17 June 2008

Public School spending ahead of recommendations

| Jazz
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It may surprise some but apparently the ACT has a higher ratio of investment public school facilities than private, bucking a national trend, and in theory making public education in the ACT a far better proposition than it might be in other states.

Andrew Barr has claimed that the $350 Million in capital works spending to be targeted at upgrading the remaining schools and opening a few new ones (like the ginnindera super school) is ahead of the Australia Education Unions recommendations to double spending to $4bn (nationally) in public education facilities.

ABC online and CT are both running stories which state that the ACT is leading the way on public school funding on a ratio basis.

I would content that its actually not. If every other state and territory is reversing that trend and supporting private education systems rather than public then surely the ACT is behind the 8 ball regardless of the education unions recommendations.

Personally I’m not entirely sure of the merits of having brilliant facilities if you can’t find the qualified teachers and education programs to use them.

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I’d love to use youtube with the Sims2 to create historical ‘stories’ with students.

It isn’t goint to happen as 1) my Smartboard is constantly stuffing up (last teacher to use it broke it) and never plays sound even with speakers attached (and yes the chords to go with it), 2) youtube is a ‘no no’ and 3) so is the Sims2.

Anything interesting to students academically is frowned upon. A kid in the US used youtube with Halo 3 to do a historial report on Jesse James. It can be done.

I hate my Smartboard and have requested a projector, speakers and a computer that will actually work. Smartboards aren’t all that and at times can be a complete waste of money.

But I also take issue with the schools for using monies to doll up their school when inside really does need the money more.

peterh, there are plenty of teachers, but I can’t say that will be the case in a few years. The dept will cry foul only when it suits them and not before, despite the blatantly obvious staring them in the face.

Look, the problem isn’t that the dept of ed needs more pc’s / smart boards etc, it is the effective management of these resources by the InTACT group & the department of ED.

The fallacy that a 12-month old computer won’t talk to a smart board is ridiculous. perhaps money could have been saved by using the “older” pc’s from other departments. (not using public schools as a dumping ground for pentium III systems, etc)Considering that i was involved from the seller’s perspective with intact, there are a lot of decisions that are poor re ICT equipment, one of which is this continual replacement every 12-months by InTACT for the act govt departments.

prior to closing schools down, perhaps the CMD could have saved us all a lot of money by closing down the InTACT group. why there is an ICT department that “sells” to the other departments is beyond me.

the spending reports will show this continual turnover of pc’s – inflating the perception of the total annual public school spending.

Perhaps they can look at more teachers, then worry about the ageing, dated, 12-month old pc’s….

They had ‘educational games’ back when I was a lad.

We didn’t play them. :p

my point was more creative use of solutions to overcome a problem. I’m sure that some smart cookie could creat a great game on a WII thats also educational.

maybe a mario kart where you’ve got to drive down the right numbered tunnel based on some previous pop up question

Jazz, that sort of teaching is going on every day in schools across the ACT. It just doesn’t get the same publicity that a fight on a school oval receives. We have lots of quality teachers and quality teaching happening right now. I guess that sort of story doesn’t sell newspapers. I’m amazed at some of the inventive and creative work that comes home with my kids from just an ordinary ACT public school. So much more interesting and applicable than some of the stuff I did as a child.

Thumper, you’ve jogged my memory. I was focusing on how hard we in the P&C were working for the funds for those IWB’s and forgot that our funding was being matched on a dollar for dollar basis. So we were receiving grants of 50%. My bad 🙂

Dante, you make an interesting point about use of more contempory tools as teaching aids which i’m sure if correctly employed could improve results.

case in point i recall a story of a teacher (might have been in the US) who was trying to teach mathematics to a class of bored students. Being the clever sort he used practical examples of a 15% store discount on clothing that the students were all wearing to show how maths could be used in practice & how much they might pay for particular items when discounted. Unsurprisingly the students really seemed to grasp that concept.

It’s sad if they’ve spent copious amounts of money on Smartboards in all of the schools… You can set one up with a projector, a Wii remote, and a IR led attached to a battery and a switch…

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/245

Training for using the Interactive Whiteboards is a bit of an issue. The glorious department left schools all alone to buy there whiteboards and they did so as considerable investment from P&C fund raising and school savings (no fed govt grants in sight sorry Thumper, at least not in the schools I’ve been associated with). Once schools had made a commitment to a particular brand, then and only then, did the department of Education make a decision to only support one brand. If schools hadn’t been able to mind read then they made the wrong choice. Professional development for teachers has only been provided to schools who have whiteboards form the chosen supplier. Bit of a shame really.

