NAPLAN, Education Systems and Professor Deming.

“It isn't about schools but about the system.

Equity is a system level measure. (Pasi Salhberg)

A Senate committee is examining NAPLAN and its results. This may be good thing. Although, we all know that most committees do not usually produce anything of great value. Some say that a camel is horse designed by a committee, but that may be a trifle harsh. We shall see.

I wonder if the Senate Committtee will talk to any actual teachers or principals? Or will it just be parent groups, industry groups, focus groups and other politicians and journalists who dabble in education.

A week ago I heard a colleague in education say that “Only people with ten years experience in schools should be allowed to make decisions about education policy.” Warming to his task he added, “And that experience would have to be within the last ten years.”

Well I can suggest two people who the Senate Committee should take note of: Pasi Salhberg and Professor W.E Deming. When Pasi Salhberg speaks about education we all should listen. If we are looking at the system of education, then maybe we should also be noting the teachings of Professor W. Edwards Deming, the father of “Quality Assurance”.

More about Professor Deming later.

Why is Pasi Salhberg so important? Well, he is the Minister for Education in Finland and Finland is one of the Top Four countries in PISA’s Education Premiership table. It is to this pinnacle of PISA educational perfection that Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, says Australia must reach within five years. Well, naturally, everyone agrees that it is a commendable thing to aim high and seek improvement.

PISA, of course, is the OECD’s testing mechanism. Every three years PISA tests a random sample of 15 year olds in 40 OECD countries, to enable their governments to see how effective their education systems are...at least in getting fifteen year olds to do well in the PISA tests.

In 2009, the last year for which we have PISA results (PISA 2012 results will be published in December 2013), Australia was ranked at number 9, well ahead of the USA (17^th) and the UK (25).

In fact Australia’s average score was judged to be significantly above the OECD average.

Not a bad effort really, although the public perception, gained from our politicians and the Australian media generally, is that Australian education is failing, our student teachers need to be better qualified and our school teachers need to work harder. Despite all the rhetoric, not a lot of evidence is provided  by the naysayers to substantiate these negative views. After all, we are 9^th in the world!

Being 9^th in the world is not good enough for the Australian PM. She has said we need to be in the top five, alongside Shanghai, Korea, Finland, Hong Kong and Singapore. One thing we do notice about these top five nations is that, unlike Australia, they do not have indigenous populations or multi cultural societies where the native language is not the language of choice spoken in the home. Under these circumstances, it would seem Australia is performing very, very creditably indeed.

It should also be pointed out that Shanghai is not a country, it is a large regional city in China. Perhaps we should be allowed to provide the PISA results for Canberra as representative of Australia as a whole. If so, Australia would be right near the top of the PISA hit parade.

As a result of the Prime Minister’s ambition to place Australia at the head of the PISA premiership table, our education system has focussed strongly on Literacy and Numeracy and instituted an annual, universal  standardised testing regime, NAPLAN. The NAPLAN testing programme has much to recommend it, for along with many other diagnostic, remedial and achievement tests, it provides teachers and schools with much useful information about individuals, whole class and school performance.

However, as the NAPLAN results of every school are now compulsorily published on the government’s Myschool website, they have become the key performance indicators for what constitutes a “good” school. That’s exactly correct. The results of the NAPLAN tests that are conducted over three days in May, and published in October of the same year, suddenly become the most important data that education systems, parents and the media can have about a school.

This has meant an increasingly heavy focus on literacy and numeracy, to the detriment of other school subjects. At the same time formal instruction in literacy and numeracy has entered the once creative and imaginative world of early childhood. Remember that Finland does not start formal education until children turn seven and they have no standardised testing except for final exams at the end of secondary school.

Some children and even some teachers, suffer stress from the heavy competitive focus on NAPLAN tests, while at the same time a whole new industry of NAPLAN teaching aids, texts and even toys are flooding the market and being purchased by parents, eager for their child’s NAPLAN success. Recently a book aimed at improving a child's NAPLAN scores was listed in the top 10 best selling books in Australia, a previously unheard of event.

Obviously these are the unpleasant, unintended outcomes of NAPLAN testing.

