced on computers, or created and disseminated in other digital mediums.
Music syllabus: why it’s important
This syllabus matters because although NSW’s K-6 Creative Arts syllabus mandates the teaching of music, research suggests a clear majority of schools do not have the specialist-trained staff to teach it.
Not only that, but the NSW Department of Education doesn’t even have an employment code for a “music teacher”, and the New South Wales Education Standards Authority (NESA) does not even offer a music specialism accreditation for a qualification for a primary school teacher.
At the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, we teach primary music approaches as part of our secondary teaching qualifications, simply because we know that our students will be in demand in the primary schools that can afford them – but technically they are all accredited as secondary school teachers.
That the Government systematically makes it impossible for schools to deliver the education promised in the same authority’s syllabus is one thing. At the same time, NAPLAN pressure, the teacher shortage, and funding pressures on principals push music to the edge of the curriculum.
Music pushed to the edge
There are wonderful advocacy projects seeking to remedy this problem, such as the Richard Gill teacher mentoring program, which pairs specialist teachers up with classroom teachers to kit them out with the skills they need to teach music. But we need systemic change, government-down, to fix such a large-scale and widespread problem.
All of this means that the chances are students arrive at high school in Year 7 having never had a class taught by a specialist music teacher – someone who actually plays, sings, writes music, arranges, gigs, leads ensembles, and all of that traditional music teacher stuff.
But at this age, we provide it, at last. We provide at least 100 hours of specialist-led music classes, in a syllabus that has historically centred the integration of all those wonderful music experiences, labelled “performing, composing, and listening”.
I call this the most important music syllabus in Australia simply because NSW has the most children of any state or territory. And in terms of participation, we are doing well.
The important thing is to grow love
And that’s why that “Aim” statement is so important. Classroom music at this level isn’t designed to produce the next Yehudi Menuin or Taylor Swift. We’re not trying to produce classrooms full of professional composers and performers – as I say to my trainee-teachers, wouldn’t it be awful if you called a plumber to fix your leaking shower and all they did was sing you a song about it? The aim of this short experience in music is to grow the love children already have for music, which according to a recent UK report is the most important thing in their lives, equalled only by video gaming.
This music education experience is to nurture that inherent love that they bring, and then open their ears and eyes to other musical cultures. It’s to give them enough of a taste in music that they think they can, and maybe they’ll do a few more years in music, or maybe later they’ll join a band, or a choir, or produce some dope beats on their laptop.
The intrinsic and the extrinsic
There is already wonderful advocacy work pushing the extrinsic benefits of learning music, especially in Australia by Anita Collins and the crew at the Albert’s/The Tony Foundation. While I do want your principal to know that there is correlation between learning music and doing well in all kinds of other subjects at school, I rather feel that I’m not going to push teaching music to make kids’ maths better until maths teachers are pushing maths to make their music better.
Music is important. So what’s wrong with the new syllabus?
I’ll explain the main shortfalls here quickly, because it’s too easy to get stuck in the detail. I’ll get into that on my own blog and podcast over the coming month, if you’re interested in finding out more.
The crowded curriculum is very real
And yet for some reason, NESA thought it would be great to give teachers 56 Content Points to check off in the new syllabus (and another 57 points in years 9 and 10). That’s one tick to be assessed every 1 hour and 47 minutes in a 100-hour course.
Music teachers are experts at teaching music. The same syllabus pared down the assessable Outcomes to just 3, only to shoot itself in the foot with pages of bullet points to be covered. And 19 of 22 content points focus on what NYU Professor Emeritus David Elliott and Monclair State’s Professor Marissa Silverman call “verbal knowledge”, knowledge about music not making music,
A step back from praxial music-making
One of the main problems my colleagues and I have written about in classroom music education in NSW is the segregation of “prac and theory”. In other words, music teachers can be tempted to draw on other subjects in the curriculum which have discrete theory components and practical skills to learn. Being an embodied skill, music-making is best learned by making music. If you’ve ever learned a musical instrument, you know this instinctively.
This was encouraged in the 2003 syllabus with a statement that learning experiences should be integrated. The new syllabus calls those learning experiences “focus areas”, which suggests they should be learned on their own (i.e. in focus), and it also removes the integration language. The result, combined with 56 Content Points to be checked off, is going to be a lot more worksheet rote learning, instead of musical learning, in our classrooms. This will be off-putting for children.
Adopt and adapt is mainly adapt and ignore
The Australian Curriculum’s music syllabus for this age range is not a perfect document, but it is one that is regularly reviewed and updated to meet feedback and research.
The NSW government have an “adopt and adapt” approach to the Australian Curriculum, but this document does very little adopting. Some terminology has been used, but it is used in such a piecemeal and inconsistent manner that it is not compatible. This has two disadvantages for Australian teachers and their students: first, resources created for teaching music in other states and territories who have more consistently adopted the Australian Curriculum will have to be “translated” to make sense in NSW. Second, teachers (and publishers) making resources here in NSW will not have reach into the rest of the country.
Which brings us full circle
What a ground-breaking syllabus would look like is probably the topic for another blog, but this certainly isn’t one. It is a syllabus with some great statements, a few improvements, and a whole lot of compromise and busywork for teachers.
That it took 21 years for us to review and refresh (this poorly) the last syllabus, which for its time was quite progressive, is the fault of successive governments of both major parties. NSW promises its citizens that their children will get a music education, with all the intrinsic and extrinsic benefits that that brings, and then fails to deliver for most children in primary schools, and keeps the brakes on the experience in this important window in high school. Other states and territories review their syllabi every three to five years. We deserve better, our children deserve better, and if we could just commit to that kind of work, with a much more transparent writing process, we could inch our way there.
Let’s just hope it’s not another 21 years.
James Humberstone is a senior lecturer in music education at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney. He specialises in teaching music pedagogies, technology in music education, and musical creativities. James publishes traditional research focusing on music teacher worldview, technology and media in music education, and artistic practice as research. He is also a composer and producer whose music is performed in major venues around the world. His intercultural work with poet and rapper Luka Lesson, “Agapi and other kinds of love”, is currently touring Australia.
As we approach the commencement of the academic semester, it is evident that a significant portion of teaching at universities is still online. Large lectures, for example, are being streamed or recordings are being posted online. It is time to get students back into the classroom. Online ‘studies’ are just no substitute. There are many benefits from being on campus – student life can be fun – but one of the main reasons to get students back into the classroom is to spur competition between them. From our research on teams and incentives, observability drives competition. On-campus studies are better, in part, because it aids observability.
Study online creates opaqueness. Someone in their bedroom cannot see how much study their peers are doing; they have limited opportunity to see what other students know. A student at home then tends to take themselves as a reference point. Someone at home can think, if I do not feel like studying, surely everyone else feels the same. In the dark, a student will infer what others know (and how much effort they are putting in) from their own efforts and understanding. This reduces the incentive to study. This indolence breeds more; at home, students can find themselves in a downward spiral of studying less and less.
Competing to be top dog
In the classroom, this cycle can work the other way. In any primary school class, invariably there are several kids competing to be the top dog. When one answers a teacher’s question correctly the others try harder next time to prove themselves. Similarly, year 12 students compete with one another to be top in a subject or dux of the year. Universities are full of those primary school top- dog wannabes. In a tutorial or lecture, students can see what a peer answering a question correctly or pushing the instructor’s analysis to the next level. Competition induces effort, which facilitates learning, which encourages more effort from others and the student themselves. Economic modelling suggests being able to observe the efforts of others can increase the total effort exerted by over 1000 times.
