The information in the Weekly Wrap is aggregated from other news sources to provide you with news that is relevant to the education sector across Australia and worldwide. Each paragraph is a summary of the subject matter covered in the particular news article. The information does not necessarily reflect the views of CompliSpace.
ABC News reports that the NSW Teachers Federation [the NSW registered trade union that covers public school teachers] has announced its members will strike next Wednesday, May 4 over pay and conditions. The union's state executive unanimously decided to proceed with the strike at a meeting last Tuesday. They have also authorised members to walk off school grounds if a NSW government MP enters them, and have put an immediate ban on the implementation of new policies. The federation's president Angelo Gavrielatos said there was "no alternative" but to take industrial action. The federation said that in a recent poll of 10,000 teachers, 90 per cent said they were not paid enough and 73 per cent said their workload was unmanageable. NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet acknowledged the concerns of teachers but said the decision to go on strike was disappointing. The strike comes amid an ongoing dispute with the NSW government over public-service wage caps. Teachers went on a state-wide strike in December last year.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that as school returns for term 2 across NSW, it’s anything but business as usual for many students in the Northern Rivers region. The devastating floods that hit the region in February caused mass disruptions and meant thousands of children missed weeks of in-person learning. For many students, school will not return to normal for months, or even years, after the flood forced classes off site for the foreseeable future. Nine public schools were significantly damaged and earmarked for rebuilding along with several Catholic and independent schools. Many more were damaged. Universities and community groups have opened their doors to displaced students from affected schools. At Lismore’s Trinity Catholic College, which has almost 1000 students, every room but eight was inundated with water and the damage bill was expected to top tens of millions of dollars. The school is waiting for assessors’ reports to find out the final damage bill and to discover if they can ever return to the site. Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said most of the public schools affected will operate as “pop-up schools”, meaning demountable classrooms have been set up at the damaged school site or another location, as early as possible in term 2.
According to an article in The Educator, in NSW, the overwhelming majority of students with disability (86 per cent) learn in mainstream classrooms, while Schools for Specific Purposes (SSPs) educate around 3 per cent of students with disability. To ensure the state’s schools remain inclusive for children with a disability, the NSW Government recently released its Inclusive Education Policy, which will be implemented from Term 3, 2022. Family Advocacy has been one of the lead organisations seeking the Inclusive Education Policy’s development. “Rather than having the effect of moving more children with disability into regular classes, this inclusive education policy will promote and expand the numbers of students in support units and special schools,” Cecile Sullivan Elder, Family Advocacy’s Executive Officer, told The Educator. “The life impact of this segregated education leads to isolation from the general school population and a higher chance of continued segregation into adulthood such as attendance at Australian Disability Enterprises and Day Services.” However, the NSW Department of Education insists its new Inclusive Education Policy is fit for purpose when it comes to ensuring that school environments and practices are inclusive for children with a disability.
According to an article in The Herald Sun, more than 2500 Victorian teachers and support staff are due to be stood down on April 28 after failing to get their third vaccination jab, the Herald Sun can reveal. All staff who work in Victorian schools are required to have three doses of a Covid-19 vaccine unless a medical exemption applies. Victoria is the only state besides NT to have this rule. This mandate also applies to visitors and volunteers performing work at schools, but parents can now freely access school campuses without needing to be vaccinated. The permanent loss of the teachers and other education workers is compounding staff shortages in schools, principals say. The new operations guide suggests schools should combine classes in large spaces such as halls to cover staff absences and reschedule camps and excursions. The Department of Education has confirmed that 99.2 per cent of the state’s government teachers have had three doses of a Covid vaccine.
According to an article in The Herald Sun, school parents do not always have the right to know the identity of their child’s bully or obtain eyewitness accounts of serious playground incidents, VCAT has ruled. VCAT Commissioner Reynah Tang said the parents of a prep student did not have the right to obtain all notes from interviews of other students who witnessed, or were involved, in an incident involving their son. Commissioner Tang said information conveyed by the prep students was in confidence and that disclosure would “lessen the likelihood of students providing information about similar school incidents in future”. This outweighed the “general right of parents to know everything about such incidents,” he said. Commissioner Tang was also not satisfied that the disclosure of the redacted information would assist in the boy’s medical treatment and thought it may identify the children interviewed. The department argued that children giving evidence to those investigating an incident are encouraged to “provide full and frank disclosure on the basis that their information will not be shared”.
According to an article in The Herald Sun, private screening has identified six Victorian employees or volunteers who should not be working with children. The six employees – picked up in 33,000 staff reviews – were immediately stood down by their employers. Schools, sporting groups and community organisations are doing their own monitoring of staff, concerned that authorities are not identifying all adults posing risks to children. Some are turning to Oho, a Melbourne “purpose-led social venture” offering staff accreditation beyond Working with Children and police checks. Oho chief executive Claire Rogers said many organisations checked credentials of workers when they were hired, but did no ongoing validation. “This means a fair proportion of them are willing to run the risk,” she said. “We want to help organisations discharge their responsibility to keep everyone in their organisation safe on an ongoing basis. “This is now a director liability as the laws have changed.”
According to an article in The Courier Mail, the Queensland Human Rights Commission has sensationally claimed the chief health officer’s direction requiring teachers and early childcare workers to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 is not justified. The Commission also claims the latest vaccine mandate direction is outside John Gerrard’s power, under the Public Health Act. The QHRC has made the claims in a submission, as an intervener in Supreme Court legal challenges against vaccine mandates by three groups of suspended teachers and early childcare workers. Counsel for QHRC said the right of the CHO to give such directions was conditioned [sic] upon him placing “reasonable and demonstrably justifiable limits upon human rights’’. “On the present evidence … the limits on human rights imposed by the current CHO direction are not demonstrably justified and so, the direction was outside of power,’’ the QHRC submission says. Justice Jean Dalton recently ruled that the CHO’s vaccine directions were legislative and not administrative decisions, not requiring explanation, but her judgment is being appealed.