It is pleasing, therefore, to note that the Australian Senate is to mount an inquiry into NAPLAN testing and its consequences. Presumably, the Senate will be mainly interested to find out if the millions of dollars being spent on NAPLAN are worth it. Do the results justify the expenditure?

Well this is where Professor Deming comes in, because, if Pasi Salhberg is right and we should not focus on schools but focus instead on education systems, then we should also focus on the teachings of Professor W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993). Professor Deming held doctorates in Physics and Mathematics and gained an enviable reputation as a statistician and systems management guru. He devised statisical surveys showing that you could obtain valid information from a random sample without having to survey the entire population. As a statistician he perfected random sampling and quality assurance techniques that helped to make industries more efficient. 

In 1951 he was invited to Japan to assist with the national census. While there he was invited by a Japanese business association to examine their work systems and management practices. As that time Japan had an almost laughable international reputation for its manufactured goods. Japanese goods were invariably labelled, "Micky Mouse", a facetious name for its largely inferior products.

Deming visited workplaces and spoke to various industrial groups throughout Japan. Eventually, he listed 14 Key Principles to enable managers to transform their business practices in order to achieve effectiveness in their organisations.

So successful was Deming in lifting the effectiveness of Japanese manufacturing that within a very few years the Ford Motor Company was surprised find that its customers in the United States preferred its Japanese made cars to the ones manufactured in the USA. With plenty of U.S. built Ford cars in their showrooms, Ford Executives were stunned to find that its American customers were quite prepared to wait for the next shipment of Fords manufactured in Japan. Their customers said that the Japanese Fords were more efficient and ran better!

Both car models were made to the same specifications. Inspection of both models by Ford engineers revealed that the Japanese models were much closer, in every respect, to design requirements than the US model, which had greater variations of tolerance. For example, if the design called for a part to be one foot long (30 cms), plus or minus one eighth of an inch, the US model showed this magnitude of variation while the Japanese models ALL had a tolerance of only one sixteenth of an inch. This made the Japanese cars run more smoothly and efficiently. Ford customers were quick to show their preference for the better product.

I have always believed that teaching is more of an art than a science, so I am reluctant to use a business model as a means of improving our education system. However, Pasi Salhberg says we must examine our system of education and I believe Professor Deming understood how systems work. They work effectively when the people in them
*know what they are expected to produce,
*they are skilled in what they do, and receive ongoing on the job training, 
*they are involved in the process and get satisfaction from it.
*Above all, they are valued and trusted by their employers.

Perhaps some of those bean counting politicians and educrats should look at those 14 steps of Professor Deming once in a while, especially the following six which seen to relate directly to our educational system:-

No 3: Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for massive inspections by building quality into the product in the first place.

No 6: Institute training on the job.

No 8: Drive out fear and build trust so that everyone can work more effectively.

No 10: Eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets asking for zero defects or new levels of productivity…the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.

No: 11 Eliminate numerical goals, numerical quotas and management objectives. Substitute leadership!

No 12: Remove barriers that rob people of joy in their work. This means abolishing the annual rating or merit system that ranks people and creates competition and conflict.

I think Pasi Salhberg would agree with all of those points and proudly point out that this is exactly how the education system operates in Finland.

If, as Salhberg says, it is the system of education that we should focus on, then we need to look at our education system through Professor Deming’s eyes. His management ideas certainly worked for the systemic improvements that the Japanese industrialists were seeking. In the early 1950s Deming set them what he thought was a five year target. They achieved it in four. It was a spectacular success, putting Japanese industry at the forefront of world manufacturing for the next thirty years.

Interestingly enough, The Cambridge University Review of Primary Education (2009), the most wide ranging review of primary education ever undertaken anywhere in the world, came out strongly against universal standardised testing. I hope the Senate NAPLAN Committee gets to read it, along with Professor Deming's 14 Key Principals for Business Effectiveness.

With regard to accountability, what the Cambridge University Review did recommend was random sampling of the population. Professor Deming would have been pleased. Random sampling for accountability purposes was the system used in Western Australia  into the late 1990s. Then the federal minister of education, Dr David Kemp, using the extortion tactics of Al Capone, threatened the state's education funding unless universal standardised testing was introduced.

Dr Deming was right. Reducing competition and conflict and developing trust, cooperation and joy in your work place seems like a good idea for education too!   Not sure NAPLAN is doing that, actually.

