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 Age reports that the ability of religious schools to discriminate in favour of hiring teachers of faith will be given further protection under contentious draft religious discrimination laws, adding to schools’ existing rights to expel staff and students because they are gay. Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge said the federal bill would override state legislation “where required”, saying this ability was “under threat” in Victoria where the state government has announced plans to pass laws to prohibit religious schools from sacking or refusing to employ teachers because of their sexuality or gender identity. Government sources said there would be no changes that displaced a special exemption in the federal Sex Discrimination Act that makes it lawful for religious schools to discriminate against LGBTQI staff and students, including by sacking or expelling them. Attorney General Michaelia Cash said she was committed to introducing the religious discrimination bill into Parliament during the final two sitting weeks of the year. Senator Cash said it remained the government’s position that no child “should be suspended or expelled from school on the basis of their sexuality or gender identity” and she expected the Australian Law Reform Commission’s review into the matter to provide detailed drafting to give effect to this. The ALRC are expected to report its findings 12 months after the passage of the religious discrimination bill.
The Australian reports that a special sex abuse tax on the multibillion-dollar Catholic health and education systems to help fund victim payments and address the monetary effects of declining support for the faith has been backed by a church figure with intimate knowledge of the long-term financial challenges. Brendan Long, a former senior adviser to the nation’s bishops, has flagged a 1 per cent user-pays levy on Catholic health and education networks that would deliver as much as $160m each year to help fund abuse payments and demographic-related financial hurdles. Dr Long said that the financial position was so bleak in some of the poorer dioceses that if they were registered under corporations law they could be trading while insolvent. He said the tax would ultimately be transferred to parents of Catholic schools, users of Catholic private healthcare services and through potentially higher aged care fees. The abuse issue was broader than just payments to victims but also costs associated with providing safer places of worship, training and compliance, with the potential for the crisis to run for many years.
According to an article in The Educator, more than two-thirds of teachers surveyed in Australia and New Zealand say training is not available alongside the roll-out of new tech despite most agreeing on the benefits of digital learning. The survey by D2L, a global learning and professional development technology leader, found that while institutions are offering 57.06 per cent of their courses fully online (up from 35.98 per cent pre-pandemic), 47.48 per cent identify a lack of support and training in the use of digital tools to deliver education as the biggest challenge in transitioning to learning online. Professor Elizabeth Johnson, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Education at Deakin University, said a lot more needs to be done to ensure that learning designs make best use of digital tools. Professor Johnson said digital fluency will help in shifting focus from digital mediums being used to what is being learnt, and that this fluency can be built by working with experts in learning and edtech, by learning from each other in communities of practice and by making digital a “normal space” for learning and teaching. “Now is the time to re-evaluate efforts to date, and identify highly intentional ways to lean on technology tools – without overcomplicating or overengineering – to fuel progress in digital learning with the right frameworks to support students, academics and other stakeholders.”
According to NSW Legislative Council Hansard, the Teacher Accreditation Amendment Bill 2021 (NSW) was recently introduced into the Legislative Council. Declared to be “urgent”, the Bill, when passed, will commence on Assent. Key provisions include, among others, child protection to be a paramount consideration in all teacher accreditation decisions; teacher accreditation decisions to be centralised with NESA, including carrying out assessments of suitability to teach as a condition of initial and ongoing accreditation; and employers to be legally required to provide NESA with information that relates to any misconduct that may result in a teacher having their accreditation suspended or revoked. According to NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell, “NESA will consult with the teaching profession, including the Department of Education, Catholic Schools NSW and the Association of Independent Schools, in developing the new accreditation policies and procedures to implement this change.” “It will be an opportunity to align new streamlined school registration processes with NESA's oversight of the school accreditation practices, leading to recommendations for accreditation,” she said.
PerthNow reports that a new curriculum will be rolled out across NSW classrooms from next year, following the first comprehensive review in more than three decades. Fresh English and mathematics syllabuses will be used across 300 public schools from January, with the remaining schools across the state set to fully adopt them by 2023. Premier Dominic Perrottet on Monday announced students in kindergarten, year 1 and year 2 would be the first to benefit from the changes. New curriculums for older year levels will be progressively released from 2021, with the government pledging to completely overhaul the K-12 curriculum by 2024. The curriculum for the first time also included explicit teaching examples, Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said. "The new online curriculum removes ambiguity for teachers...this will be particularly helpful for early-career teachers." Among the changes are a shift in focus from "sight reading" words or learning them as a whole to phonetically sounding them out, and an enhanced focus on handwriting in the early years of a child's schooling. The new maths syllabus places emphasis on reasoning and advanced counting strategies. The new curriculums also remove learning timelines, so students are not compelled to complete a certain stage each year.
