Curios of the week #41

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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Last weekend saw me smoking a brisket under the car port because of a deluge of rain. To be honest, it was not all bad. A smoker needs tending and so I had a rare moment of peace and quiet to sit and read my book. I intend to do more of that this summer.

This week has been a big one for Australian education. There are many things I could have written a post about but I have been pretty busy with the end of the school year, staff functions and our VCE results. It is at times like these that a synoptic format like Curios is pretty handy.

This weeks Curios include an essay, a tweet, a fence and much more. We go a bit old-school, wonder if we are being played for fools and celebrate some modest successes from Australia and the wider world. I hope you enjoy.

Report of the week

School funding in Australia is a complex negotiation between the federal and state governments. To better inform the next school funding agreement, the federal government instituted a panel of experts. This panel’s report was published this week.

Obviously, a lot of it focuses on funding. I don’t have much to say about that other than that schools should be well funded. However, the effect of this funding will vary, depending on what you spend the money on. To that end, some of the panel’s other recommendations are interesting.

Australia has gradually introduced a phonics check, similar to the one used since 2012 in England, in a piecemeal fashion with different states taking slightly different approaches. The panel recommends a nationally consistent screening check — which is an obvious next step — and have proposed a target of 90% proficiency.

I was also pleased to read Recommendation 3A because I have been calling for a behaviour survey for some time:

“To support improvements in wellbeing, the Panel recommends that governments, school systems and approved authorities work together to develop a national measure of student wellbeing by the end of 2028, which:

i. collects, aggregates and reports on consistent and comparable national wellbeing data covering (at minimum) the in-school domains of belonging, safety, cultural safety, engagement and classroom disruption, in a way that builds on jurisdictions’ existing data collection where available

ii. provides a structured framework to support the efforts of schools, systems, researchers and governments to evaluate the impact of policies, inform policy design, and improve accountability and reporting at the school, system and national levels

iii. enables disaggregation of data by priority equity cohort and school type, intersectional and longitudinal analyses, and linkage to other data sets relevant to student wellbeing.”

Finally, the report is enthusiastic about Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS), which I have tended to refer to as Response to Intervention (RTI) and which strikes me as pragmatic way of addressing different learning needs. I perceive things shifting in the background and those who previously espoused differentiation have now latched on to MTSS and, at least in one case, become advisers on the practice. It’s funny how the wheels turn.

Communique of the week

Australia’s state and federal education ministers met this week and issued a communique that complements the expert panel report:

“Ministers agreed that Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) will publish an addendum to the Accreditation Standards and Procedures document, setting out the core content that higher education providers will now need to embed in their ITE degrees. Providers will have until the end of 2025 to make these changes to their programs.”

This is in response to a previous report by the Teacher Education Expert Panel (TEEP) that recommended the government require teacher training courses to include important compulsory content including content on the effectiveness of explicit teaching.

This is progress because we know that many teacher trainers are sceptical of explicit teaching and therefore unlikely to present it in a positive light.

Strawman of the week

We met the strawman argument last week and this week, like a movie baddie, the strawman makes an old school return.