Memories of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

"Do you know the way to...?"

I first became aware of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen when I was in primary school at Christian Brothers, Highgate, in the late 1940s. He was Monsignor Fulton Sheen when he visited Australia around 1949 to participate in a major church celebration in Melbourne. At the time he was undoubtedly the most famous Catholic speaker in the world. He had his own hugely popular television programme which even out rated that of the famous American comedian, Milton Berle.

Berle used to quip that, “Monsignor Sheen has better ratings than me because he has a more influential sponsor.” while at the same time soulfully raising his eyes to the heavens.

Sheen’s visit aroused great interest throughout Australia. My Grade 5 teacher in those days was Brother Kevin John O’Brien, who had somehow or other managed to get tape recordings of several of the talks that Bishop Sheen gave while he was visiting Melbourne. My classmates and I listened to Bishop Sheen’s stories with great interest. He had a wonderful speaking voice and he interspersed his talks with humorous anecdotes that amused us all.

One in particular I have remembered over all these years. While in Melbourne Monsignor Sheen was in great demand as a speaker. He agreed to address a public meeting which was to be held in the Brunswick Town Hall. He was given rudimentary directions as to how to get there but, after getting off the tram in Brunswick, he could not see any sign of a building looking remotely like the Brunswick Town Hall.

At length he decided to ask a young boy who was very loudly selling The Herald afternoon newspaper on a street corner. According to Archbishop Sheen this is what happened next.

“Excuse me, young man, could you please tell me the way to the Brunswick Town Hall?”

“What do you want to go there for?’ enquired the brash youngster.

“Well I have to get there because I have been invited to give a talk to a lot of people.”

“What about?” asked the curious interrogator.

“Well, I want to talk to them about God,”

“Why do you want to talk to them about God?”

“Well, I want to talk to them about God because I want to tell them how to get to heaven.”

The young paper boy looked up at the man in the black suit and the crimson vest and laughed, “That’s really very funny, Mister. You want to tell all those people how to get to heaven and you don’t even know how to get to the Brunswick Town Hall.”

Questions about the Constitutional Referendum

Apparently we will have a referendum asking us to recognise  Local Government when we vote in the federal election on September 14.

This referendum is deemed necessary because local government is not named specifically in the Australian Constitution and therefore any federal payments to local governments may be deemed invalid.

If this is the case, perhaps we ought to broaden the referendum.

After all, the state of Western Australia is not mentioned in the opening paragraph of the Australian Constitution as one of the states “having agreed to unite.” Are Western Australians invalid members of the Australian Commonwealth?
Political parties are not mentioned in the constitution, however, for some years now after every election these parties collect money from the government based on the number of votes they receieved. Is this daylight robbery?

The constitution also states that the Governor General’s salary shall be ten thousand pounds ($20 0000). I am sure it has been much more than that for many, many years. Should we be seeking to recoup these “invalid” overpayments from the Queen's representaive.

Finally, neither of the positions of Prime Minister or The Cabinet are mentioned in our constitution. Does this mean that all decisions and policy announcement by the Prime Minister of the day, and/or the Cabinet, since January the first, 1901, are invalid?

Just a thought.

Stick it up your jumper!

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          For well over 100 years teams in the VFL/AFL played against each other wearing their traditional football jumpers.

Then about ten year ago Mr Bright Spark, an AFL Strategic Planning Officer, decided that spectators were being confused by these historic and distinctively coloured club treasures. He decreed that Away Teams must wear a different sort of jumper to the one their loyal supporters, and their parents before them, grew up loving and cheering for.

The aforesaid Mr Bright Spark then decreed that Away Teams must wear what was basically a white jumper with a few club logos on it. They looked ghastly. They were pale and anaemic. Many true blue loyal supporters were less than impressed and very unhappy to see their bronzed Anzac footy heroes running around in weak as water pale white jumpers.

 However, club officials quickly realised having two jumpers, their real jumper and a white one with some animal or bird pictures on it, provided an opportunity for a new revenue stream. They hired marketing gurus to devise advertising campaigns to sell the very white Away Jumper to their supporters.