Students in class are frenemies – their rivalry lifts the learning of the cohort. To be clear, universities are not for the fainthearted; they are institutions of judgement. Unlike primary school (or the HSC), rankings at university matter; they indicate greater competences, leading to better jobs and higher lifetime pay.
Observing their own understanding
Assessments play a role in enhancing observability of peer effort and inducing competition amongst students. Grades allow a student to observe their own understanding but also their relative ranking – how are they going compared with their peers? Assessments that make peer-to-peer comparisons easier facilitate more competition. This is one advantage of examinations, aside from the obvious one of avoiding cheating using AI. When everyone sits the same exam, your performance is directly comparable to your peers. If you did not do well compared to everyone else, you should work harder. This incentive can be lost with bespoke assessments; maybe underperformance was due to choosing the wrong project or maybe the marker did not like your topic. Different assessment breeds excuses for poor performance, fuelling lower effort and the downward cycle that brings.
University instructors also need to consider using other assessments that increase observability. In- class presentations are a traditional assessment that works well in many disciplines and that allows students observe each other. Releasing of average grades from small stakes assessments is another. Students should not be allowed to think that their mediocre performance is the norm.
Both formal and informal
To be sure, students also need to learn to collaborate with one another, both formally in assessments like group projects, but also informally in study groups and the like. Being on campus is better for collaboration too. When working on a group project, there is a temptation to freeride on others’ efforts. This is mitigated by in-person interactions; peer effects and pressure are stronger in- person. Our research also shows that incidental interactions are critical in transferring knowledge. Students learn from each other. Without the opportunities for these informal interactions before and after class, or in the coffee shop, an important learning experience is lost. Finally, competition once again plays a role. Study groups are often a critical learning activity; studying harder and knowing more allows someone to get into a study group with better students.
We must get students back on campus
The mode of teaching and the way universities assess learning creates incentives, or otherwise, for students to put in effort. A lack of observability between peers is a recipe for a lack of effort, and hence poor learning. It is vital that a concerted effort to get students back on campus is made now, relatively soon after the COVID lockdowns. To not do so not only hurts the learning of current students, and their potential lifetime earnings, it hinder the long-term productivity of the country. Any delay, moreover, just makes the adjustment to study back on campus more difficult, perhaps even preventing it from happening altogether.
Vladimir Smirnov received his PhD from the Australian National University in October 2002. His main areas of interest are in the economics of contest, collusion and innovation. He has published in leading economics journals such as the Rand Journal of Economics, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control and Games and Economic Behavior. Vladimir is an experienced educator, having taught mathematical economics, microeconomics and the economics of regulation.
Andrew Wait is a professor in the School of Economics at the University of Sydney. Andrew’s research interests include industrial organisation and organisational economics. Andrew has published in the Rand Journal of Economics, the International Journal of Industrial Organization and the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization. He is the co-convenor of the Annual Organizational Economics Workshop. Andrew is a co-author of the introductory economics textbook ‘Essentials of Microeconomics’.
As researchers located in Australia, we observed this reporting on the presence of Andrew Tate’s ideology in UK schools with interest, and wondered in what ways, if any, was Andrew Tate reaching, and possibly changing, boys in Australian schools. While there is a long history of research into sexism in Australian schools, the recent rise in popularity of ‘manfluencer’ figures—internet personalities who share extremist ideas about masculinity and sexist ideas about women—of which Andrew Tate is a particular popular figurehead, calls for renewed investigation into the way these personalities might be informing boys’ views on girls and women.
In our just-published paper on this topic we report on our ongoing project—the first known study on the influence of Andrew Tate’s influence on boys in Australian schools. Drawing on interviews with 30 women from across Australia, who teach in both primary and secondary settings and across the Catholic, government and Independent sectors, we explore accounts of a widespread, discernible shift in boys’ attitudes and behaviours towards women and girls.
This shift was identified by each of our participants, characterised by behaviour overtly informed by Andrew Tate’s ideology, underpinned by a palpable masculinist supremacy, and culminating in accounts of unrelenting sexual harassment and misogyny encountered at participants’ schools. We explore each of our key findings below.
Infiltration of Tate ideology
Teachers unanimously reported during our interviews that changes in boys’ behaviour intersected with the growth of Tate’s popularity online. They shared that many of their students use Andrew Tate’s name to provoke girls and women in the classroom, that boys express freely how much they admire him, that they often share some of Andrew Tate’s beliefs about women (for example, ‘Andrew Tate says women shouldn’t be able to drive because they get into more accidents than men’), and that they have adopted Andrew Tate’s belief that men are victims of women’s increasing power and status in society.
Teachers also reported their students aligning with Andrew Tate’s belief that the charges laid against him are the result of a global conspiracy and that Tate is being unfairly vilified for his views on women. This makes it particularly difficult for teachers to challenge boys on their respect for Tate, when concern can be dismissed as part of the same conspiracy responsible for Tate’s arrest.
One of the key issues with Andrew Tate’s ideology in schools is that superficially, he presents as espousing a type of masculine success—wealthy, athletic and dominant with very clear rules on how to enact masculinity in the world. Disturbingly though, alongside boys’ engagement with Tate’s messaging on wealth, fitness and success, are other narrow and dangerous versions of masculinity that are founded on power, aggression and misogyny.
Male supremacy
Participants in our study described a resurgence of behaviour they described as male supremacy. Women reported increasing expressions of aggression and domination, unreasonable demands made of women teachers, and boys patronising girls and women. These behaviours have been accompanied by the use of Tate’s phrases to belittle and dehumanise women and girls, as well as the use of Tate’s mannerisms and ideas to wield dominant power in classroom interactions.
One of our participants reported that it is common for boys to demand more labour from women teachers, another described experiencing frequent expressions of male superiority, such as boys placing their feet on furniture or surrounding women teachers on yard duty, deliberately derailing lessons and dominating time and discussion, while another described the presence of an overwhelming culture of ‘entitlement and audacity’ from cohorts of boys that her school was unable to counter.
These examples, as well as others provided by women teachers, which include dismissing English texts written by women as not worthy of study, behaviour that constitutes gaslighting, belittling and dehumanisation, profoundly affect women at work. Women reported frequently engaging in combative interactions that challenge and undermine their gender, their political orientations, and their stance on Tate.
This behaviour, which women largely attribute to boys’ consumption of Andrew Tate content, led to one of our participants observing that ‘schools are not a safe place for teachers.’
Sexual harassment and misogyny
Although education research has long documented sexual harassment of teachers and girls, participants reported a wave of renewed and targeted harassment. This behaviour is causing huge disruptions to work and education, and in some cases prompted teachers’ resignations.
In our paper we report an instance of a student spitting in his teacher’s water bottle, objectification of women teachers’ bodies, sexual moaning noises, sexual harassment at school functions and in the classroom, and gendered slurs yelled at girls across the classroom. One of our participants observed that she ‘can see the influence of [Tate] in how my male students talk about girls.’
These examples serve as indications of the denigration of girls and women through sexual harassment, expressions of dominance in the classroom, and strategies that legitimate gender inequality.
Where to next?
In response to these findings, We argue that there is an urgent need to invite conversations in schools about sexism and sexual harassment, and to allow women and girls to be heard. There is a need for open discussion about the impact of misogynist influencers on boys and their behaviour, developing relationships and identities. School-level responses to this issue must be broader, long-term and more comprehensive to have an impact on the kinds of behaviour we have reported on in this article.
We are also interested in furthering the emerging research agenda examining ‘manfluencer’ culture and its consequences for educational settings; in particular, how leadership-level responses and school-wide policy approaches, for example, can tackle systemic and cultural problems in school that perpetuate violence against girls and women.
