How well are ACT schools performing?

I am with Miz and Garfield on this. Firstly, the system the teachers are bound by gives them little opportunity to really help kids progress. Just this week my son complained that they relearned the same maths lesson for the third time, whilst my daughter and a friend got in trouble, yes trouble, for correcting the teacher that the word “honest” has a silent “h” and this is in year 7!
The other huge issue is lack of discipline. How an 8 year old is allowed to get away with kicking, swearing, punching and generally being a menace, with apparently no consequence, is beyond a joke. Yes, police should be called in. If they don’t change their behavior for authorities such as teachers and law enforcement at this age, what are they going to be like at 17? By using the softly, softly approach it paves the way for a new generation of disobedient delinquents. The kids I am referring to have not changed in the many years I have witnessed their carnage, so how can anyone say the present methods are working. They need special help, not be let to “blow off steam” in the playground or on an ipad, that only reinforces that what they are doing is acceptable and has rewards as well. Meanwhile, the poor kids that suffer the brunt of their “anger issues” are scarred for life and fear going to school. Where are the parents who need to be taking measures to not just dump their troubled kids on the education department but to also protect society from the ratbags? My children are being disadvantaged because of ill-didciplined, troubled bullies. Who decided that their welfare comes second to those incapable of controlling their outbursts?

I was speaking to a person who teaches in a NSW government primary school. They said that the rule now is that there are no rights and wrongs. I answered to that by asking about maths. She replied, that it was even with maths. Children must not be given negative answers. So if a child adds up 2 +2 to equal 5, apparently they can’t be given the simple answer that is wrong, but another convoluted way must be found to ‘guide’ them. (If the teacher is following the guidelines.) Help us!!!
Is that the same in ACT? I certainly would not have done well at school with that weird, fluffy approach.
I can see why many parents hire tutors. They would not have to follow that approach and could teach effectively.

Garfield said :

Hearing things like modern teaching methods in the ACT don’t include phonics sounds like a big problem, as do things like “its more about kids expressing themselves than getting the spelling and grammar right”. … Then there’s also the matter of lack of discipline with verbal and even physical attacks on teachers being handled in house with what seems like a softly-softly approach. If a kid assaults a teacher, the police need to be involved to scare the hell out of the kid and their parents. I think we have fundamental problems with the underlying methodology used in our schools and the fault there lies entirely with the government.

There is a tendency in Canberra, as in other places, to embrace fads and crazes in teaching. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the obsession with whole language, group learning, and Montessori and Reggio Emilia etc. All this stuff works great for self-motivated, middle class kids who pick up the basics through osmosis, but it is disastrous for many others who can’t get the necessary support from parents, family or peers.

As for discipline …. I don’t think anyone would deny that there are problems in Canberra schools. Sure, we don’t have gang warfare, but we do have a problem with constant, low-level interruption and disobedience by children who do not want to learn, and who are determined to stop others from doing so. Behaviour such as watching ipads in class, turning up late, not sitting down, failing to participate in group activities, and generally just being disruptive. Criticism of such behaviour by the teacher is responded to by the student giving a declaration of their rights, and defiance such as “what will you do if I don’t?” What indeed? We do nothing. The result is that much teacher time is taken up with managing these little annoyances –time that should be spent teaching. It is this problem, more than anything to do with facilities or perceived prestige or ‘values’, that drives kids into private schools.

That said, it is easy for me to whinge about the problem, and less easy to identify a solution. We can hardly deny kids an education because they are immature teeangers. The current education system isn’t really serving us very well. It was designed to be a time-progressive, tiered system, for a time when kids progressively dropped out to pursue other options. Times have changed. The educational system probably needs catch up.

I am a Rabbit™ said :

This isn’t really limited to the ACT alone… The entirety of Australia has been dropping on international educational rankings. Our educational system is broken, and the root issue is stemming from our decision to copy the American education system in the 1960’s by selling our children for profit to the private education lobby.

Garfield said :

However those sort of large differences really call into question the efficiency and effectiveness of the ACT government education system.

The issue is more nuanced than this. It’s not that private schools are more efficient and/or effective than their public-peers, but rather that parents who pay for private schools generally care more about properly raising their children. This has caused a domino effect where only children with behaviour issues and/or those from lower-socioeconomic families attend public schools, leaving the higher achieving students within the private schools.

This leads to significant equality gaps within standardized testing results such as NAPLAN, which further inflates the issue. If you look at the results through the average of the school, I can understand why you think public schools have poor teaching outcomes. With that said, it’s important to remember that academic results are largely derived from the home environment, and not that of the school.

Garfield said :

But I have noticed schools on the southside are more crowded than they used to be, and that’s got to have an impact on academic results.