At the same time Mr Bright Sparks’ cousin, Mr Smart Aleck, an AFL Public Relation Development Officer, did the exact opposite with the outfits worn by the umpires. For over a hundred years the umpires had always worn white shirts and shorts with long black socks. However, Mr Smart Aleck announced that this was quite wrong. He said that umpires wearing whites could not be seen by the players who would keep bumping into them. He decreed that the umpires would have to wear brightly coloured shirts and shorts, just like the Away Teams used to do before they were made to wear their Away white jumpers.

And so it transpired that while the Away Teams started wearing white jumpers so that they could be seen, the umpires stopped wearing whites because they could not be seen. I mean it was all so obvious. Why didn’t somebody think of it one hundred years ago?

Worse was to come. Club officials soon realised that they could change the format of their basic white Away Jumpers from season to season and raise even more money. Each year the poor but loyal supporter would have to fork out anywhere up to $100 to buy a new Away Jumper for his ten year old footballing prodigy.

After that the floodgates opened. In 2012, the Dockers, whose proud history goes back to 1995, when they first ran on to the field looking like well dressed Italian gentlemen in jumpers that were red and white and blue and green and purple, decided on BIG changes. They became the first club in AFL history to completely change their Home Jumper. After seventeen years in the competition they threw their red, white, blue, green and purple jumper off Victoria Quay and hired an advertising graphic artist to design a new one.

That is why the Dockers today play their Home Games in a jumper that is a hybrid of a navy blue Carlton jumper and the navy blue Victorian state jumper with its big white V. The Dockers chose to go with a lot of little Vs and a deep purple jumper that looks navy blue in the dark with light behind it.

After some time, AFL clubs took note of their anguished supporters’ cries to get rid of the weak as water white Away Jumper and put a bit of colour back into it. The result has been Essendon running around in jumpers with their traditional red sash and a horrible washed out bluey grey coloured jumper, if coloured is the right word.

The mighty Carlton Blues traded in their white Away Jumper for an insipid pale blue which makes one think of a water colour by Constable. It’s pathetic really.

Just last week I was at the Eagles versus Bulldogs game. The proud Doggies, once known as Footscray, have a Home Jumper that is basically dark blue, with red white and blue stripes around the midriff. They wear blue shorts and socks. It looks terrific and has been worn with pride by some of the game’s greats, including Ted Whitten and Doug Hawkins.

The legendary Ted Whitten passed away some years ago so, thankfully, he was saved from the shock of seeing his beloved ‘doggies’ run onto Subiaco Oval for their Away Game wearing red shorts, red socks and an Away jumper that was predominantly red and white, with just a tiny blue band around the midriff.

“They look just like the Sydney Swans,” exclaimed my wife, as the red and white Doggies crashed through their supporters’ banner and onto the field. Of course my wife is a strong traditionalist. After all, she has stayed with me for 45 years. Ironically, most of the Bulldog supporters around the club banner were wearing the Doggies traditional colours.

How I long to watch those games where, for some unexplained reason, both teams wear their traditional colours. It happens when Collingwood plays Essendon in the ANZAC Day games. It happens when the Adelaide Crows play their cross town rival, Port Power. It happens in Grand Finals. But it does not happen very often.

Speaking of Collingwood, a club loved by its supporters and hated by just about everyone else, may I say a word on its behalf? Through all of the colour changes that have befallen the other 17 AFL clubs, Collingwood has been resolute and steadfast in its determination to play every game in its traditional black and white jumper. I know their President, Eddie Maguire, did on one famous occasion say that Collingwood did have an Away Game strip.

“We play Home games in a white jumper with black stripes and play our Away games in a black jumper with white stripes,” said Eddie with a very straight face. Eddie is quite a joker.

It is a rare pleasure, today, to see two AFL teams playing each other and wearing their traditional club colours. It stirs in me memories of the old days; when we had the drop kick and the stab kick and reserves only came on to replace an injured player. There was no zone defence or flooding and the AFL was that unique game among games, a team game that was also man on man.

Today our footballers are much more athletic. They need to be, because they spend most of the match sprinting from rugby scrums and rolling wrestling matches at one end of the ground to rugby scrums and rolling wrestling matches at the other end. Except for when they are resting on the interchange bench. But that is another story.