Stephanie Wescott is a lecturer in Humanities in Social Sciences in the School of Education, Culture and Society, Monash University Faculty of Education. Her research explores socio-political phenomena and their intersections with education policy and practice.
Steven Roberts is a professor of Education and Social Justice in the School of Education, Culture and Society at Monash University Faculty of Education. He is a sociologist and has published widely in the areas of Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities and Critical Youth Studies.
Federal Minister for Education Jason Clare released the final Universities Accord report on Sunday. Experts for EduResearch Matters respond.
From left to right: Andrew Norton, professor in the Practice of Higher Education Policy at the Australian National University; Gwilym Croucher, associate professor, in the Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education; Jess Harris, associate professor, School of Education, University of Newcastle; Sarah Gurr, postdoctoral research fellow, School of Education, University of Newcastle; ARC Tracker, researcher at an Australian university tracking the activities and decisions of the Australian Research Council; Mark Scott, vice-chancellor at the University of Sydney and chair of the Group of Eight Universities; and Steven Hodge, associate professor, School of Education and Professional Studies, Griffith University
The Australian National University’s Andrew Norton: The question now is whether a plan for everything is a strategy for nothing
The Universities Accord final report is a long-term plan for a new tertiary education system – one which would see a larger share of the population attain a university degree, especially from equity groups; that would see new universities opened and existing universities expanded to accommodate these enrolments; and solve the problem of skills shortages by better aligning enrolments with jobs.
The Accord plan would reform the student contribution system so that fees were linked to expected future earnings, pay students on compulsory clinical training and teaching rounds, widen eligibility for Youth Allowance and increase its rate, change the way HELP debt is indexed, and alter the way HELP repayments are made to increase disposable income for many HELP debtors.
Much of this would be coordinated by a new bureaucratic body, an Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC), that would also include the existing quality regulatory agency, TEQSA; the non-medical research project grants body, the ARC; and eventually absorb the vocational education regulator, ASQA, to create a true tertiary education system.
The question now is whether a plan for everything is a strategy for nothing. While the Accord agenda is long-term – its attainment targets stretch out to 2050 – the total cost to implement all of this would be several times current tertiary education spending. And that is not counting the cost of school reforms that the education minister, Jason Clare, sees as essential to making Accord higher education attainment goals realistic.
Clare has moderated expectations; it is not a matter for one budget. My own view is that the Accord panel is jumping ahead of itself with enrolment targets. ATEC would have a much larger analytical role than the current Department of Education, and the targets need to be tested against the evidence. We need to make the lives of the potential students better, not just conscript them into meeting an attainment target based on a consultant’s estimates of job needs in 2050.
The Accord proposals that would give university students we already have a better chance of success – free preparatory programs to fill gaps in knowledge and skills, funding universities partly on the level of student academic needs, perhaps paid placements (arguably state governments should also contribute to the training of their teaching and nursing workforces), and making sure Youth Allowance does its job helping students focus on their studies rather than work excessive hours. There is good empirical evidence that Youth Allowance improves course completion rates.
Even these things would, of course, be expensive. But the current period of soft demand for university creates some budget space to make a start.
The University of Melbourne’s Gwilym Croucher on the mess that was job-ready graduates
One of the most prominent proposals in the Universities Accord report is the reversal of some or all of the fee increases introduced under Job-ready Graduates (JRG).
The report is scathing of the Morrison government’s JRG policies introduced in 2021. Criticising the outcomes of the policy for students (more debt) and, importantly, the policy’s failure to deliver on its stated purpose (incentivising what people study).
Core to the JRG was the increase in fees for many students. This fuelled debts when it increased fees for a lot of popular subjects in humanities, communications and human movement degrees while also increasing the already high fees in law and commerce but by much less. The cost of many subjects rose by 113% under the scheme.
In 2023, someone studying humanities was paying around $16,000 a year. Add in the fees for a master’s or graduate professional qualification, and graduates with high debts become commonplace rather than outliers. It is not unheard of now for people to have debts over $100,000.
Reversing this would mean significant reductions for many students. But it would come with a serious price tag to return to anything close to the previous settings. It could cost the federal budget a billion dollars or more, depending on the final details.
This would be worth it, not just for students but also because it was a seriously flawed policy from the outset.
The Morrison Government sold the fee increases in humanities and other degrees as a way to dissuade students from studying these courses and instead select lower fee ‘job-ready’ courses, such as teaching and nursing. This was never going to work for the simple reason that because fees are deferred through the HELP scheme, students face zero price at entry and know that they have a good deal on loan that won’t be repaid for many years.
A cynic might say the Morrison government knew this at the time but wanted to shift the cost to students further. Which is harder and harder to justify. Data from the OECD shows there are only a few other countries where students and their families contribute more to the total cost of tertiary education.
There is plenty of evidence that students don’t select university courses on price. The report recommends that fee levels should reflect “projected potential lifetime earnings” for graduates, as they (sort of) did previously. This approach is not perfect but better than the mess that was JRG
The University of Newcastle’s Jess Harris and Sarah Gurr on facing students in tears
Compulsory, unpaid placements form an integral part of many university degrees, including teaching, nursing, allied health, social work, and medicine. For teachers, unpaid work in the classroom has been referred to as the ‘signature pedagogy’ of initial teacher education. These placements provide undergraduates to apply and develop their skills in ‘real world’ settings, while being supported and mentored by professionals. While the concept of work placements works well in theory, it can present a massive struggle for undergraduate students who are required to work full-time hours for weeks at a time without payment.
We have faced students in tears, wondering how they will be able to pay rent or secure child care when they are required to complete a ‘rural’ placement that means they need to spend two to three weeks away from home. Nursing students have reported that they have been disciplined by their placement supervisor for being tired, after having worked all weekend to afford hospital parking, rent and food while on a 6-week placement.
The Final Report of the Australian Universities Accord recognises that ‘placement poverty’ is a barrier to “tertiary participation and successful completion” (p. 6). Within universities, we know that placements pose a massive obstacle to students enrolling in and completing degrees with mandatory placements. The commitment of the Accord “to reduce the financial hardship and placement poverty caused by mandatory unpaid placements…[including] funding by governments for the nursing, care and teaching professions, and funding by employers generally (public and private) for other fields” is a first step in alleviating this obstacle.
Challenges, however, remain for students in any degree program that requires large placement blocks (e.g. two weeks or more). Teaching and nursing students often rely on their families, partners and friends to support them during long periods of full-time unpaid placement, meaning that placement poverty disproportionately impacts students who are already struggling financially.
In teacher education, we see our students taking on extra work to save money before placements, leading to periods of intense workloads immediately before starting an intense and stressful placement experience. In other cases, we see students sacrificing engagement in their face-to-face course work (e.g. tutorials and lectures) in order to complete paid work, especially before placements so that they can survive internship blocks and the rising cost of living. So in order to meet the mandatory placement requirements of their degree, some students are sacrificing the quality of their learning experience at university in order to make ends meet. Many students are reaching the end of their placement periods stressed and burned out, putting them at risk of extending and not finishing their degrees.
Government support for students, who face ‘placement poverty’ is a welcome change. There is, however, a need for careful planning to ensure that any reforms proposed by the Accord are sustainable. Sustainable change needs to both support the development of students’ skills, particularly in placements where they are completing work that is ordinarily completed by experienced professionals, and to alleviate some of the serious inequities in higher education that are exacerbated by unpaid placements.
We know there are shortages in placement availability, particularly in initial teacher education. If workplaces are required to provide financial support for students engaging in placements, we face a critical risk that fewer schools, hospitals and other organisations will participate in university placements.
Any reforms made in response to the Accord need to consider the wellbeing and educational needs of students, supporting Universities to provide the best possible preparation for our future professionals.