Not really. Every single school in Tuggeranong is running at under 30% of its maximum student capacity. It gets better near Woden, but numbers are generally still well below the max capacity. If you want to see crowded schools, look at the ones near the lake/north – there are some schools running OVER their maximum capacity.

Continued …

Hearing things like modern teaching methods in the ACT don’t include phonics sounds like a big problem, as do things like “its more about kids expressing themselves than getting the spelling and grammar right”. Try telling that to an employer when a job application is riddled with errors. Then there’s also the matter of lack of discipline with verbal and even physical attacks on teachers being handled in house with what seems like a softly-softly approach. If a kid assaults a teacher, the police need to be involved to scare the hell out of the kid and their parents. I think we have fundamental problems with the underlying methodology used in our schools and the fault there lies entirely with the government.

In regards to under utilisation of government schools in Tuggeranong, that was bj_ACT not me. I however addressed it in regards to poor government policy in things like first home owner concessions forcing many younger people out of Tuggeranong. Maybe that exit of younger and probably better educated and paid parents is skewing the demographics in Tuggeranong and contributing to falling government school performance in the region.

I am a Rabbit™ said :

This isn’t really limited to the ACT alone… The entirety of Australia has been dropping on international educational rankings. Our educational system is broken, and the root issue is stemming from our decision to copy the American education system in the 1960’s by selling our children for profit to the private education lobby.

Garfield said :

However those sort of large differences really call into question the efficiency and effectiveness of the ACT government education system.

The issue is more nuanced than this. It’s not that private schools are more efficient and/or effective than their public-peers, but rather that parents who pay for private schools generally care more about properly raising their children. This has caused a domino effect where only children with behaviour issues and/or those from lower-socioeconomic families attend public schools, leaving the higher achieving students within the private schools.

This leads to significant equality gaps within standardized testing results such as NAPLAN, which further inflates the issue. If you look at the results through the average of the school, I can understand why you think public schools have poor teaching outcomes. With that said, it’s important to remember that academic results are largely derived from the home environment, and not that of the school.

Garfield said :

But I have noticed schools on the southside are more crowded than they used to be, and that’s got to have an impact on academic results.

Not really. Every single school in Tuggeranong is running at under 30% of its maximum student capacity. It gets better near Woden, but numbers are generally still well below the max capacity. If you want to see crowded schools, look at the ones near the lake/north – there are some schools running OVER their maximum capacity.

Even though education standards in Australia are slipping overall, the ACT is slipping backwards in comparison to other parts of the country meaning we’re doing it worse than everyone else.

The catholic school system educates the majority of non-government kids and they’re not for profit. The goings on with the Islamic School of Canberra illustrate what happens when questions are raised about a non-government school potentially using funds for purposes other than education – they get funding withdrawn. I think you’re completely off base suggesting that we’re selling our kids for profit.

Are you seriously trying to blame the failures with public education on the parents? I find it hard to believe that there would be a vast difference in the involvement of parents of the same socio economic group in their kids education. There certainly shouldn’t be much variance in the ability of parents within the same group to contribute. I accept that high SES parents are likely to have a greater education level themselves than low SES parents and so should be able to help their kids more at home, but that’s something for which NAPLAN provides information. The My Schools data showed very little difference in the ICSEA scores for the 2 Gowrie schools yet there’s a massive difference in results even though the public school is receiving almost twice as much recurrent funding per student. With so many fewer students per teacher, each government school kid should be getting much more 1 on 1 time which should be manifesting in better results. TBC …

I love the idea of naplan, but I don’t think the naplan comparisons work very well in Canberra.

The socio-economic ratings for Canberra schools seem to be completely out of whack. The naplan results for my daughter’s school are a sea of green against “all schools”, and red against “like schools”. However, the “like” schools are a combination of highly selective high schools and exclusive academies for the daughters of the North Shore elite. I am sorry, demographers, but in no way are these schools actually “like” my daughter’s school (or any school outside of Canberra’s Inner South – if even there).

Also, in Canberra, the salt and pepper approach to public housing and planned design means that disadvantage is spread across the community. My local school serves several very different suburbs. It has the children of surgeons and CEOs, building magnates, tradesmen, all ranks of public servant, labourers, and the intergenerational unemployed. Again, looking at the “like” schools, most are comparatively homogenous. None of them are likely to have even two or three kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, let alone the usual half a dozen that my local school has. NAPLAN works on averages, so even a couple of kids who are significantly below average can pull the school’s scores down. It would be interesting to look at medians as well as averages and see if there is much of a difference.

bj_ACT said :

It’s interesting to see some posters anecdotally confirm the evidence based analysis from NAPLAN and PISA about poorly performing Tuggeranong schools and the lack of focus and investment by ACT Government.

