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 Australian Financial Review reports that teachers feel overwhelmed by the enormous expectations of their jobs, with nine in every 10 saying they don’t have enough time to prepare for their daily classes, a new survey has found. A new report from the Grattan Institute has found that teaching quality is suffering as a result. Time poverty among teachers was consistent across independent, Catholic and public schools as well as primary and high schools. The survey found Australian teachers work, on average, 44 hours a week, higher than nurses and other professionals. Dr Jordana Hunter, education program director at the Grattan Institute, said for a small investment of around $60 million governments could trial a range of possible solutions that freed up teachers from non-essential work, including shared curriculum resources. Dr Hunter said one of the most effective interventions governments could make would be to rethink the way teachers’ work is organised through industrial agreements, allowing schools the flexibility to invest in more time for teachers to prepare for their classes.
7 News reports that Australian parents are being warned of the dangers of sharing their child’s information online as hundreds of thousands of children head back to school - including things as basic as their full name, age, or images. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has seen an increasing number of predators creating online social media personas - assuming the identity of children or celebrities - to make contact with children and over time, extract sexually explicit images. “Once they have built a rapport with children, online predators can often groom victims and coerce them into providing sexually explicit material,” the AFP said. AFP Commander for the Australian Centre To Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE) Hilda Sirec said while it was normal for children and young teens to want to interact with people their own age online, predators “prey upon this”. “With the start of the school year, many students will be connecting with each other on social media for the first time, making it a good time to remind kids to ensure they know who they are adding.”
According to an article in The Educator, Sydney is home to Australia’s most expensive public and private education, with Brisbane boasting the nation’s most expensive Catholic schools. The Futurity Investment Group’s ‘Planning for Education Index’, released today, found that Sydney is Australia’s most expensive city for a public and private education, while Brisbane is the most affordable city for a public education. However, it is the most expensive for parents choosing a Catholic education for their child. Adelaide was found to be one of Australia’s most expensive cities for a public education, yet one of Australia’s most affordable cities for parents sending their kids to private schools. Perth was named Australia’s most affordable city for a private education. The index identified Melbourne as one of Australia’s most expensive cities for an education, irrespective of the school type. The release of the ‘Planning for Education Index’ follows an analysis released last week by education payment provider EdStart which found that private school fees have increased back to pre-pandemic levels amid rising cost pressures.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the trend to withdraw children from formal education with a record 9000 students now registered for home schooling in NSW, a jump of nearly 30 per cent. Home schooling has been rising in popularity for several years but spiked dramatically after the pandemic started – with 19 per cent growth in 2019, compared with an average 13 per cent for the three years before that. Home Education Association president Karen Chegwidden said there were many reasons the pandemic was driving the trend. Having children at home during lockdown made some families realise they like the lifestyle of having their kids at home, while others were alarmed by their child’s lack of progress in mainstream schooling. Some who were vaccine-hesitant were worried their child would be vaccinated against their will, while others would not send their child to school until they were fully vaccinated. “Then there are just the people who are sick of the disruption,” she said. “Kids are stressed out and parents are stressed out and that’s really reflective of a lot of families.”
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that principals warn that boarding students may spend much of their first school term moving in and out of isolation due to COVID-19 rules that send an entire dormitory of up to 20 students into quarantine for a week if there is a single positive case among them. Some students may make the long trip home to isolate for seven days, only to be exposed again when they return and have to go back for another week. Catholic Schools NSW chief executive Dallas McInerney said the rules subjected students to unnecessary anxiety. Public, Catholic and independent school sectors run boarding schools. NSW Health treats students sharing a dormitory - or “share sleeping or intimate communal spaces where masks and physical distancing are not applied” - as household contacts. Australian Boarding Schools Association chief executive Richard Stokes is calling on NSW Health to alter its definition of household contact from students sharing a physical space - which could be a whole dormitory - to those sharing a room or cubicle.
The Guardian reports that experts have questioned whether a new $500 voucher scheme for New South Wales parents to access before-and after-school care will be enough to change behaviours altered by the pandemic. The $155m scheme, announced by the NSW premier Dominic Perrottet on Monday, will cover the gap fee for care services, covering about 60 sessions per primary student. However, Terry Rawnsley, a demographics and urban economics expert at KPMG, said getting parents back into the office would not be as easy as making childcare services temporarily more affordable. “There is this entrenched behavioural change for people over the last 12 months, especially in NSW where before and after school care has dropped off,” he said. Rawnsley expected the vouchers to be cashed soonest by parents who wanted or needed to go into their workplaces more regularly as the economy opened back up. But he said the temporary nature of the scheme meant people would not be likely to take on extra shifts or start a new job because of it.