We welcome the Australian Universities Accord report’s vision for the future of tertiary education, but the idea that universities should pay a tax on some income streams, including philanthropy, must be rejected.
Academic and investigative tweeter, ARC Tracker, on why universities need more money for research: I’m sure the “best students” will be beating down university doors . . . probably looking for food.
New ideas are risky. Sometimes they lead nowhere. But sometimes they completely transform our world for the better. Only governments can take the risk and fund basic research to explore this world of possibilities.
But in Australia, funding for basic research is dreadfully low. Worse, it’s been dropping, in real terms, for a decade. New ideas for basic research are usually funded through the Australian Research Council. But the ARC’s funding is now so low it only funds 1 in 6 new ideas from Australia’s best researchers.
The Universities Accord Report says the ARC should “be given increased funding to invest in fundamental research”. Yay! Obviously that’s a very welcome recommendation. But the Report didn’t go any further. How much should it be increased? I sincerely hope we don’t need yet another review to figure that out. (Hint: It’s gotta be at least double, if not triple the current funding!)
The Report is a bit more specific about another crippling problem in Australian research: the Government always wants a discount. The ARC only funds the “direct” costs of research – salaries, equipment etc. – but not the additional 50% on top to manage and administer it. When a researcher “wins the lottery” and gets a (pretty small) grant to explore a new idea, universities groan: they see a penalty, not an opportunity. They have to replace that researcher’s teaching duties and pay for additional administration. The Report recommends that ARC grants move towards funding these “indirect” costs of research.
Awesome! Just like it was awesome in 2008 when Labor’s last reviews of higher ed and research (Bradley and Cutler) recommended the same thing.
The unheralded hero of Australian research is the PhD student. Learning on the job, they help explore the newest, riskiest ideas. But we pay them a pittance: $30k per year, below the poverty line. It’s shameful. Or, in some of the Report’s strongest language, it’s “discouraging many of the best students from becoming the next generation of researchers”. Heartening stuff, especially after PhD students campaigned hard last year for a pay rise … to the minimum wage. Again, the Report doesn’t say how much they should get, musing only that $47k is “more competitive with other countries’ rates”, a sweet $10 per week more than minimum wage. I’m sure the “best students” will be beating down university doors … probably looking for food.
The University of Sydney’s Mark Scott on donor worries – and why the government must recognise the cost of teaching, learning and research and invest in it.
Australia’s public universities are not-for-profit registered charities. Donations are tax deductible because the Government recognises the crucial contribution our universities make through teaching, research and community outreach. This proposal is inconsistent with the Government’s broader approach to encouraging philanthropy through tax incentives and policy reform.
Philanthropic revenue isn’t usually discretionary. Most gifts to universities must be used in accordance with the donor’s wishes, set out in legally binding agreements. They can’t be redirected to other causes.
Donations come in all sizes from ordinary people who’ve worked hard to be able to support deeply personal causes. Our donors believe that universities have the power to shape a better world and want to understand exactly how their gifts will be used. Imposing a tax on university philanthropy will deter donors when we need them more than ever.
Donors help pay for the very things the Accord report identifies as gaps under the current funding model. Their generosity gives regional, disadvantaged and Indigenous students the chance of a university education and supports vital research.
Universities don’t make profits. We invest every cent we receive back into teaching, learning, student support and research. Many large-scale initiatives supported by philanthropy require extra funding from universities, drawing on resources rather than providing revenue.
It’s perplexing to suggest that the way to improve an underfunded system is to tax the measures universities have developed to close funding gaps, such as philanthropy.
We look forward to the Government’s response to the report and to collaborating to secure the future of tertiary education in Australia. If we are to have the world-class university system we need, we must recognise the cost of teaching, learning and research and invest in it.
Griffith University’s Steven Hodge on the familiar ring of skills
The Australian Universities Accord makes over 700 references to the concept of ‘tertiary’ education, a notion that signifies an interconnected system of higher and vocational education that was envisaged 16 years ago in the Bradley Review (2008). Although the Accord process was about developing a long-term plan for higher education in Australia, the Review Panel acknowledged challenges that would require all educational sectors to work together, including higher education and vocational education and training (VET). That is why the framing of the report is often in terms of ‘tertiary education’, recognising higher education and VET as ‘2 important parts of the same system, each bringing different strengths’ (p. 1).
Observers of VET policy will find much of interest in the Accord document, although some of the suggestions have a familiar ring. At multiple points in the document there are calls for better pathways between VET and higher education. One would expect that moving between the two kinds of tertiary provision would be straightforward, and that providers would do all they can to facilitate such movement. While there are some excellent examples of seamless transition between VET and higher education studies, there are too many situations where students face frustrating barriers. The Accord document calls for this situation to be addressed, although fundamental change would be required to fully overcome it.
For VET observers a striking feature of the Accord document is the prevalence the language of ‘skills’ throughout. For those who research VET skills talk is so common it is no longer noticed, so to see it assume such importance in this context is interesting. Higher education has always had a vocational purpose. Whether preparation for professions or disciplinary scholarship and research, higher education is vocational through and through. A concern is that the intent of the document is to eventually foist a narrow conception of skills upon higher education. That approach has not always worked well in VET, where the call now is to embrace richer approaches to expressing skill standards.
Indeed, one of the most promising ideas in the document from a VET perspective is that of TAFEs being allowed to self-accredit in the VET space, at least in higher VET qualifications (Diploma level and above). What this recommendation amounts to is freeing providers from the limitations of centrally defined competency standards and giving them scope to directly address the needs of employers, communities and students. This is a revolutionary proposal in the context of VET. So long as both sides of the tertiary sector can be allowed to innovate like this, then the system should be well-placed to address the changing skill and knowledge needs of the future. While it makes sense for industry to articulate standards for its occupations, great care should be taken to express these in a way that fosters – not constrains – curricular innovation on the part of tertiary education providers.
Header image of Minister for Education Jason Clare and Professor Mary O’Kane, Chair of the Australian Universities Accord Panel, taken from the minister’s Facebook page
The purpose of educational research is to develop new knowledge to address educational needs through practical applications and policies. My experience as a teacher, coach, and researcher ideally positions me within pracademia, or what Hollweck and colleagues recognise as translating “research into practice/policy and practice/policy into research”.
In my doctoral study, three NSW schools participated in interviews and provided coaching documents for their established school-embedded coaching programs. Although coaching was available to all teachers, my research focused on coaching Early Career Teachers (ECTs), with the term coaching representing mentoring and coaching. The demographics of the participant schools are illustrated in Figure 1. I analysed the data using thematic analysis to explore the factors contributing to a conducive environment for the implementation of a coaching program for the professional growth of ECTs. Professional growth included learning and wellbeing, given their interdependence and mutual influence.
My research study indicated that it was not coaching alone but contextual coaching and the learning environment that collectively supported ECTs’ wellbeing and influenced their motivation and learning. While contextual coaching addressed current school needs and shaped the school environment, it required strategic planning and resourcing. Based on my research findings and experience in coaching, teaching, and accreditation, I propose a distinctive induction program that requires a collaborative effort from all levels of the education system. This proposal is pertinent to four priority areas of the National Teacher Workforce Action Plan designed to improve teacher supply and retention in Australia through additional support and processes. These include-
#7 States and territories to investigate the potential to promote teaching, mentoring, and other opportunities to people who are registered but not currently working as teachers.
#14 Develop national guidelines to support early career teachers and new school leaders, including mentoring and induction.
#17 Streamline Highly Accomplished and Lead Teachers (HALTs) processes, making it less burdensome for teachers.