ABC News reports that South Australian students will have to wear face masks for another month after school resumes next week, as the state records another 3,463 cases of COVID-19. All high school students and adults, including visitors, are required to wear masks in school settings, while the practice is only "recommended" for students in Years 3 to 6. South Australia's Premier Peter Malinauskas announced the decision after the state's Emergency Management Committee met last Tuesday. The Premier pledged the state government would also install 1,000 air purifiers in schools across the state in an effort to improve ventilation, taking aim at the previous government's dismissal of the idea. The exercise has been costed at a total of $530,000, with 700 air purifiers already acquired. Education Minister Blair Boyer said a ventilation audit undertaken by the previous government last year identified 652 sites that did not meet standards. Mr Boyer also indicated the government would open 40 vaccination hubs at schools across the state, which will target children aged between six and 11 years old.
The Canberra Times reports that all school sectors are set to be impacted by significant amendments to the Education Act. The Education Amendment Bill 2022 recently introduced into the Legislative Assembly would move to overhaul the ACT's registration process for non-government schools from a five-year registration period to ongoing registration with a risk-based review processes. The bill outlines standards for non-government schools with respect to governance, educational programs, safety and welfare and other requirements. The amendments would create a registration standards advisory board to oversee the new registration process. The new system would allow for a program of annual school reviews but a review could also be initiated if a concern is raised over a school not complying with the Education Act.
According to NT News, Northern Territory schools were to be advised to help children as young as 14 transition their gender without their parents’ consent under draft education department guidelines that have now been scrapped. The draft guidelines – sent to some groups last year for consultation – offered schools advice on how to help children who were questioning their gender. The Government has been forced to distance itself from the recommendations of its own education department after the draft guidelines were recently revealed by Sky News. The guidelines also advised schools to hold “non-gendered” sports days and told teachers they should avoid using terms like “boys and girls” in case they upset children who were questioning their gender. Deputy Chief Minister Nicole Manison said the recommendations in the draft guidelines would not become Government policy. Ms Manison said updated guidelines would be put out for widespread community consultation later this school term.
The Guardian reports that lectures have been delivered to students in schools across the country, decrying “fascists” in Ukraine and suggesting that Russia was acting in “self-defence”. Russia’s plans to overhaul education have gone hand-in-hand with its war in Ukraine. Officials are writing curricula to justify the invasion, and have suggested schools will hold flag-raisings and sing the national anthem each morning from September. A major Russian textbook publisher is reportedly using autochecking software to edit out positive references to Ukraine in its schoolbooks. According to Russia’s education ministry, history will become a compulsory subject from the first grade. “We will never allow it [to be written] that we somehow treated other nations – our fraternal nations of Ukraine and Belarus – poorly,” said education minister Sergey Kravtsov, who announced the new initiative at the opening of an exhibition called “Everyday Nazism”. There is also a new level of pressure on teachers, sometimes to organise pro-war photo-ops with children, or in other cases to hide their anti-war feeling from their students. One of the first Russians to be targeted under a new law banning “fakes” about the Russian military was Irina Gen, a schoolteacher who now faces 10 years in prison.
The Guardian reports that the United Kingdom’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak and his wife, Akshata Murthy, have donated more than £100,000 to the chancellor’s old private school, Winchester college. The private boys’ boarding school, which costs £43,335 a year to attend, revealed the donation in its annual journal. A spokesperson for Sunak said: “Rishi and his wife have donated to numerous charities and philanthropic causes for many years and will continue to do so. These donations are made to help fund scholarships for children who would not otherwise have the opportunity to go to Winchester.” The school’s journal from 2020 also put him in the list of benefactors who have donated more than £100,000 in total, suggesting he has been a regular donor. Labour highlighted Sunak’s previous claim that he had “maxed out” on how much support he could give state schools, while continuing to hand subsidies to “elitist private schools” through tax breaks. Sunak’s personal wealth has recently come under scrutiny over investments his wife holds in Infosys, which had business in Russia. Murthy holds an estimated £690m stake in the Indian IT services company and collects about £11.5m in annual dividends. The Guardian reported last week that it was “urgently” closing its office in Russia.
The Economist reports that on 21 March Los Angeles Unified, America’s second-largest school district, enrolled every first-grader into a free college-savings-account programme, depositing $50 for each child. With 44,000 pupils, Opportunity LA is the biggest college-savings scheme for children in the country. Children’s savings accounts (CSAs) typically help towards a specific purpose, usually college or buying a home. Many barriers exist to amassing savings, especially for the poor. Foremost is a lack of funds to put away for later, but bad experiences with banks – worries about credit scores, for example, or fears about overdraft fees – also put people off. An automatic programme can encourage families to invest. Opportunity LA will enable families to use the savings account for college fees and associated costs, such as tests and supplies. The funds can be used for any two- or four-year programme at an accredited institution. If families pay in extra money and file taxes in the county, they will receive a matching contribution (up to $25 each year). If a pupil leaves the district, the funds are forfeited and any family contribution returned. Families can opt out of the plan, but few are expected to do so. Efforts elsewhere have had success, such as Seed for Oklahoma (Seed OK), which began 15 years ago.