The round table format has long been an effective means of shaping debate and priorities. GWSRRs are held every two months with an edited transcript of each session published in dedicated pages in WSBA and online at www.wsba.com.au.
Following is an edited transcript of the March GWSRR on the subject of EDUCATION – FUTURE PRIORITIES. This GWSRR was held at the Parramatta Parkroyal Hotel with photography by Milestones Photography. Attendees included: Adjunct Professor Dr Jim Taggart OAM – GWS RR Chairman; Emeritus Professor Stuart Campbell – Student Campbell Consulting and former PVC at UWS; Ralph Anania – international business coach and entrepreneur; Professor Keith Kennett – Internationally recognised psychologist and educator; Ross Grove – Mayor of Holroyd; Steve Frost – Managing Director, BREED Inc.; Peter Wade – Principal Delany College; Granville, Joan Stone – Director, Cubbyhouse Child Care Australia and Michael Walls – WSBA publisher and editor.
Dr Jim Taggart: Welcome everyone, today we will be focussing on education and I’d like to say it’s great to see so many experts in this area around the table. You’ll see that all of you come from various areas of education, from pre¬school right through to tertiary education and higher education, and in between. All playing an incredible role in the development of education be it in private schools, public schools, TAFE, or universities. So what we’ll do is we’ll start by just introducing ourselves. Can we start with you Ross?
Ross Grove: Hi everyone, Ross Grove, Mayor of Holroyd City Council. I am probably the least educated of everyone. Holroyd City Council is, I suppose, a fairly interesting council from an educational point of view. We’ve got a changing population. We don’t have a huge stake in the tertiary market in education. We’ve got a few small businesses offering some fairly limited skills and accreditation programs within Holroyd. We’ve got some incredibly good success stories in our local schools, where the schools have been given more autonomy, and we’ve seen very positive dividends from two schools in particular; which I’ll probably go into more detail as we go through the day.
Ralph Anania: Hi I’m Ralph Anania. I spent close to 30 years building multi¬million dollar companies. I got close to bankruptcy three times in those nearly 30 years. But that did allow me to grow one of those companies to $130M. And in doing so, I learnt a lot of that I was never taught at school. So today, I basically have gone into educating small business on how to run a successful business and make it sustainable with a solid foundation. I’ve seen a lot of small businesses go broke over the years, and it’s only because no-one showed them how not to go broke.
Peter Wade: Peter Wade, I’m a Principal up at Delany College at Granville. It’s a seven to 12 co-ed school. I call us boutique. We have around 500 students in our school. It’s in a very low socio¬economic area, so it has those sorts of challenges of the students who come to our school. My mission is really for those students. My mantra is about personal best, so achieving your personal best. So we’re really on about taking the raw material that walks into our school, and sending them on their way when they graduate from Year 12. The vast majority are students graduating to universities, Western Sydney Uni and northern unis right throughout Sydney. But we offer a full vocational program as well for our students.
Michael Walls: Hi everyone and thanks for coming. My name is Michael walls and I am the publisher of Western Sydney Business Access. My background is in media, particularly print and I worked for five years at the University of New South Wales running their media unit and later as media and communication manager at the Australian Graduate School of Management.
Professor Keith Kennett: Professor Keith Kennett. I don’t know where to start, but I will start by saying I began my career as a Primary School teacher with almost no qualifications. My last school as an educator was Principal Headmaster at Nuriootpa in the Barossa Valley. I taught at all levels of education. My Majors are English, history, and political science, although I do have University Maths. I’ve run a vocational college, Excelsior College, for five years as the Head and President in TAFE. I’ve taught 11 different areas of psychology at St Francis Xavier University. And my last appointment before I took early retirement was as Dean and Professor at what was then the University of Western Sydney.
Steve Frost: Stephen Frost. I’m managing director of BREED. We have a business incubator, a three-storey building at Nirimba Education Precinct, where we provide business support and mentoring for those businesses starting out or expanding from a home base. I was involved in a number of boards with vocational education as they introduced the mandatory component of work placement for the school, kids doing frame¬work subjects as part of their Higher School Certificate. We’ve placed around 40,000 students into industry work placement over that year, and not personally, but into host employers. It’s expanding. I also chair Western Sydney Institute of TAFE, the Advisory Council.
Joan Stone: Joan Stone. I run Cubbyhouse Child Care New South Wales and Australia. All of our staff have to be trained in child¬care at least to Certificate Level III by the end of ’14, beginning of ’14, the end of this year. So we put a couple of hundred of our students through at the moment. I have about 200 employees. And we run 18 after-school care centres, three pre¬schools, and we’ve got another couple ready to be built now.