#22 Identify and assess the effectiveness of initiatives to support teacher retention.
All coaching programs differed in my study, revealing one size does not fit all. But at the school level, contextual coaching was evident in all three cases. This finding suggests that ECTs across Australia need a coaching program that is consistent in approach yet accommodates and values contextual differences. While AITSL provides guidelines for induction and coaching resources, this does not guarantee consistent implementation or effectiveness. While the guidelines allow context variations, the loophole permits inequitable support for ECTs, with induction programs being inconsistent across Australia. Regardless of school location or financial status, all ECTs deserve support in their learning and wellbeing through a national induction program.
My study offers three crucial ideas for the design, implementation, and evaluation of an induction program to support, develop, and retain ECTs while at the same time yielding multiple benefits for other stakeholders.
1. Principals catalyse a positive learning environment that supports and sustains programs.
This study revealed the significant impact the three principals had on their learning environment and the success and sustainability of the coaching program. The positive learning environment conducive to coaching reflected a strong commitment to learning, staff, coaching, and research. Every principal in my study collaborated with a coach leader and coaching team, supporting the concept of distributed leadership. The proposed induction program requires distributed leadership, shifting the important yet arduous induction and accreditation processes from the school principal to school leaders with the support of universities, education authorities, and AITSL. Before commencing the program, the principal and relative staff could complete a survey based on the learning environment to determine suitability. Furthermore, questions generated from my research findings may provide provocations for the leadership team to discuss before implementing a coaching initiative and may assist in the selection of coaches and a coach leader.
2. Programs require clearly defined, well-comprehended, and evidence-informed concepts and practices.
Terms such as induction, coaching, and mentoring require unambiguous definitions and practices known Australia-wide. The “jingle-jangle fallacy” refers to using one phrase to express various concepts or when several terms represent the same concept. In my research, induction incorporated concepts such as coaching, mentoring, accreditation, and school orientation and, when used synonymously, created ambiguity. Terms that include multiple concepts hinder comprehension and practice. In an effort to reduce inequity and the variability of induction program experiences across contexts, a collaboratively designed induction program that spans Australia could clarify concepts and practices, thereby promoting consistency. Teachers unaware of what induction entails cannot reliably evaluate a program.
3. An induction program that supports ECTs’ professional growth requires suitable funding, and the findings suggest those supporting ECTs’ professional growth require knowledge of adult learning, contextual coaching, accreditation, wellbeing, and emotional intelligence.
Based on the findings, effective coaches integrate principles of adult learning and emotional intelligence with coaching elements that include knowledge, skills, and dispositions. All coaches received training, but similar to teacher quality, quantifying or developing coach dispositions is challenging. Training experienced teachers to coach ECTs as self-determined learners results in the development of collaborative and reflective skills, as well as reciprocal learning. A university graduate certificate based on a context-specific action research project could integrate coaching, accreditation, emotional intelligence, and wellbeing. All research participants agreed that coaching was beneficial for professional growth, despite time being a consistent barrier. Implementing and sustaining effective contextual coaching demands support and funds from sources beyond the school.
The proposed induction program requires shared responsibility, fostering collective accountability across systems, schools, authorities, organisations, and universities to design and assess impact. In Wales, the Government, seven universities, and essentialstakeholders collaboratively designed a postgraduate program to ensure all participants receive the same high-quality program, improving consistency while enhancing teachers’ professional learning. My proposed initiative could support ECTs’ learning and wellbeing while offering numerous benefits to other stakeholders.
· Experienced teachers could learn how to effectively support ECTs’ accreditation process.
· University course participants could disseminate research-based information and create a positive learning environment.
· Universities could access data from school leaders, coaches, and teachers and work collaboratively with other universities, education authorities, and school systems.
· Participation rate of teachers participating in post-graduate studies or higher levels of accreditation may increase.
A considered induction program recognises the time and financial investment that a university teaching degree entails while ensuring the continuation of teacher learning and wellbeing support. Creating a postgraduate university course incorporating induction, coaching, accreditation, and wellbeing with an overarching inquiry project would provide program and practice consistency, additional school support, and shared professional accountability. This may reduce the inequity of professional support for ECTs while building the capacity of teachers and middle leaders. The initiative could contribute to various accreditation requirements and involve stakeholders such as universities, schools, education authorities, and AITSL to ensure program effectiveness and integrity while providing equitable access for ECTs’ professional growth.
The teacher shortage is at a “crisis” point, and long-term alternatives include the improvement of the profession’s status and working conditions. Focusing on strategies to attract teachers requires considerable investment in time, effort, and funding, whereas this suggested program takes a more pragmatic approach, prioritising and supporting current teachers’ professional growth. By providing strategic support for two years, the induction program creates a positive environment to retain effective teachers, nurture future leaders, and support early career teachers’ professional growth.
Andrea Stringer completed her doctorate at the University of New South Wales and is passionate about supporting early career teachers and creating environments to retain effective teachers. Accredited through the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, she coaches educators and leaders to develop professionally and increase wellbeing. Andrea connects research with practice, working collaboratively with school leaders and educators to build their capacity. Contact her andrea@contextualcoaching.com.au
For students in ancient history, generic writing advice is insufficient. Advice about structure, such as, say what you are going to say, say it, then say what you have said, or acronyms, such as PEEL (Point Example Elaboration Link) emphasize repetition and connecting ideas. They aren’t much help to students needing to evaluate historical figures and events. What else can teachers do to help?
In our study (part of an ARC funded research project, https://doi.org/10.52289/hej10.106) we want to help ancient history students with writing for exams. The extended responses are daunting and high-stakes in terms of marks that contribute to the overall exam grade. In our data set, drawn from a lower Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage (ICSEA) in Western Sydney, we found that students struggled with writing conclusions and tended to just fizzle out – as if there was nothing new to say. In our data set, one-line conclusions were common, such as:
Extract 1 Despite his achievements to unify China he should still be considered a cruel king.
Flunking the conclusion section and getting confused about where and how to evaluate a historical figure makes it very hard for students to achieve higher grades.
To tackle this issue, our study investigates how Yr 12 ancient history students can successfully write a discussion in which they evaluate historical figures, like Emperor Qin. While students could critique behaviour, like saying the Emperor was cruel, they often didn’t know how to gradually build towards a standpoint where values are connected to historical concepts. In ancient history, these concepts include collections of values that are abstractly packaged as ~isms, such as individualism, collectivism, socialism, democracy, etc.This means students need to express values (cruel, powerful,successful, etc) as a connection point for saying something broader about historical concepts, like the ~isms of history.
How to evaluate Emperor Qin
In our data nearly all students could use evidence from artefacts and events to express specific values, but few could pull the values together. They missed the ~isms boat.
Yet this identifies a teaching opportunity. We can teach students to marshal evidence and build towards a culminating standpoint. Instead of the fadding one-liners, conclusions are an ideal place for the ~isms. This is because a broad claim in the conclusion can be well supported by all the evidence and corresponding evaluation that has been previously introduced. Here’s an example adapted from our data where evaluation (ruthless, barbaric, brutality, rigidity) is pulled together under the concept of Legalism.
Example Conclusion
In conclusion, the discovery of the Terracotta Warriors reveals both negative and positive aspects of Qin’s rule. He can be perceived as a successful leader with respect to his role in the unification of China and reforms which led to a more prosperous and advanced society. However, the ruthless and barbaric bloodshed of his own people reveals an underlying obsession for power and control. For Qin, it seems that the price of progress and domination was never too high. Ultimately, the rigidity and brutality of leadership grounded in Legalism led to the demise of the Qin dynasty.