Many Tuggeranong Government schools are still experiencing reduced pupil numbers, so the call for overcrowding is not necessarily relevant to all the schools in the area.

What this does tell us however:

Is that families are increasing sending their kids to Private Schools in the Tuggeranong region because the Government schools are performing so badly and are so poorly resourced and maintained by successive Labor Education Ministers.

The ACT Government has not properly managed the implications, causes and effects of the school closures they made in Tuggeranong since they won government.

Interestingly a number of Government Schools that won a last minute reprieve from closures (such as Mt Rogers and Giralang) are now bursting at the seams with high pupil numbers. This highlights that if you close schools in an area, young families will stop moving to that suburb. Further declining the need for schools and continuing a viscous cycle of reduced education opportunities in Tuggeranong.

Instead of trying to save money by closing 3 Primary Schools, 2 pre Schools and a High School in Kambah alone, John Stanhope and Andrew Barr as Education Minister should have looked at ways to encourage more young families to move into the suburb by updating community facilities (particular for under 17s), improving the schools and funding new programs to get the best teachers into Kambah and creating an area and environment to encourage better student outcomes.

ACT Government has dismally failed the students of Tuggeranong as evidenced in declining school quality, declining performance testing results, declining numbers moving onto University study and declining educational outcomes.

You only need to look as far as the government’s stamp duty concessions for first home buyers for some of the problems. The concessions are only available for people buying newly constructed properties, meaning many young couples must have moved from the south to Gungahlin. As such the government is under pressure to provide adequate infrastructure for the boom in young kids up north while existing infrastructure down south is neglected because its under utilised. Its a fundamental failure in town planning.

This isn’t really limited to the ACT alone… The entirety of Australia has been dropping on international educational rankings. Our educational system is broken, and the root issue is stemming from our decision to copy the American education system in the 1960’s by selling our children for profit to the private education lobby.

Garfield said :

However those sort of large differences really call into question the efficiency and effectiveness of the ACT government education system.

The issue is more nuanced than this. It’s not that private schools are more efficient and/or effective than their public-peers, but rather that parents who pay for private schools generally care more about properly raising their children. This has caused a domino effect where only children with behaviour issues and/or those from lower-socioeconomic families attend public schools, leaving the higher achieving students within the private schools.

This leads to significant equality gaps within standardized testing results such as NAPLAN, which further inflates the issue. If you look at the results through the average of the school, I can understand why you think public schools have poor teaching outcomes. With that said, it’s important to remember that academic results are largely derived from the home environment, and not that of the school.

Garfield said :

But I have noticed schools on the southside are more crowded than they used to be, and that’s got to have an impact on academic results.

Not really. Every single school in Tuggeranong is running at under 30% of its maximum student capacity. It gets better near Woden, but numbers are generally still well below the max capacity. If you want to see crowded schools, look at the ones near the lake/north – there are some schools running OVER their maximum capacity.

It’s interesting to see some posters anecdotally confirm the evidence based analysis from NAPLAN and PISA about poorly performing Tuggeranong schools and the lack of focus and investment by ACT Government.

Many Tuggeranong Government schools are still experiencing reduced pupil numbers, so the call for overcrowding is not necessarily relevant to all the schools in the area.

What this does tell us however:

Is that families are increasing sending their kids to Private Schools in the Tuggeranong region because the Government schools are performing so badly and are so poorly resourced and maintained by successive Labor Education Ministers.

The ACT Government has not properly managed the implications, causes and effects of the school closures they made in Tuggeranong since they won government.

Interestingly a number of Government Schools that won a last minute reprieve from closures (such as Mt Rogers and Giralang) are now bursting at the seams with high pupil numbers. This highlights that if you close schools in an area, young families will stop moving to that suburb. Further declining the need for schools and continuing a viscous cycle of reduced education opportunities in Tuggeranong.

Instead of trying to save money by closing 3 Primary Schools, 2 pre Schools and a High School in Kambah alone, John Stanhope and Andrew Barr as Education Minister should have looked at ways to encourage more young families to move into the suburb by updating community facilities (particular for under 17s), improving the schools and funding new programs to get the best teachers into Kambah and creating an area and environment to encourage better student outcomes.

ACT Government has dismally failed the students of Tuggeranong as evidenced in declining school quality, declining performance testing results, declining numbers moving onto University study and declining educational outcomes.

Both my children went to a middle of the pack Catholic primary school according to NAPLAN. My youngest once received a half page written assignment question with at least a dozen spelling and grammar errors in it. So what hope do the kids have?