The Age reports that coronavirus border closures forced international students to choose between staying in Victoria indefinitely and returning home for remote learning. Students who remained in Victoria were unable to see their families for about two years. Some have still not travelled home due to lengthy quarantine requirements in their home countries. But Australian airports have finally roared back to life, with more than 43,000 international students arriving since the Commonwealth opened the borders to fully vaccinated foreign students in December. Victoria’s schools and universities hope the newly opened border and the abolition of two weeks’ hotel quarantine for fully vaccinated travellers will revive the state’s biggest export sector. The “education state” still has more international secondary students than the rest of Australia, although numbers have dived during COVID from almost 9000 in late 2019 to just over 4800 late last year.
ABC News reports that a Brisbane Christian college's enrolment contract that demands families denounce homosexuality and subscribe to traditional gender roles is "unacceptable", and a review by Queensland’s Non-State Schools Accreditation Board is under way into whether the school is in breach of its legislative obligations, Queensland's Education Minister says. Human rights lawyer and LGBTI Legal Service president Matilda Alexander questioned whether the school's document was legally binding. Ms Alexander said the Queensland Anti-Discrimination Act makes it unlawful to discriminate against people based on their sexuality and gender identity, among other characteristics like race and religious belief. "In my opinion, those are illegal clauses — you can't contract out of discrimination law," Ms Alexander said. Principal Brian Mulheran said the school had sought legal advice in drafting the contract, and argued it had "certain freedoms under international law and under Commonwealth and state legislation" which allowed it to include the clauses.
The Courier Mail reports that a Brisbane private school has today withdrawn an enrolment contract which asked families to agree their children would identify as their birth gender or face being excluded from the school. Citipointe Christian College, in Carindale, initially gave parents little more than a week before school returns to consider its new contract, which also proclaimed beliefs that homosexuality and bisexuality are destructive to society. The school on Thursday confirmed families would no longer be asked to agree to the controversial contract which The Courier-Mail revealed on Sunday, with Education Minister Grace Grace welcoming the move, saying “I hope this never ever happens again”. By Thursday, a change.org protest had recorded more than 155,000 signatures from people who opposed the contract.
The Age reports that federal moderate Liberal MPs will renew their push for fast-tracked protections for LGBTQ school students when Parliament returns next week, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison aims to deliver on his election promise to legislate to protect religious freedom. Fresh controversy over the Federal Government’s proposed religious discrimination bill was ignited on Tuesday after reports that Citipointe Christian College in Brisbane had issued contracts requiring students to agree to specific gender roles and denounce homosexuality. Liberal moderates Angie Bell, Katie Allen, Dave Sharma and Trent Zimmerman said the Brisbane school’s example highlighted the need for Parliament to act to protect LGBTQ students ahead of a potential vote on the bill in the coming sitting fortnight. Ms Bell said she would return to Parliament next week seeking the repeal of an exemption in the Sex Discrimination Act that allowed contracts such as that proposed by Citipointe Christian College to be enforced, as well as other possible solutions, to protect students.
The Advertiser reports that a public teachers’ strike on the first day of school has been postponed after union members voted 76 per cent against industrial action in a second ballot. Members originally voted in favour of a strike, but a second ballot was called after the state government provided a comprehensive “back-to-school” Covid plan. The plan addressed a number of the issues concerning the SA branch of the Australian Education Union. A major sticking point in negotiations were union calls for rapid antigen testing, or similar surveillance regimen, in public classrooms. That was not granted, after the union accepted the advice of chief public health officer Professor Nicola Spurrier that blanket testing was not needed. Union state president Andrew Gohl said the way members voted a second time around was not surprising. “I think it’s an indication that we’ve got the settings right within the union,” he said. However, future strike action has not been ruled out. Mr Gohl said the union would be watching the start of term closely.
BBC News reports that a Pulitzer prize-winning novel about the Holocaust has topped Amazon's best-seller's list after a school board in Tennessee banned it. The graphic novel Maus: A Survivor's Tale depicts how the author's parents survived Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Board members voted in favour of banning the novel because it contained swear words and a naked illustration. In an interview with CNBC the author of the novel, Mr Spiegelman, said he was "baffled" by the decision and called it an "Orwellian" course of action. He told The New York Times that he agreed that some of the imagery was disturbing. "But you know what? It's disturbing history," he said. The move to ban the novel comes amid a national debate over the curriculum in US public schools. Parents, teachers and school administrators have been grappling with how to teach race, discrimination and inequality in the classroom.
According to an article in Al Jazeera, the SAT exam will move from paper and pencil to a digital format, administrators announced Tuesday, saying the shift will boost its relevancy as more United States colleges make standardised tests optional for admission. Test-takers will be allowed to use their own laptops or tablets, but they’ll still have to sit for the test at a monitored testing site or in school, not at home. The format change is scheduled to roll out internationally next year and in the US in 2024. It will also shave an hour from the current version, bringing the reading, writing and math assessment from three hours to about two. Once essential for US college applications, scores from admission tests like the SAT and rival ACT carry less weight today as colleges and universities pay more attention to the sum of student achievements and activities throughout high school. Amid criticism that the exams favour wealthy, white applicants and disadvantage minority and low-income students, an increasing number of schools have in recent years adopted test-optional policies, which let students decide whether to include scores with their applications.