Heavy lifting
In the example above, the heavy-lifting for evaluation is done in the first and final sentences with corresponding evidence in between. It’s the final part of this ‘evaluation sandwich’ where students ‘go beyond the dude’ (in this case the Emperor Qin) and point towards historical concepts, like unification and Legalism.
In our project, we used a theory from within the sociology of education, called Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) to understand how students can use evaluation to talk about the ~isms. This theory, developed by Professor Karl Maton at the University of Sydney involves the concept known as semantic gravity. When analysing student writing, semantic gravity can be used to compare and contrast how tied to context something is. For example, when students say that Emperor Qin’s behaviour is ruthless, barbaric or brutal, their writing displays relatively strong semantic gravity (SG+). They discuss a specific figure, doing specific things in a specific setting. In contrast, writing about the concept of Legalism has weaker semantic gravity (SG-). It is not necessarily only tied to the Emperor Qin but could be linked to other historical figures in other times and places.
Ruthless, barbaric or brutal
In our research, we plotted the relative strength of semantic gravity as it changes throughout students’ text. This creates what is known as a semantic profile. Points at the top of the semantic profile represent more abstract and generalised meanings, whereas points at the bottom represent meanings that are more strongly tied to context. Here’s a sample (please see our article for more detailed analysis and an earlier blog post for another example with a different kind of exam question).
Figure 1: Plotting a semantic profile that builds towards a conclusion
What this kind of semantic profile highlights is that the fragments of evidence can be connected to values. Students can organise the pairing of evidence and values in series of body paragraphs, such as a paragraph with evidence of why Qin can be perceived as cruel, or another with examples of being powerful. These ‘evidence-value’ connections involve students controlling degrees of context dependency. Then in the conclusion, students can further reduce context dependency so that collections of values are interpreted as an ~ism (like Legalism).
If students write in this kind of way, then their culminating claim can be perceived as justified by the reader and not come out of the blue. For evaluating historical figures, a conclusion can be far more than ’say what you’ve said’. It’s more helpful to ask, ‘what can you say now that you couldn’t authoritatively say before?’
Evaluative bits
In our study we argue that teaching students where all the ‘evaluative bits’ go and what their evaluation can build towards should be explicitly taught.
Given that the NSW curriculum reform requires teachers to “clarify and strengthen ‘writing’ content” in all subjects, identifying what is valued in writing and why is vital. Through teaching practices, such as modelling and co-constructing texts, we can show students how to control context dependency and explain why it matters so much.
For year 12 students doing ancient history, this means learning to evaluate the dude but getting to the ~isms.
Lucy Macnaught, senior lecturer and learning advisor, Learning and Academic Engagement team within the AUT Library, collaborates with the Graduate Research School and faculty to integrate academic literacies in programs. Her research draws on theories of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory to investigate what students are expected to create. She designs teaching making these expectations clear. Twitter @lucy_macnaught and LinkedIn
Erika Matruglio, associate professor, School of Education, University of Wollongong, draws on theories of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory, and on Design Based Research, to research literacy practices in schooling. She has published on the nature of classroom discourse, conditions which enable cumulative knowledge building, disciplinarity and the demands of writing in the disciplines. Twitter @Lingitude and LinkedIn.
More students than ever before are being enrolled in Australia’s private schools, according to new data on school choice from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Most states and territories have experienced a similar trend. Even before current increases Australia had among the highest proportion of kids enrolled at non government schools in the OECD.
Why are private schools growing in Australia?
The growth tends to be concentrated in what’s called the lower-fee sector although that can still be a burden – two or three children at school at $5,000 per child before tax income, so it is still quite an expense. By far the highest growth has occurred in the newer, non-elite non-government schools. This group of schools is heavily funded by governments.
I think there is a mystique around private schools – parents feel that they’re doing the right thing by their children by sending them to private schools. I get asked a lot about values.
What does ‘values’ actually mean?
Public schools have very good values, the most important of which is their fundamental mission to welcome all children. When people talk about values in relation to private schools I get quite irritated because I think of all the reasons why you might choose one school or another, ‘values’ are not really the reason unless you are thinking about a particular religious set of values and religious beliefs.
The majority of private schools belong to the more traditional Christian churches, the Christian denominations Catholic or Protestant. So in terms of values, the schools that have the strongest anti-discrimination values, for example, are actually the public schools. Those are values. Anything else is a myth.
When it comes to school choice, does it benefit someone to go to a private school or public school in the long term, in terms of either earnings or job success?
The big difference is to do with other factors: social class is the big factor statistically that shapes people’s outcomes. Success comes in all sorts of different individual experiences.
Some people from very modest backgrounds go on to the highest offices of the land. Former Prime Ministers John Howard, Julia Gillard, Scott Morrison all attended public schools. Current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went to a Catholic school.
The correlation between class and schooling success
And some people from extraordinarily privileged backgrounds go belly up. Statistically speaking there’s a very strong, long-term and robust correlation between family wealth, or social class or whatever measure you’re going to use, and schooling success. In a wealthy country like Australia, that’s pretty shameful. It’s much stronger than it should be.
It’s very easy to blame the media. I think media report things that are interesting, and that have conflict, and the discussion about sending your kids to which school you send your kids is a bit of a backyard conversation, a topic among parents. People have arguments about school choice. People hold passionate views, they disagree about it. Sometimes parents disagree with each other. Sometimes grandparents disagree with their children about where the grandchildren are sent. It’s a cause of struggle and interest and so I think that’s where the media interest comes from. There are also widely publicised issues public schools face, such as teacher shortages, which may contribute to parents considering private options.
There has been a long-term disparagement of public schools, there’s been many people talking them down. It is very hard for public school leaders. If they don’t talk about the crisis and the resources, how are they going to get anything done? On the other hand, if parents hear about teacher shortages, they’re naturally going to get very worried.
In a sense, Catholic schools have Catholic offices to lobby for them–as a day job. The private schools have various peak bodies to lobby for them.
Who lobbies for public schools?
No one has the day job of lobbying for public schools yet they still enrol the majority of Australian kids and presumably the majority of Australian parents are pretty happy with their local public school.
We are currently undoubtedly facing a crisis in the nation’s public schools. Now, that’s not all public schools. It’s very much determined by certain localities and certain sort of clusters of areas where there are problems.
Public school people are in a real bind. If leaders of public schools say nothing, and they say everything’s fine, how are the problems ever going to get addressed?
And yet if they talk about how much they need more resources, which they do then it has this effect of implying that the education that they’re offering is below standard and one thing we know about parents is that they are absolutely risk-averse.
That’s their job description, parents’ job description is to be risk averse. If you’re reading in the newspapers, if you’re listening to the radio or you might even see the local public school with, you know, demountable walls or falling-down buildings, your natural instinct is to do what you can to to send your child somewhere else.
Those thousands of unstaffed classrooms across the nation have an impact on parental school choice. How could it not? If you’re hearing that your child might not have a maths teacher, what are you going to do?
What impacts school choice?
Of course, you’re going to make a certain set of decisions. I would say to parents, have a look at your local school and see how your local schools are going, because it may well be that you’re not in it in an area where there are those shortages.
But yes, of course, people are going to be worried about that. And that’s not to say anything about the abiding quality of public education or the dedication and commitment of public school teachers. It’s to say that it’s shameful that a wealthy country like Australia cannot find it in its coffers to properly fund public education.
We know that public schools are the only schools that systematically enrol all children, they enrol all children in an area, they enrol all children, no matter how savvy their parents are, no matter how wealthy their parents are, no matter what kind of connections that parents have. And so it absolutely is critical to all of us, whether we send our own kids public or private to have a really strong public sector.
It’s a question of national importance.
