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 Educator reports that on May 12, the Mutual Recognition Amendment Bill 2021, which aims to support high quality school leadership and teaching and learning across Australian schools, was passed by the Senate. The Australian Government Primary Principals Association said the mobility of teachers is critical to supporting and developing the capacity of the profession at all levels to achieve the successful delivery of Australia’s national school reform agenda. However, others have raised concerns about how educators who move interstate to teach will be supported to navigate the various curriculum requirements of each state. The NSW Teachers Federation says it opposes the Bill as it will have a “profound and enduring” impact on the teaching profession and students in NSW public education. However, Independent Schools Queensland (ISQ) believes the potential benefits from automatic mutual recognition of teacher registration would outweigh any risks to the effectiveness of current state and territory-based registration arrangements.
According to an article in The Conversation, in February, Australian media companies pleaded guilty to contempt of court over their reporting of Cardinal George Pell’s conviction on sexual abuse charges. Last Friday, the Victorian Supreme Court handed out more than A$1 million in fines against 12 media organisations. The most heavily hit were The Age ($450,000) and news.com.au ($400,000). These heavy fines were meted out despite the fact that the media companies had apologised to the court and had even agreed to pay the prosecution’s legal costs. There are many ways the law restricts media freedom in Australia, including laws regarding defamation. But contempt of court, seen here by the media’s breaching of a suppression order, is one of the more controversial mechanisms. It is, however, a limitation that the courts impose regularly, and take very seriously. Justice John Dixon said media companies had not only usurped the function of the court, but had taken it “upon themselves” to decide “where the balance ought to lie” between the cardinal’s right to a fair trial and the public’s right to know about it.
According to an article in The Conversation, Bills in the Federal and New South Wales Parliaments have sought to stop teachers talking about gender and sexuality diversity in the name of either religious freedom or parents’ rights. If passed in its current form, the NSW Education Legislation Amendment (Parental Rights) Bill 2020 would prohibit teachers from discussing gender and sexuality diversity. It would also make offering targeted, requested support to gender and sexuality diverse (often known as LGBTQ+) students grounds for revoking teachers’ accreditation. At NSW universities, the Bill will mean programs that educate student teachers about the existence of LGBTQ+ students and how best to support them at school would be at risk of losing their accreditation. The same goes for registered professional development of NSW teachers. Such bills fail to acknowledge the daily realities for many LGBTQ+ youth. These young people experience one of the highest rates of school bullying in the Asia-Pacific and are almost five times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers.
The Age reports that uninvited and threatening people joined online Google Classroom sessions with Victorian school students on at least three separate occasions last year, amid privacy concerns from parents and schools. The incidents were reported to police, who told The Age their investigations were continuing. The Google education suite, which includes Google Classroom, is a set of popular online learning tools used by public and private schools in Victoria to assist with remote learning. In March 2020, data rights activist Asher Wolf made an official complaint to the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner regarding the Department of Education’s use of a single Google directory listing thousands of teacher and student names and email addresses. Kylie Auld, the Department’s director of knowledge, privacy and records, told the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner that the Department was moving to a school-specific directory model, to be completed by the end of June last year. The promised transition did not occur until April this year. The single directory still exists, but can now be seen only by teachers.
The Educator reports that the Alliance of Girls’ Schools Australasia is supporting a three-year study investigating academic buoyancy in girls, with the 2021 Alliance Research Grant awarded to Associate Professor Rebecca Collie and Professor Andrew Martin of the University of New South Wales. First discovered by Australian academics Andrew Martin and Herbert W March in 2008, academic buoyancy refers to the ability of students to successfully deal with the everyday academic stresses and setbacks of school, including challenging schoolwork, poor test results, difficult exams, juggling multiple assignment deadlines, oral presentations, performances, and fluctuating levels of confidence and motivation. Recent studies undertaken by Collie, Martin and others have confirmed a concerning finding — that female school students are significantly less academically buoyant than male students. In fact, this is one of the relatively few areas in which gender differences at school are not in favour of girls.
