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.
The Courier-Mail reports that dozens of after-school care centres are set to shut as pandemic lockdowns send half of them broke, providers have warned. With 80 per cent of students homeschooling in Sydney, Melbourne, southeast Queensland and the Upper Hunter Region of NSW, many centres are struggling to stay open. Closures could force essential workers whose children still attend school – such as nurses, police, doctors, supermarket workers and ambulance officers – to quit work to care for their kids at home. Out of School Hours Council of Australia co-president Melinda Crole said half the services in Sydney and Melbourne are already unviable. She said centres were set to close in Canterbury, Manly, Lindfield, North Sydney and Summer Hill in Sydney. In Victoria, only 18 per cent of students attended before and after school care during last month’s lockdown, with Out of School Hours Care (OSHC) centres struggling again under this week’s stay-at-home orders.
The Australian Financial Review reports that Education Minister Alan Tudge has refused to put a “hard deadline” on when international students can start to re-enter the country despite figures showing a 33 per cent decline in new enrolments. Once national vaccination rates reached 80 per cent, which was expected by Christmas, Mr Tudge said the government would be in a “position of having more open borders”. Mr Tudge is under increasing pressure from the business community and the university sector to provide a national plan for the return of overseas students. Australia is the only major destination country for international students that has not released a post-COVID-19 recovery plan for the $37.5 billion sector. To date, the states and individual institutions have been tasked with developing plans for the return of international students which require sign off from the Federal Government. South Australia is the only state to have its plan approved and is pushing ahead for students to return and quarantine at a disused airport outside Adelaide.
The Age reports that Professor Alan Reid says that the key to tackling the climate crisis lies in our schools. The Monash University education academic, along with researchers from the University of Southern Queensland and international universities Exeter and Stanford, has recently published new research showing that embedding climate literacy across the curriculum is essential to help future generations successfully fight climate change. Professor Reid said that there was a clear appetite for change from students, evident in the national School Strike 4 Climate rallies. He said that it was important teachers not just discuss climate change in science and geography classes but in the arts and humanities as well because students need to be able to think critically to identify fake information and ideologies and understand and respond appropriately to climate warnings. Improved climate education can also go a long way towards addressing and alleviating young people’s climate anxiety, which has been a growing problem.
The ABC News reports that, in less than a week, clusters of positive cases have emerged in a number of schools in Queensland, Victoria, and the NSW Hunter region — with city-wide lockdowns following. In Greater Sydney, plans for Year 12 students to return to campus for trial exams and to see out the last weeks of their education have been cancelled. A Pfizer rollout for Year 12 students from at-risk suburbs has been started in the hope that the actual HSC exams won't be next on COVID's chopping block. Kristine Macartney, a paediatrician and director of the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, who led a study last year into the behaviour of COVID in schools, says "Delta's greater transmissibility is really impacting younger people more than we possibly could have predicted." From an epidemiological point of view, Catherine Bennett, Chair in Epidemiology at Deakin University's School of Health and Social Development in Melbourne, says, schools are "just perfect" as a vehicle for transmission.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Australia is being considered as a test site for US company Moderna to study a COVID-19 vaccine for children as young as six months, in a sign of the firm’s interest in the country as it negotiates with the Federal Government over local vaccine production. Moderna is evaluating Australia as one location for a trial that aims to enrol 6000 children aged from six months to 12 years, with most of the study taking place in the United States. The move, revealed in the company’s quarterly report to US regulators in recent days, comes as the Federal Government talks to Moderna officials about the cost of building a facility to manufacture its messenger RNA vaccine in Australia. The Moderna vaccine is expected to be cleared by the Therapeutic Goods Administration within weeks but has been shipped for months in large volumes to countries including Canada, Singapore and member states of the European Union.