I dream of the day when all clubs do away with their Away Game strip and once more play in their traditional club jumpers for every game, both home and away. Just as they did in their early days.            Well, perhaps not the Dockers.

Catechism Cheats.

Corporal punishment was phased out of  Western Australian schools in the late 1980s. For most of the twentieth century it was quite normal for teachers to inflict pain on their students as a  punishment for some wrong doing or ommission.

This story describes one such episode of corporal punishment. To a reader in the 21st Century, it may seem cruel and sadistic to inflct pain on school students, but in those days it was the accepted thing. In fact most boys took some pride in being stapped (or caned in governmet schools). I know I did.

*** *** *** 

I remember my primary school days at the Christian Brothers High School at Highgate, during the late 1940’s, with great affection.My favourite teacher was Brother O’Brien, He was a young, smiling faced man with bright red hair, a big smile and a love of laughter and singing. Being in his class was great fun. It was like being taught by Father O’Malley in Going My Way, the Academy Award winning role played by Bing Crosby.

However, though Brother O’Brien was my favourite teacher, he could also strike fear into my heart. With a mixed class of about 55 Year Fours and Year Fives, Brother O’Brien was not reluctant to use the strap in order to maintain discipline.

In those days of course corporal punishment was not only permissible it was almost compulsory. Parents expected the Brothers to be firm and strict. And they were. The strap was in use on most days. Although Brother O’Brien generally eased up in  very cold and frosty weather and did not bring the strap down quite so strongly on those frozen fingers.

I received my fair share of the strap and soon realised the futility of telling my mother in the hope of getting some sympathy.  My mother would just say, “Well you must stop being so naughty! You must do your work and learn to behave yourself. Whatever will the Brothers think of us?” These days of course  mothers would be  rushing down to the lawyer’s office wanting to sue for the assault and battery on their precious  little angels.

The first period each school day was Catechism. Each night the class had to learn three or four questions and answers from the catholic catechism. Some of the questions were really interesting.

“Why do we call that day Good on which Jesus died?”, “What does Transubstantiation mean?”, “What is meant by Fast and Abstinence?”, “What is an Indulgence?”, “What is a Plenary Indulgence?” and “What is meant by the Infallibility of the Pope?”

The questions were interesting alright, it was learning the answers that caused me and my fellow Year Four and Year  Five classmates the problem.If anyone had a wrong answer they had to write out the question and the answer three times at playtime. Very time consuming. To avoid this punishment cheating became widespread. The boys would sit with their catechism booklets beneath their legs and glance down for the answers when Brother O’Brien called out the questions. In such a large and crowded classroom this was fairly easy to do.

Brother O”Brien used to keep a daily tally of correct and incorrect answers. His beaming smile grew wider and wider each day as the correct tally grew and there were very few incorrect responses. Brother was happy and life was good in Year Four and Five at Highgate Christian Brothers. But some wise person once said, “God is not mocked.” He was right. And God is not too fond of cheats either, especially good holy catholic boys who are cheating at Catechism.

Came the fateful day when Brother O”Brien discovered that mendacity and duplicity were alive and well in his classroom.At least we were honest enough to own up when he discovered one boy cheating. When he asked who else had been cheating all of the other 54 boys rose sheepishly to their feet.

We felt bad about being caught cheating. We felt bad that we were about to be punished. But we felt absolute remorse that we had deceived our beloved teacher and caused him to be so upset with us. Red headed people have a reputation for short fuses and strong rages. Brother O’Brien proved to be a typical redhead that day. He felt tricked and betrayed and he was duty bound to teach us all that cheats never prosper. Of course it is a well known fact that some cheats prosper enormously, but not in Brother O’Brien’s class.

He lined us 55 boys up around the room and then set off giving each of us two cuts on each hand with his thick black strap. It took him about five minutes to work his way around the line giving out a total of 220 strokes. About two thirds of the way around it was obvious that he was beginning to feel the strain of his exertions. However, he battled on. After administering the final four blows to the last boy, he quickly moved to his chair, slumped down behind his desk and let out a huge sigh.

The boys, quite impressed with his energetic and athletic performance, burst into a spontaneous round of applause.Brother O”Brien’s face lit up in a big grin. Justice had been done and harmony and peace returned to our happy class once more.