The Canberra Times reports that there will be greater oversight of organisations that work with children after NSW passed a law mandating key recommendations from the child abuse royal commission. The Office of the Children's Guardian has been granted new powers to implement the Child Safe Standards, which NSW Families, Communities and Disability Services Minister Alister Henskens said "provides a framework for organisations to create and maintain child-safe cultures, operations and environments". The Standards include embedding child safety in organisational leadership and culture, and children participating and being taken seriously in decision making that affects them along with families and communities. Organisations will also have to ensure that the people working for them are suitable and supported to work with children, and equipped with the skills and awareness to keep children safe. There also needs to be child-focused processes in place to respond to child abuse complaints, and organisations will have to document their child-safe procedures and policies.
The Age reports that state school staff will seek to ban Andrews Government MPs from setting foot on school grounds from Tuesday, as the teachers’ union ramps up its campaign for better pay and conditions. Teachers will also disrupt the statewide effort to shift NAPLAN from paper to online in time for next year’s test by refusing to conduct trial tests for students for the rest of this term. A day after Education Minister James Merlino visited Jells Park Primary, a government school in Melbourne’s east, to announce rapid antigen testing for students aged under 12, teachers say Mr Merlino and his parliamentary colleagues are no longer welcome on school grounds. Though the Australian Education Union cannot literally ban a government MP from visiting a school, it has directed members to instantly begin a one-hour stop-work if one does. Union members have also been encouraged “to wear red and protest at the front of the school” if a government minister visits their school. It is one of three new actions government school staff will take from Tuesday in an industrial campaign that has so far stopped short of striking, though Fair Work has granted union members permission to strike as part of their campaign.
ABC News reports that South Australian authorities have introduced a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy for the state's schools, with teachers required to have had their first dose within weeks. All staff and volunteers at South Australian schools, preschools and early childhood facilities will have to be double-vaccinated for COVID-19 before the start of the next school year. They will have to show they have received their first vaccination by December 10 — the end of this school year — and must have a plan to get their second jab. The direction includes parents who volunteer in classes and canteens. South Australia is expecting a surge in COVID-19 cases once the state's borders open to double-vaccinated travellers from NSW, Victoria and the ACT on November 23. The mandate will not include people with medical exemptions, students, parents and carers who are dropping off or picking up children, or incidental visitors to the school, such as delivery drivers and urgent maintenance workers. Mr Gardner said schools with confirmed COVID-19 cases would be cleaned overnight, or closed for one day for cleaning.
ABC News reports that a freedom-of-information document obtained by the ABC shows a Northern Territory education department investigation into a former Milingimbi School principal "failed some of Australia's most disadvantaged kids", a union says. An ICAC report in July this year found that between 2015 and 2019, former school principal Jennifer Lea Sherrington helped herself to more than $500,000 meant for students in Milingimbi — an Arnhem Land island 450 kilometres east of Darwin. ICAC found Ms Sherrington diverted education funds meant for the "poorest cohort of students in the country" for her personal enrichment, and spent taxpayers' funds on unnecessary charter flights, hiring cars for shopping, and charging for dinners with family and friends, among other expenses. "On the balance of probabilities, I make findings of corrupt conduct in respect to Ms Sherrington," former ICAC commissioner Ken Fleming said in the report. No charges have been laid since the ICAC report in July, which did not specifically mention an investigation commissioned in 2017 by the education department into the matter. The department and NT Education Minister Lauren Moss did not address specific questions about the 2017 investigation, although a departmental spokesperson did say: "We agree the ICAC report outlines failures in our processes."
The Guardian reports that in April and May more than 70 students were abducted from the federal college and the nearby Greenfield University. A group of parents went to the kidnappers and paid more than 40m naira (£70,000) to get their children back. Those young people were returned. Five from the Greenfield group were killed. Kidnapping has become endemic in northern Nigeria. Bandits – heavily armed militants, many of them ethnic Fulanis – are waging their own insurgency, killing, abducting and terrorising impoverished communities. The lawlessness has evolved from years of conflict between farmers and herders, fuelled by economic crisis, police inaction and the authorities’ refusal to intervene. Since the kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014, abductions by armed groups have become a highly lucrative crime, with ransom demands of hundreds of thousands of pounds. More than 2,000 children and young people have been abducted in Nigeria this year, according to the UN.
According to an article in Fortune, one narrative about the wealth gap in the United States claims that it is at least partially driven by a gap in financial literacy: If people simply knew more about money, they would make better financial decisions, and more wealth would undoubtedly follow. However, data from education technology provider EVERFI shows that low and middle income students know as much as their higher-income peers about savings accounts, and they’re eager to save for future financial goals like buying a home or investing. But they don’t all have the resources to do it: Though 53 per cent of low and middle income students named paying for education as a five-year goal, only 21 per cent reported having a college savings account. While financial education is beneficial, researchers including William Darity Jr. from Duke University and Tim Kaiser from the University of Koblenz-Landau have found that such education needs to be accompanied by adequate resources to close the United States’ $14 trillion wealth gap.