Still, not to despair too much. The professional development is really all about using the particular software. Teachers are very good at teaching that sort of stuff to each other, but it is frustrating all the same. As Maelinar said, its the quality of the instruction that is the most important part, not the tool. That is where the teachers need support. In that regard it doesn’t matter what brand they have.

The good news is, and it hasn’t really been publicised, is that the department has made a big investment in providing support for teachers to improve their actual teaching over the next few years, by adopting the quality teaching pedagogy model. As I understand it, this model has real benefits for teachers by providing a quality framework for improved teaching. Well, lets hope anyway.

If all of these smartboards were distributed thinly across several dozen schools that have now been shut down, it figures that the remaining schools will now be brimming at the rims since they have now been gutted.

Simple math really.

My question is more about how much extra training value does a teacher get from using a ‘smartboard’ over the more traditional blackboard ? When I was at school, it wasn’t really about how the material was presented, it was the material that was being presented that was the important bit.

Clown Killer9:22 am 18 Jun 08

The Girls Grammar school has them in every class room. I guess that’s another example of the comparison between private and public investment.

someoneincanb: report is every classroom, in every school she has worked in.
Talking about 10 or 15 schools by now.. and no, they aren’t all in Central Canberra.

As I said, I’m only relaying information (and I do admit to some level of doubt myself to it being every room, every school)

someoneincanb8:15 am 18 Jun 08

EVERY classroom has a Smartboard?? She must be working in central canb. The only classrooms I’ve ever seen with Smartboards were closed by Stanhope (I acknowledge they didn’t actually wait for the school to close before they ripped out the Smartboard for some lucky school staying open). I’ve seen lots of glossy advertising distributed within open public schools about how Smartboards are coming… some time …
But Smartboards and capital works aren’t everything. Without quality teachers it is still the pits.

weighing in with someone else’s opinion, it does seem like the ACT D.Ed spends a whole heap of cash on public schools. My partner has started doing relief work in the ACT and says it’s a huge difference from NSW – every classroom here she has been in has a Smartboard in it… saying EVERY classroom.. who am i to argue, I haven’t seen them.

Anyway..those things aren’t cheap…

They also seem to have trouble actually getting teachers… she had 4 calls last night to work today. Has had several offers of contracts to the end of the year.

(I’m talking primary btw)

I should clarify that my observations are purely from the outside looking in, there may be state of the art facilities “in the back” that are not evident to a passerby. But I doubt it, otherwise all those kids wouldn’t be squeezing on to the old crappy basketball court at the front every day would they?

Has anybody driven past Red Hill Primary lately? There is often what looks like 2 (or more) full classes of kids squeezed onto a single basketball court with backboards that are too low and questionably well structured. In between the carpark and the main road is a hill with what was apparently once a netball court. The rings are still there, albeit bent and rusty looking. That school has high enrolments from a struggling demographic (the area behind Red Hill shops)and is so long overdue for funding it is dispicable. Those kids parents do not have the luxury of the choice of public v private.

The Government should be ashamed that any school should be without basic outdoor education facilities when they are commissioning bullshit art on the GDE.

As for attracting good teachers, how will the Government do that when the facilities are not comparable with other schools? If I was a sports teacher, I would prefer to teach the kids on the 2 brand spanking basketball/netball/tennis courts at the private school a few kilometres down the road than on a single cracked broken bit of asphalt with 30 kids packed onto it.

darylk, it’s an election year – they count the non-permanent staff to say ‘we have plenty of teachers’.

However, they’ll soon cry ‘foul’ when over 50% retire in the next 2 years.

I personally like to see the money spent on better tables, desks, text books, ICT requirements etc than chip wood, plants, decorative stones etc that some schools are so keen to purchase just in time for the enrolment period.

Mutton dressed as lamb.

The funding has increased due to a smaller number of ‘properties’ to care for. Shame that the only ones really getting anything are the ‘Lynehams’, ‘Amaroos’ and ‘Telopeas’ of the system.

Its a cheap trick and nothing more. How much money did the government stop spending when they closed all those schools? Are they spending more than that now? Has there actually been an increase, or is the increase only since they pulled the funding on the 30 or more schools CharlieBell mentioned?