We had learned quite a lot that morning!

(An edited excerpt from “LEON: A backward glance at boyhood” by Noel Bourke. Published September, 2005)

My School versus Your School

I wrote this article in November 2010. It was printed in the Western Australian Primary Principals Association's  Leaders Library in March, 2011.
I believe what I wrote then is still very pertinent to the current education debate.
Since that time more  and more people have raised serious objections about the way NAPLAN has impacted on the teaching of the arts, science, society and the environment and how it has has also forced formal literacy and numeracy instruction into Kindergarten and Pre Primary.(Refer to my blog "The lost Childhood Generation", September 3, 2012).

It is ironic that while the federal government has put its My School website on steroids, the reverse is true in the UK and the USA where serious questions are being asked about the negative effects of the heavy emphasis on national literacy and numeracy testing regimes.

In 2009, when the Australian government was setting up its national literacy and numeracy scheme (NAPLAN), two important events in education took place overseas. In the United Kingdom, in October, 2009, the Cambridge University Review of Primary Education was released. It is the most comprehensive review of primary schooling ever undertaken anywhere in the world. The Cambridge Review is an evidence based and visionary document that produced 78 conclusions and 75 recommendations.

It did not look kindly upon the effects of standardised numeracy and literacy tests. Among its findings was one that said standardised testing had “narrowed the curriculum” and that the arts, science and the humanities were being eroded by the heavy focus on national standardised testing. The British Office of Standards in Education (Ofsted) agreed and stated that music, in particular, had a vital role to play in primary education.

Can we expect the same narrowing of curriculum focus to occur in Australia. It is already happening. Several Western Australian schools have cancelled or deferred various sporting and cultural activities in Term One so that teachers could be focussed solely on NAPLAN success? In 2011 the Education Department altered its term holiday dates to give teachers more time to prepare their children for the NAPLAN tests.

The other educational landmark event of 2009 occurred in the USA, where Dr Diane Ravitch published her bestselling book, “The Death and Life of the Great American Public School System”. The book’s subtitle was “How testing and choice are undermining education”.

Dr Ravitch should know about these things. She was the Assistant Secretary for Education in the administration of President George Bush the First. She was instrumental in setting up the federal government’s “No Child Left Behind” project which established a nationalised literacy and numeracy testing programme and established Charter Schools to focus specifically on raising standards in literacy and numeracy.

President Clinton later appointed her to the National Assessment Governing Board which supervised the national testing programme. However, after examining the evidence of the national testing programme, Dr Ravitch has now had a 180 degree conversion. She now regrets sacking so many principals and teachers because their schools did not measure up. She says, poverty, not poor teaching, is the major cause of failure in schools.

She backs her argument with hard evidence and is severely critical of the highly touted results of the New York school system. The New York school system, administered by Joel Klein (a lawyer), has a major focus on literacy and numeracy testing. It is the education system that so impressed our then Education Minister, Julia Gillard, when she was in New York one day, that it set her mind to establishing what eventually became NAPLAN.

But Diane Ravitch produces data to refute the achievements of New York’s education programmes which shows New York college students compare poorly against students from other states who enjoy a broader curriculum.She also claims some New York test data are "fudged".

Dr Ravitch says that school accountability, based solely on standardised testing, has been a disaster. It encourages schools and teachers to teach to the test and devote less and less time to science, social studies, history, geography, foreign languages, art, music and drama. Why wouldn’t they. Their jobs depend on it. She says that in the 1990s she was optimistic “that testing would shine a spotlight on low performing schools and that choice would create opportunities for poor kids to leave for better schools.” Sound familiar. The problem was that it did not turn out that way. Ravitch  now says, “There is little empirical evidence...just promise and hope.” and is convinced that schools operate better “in a an atmosphere of cooperation, not competition.”

With NAPLAN being touted as the benchmark for school achievement, Australian schools are now competing with each other. In some schools even the teachers are competing with each other. Some principals are using NAPLAN results as a staff performance management tool. Surely good principals would have other and wider means of detecting poorly performing teachers.

Obviously, it would be prudent to take heed of the Cambridge Primary Review, which clearly outlines the aims of primary education and the best ways of achieving them.It would also be prudent to study Dr Ravitch’s book so as to avoid the pitfalls of a heavy reliance on nationalised testing.

