Originally published in The Conversation, 8th June 2022 One of Labor’s key education pledges is A$50 million to encourage school leavers with an ATAR over 80 to study teaching. This is part of the new government’s plan to “fix teacher shortages”. The teacher shortage in Australia has reached crisis levels. But this must be addressed by improving the working conditions for existing teachers, not by cash incentives to…
read moreBy Pasi Sahlberg and Caitlin Senior As the new political leadership in South Australia state their plans for improving education, we should all keep one fact in mind: Australia is an outlier in global education. Not because it provides every student a ‘fair go’. Quite the opposite. Because it is uniquely unfair. In Australia, according to international data, at the age of 15 the most socio-economically disadvantaged students…
read more By Pasi Sahlberg and Adrian Piccoli If you were a disadvantaged child today in an Australian school, chances are high that a majority of the other children in your school would also be disadvantaged. Your school would most likely need more resources to have experienced special education experts; it probably would not have qualified mathematics and science teachers, and nobody to teach music. In this respect, Australia is an…
read moreWhen colleagues overseas ask what I think about Australia’s school system, I tell them that it does offer world-class education, but not for everyone. Published in The Guardian, 31 January 2022 ---- I was trembling. Not because I was about to do something risky or scary – quite the opposite. This was a situation I had been in many times before, but I was nervous about what was going to happen next. I was on the Concert Hall…
read moreBy Joe Scavo Schools are resuming classes amid parents' fears their children may have a COVID 'lockdown gap' in their education following the stresses of remote learning. The worry is children could not have possibly learnt as much at home, with parents as stand-in teachers, as they would have in usual school surroundings. But to a renowned international education expert, these fears betray a uniquely Australian attitude and could…
read moreEducation systems that treat teachers as trusted professionals adjusted better to pandemic disruption, research suggests If remote learning has shown parents anything, it is a renewed appreciation for the job that teachers do. Now as teachers return to school in the coming weeks, at least in New South Wales, it’s a chance to ask some consequential questions: Are the teacher policies what they should be to improve education…
read moreThe following interview with Alyona Yurchenko of "The Teacher's Newspaper" was done in July 2021 about education in Finland. This is the original (rough cut) interview in English. Published Russian version is here: "Мы должны дать детям больше ответственности". Alyona: Finland and neighboring Nordic countries are quite similar in many ways, however, according to the results of global rankings,…
read moreWhat strikes me most about Iceland is not the coexistence of the hot volcanoes and the cold sea. While I continue to be thrilled about the sagas and the magic of the history, there is something else that makes Iceland a special place. I am always impressed when I think about how people in Iceland view education as a fundamental element of survival and community, and a condition of good life. What anyone arriving to Iceland needs…
read more By Pasi Sahlberg and Amy Graham More than nine out of ten parents think digital media and technologies are a negative distraction in their lives. And 83% think their children are also negatively distracted by digital devices. These are some of the findings from our Growing Up Digital Australia study. In 2020 we surveyed nearly 2,500 parents, grandparents and caregivers across Australia. This data set yielded data about over…
read moreIf you have children or grandchildren, I have a question for you: Do children today spend less time playing compared to when you were their age? This can be a hard question to answer accurately. According to my experience most people have a very clear response: Children today play less than they parents did in their childhood. Often much less. Recently we asked nearly 2,000 Australian parents about their perceptions of children’s…
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