SBS News reports that a list of 23 prominent NSW lawyers have signed an open letter in support of reforms that will require people accused of sexual assault to prove they took steps to obtain consent. The reforms, announced by NSW Attorney-General Mark Speakman, will adopt an "affirmative consent" model, which means a person does not consent to sexual activity until they say or do something to communicate it. The open letter was written in response to the NSW Bar Association, which had previously labelled the reforms as "ill-considered". "The reality is that barristers, like any other members of the community, are likely to have a range of views on a controversial topic like this," the open letter reads. It is signed by prominent lawyers such as Justin Gleeson, a former Commonwealth Solicitor-General, and Gail Furness, who was legal counsel to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that students living in Sydney’s single-sex public high school catchments will have guaranteed access to a nearby coeducational school under a plan being developed by the NSW Department of Education. From next year, students zoned for the Penshurst Girls and Hurstville Boys’ campuses of Georges River College can also choose the co-ed Peakhurst campus. Other catchments will follow once the Department finishes the complicated process of assessing student numbers and re-drawing catchments, senior government sources said on the condition of anonymity because the policy has not been finalised. There are 34 single-sex public high schools in Sydney. Under the catchment system, students are only guaranteed a place at their local school. Many parents in single-sex catchments – ranging from the eastern suburbs and inner west to Hornsby and Kogarah – have been lobbying for guaranteed co-ed alternatives, saying they want the option of having their children study with the opposite sex and their sons and daughters to attend the same school.
The Age reports that the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommended that state and territory governments place particular emphasis on monitoring boarding schools to ensure they meet Child Safe Standards. In response, the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority will be granted compliance and enforcement powers to ensure that school boarding premises satisfy minimum safety standards from July. The Victorian Government is proposing to prescribe minimum standards that closely align with existing standards for schools, describing them as the most practically feasible of three options. The Government forecasts that this will cost $1.56 million over seven years, mostly borne by the regulator. But the Australian Boarding Schools Association, which represents every Victorian boarding school, said the government should have chosen a more ambitious national system of certification that schools have developed with Standards Australia. Victoria has five boys’ boarding schools, eight girls’ boarding schools and 18 co-ed boarding schools.
The ABC News reports that South Australia's Children's Commissioner urges politicians and educational leaders to engage in "contemporary, mature and pragmatic" conversations with young people about relationships and sexual health. Commissioner for Children and Young People Helen Connolly on Sunday released Sex Education in South Australia, a report examining the relevance of sex education in schools. In preparing the report, she received 1,225 survey responses from regional and metropolitan South Australians aged 12 to 22 years old regarding "the quality, appropriateness, accessibility, and timeliness" of their sex education. She said the responses indicate that young people want sex education that is "more comprehensive and responsive to the current realities, pressures and complexities" of their lives, which are different to earlier generations.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Pope Francis on Sunday expressed his pain over the discovery in Canada of the remains of 215 Indigenous students of church-run residential schools and pressed religious and political authorities to shed light on “this sad affair.” But he didn’t offer the apology sought by the Canadian Prime Minister. Pope Francis, in remarks to faithful gathered in St Peter’s Square, also called on the authorities to foster healing but made no reference to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s insistence, two days earlier, that the Vatican apologises and takes responsibility. From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools, the majority of them run by Roman Catholic missionary congregations, in a campaign to assimilate them into Canadian society. The Canadian Government has admitted that physical and sexual abuse was rampant in the schools, with students beaten for speaking their native languages.
The New York Times reports that, after a school year rife with debate over the safety of returning to classrooms, experts say that the United States is edging closer to a safe return to in-person learning in the fall. Children ages 12 to 15 recently became eligible to get the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in the US and in the European Union, and the vaccine was endorsed by Britain’s drug regulator on Friday to be used for the same age group. Moderna plans this month to ask the Food and Drug Administration to clear its vaccine for use in 12- to 17-year-olds. A study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday indicated that the hospitalisation rate for COVID-19 in adolescents was about three times greater than hospitalisations linked to influenza over three recent flu seasons, lending urgency to the drive to vaccinate children. The findings run counter to claims that influenza is more threatening to children than COVID-19, an argument that has been used in the push to reopen schools. Experts say that more research is needed.
Stuff reports that Florida's Republican governor signed a bill last Wednesday (NZ time) barring transgender females from playing on public school teams intended for student athletes born as girls, plunging the state into the national culture war over transgender rights. “In Florida, girls are going to play girls sports and boys are going to play boys sports,” Governor Ron DeSantis said as he signed the bill into law at a private Christian academy in Jacksonville that would not be subject to the law. “We're going to make sure that that's the reality." The new law, sure to be challenged as unconstitutional, inflames an already contentious discussion unfolding nationally as Republican-controlled states move to limit the rights of LGBTQ people, whose advocates were particularly annoyed that the legislation was signed on the first day of America’s Gay Pride Month. The Florida law mirrors an Idaho law, the first of its kind when enacted last year, that is now mired in legal challenges. Republican governors in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee recently signed similar measures.