Helen Proctor is a professor of education at the University of Sydney, with a research interest in how schools shape social life beyond the school gate. She uses historical methods to examine the making of contemporary educational systems by focussing on the changing relationships between schools, families and ‘communities’.
There are unclear messages of who the ECEC professional is and where they fit in the overall education profession due to a combination of social, political and economic factors.The idea of ‘quality’ in ECEC is used as a political and economic tool to justify government spending and to measure output. The historical beginnings of the ECEC sector are grounded in welfare and mothering-type child care roles. That’s further compounded by societal beliefs that early childhood educators don’t require credentials or even deserve the title of educator.
These issues of professional recognition in the ECEC sector are being addressed through quality-driven compliance processes and increasing surveillance disguised as rewards, such as higher ratings within NQS processes. These factors are challenging the opportunities for a true reflection of professional recognition for our ECEC workforce.
There’s an upturn in applications for ‘excellent’
As a researcher of professional identity in the Australian ECEC sector, I pay attention to patterns of engagement in professional recognition undertakings. There appears to be an upturn in ECEC services applying for the ‘excellent’ rating.
I wondered why that was. Why the need for an excellent rating? And why spend precious resources applying for this rating?
Let me explain the process of assessment and rating within the Australian ECEC sector.
The operation of an approved ECEC service including long day care and preschools in Australia is regulated through a national independent authority the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA). This body oversees the implementation of the National Quality Framework (NQF) under which a National Quality Standard (NQS) system exists.
Since 2011, ACECQA has assisted state and territory governments in implementing the NQF for children’s education and care. Its role is to provide support for the ECEC sector and to monitor the application of the National Law and Regulations system. The standards are implemented through assessment of an ECEC centre’s performance against seven quality areas.
Seven quality areas
The seven quality areas are educational program and practice, children’s health and safety, physical environment, staffing arrangements, relationships with children, collaborative partnerships with families and communities and finally, governance and leadership.
For an ECEC service to achieve a rating of ‘Meeting’ the NQS an authorised officer from a state or territory regulatory body needs to assess the centre’s performance against seven quality areas as listed above and have met them all. That rating shows the service meets the NQS providing quality education and care across all seven quality areas Guide to the National Quality Framework (NQF) – September 2020
What does ‘exceeding’ mean?
To achieve a rating of ‘Exceeding’ the National Quality Standard, the centre needs to be rated Exceeding in at least four or more of the quality areas with at least two of the areas being either educational program, relationships with children, collaborative partnerships with families and governance and leadership. Under the standards, a centre rated as Exceeding demonstrates that the centre goes beyond standard requirements. To achieve the rating of Excellent the centre needs to have been rated as Exceeding the standards in all seven quality areas.
The NQS considers that a centre rated as Excellent promotes exceptional education and care, demonstrates sector leadership, and is committed to continually improving Guide to the National Quality Framework (NQF) – September 2020. To be awarded an Excellent rating a centre must make an application to the authority and demonstrate it meets three of the authority’s criteria.The first criteria is related to exemplary and exceptional education and care covering partnerships with professionals, community and or research organisations; show a commitment to children in relation to diversity, culture and inclusive partnerships; demonstrate positive workplace culture and values and environments that enhance children’s learning.
The second criteria needs to demonstrate leadership that enhances the development of the community or wider ECEC sector.
The third criteria needs to demonstrate a commitment to practices of excellence that are sustained and continuous.
Exceptional Practice Framework
There is provision of an Exceptional Practice Framework to assist applicants. Just 34 ECEC or OOSH settings hold the excellent rating in Australia, compared to 3,700 rated at exceeding and 15,700 rated as meeting.
During my doctoral studies with the University of Newcastle researching the relationship between leadership, quality discourse and professional identity, participants shared that gaining an excellent rating for their centre provided a perceived heightened sense of professional identity amongst colleagues and families.
According to the report, what matters to families is skilled and experienced educators, cost and location.
If the imperatives of the early childhood sector are to ensure children and families are thriving in accessible and affordable ECEC settings, why do we need ratings beyond meeting a national standard?
Why does achieving a higher rating matter and why would educators be drawn to undertake the significant work involved in proving their practices are ‘excellent’?
Here’s why.
The excellent rating awarded by ACECQA seeks to highlight specialisation by providers and educators that showcase outstanding practice and programs.
I believe a tension exists around the measurement of ECEC programs based on the contextual nature of a settings’ specialisation through a neoliberal mechanism such as quality assurance.
This tension questions whether or not specialisation can remain a meaningful marker of excellence when held within frameworks of criteria, themes and external decision-making. There is a risk that this process reduces the excellent rating to a politically domesticated professionalisation award in place of truly valued and authentically understood pedagogy and professional identity for the ECEC sector.
The ‘truths’ of quality
The discourses of quality and accepted truth claims of centres holding high ratings equate to better quality outcomes, move through the ECEC social body. This normalises quality processes encouraging the sector to pursue professional status through higher ratings.
There is little evidence to support the claim that high ratings held under the NQF ensure quality outcomes for children.
The evidence demonstrates quality outcomes are dependent upon individual educators’ motivation to seek ongoing professional learning and higher qualification. That cannot be assured by the NQF.
The quality assurance process can alter – and shift – educators’ focus away from the heart of expert activity and opportunities for reflexive, democratic pedagogical curiosity.
Quality assurance mechanisms incite self-governance that fixate the ECEC sector to exceed external standards and re-design thinking about practices of care and education to evidence themes and ‘quality’ criteria.
Is this the criteria that educators, children and families would choose? Does this matter to them or are they simply governed to generate these values? What other values and ideas are overlooked when the sector is so entranced by quality highlights?
Complicating ‘excellence’
Those applying for an excellent rating are seeking validation for the considered pedagogical efforts of their setting that highlights the big and bold points of difference of their context.
But I argue that centres look beyond external ratings and instead re-focus on the everyday value rational practices of expertise in care and wellbeing.
The inequity of the excellent rating for those centres who do not have the resources to meet criteria could be balanced by ‘excellent’ educators sharing and connecting with other educators about daily practices of deeply practical pedagogical care that forms our decision making.
Focus could be directed to co-constructing new narratives of professional practice within our teams, to debate and discuss the purpose of our work and create better outcomes for more children.
All centres could be proud of this kind of work, resulting in significant, albeit difficult to measure, ongoing ethical improvement.
Educators and centres need a deeper understanding
The opportunity for professional identities existing within collective societies informed by democratic values is lost through these quality assurance processes. Educators and centres need a deeper understanding of how these mechanisms shape what the sector does – and a broad cohort of educators must become confident to let go of the truth claims of professional certainty gained from external gildings of excellence.
We can’t lift the ECEC profession through ideas of individualised excellence and themed specialisation and continuing to accept that quality ratings proves professionalism.
Could we move our thinking away from instrumentally rational approaches of ‘doing what works’ to achieve professional recognition, towards more value rational approaches of ‘doing what is right’ for children and a workforce in desperate need of sustainable reconceptualisation?
Elevating education and care through joining educator expertise with regulatory structures
Quality discourse in the form of criteria, themes, outcomes and frameworks wears a cloak of certainty that provides ‘truth’ about what can be highlighted as macro practices of specialised excellence.
The cloak of certainty hides complexity
But this cloak of certainty hides the complexity of the micro practices within the relationships and shared values of care, trust and wellbeing when working with children and families. To validate the work of the ECEC educators’ daily practices, the influences of formal and moral knowledge operational within educator expertise and regulatory structure should be revealed.