Unfortunately, in Australia, teachers are not politically powerful and our education system is controlled by politicians who generally make decisions based on what gets the most votes not on what is in the best interests of our children...and ultimately, our country.

We can only hope that some Australian educators will acquaint themselves with the evidence presented by the Cambridge University Review and “The Death and Life of the Great American Public School System” and try to influence our politicians before our primary children are completely deprived of the wider curriculum that they previously enjoyed.

And in primary schools “enjoyment” should be the operative word. We have all heard the horror stories about children being sick on NAPLAN test day. Perhaps some teachers and school principals even felt the same way.

Interestingly enough, the Cambridge Review does recommend an accountability system. It says there should be testing of randomly selected children in order to ascertain overall performance levels in literacy and numeracy.

Bingo! This was the very system that was so successfully employed by the Western Australian Education Department up until the mid 1990s  until a conservative federal Minister for Education, Dr David Kemp, using the extortionate tactics of Al Capone, threatened to withhold federal funding unless the state government introduced universal testing. David Kemp's testing policy was continued by Brendon Nelson, a doctor. It was expanded into NAPLAN by Australia’s next  education minister, Julia Gillard, a lawyer. The present Minister for Education, Peter Garrett, used to sing in a rock and roll band. (I will refrain from describing what Christopher Pyne, the current Minister for Education is. NB 10.4.2015)

We should all be praying that one day we can have someone with real teaching experience making the important decisions that will impact on children in our primary schools.

\

A Word About Puns

Isn’t it funny how people groan when someone makes a pun. Personally, I love words and I think puns, well most of them, are quite funny. Some are brilliant.

The title of my blog, The Font of Noelage, is itself quite a witty pun for which I can take no credit . It was created by my eldest daughter, Jane, who is the gifted wordsmith and website whiz who actually set up my blog site for me.

I remember when I was at boarding school in my Leaving Year. We had a boy who couldn’t help himself. He punned about everything. We decided that the next time he made a pun we were going to shove him inside a locker. Well, despite our warnings, he punned again and we did shove him inside a locker. He immediately yelled out, “O pun the door.”

Some of the best puns are in newspapers. My late cousin, Maurie Carr, was a journalist who finished his long career in newspapers writing a much loved column on the back page of Perth’s Daily News. Although he was a brilliant columnist, Maurie really liked being a sub-editor, correcting and re-writing other journalist stories, writing appropriate headlines and then placing them in the newspaper.

He had very good collection of puns, many that came from newspaper headlines. He told me of a Scottish sub-editor who had to write a headline for a report of a soccer match between the powerful and famous Celtic side (pronounce Sel-tic) and a lowly rated team called West Caledonian Highlands, affectionately nick named Calley, for short.

In this particular Scottish Football Association game, the lowly Calley thrashed the highly fancied Celtic. It was as unbelievable as East Perth Under 18s thrashing Hawthorn in the AFL. Well, on this particular night the unbelievable happened and West Highlands Caledonian blitzed the mighty Celtic side 4 goals to nil.

What sort of headline would you write to recognize this truly sensational result. Well, the Scottish Sub editor ran his headline across six columns, three inches deep. It read,

“Super Calley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious.”

Another one of Maurie’s favourite news headline puns came from a report by a Times of London journalist covering the Spanish Civil War in the mid 1930s.The Basques of northern Spain were attacked by General Franco’s troops and forced to flee to safety across the Pyreness into France.

Naturally, they could not all retreat through the usual border crossings. This resulted in a crowded sea of human misery locked together in a very narrow mountain pass. The Times reporter told of this vast logjam of refugees, fleeing their attackers through a confined mountain passage to freedom, by saying,

“Of course this catastrophe always occurs whenever you put all of your Basques in one exit.”

I was reminded recently of that very witty Scottish sub editor, obviously a Mary Poppins fan, when a friend told me that, “Mahatma Gandhi, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him...A super callused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.”

He also told me that he was reading a very interesting book about Anti-Gravity that he just could not put down.

At the risk of being cast into my own wardrobe as punishment, now may be a good time for this pundit to cease.