Last Friday, Australia’s state and federal education ministers met with emotional teachers, who spoke of working on weekends and Mothers’ Day to cope with unsustainable workloads – and how they were thinking about leaving the profession. This was part of their first meeting hosted by the federal minister Jason Clare. The top agenda item was the teacher shortage. The issue has certainly reached crisis point. Federal education…
read moreOne 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 university students. Thousands of vacancies Teaching…
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 moreI have always seen great potential in the Australian education. In 2019, I told the ABC that based on what I have seen after spending a year here, it was my belief that Australia had “one of the best education systems anywhere.” “It is world class. But only for some children,” I pointed out. I have two primary school-aged children and my wife works in education – hence my position to the question how to change Australia’s…
read moreBy 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 outlier…
read moreI 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 stage at the Sydney Opera House looking at an audience of about 2,000 people. Not to perform music, thankfully. I’d been invited to speak about why Australia should abolish its private schools. Typical…
read moreSchools 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 even harm…
read moreIf 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 in these uncertain times? Is teaching such an attractive career choice that there will be enough qualified teachers in all…
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…
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