Don’t get me wrong, im all for more spending on public education, in almost any form, but the government does not deserve kudos here, it really sounds like the figures have been seriously distorted.

Any government with half a brain (which is debateable with Stahope and Co) makes the hard decisions early in their term, so as to dole out the gravy when the election comes around.

And I have no problem with that, so long as the hard decisions are made, and the gravy goes to where it will actually do some good.

dalryk: You’ve got to admit that its nice when the numbers are so shiny on an election yeah though hey?

Oh, and also for spending money on facilities, not teachers, which are presumably so plentiful that we shouldn’t have closed any schools….

It must be a tough gig being a pollie some times: Close a bunch of schools so as to consolidate service delivery, increase spending on the remaining schools with the money saved, and then be criticised simultaneously for closing schools and for the ‘election stunt’ of increasing funding.

Not that I’m a fan of our government’s work generally, but I think I’m on their side on this one.

Oh i see what you mean *catches up* you are talking about comparing the public to private ratio, im talking about comparing the comparison. It does seem manipulatable.

Yet all we ever hear about is Lyneham!

Aidan, you are so right. It’s what goes on inside the buildings that counts! Eg, look at Calwell High – the building has never been marvellous, but the school has excelled in the Arts, on a national basis, due to its curriculum.

Excuse my cynicism, but please remember its election year in the ACT.

Last year we had 30 or so schools closed. This year the government is spending lots of money on building new schools. The result is an abnormal spike of ACT government expenditure on public school buildings – and a fuss being made about it by the education minister a few months before an election.

The non-government school systems don’t need to save up their expenditure for election years.

I would argue that there isn’t a great deal wrong with the public education system. There is this sense of crisis whipped up all the time, and yet the outcomes of the Australian education system are world class (as judged by the literacy/numeracy of our population).

I thought they were comparing percentage spending of capital works between public in the ACT and public elsewhere. I still do actually.

Why is it stupid? Becuase they are comparing percentages of capital works spending between private and public, not actual dollar value per student.

I’d wager that most of the captial works spending on Private education actually comes as a result of the exhorbitant fees they charge.

Jazz: What the ACT is spending on public education isn’t relevant to elsewhere is australia? Why is it stupid to make comparisons between public schools in the ACT and elsewhere?

All well and good about improving the quality and number of teachers, but to say it is pointless to refurbish schools in other ways seems a bit much.

Kramer: Or a slightly more disturbing (if fairly extreme) scenario, it will push people to the private system until you have nearly everyone in private and public education is deemed unworkable and unneeded and scrapped altogether.

The problem with reducing spending on public education is that it effectively pushes people to the private system. As less funding = less students = less funding = less students… Until you have nearly everyone in private education, and a small number of disadvantaged people in a clapped out public school system.

Clown Killer1:33 pm 17 Jun 08

Well they’d want to be doing somthing to stem the flood of students to the private schools.

nope

I mean that to claim that ACT is leading a trend may be incorrect. If every other jurisiction is shifting its capital works spending into private education then ACT is not leading anything.

That there is any comparison at all is also stupid. just because the ACT is spending more on public education capital works is only relevant in this jurisdiction and only relevant to the expectation of what people in this town want from public and private education. The amount of spending is also all pointless if you dont also improve the quality and or number of teachers to go along with it.

20 pieces of silver is what this increased funding feels like – one of my children’s schools has received an increase because of the new amalgamation that we ‘had to have’ (and no one wants) – but it feels so wrong to get more money at the expense of the now-closed schools.

I think you may be suggesting that underfunding public schools is a positive thing that is expected to yield positive results in the future? Thats why the other states are doing it? And the ACT is behind on increasing its underfunding of public schools?

I meant that if every other state and territory has less spending that perhaps the ACT it may actually at the rear of a trend in spending despite the education unions recommendations (who know’s what their agenda is).

In spite of that, all the extra spending on facilities isnt worth much if they cant sort out the other aspects of the education system like programs and well paid and qualified teachers.

that clear enough?

I’m not sure what your argument is Jazz.

You say that even though the ACT is ahead of AEU recommendations for funding public school infrastructure that this might not be enough. In the next sentence you state you’re not even sure it is worth having these facilities! These seem like contradictory positions to me.

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