Former WA Premier Carmen Lawrence recently handed down the final report of a year-long review into the state’s public education system. The report was commissioned by the WA State School Teachers Union. It's chief finding is that teacher shortages will increase unless there is a drastic reduction in teacher workloads.
Teacher workloads have increased over the years as more children with special needs moved into mainstream classrooms. At the same time, accountability pressures have also increased. Many teachers feel overloaded and stressed. Many are resigning or taking early retirements. The report says that work overload and lack of resources, "Has lowered morale, increased burnout, and created an environment in which teachers feel undervalued and disrespected. Many teachers, particularly in disadvantaged schools, are paying a high personal price for staying in the profession."
No doubt most teachers and principals in government schools will heartily agree with Dr Lawrence's Report about the many problems confronting them in their schools each
day. The report highlights a decline in real funding and the increasingly
complex task that teaching has become. Dr Lawrence was a highly effective
Minister of Education before she became Premier of Western Australia. Her report indicates that these
problems can be addressed by a more equitable distribution of resources
to government schools, especially those with the greatest needs. We have heard this song before.
Four years ago, another distinguised educator and academic, Dr Pasi Salberg, highlighted the inequitable gap in school resourcing. He also reminded us of Albert Einstein's warning "that problems will never be solved by employing the same type of thinking that caused the problems in the first place." Which may explain why the problems in education have not gone away. They have grown worse.
In 2019, Professor Pasi Sahlberg, suggested
three things needed to be done to close the ever-widening education gap between
high and low achieving schools. This
education gap was identified by David Gonski in 2009. His Gonski Report
of 2010 allocated extra funding to schools in need. Since then, several
national reports show that spending on private schools has increased five fold compared with spending on government schools. That is, more resources were given to schools that were already already well
resourced. Government schools still require adequate resourcing. The education gap grew wider.
Professor Sahlberg is a Professor of Education at the Gonski Institute at the University of NSW in Sydney. Before that, he was the Director of Education in Finland, which is ranked as one of the highest achieving countries in Education in the world.
The three things Professor Sahlberg suggested four years ago were: Remove the inequitable resourcing of schools. Secondly, make Health and Wellbeing a major priority of education. He pointed out that ‘A student suffering anxiety disorders, depression, hunger, sleep deprivation or suicidal tendencies is not likely to be successful at school.’ Classroom teachers and principals deal with these children every day….while doing everything else they are expected to do.
Finally, Professor Sahlberg said, “Avoid Quick Fixes”. As a Principal, I saw many Quick Fixes applied to schools from the late 1980s onwards. A Quick Fix is something that a politician or government does to make them look good in the eyes of the voters, whether it is good for children in schools or not. NAPLAN was a well-intentioned Quick Fix that had diabolical consequences. As a diagnostic tool it was useles because the results came out more than six months after the tests. Instead, it became a tool, or perhaps, a weapon, for school and teacher accountability. Schools began competing against each other. Some teachers began competing against each other. Most damaging of all, NAPLAN results, expectations and accountability measures all put pressure on early childhood teachers.They were encouraged or instructed to drop the play based, creative activities and strategies of Regio Emila and Montessori and pressured into introducing formal instruction in literacy and numercacy into their classrooms. I know of more than one early childhood teacher who resigned because formal education of four and five year olds was not what they signed up for. These days, Kindergarten and Pre-Primary have become the new Year One and Year two. In Finland, there is no universal standardised testing and formal education does not start until children are aged seven.
Before that, in the late 1990s, another quick fix was the downsizing of the central office of the educatuon department. Among other things, schools were forced to take on the data processing role previously performed by head office. Since then, schools have become mini education departments. Teachers and principals are incresaingly bogged down with data collection and processing and increased accountability procedures that deflect them from their main focus...teaching the child sitting at the desk.
Politicians, policy makers and
bureaucrats should all remember that if their policies do not improve the
performance of the child sitting at the desk, then nothing in education will
change. Not for the better, at any rate. In fact, as Einstein pointed out, and we have all noted, it gets worse.
I am sure Dr Lawrence’s Report highlights many Quick Fixes. These all looked good to some people at the time but have been detrimental to the education and welfare of students and to school staff trying to educate them. At present, hard working teachers teachers and principals are like poorly equipped soldiers, fighting with obsolete weapons and inferior ammunition, who are constantly berated by remote generals for not winning the battle.
It is not the teachers and principals who need fixing. It is the system!
