Who’s making these dumb decisions about education?

Julia Gillard must have a bunch of faceless monkeys making the calls about her education revolution and I am worried about the profound lack of common sense and respect that she is paying to those who work at the coalface.

Everyone wants the best for their children however every child is different and roughly only 30% have the academic ability to secure a university education. Instead of making for exciting innovation and improved standards, the focus that Julia has amped up about testing, marks and grades has caused a nightmare for many children, parents and quality teachers.

Around 70% of adolescents leave high school feeling like a loser because they have failed to reach the holy altar of academic excellence. Children are now being taught to the NAPLAN from Year 1. Parents are telling me students feel so pressured and stressed about the NAPLAN they are struggling with anxiety, panic attacks and many returning to bedwetting, poor sleep and feeling emotionally very vulnerable.

We must not forget that the NAPLAN tick-a-box test is considered by many academics as a statistically invalid test and is a poor indicator of a student’s level of competency, and definitely a poor way of measuring academic progress over time. Then these results get stuck on the equally dumb website MY School as a valid way of comparing schools’ quality.

Once again this is a poor way of comparing schools for so many reasons and parents are using this information to choose schools for their children. Indeed I have heard of parents pulling their children out of a “poorer performing school” and moving them into a “better performing school” because of that website.

This is insane and rubbish – social dislocation like moving schools is like a death to children under 10 and they will struggle with many levels of grief as they settle into a new school – settling in, making new friends and processing a deep sense of loss of their normal world.

This level of stress will compromise their capacity to learn because the brain when it feels threatened will lock down in to survival mode and upper cognitive processing will be impaired for anywhere up to 12-18 months. Great, so now these children will have technically gone backwards and for what?

This is sad because parents have done what they felt was best for their children WITHOUT knowing the full impact such a change can have on children. Adolescents who are moved from secure friendship bases are at a serious risk of struggling because strong friendships are a huge protective factor on the bumpy ride to adulthood. They will often form alliances with ANYONE rather than be solo and they can be lead astray during the window when they are biologically driven to belong.

Teachers know the problems with this hideous pressure for testing and when they make a stand driven by professional knowledge and ethics – they get threatened and bullied by a politician with no experience in education and certainly no time in the classroom as a teacher. I found this incredibly disrespectful.

The key drivers to improving student performance are teacher competence, teacher disposition, positive parental involvement and safe caring environments that help students feel safe and valued. The big spend-up and subsequent waste of massive amounts of money through the Building the Education Revolution stimulus package once again shows a blatant disdain for teachers and schools. They know what their individual school needs and what would benefit their students the most and yet many have been denied their needs to instead have pointless buildings built when they what they really needed serious were repairs and maintenance, and new resources.

I almost cried to see that money wasted when it could have been spent on up-skilling teachers to meet the unique needs of today’s over stimulated, over anxious and often stressed students. And if you could see the paint-peeling walls, leaking ceilings, vomit-coloured torn carpets I see in some of our government schools as I travel around Australia most of the year, you would be as distressed as I am.

Staff and student stress is dumbing down our children and brain researchers can now show that stress influences all levels of a child’s growth – cognitively, emotionally, socially and psychologically. Invalidating professionals from doing their job well lowers morale and sucks the enthusiasm from them. Teachers are trained to meet the individual needs of children without needing nationalised testing using a NAPLAN. There are other ways of quantifying sound assessment done in the classroom to show how our students are doing – even on a national basis.

This national testing initiative is coming from the US – such a worry. One of the worst systems of education on the planet is the US, especially while under George Bush. The UK system has found that the national testing system DID NOT deliver what they had hoped and it has been wound back. Why we are not pursuing the education model the Scandinavian country’s use, I have no idea. They are among the best in the world.

My final gripe about the Julia Gillard education revolution is what is planned for our children in the year they turn 5. It is being mooted that formalised learning will start for this age with the aim to have them writing sentences and doing phonics in the pre-school year. The Early Years Learning Framework has been created for those who work with children birth to 5 and is profoundly play-based. All of a sudden we are taking a year out of early childhood and forcing formalised learning onto children – regardless of whether readiness has kicked in.

This will profoundly affect boys and Indigenous children who often have a delayed readiness for formalised learning. Nothing turns children off formal learning faster than introducing it too early – as a mum of four sons I am very concerned for our boys. My oldest started Year 1 (year he turned 6) unable to write his full name – Michael is a long one. He didn’t have many lights on for formal learning until the year he turned 8 and he is now a very savvy lawyer.

Once again, such a  decision is surely being made by one of those faceless monkeys acting without proper consultation with the real experts or without knowledge of the unique needs of children 5 and under.

I just want to plea for some common sense when making these big decisions about education and call for more respect for those who are actually at the coalface working with children and families. Is that too much to ask?

Leave A Reply

Your email address will not be published.