The Age reports that vaccination teams could be sent to “hotspot” suburbs with significant coronavirus outbreaks, health experts say, with fears that much of Melbourne’s north and west is under-vaccinated and at risk. Victoria last week went from zero new cases to another lockdown in just over a day. New polling shows that most people believe that there is an urgent need to give teachers access to vaccines to reduce the risk of the virus spreading in school communities. Fresh polling commissioned by the Australian Education Union found that four in five Australians believe that it is critical to prioritise teachers for vaccination against COVID-19, with a poll ranking them ahead of essential retail workers, transport, warehousing and construction. Teachers at two of the largest schools west of Melbourne have been infected in recent weeks, forcing thousands of other staff, students and their families into 14-day isolation. A small number of non-government schools have already taken it upon themselves to help their staff get vaccinated.
The Daily Telegraph reports that police receive reports almost daily about young people falling victim to revenge porn or being coerced into posting nude images online. The incidents are also under-reported, according to the new boss of the NSW Child Abuse and Sex Crimes Squad, because children don’t always feel comfortable telling their parents or school. With young people spending more time on their devices during the current COVID lockdown, the environment has also created more opportunities for cybercrime and harassment, police say. That includes students sharing intimate photos without consent, or predators targeting chat rooms on gaming sites and social media to groom children. These types of predators are targeted heavily by Strike Force Trawler, which in the past two months arrested on average one person a week for allegedly trying to groom children online for sex.
The Educator reports that a groundbreaking new framework will guide and assist Australian teachers to help young people deal with growing and ever-changing risks online. The “Best Practice Framework for Online Safety Education”, launched by the eSafety Commissioner, represents the first-ever resource of its kind for Australian schools. The comprehensive Framework, designed to address the needs of every student, at every year level, provides guidance on: students’ rights and responsibilities in a digital age; resilience building; current and emerging risks; help-seeking; how to obtain guidance and support; and professional learning and capacity building for schools and their staff. The Framework is also an important component of eSafety’s work delivering on recommendations of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. eSafety commissioned Queensland University of Technology to undertake research as part of the consultation process to inform the Framework.
The Courier-Mail reports that new [Queensland] laws that could jail adults for three years for not telling police about the sexual abuse of a child have raised criticism from legal and academic circles about potential ethical dilemmas and how they will be enforced. The laws, introduced last month, now require all adults to report known or suspected sexual offences against a person under the age of 16, or a person with an impairment. The laws were designed to break the seal of confession in religious institutions and implement recommendations from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse; however, concerns have been raised as to how they could be applied to other professions. Bond University Professor and former police detective Terry Goldsworthy said the laws were poorly formed, had not been explained, and questioned what extra resources police would get if there was an upsurge in complaints.
CTV News reports that the province says most schools and some workplaces in BC will be closed for a day in September to mark a new national holiday meant to commemorate the history of Canada's residential school system. The new statutory holiday was announced by the Federal Government back in June, and last week, the provincial government explained how it will be observed on the West Coast. September 30 will now be known as Truth and Reconciliation Day. According to the Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, it has advised employers in the provincial public sector to honour the day. Many public services will remain open, but may be on reduced hours, or have fewer staff members working. Most schools and post-secondary institutions will be closed, as will some health-care sector workplaces and Crown corporations, the Ministry said in a news release. Federal employees and workers in federally-regulated workplaces will also have the day off. It is not yet known what the "day of commemoration" will look like in BC.
CTV News reports that, as schools get ready to welcome students back to the classroom in September, they’re outlining measures to keep everyone safe from COVID-19, but there’s growing concern about what that means for the youngest cohort. Canada hasn’t approved a vaccine yet for children under the age of 12. And only about 37 per cent of children between the ages of 12 and 17 have been fully vaccinated. That means precautions are needed. And the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) plans to release guidance for schools, including those with children under the age of 12, in the next few weeks, agency spokesperson Anne Génier said last Wednesday. “It takes into consideration important factors such as transmission dynamics in school settings and child/youth populations, community vaccine coverage, as well as indicators like COVID-19 epidemiology, healthcare and public health capacity, and risk reduction measures in place,” Génier said. In the meantime, various pandemic rules remain and schools are laying out plans.