Educator agency and moral knowledge is gained through deeply reflexive praxis, experience and wisdom that considers the broader conditions that educators are working in. These conditions include economic and political influences, discourses of quality and self-governance that educators are complicit in when seeking an excellent rating. These conditions distract the focus of ECEC professionals to technocratic ways of highlighting success in their work. This distraction can hinder value rational acts that may better serve ECEC contexts. Our daily practices of criticality that truly represent the complex capacity of the ECEC educator are far more intricate than any reductive notions of ‘excellence’.
Mel Duffy-Fagan is a proud Early Childhood Teacher with over 30 years experience as an educator and director with 20 years also being an Approved Provider of a centre in Lambton, Newcastle. Mel works as an academic and researcher within the ECEC sector and completed her PhD in 2023 with the University of Newcastle. Her doctoral studies explored the themes of leadership, professional identity and quality policy. Find her on LinkedIn.
The advice given to teachers entering the classroom for the first time is often ‘Don’t smile until Easter’. The expression suggests hostility, attempting to place the teacher as the enforcer and the one who will wield the power for the year.
While the phrase might still ring true for some teachers, we, as teachers, are dealing with very different classrooms and students today that require a more socio-emotional approach. Classrooms are more heterogeneous than ever; the breadth of diversity and needs of students has grown. Students are entering the classroom with ever more diagnosed and undiagnosed disabilities, and growing wellbeing issues.
The classroom can and should provide a warm, safe learning environment where students feel known and cared for. And whilst such an approach is highly applicable in primary schools, it also has its place in secondary classrooms.
Teaching is social and emotional
We know teaching is a social and emotional practice, and using the first weeks of the term to build positive connections with students can have long term benefits for both teachers and students. Research tells us that positive teacher-student relationships can assist positive social and emotional development in students; influence student motivation and engagement; improve academic outcomes; support at-risk students; provide a sense of belonging for students; and are beneficial for teachers and their wellbeing. The research is there, but how do teachers build these relationships in the classroom, especially in secondary schools when teachers often teach up to 180 students per week?
My research into teacher-student interactions in the classroom, collected data from 42 teachers across NSW secondary schools, covering all sectors and spanning 17 disciplines. I was curious to know how teachers interact with students in their classrooms to build teacher-student relationships and whether a teachers’ workload may be compromising these relationships. Many of the practices observed and counted are evidence-informed and low cost, high gain. The practices were split into those that teachers can proactively implement directly and those that indirectly contribute to creating and maintaining an optimal learning environment.
Eye-contact, a warm voice and good manners
The early findings give insights into how teachers are navigating the classroom and their relational interactions with students (Figure 1). Highest counts came from teachers providing genuine praise, modelling respect, reflective and supportive listening, getting to know students and providing feedback. Teachers effectively used praise during lessons for positive behaviour, academic work and actions of individuals or a collective group. They modelled respect through eye-contact, a warm voice and good manners. Supportive and reflective listening through shared dialogue was characterised by teachers reflecting on a student’s thought or idea by supportively listening, then converting that thinking into further thinking and inquiry. Feedback came in the form of verbal advice to students of ways to improve and develop their thoughts. And teachers shared stories of themselves, and used familiar ‘teenage’ or contemporary examples to explain work or reference a students’ interest, to demonstrate knowing their students.
Figure 1: Counted practices
Hello and goodbye
Two of the simplest techniques, positive greetings and farewells, which were only counted once per lesson, recorded one the lowest of counts. Over a third of teachers didn’t positively greet their students and a quarter of teachers didn’t finish the lesson with a positive farewell. This could reflect a number of things prevalent in the observation of lessons and the teacher interviews; the constant time constraints that teachers face such as the need to work through content or towards an assessment meant that teachers started lessons immediately with little personalisation; or the time it takes to travel to a new classroom each lesson, provide paper, pens and equipment for students, and student lateness often chewed up the time to genuinely greet students. The lack of time to build quality relationships was evidently a major concern for teachers in post interviews, claiming:
“It’s a bit more of a lack of a chance to talk with them. There’s a lot of…’everything needs to be doing’ things all of the time and that lack of…slowdown to sort of have a chat with them and see them as people, to get them to see you as a person”. (Teacher 21)
“I wish that I had more time to interact with them in the classroom and I wish I had more time to interact with their drafts and things like that and give them that timely feedback. And I think that the fact that I don’t. I just have to go “You’ll be ok” that makes me feel like I’m not doing enough for them.” (Teacher 28 )
What gets in the way
Many of the lower counts came from interpersonal practices that teachers adopt and can indirectly affect the teacher-student relationship and shape the learning climate (see red in Figure 1). These teacher actions can be done before and during the lesson. They help structure the learning environment, set the expectations and manage students positively. It is a way for teachers to bolster student confidence, build trust, and set and uphold classroom expectations. None of the 42 teachers in this study found time to write in a diary or provide a positive note to parents during the two observed lessons. Instead, time was taken up with constantly documenting student misbehaviour and negative incidences, all of which must be logged. A teacher reported:
I try to make a phone call to parents and say this kid has been good, but I just don’t have the time. I have 3 or 4 ‘negative’ calls to make, to inform a parent that their child is not working in class. (Teacher 23)
What do teachers value
Secondary school lessons can range from 40 to 75 minutes with the expectation that students sit still for the duration of the lesson. Studies show that small movement breaks contribute to less disruptions and better student concentration. Lesson time is often the most inactive part of a student’s day at school with the expectation, in a traditional sense, that students sit, listen and partake in learning. Three quarters of teachers provided no movement breaks during their lessons, even when observing students falling asleep and heads on table. Many lessons observed lacked peer collaborative strategies and student choice of their learning which can contribute to student motivation. Teachers reported resorting to ‘lecture style’ teaching or ‘talk-and-chalk’ due to the demands of additional work or workload which took away from planning and preparing for more engaging, student-centred lessons.
Teachers were also asked what they value in their teaching, with 42.9% stating relationships, and 57.1% stating other factors such as the curriculum, getting through the content, planning and preparation, and student understanding. Many of these teachers, speaking about how they form relationships with students, were unclear how this happens, whilst others spoke about specific tasks they may do at the beginning of the year as a way of getting to know their students.
Bingo
These involved asking students to write introductory letters; informing students about yourself and your interests; learning their names and using them regularly; collaborative making of classroom rules, goals and expectations; playing ‘getting to know others’ bingo; or general discussions, either as a group or individually about likes, dislikes, interests etc. Much of the research, using student voice, reported care as a quality students want to see in teachers often commenting that the teacher doesn’t know them personally. Students also respect teacher competence; not being able to ‘run the room’ can be the quickest way to lose the students.
Teachers influence their students, not only through their pedagogy and behaviour, but also in teaching and modelling social and emotional constructs. Creating positive teacher-student relationships is not about making friends. As the adults in the room, teachers instruct, direct and guide their students and their behaviour, not hesitating when difficulties arise. But also as the adult and leader in the room, teachers can help students feel safe, known and cared for, something which might not be happening at home.
Smile on day one?
So perhaps standing by the belief of “Don’t smile until Easter” is an outdated adage. Instead, bring the humanness back to teaching; show a little of yourself, bring humour, get to genuinely know students and show you care. Underpin this with established routines and structure, transparency and predictability, and trust, to create a conducive learning environment that builds strong teacher-student relationships.
Julianna Libro is a PhD candidate at The University of Sydney. She is interested in teachers’ growing workload and the consequences this has on teachers themselves, their practice and relationships with students. Julianna has over 20 years teaching experience in secondary schools as an English and History teacher and has taken on a variety of leadership roles throughout her career. Recently, Julianna presented her initial findings at ICERI Conference in Seville, Spain and AARE, Melbourne.