Professor Stuart Campbell: Stuart Campbell. Despite my funny accent, I’ve been here for 38 years. I’m a Londoner originally, you might have guessed. I’m a Western Sydney veteran. I was at the University of Western Sydney for 28 years, and previously I was a TAFE teacher down in Sydney. I finished up at University about a year and a half ago. I was Pro Vice Chancellor, Learning & Teaching, and a Professor of Linguistics. And I think I left Learning & Teaching in a good shape, because that was the year that we won ten of the National University Teaching Awards, the maximum number you could win, and we won the Prime Minister’s University Teacher of the Year. So I was quite satisfied when I left that I’d done a reasonable job at UWS.
Dr Jim Taggart: Let’s get straight into it. And Peter, I’m going to go straight to you, if I may. Catholic education has a particular mission and vision. Education – what’s it all about, and what’s the purpose of it?
Peter Wade: Look, what’s education about? And I also very much respect the thoughts and sentiments here that it’s about life. It’s not about the number that you produce at the end for your schooling. Whilst that gets the popular press, that’s what gets everyone’s attention, and we do ride on the back of some of that success and so on. But look, without getting on a moral high horse in terms of Catholic education, I don’t think we can take the high ground on that. I have many colleagues and friends and family who teach across various sectors in school. So I’d like to talk in terms of more general education rather than Catholic education. Obviously, we’re based on gospel values and so on, but I believe any school that is worth its salt has a very solid value system, and we come from a slightly different spring¬board; that’s the only way we can define that. But what do I want? I don’t believe it is very much the sort of industrial model of, you’ve got your inputs and we grind them through, and then they pop out at the other end, and then they’re ready … fashioned and ready off to go. I see education really as, it is a life¬long pursuit. And the fact that I was sitting there with some mums the other night when we had our information evening for Year 7, and we were talking about some of the requirements in school, and we touch on all your own work and plagiarism and da-da-da-da-da. And here’s a mum saying, “Oh gosh, I’ve got to go through this again. I was just doing this today at my University orientation.” And it really brought home to me that education is a life¬long pursuit. So I have students who are bright buttons and really high achievers, but at the end of the HSC I will probably celebrate the student who has maybe come to the country; maybe we have a number of Sudanese students who’ve come to the country with very little English, not much numeracy skill there as well, and I will celebrate that as much as I will celebrate the kid who’s got 99 point whatever. And that’s what I think education’s about. There’s a beautiful analogy, if I could – if you’ve ever seen a butterfly coming out of a cocoon, if you’ve ever been tempted to help it, right, don’t. Because you’re going to damage its wings, and it will never flourish and never fly. And I use that analogy with our staff, that sometimes kids have got to understand … if you want resilient people, they’ve got to understand failure. They’ve got to understand that it is a hard slog, and you’ve got to work hard. So what do we want? We want people to grow up to be good people. And people who can then find their way and not that they’re a finished product when they graduate; they are a work in progress, and we model that ourselves as learners. So as a community, we learn it. So we try new things.
Dr Jim Taggart: That’s great, Peter. Joan if I could turn to you. In your business, people pay a bill. They drop the kid at the door and say “do something.”
Joan Stone: All right. Well what we’re finding now is, they’re coming out with a degree, but they can’t teach. They haven’t had the practical experience. We had a student just recently, on work experience and she was in her fourth year and she’d never been to a pre¬school. She didn’t even know whether she liked it. We’ve got to get them out there earlier. And also, I think, they need to toughen up a bit. I mean, they’re wimps; they don’t want to do anything. They want to sit down, you know. I mean, sand¬pit and water play is such an experience. But what we’re finding is, when we went through, we brought in our own resources. I went into one of my pre¬schools the other day and spat the dummy. I said, “Where’s your Science table? Where’s your little bugs and your butter¬flies, and things like that, on there?” They just don’t think now. You’ve got to buy more resources for them. So we’ve got to get them into being professional, and when they come out, they’re a professional body; that they don’t wait for someone to go and buy them a toy so that then they’ve got another resource, you know what I mean? And I think we seem to have lost that somewhere.
Dr Jim Taggart: Okay, Joan. Can I just take a wider perspective? I appreciate what you’re saying; we’ll hone in a little bit on that again. The purpose of education, though, when I dropped our grand¬daughter at your place, what’s happening?
Joan Stone: All right. What has happened with early child¬hood … when I was a primary teacher we had to give the Principal a six-week program in advance. But now it is after the fact. So I say to them, “Well what happens if you have all little boys in the room, and the girls love ballet but all the boys like trucks? Does that mean you’re always going to talk truck, truck, trucks, and transport, and do everything around that?” Now, teachers have to be more skilled to set up little areas so they can still choose, but it’s not a formal choice. And then the teachers make the program out of that, which is kind of programming in reverse, which is hard to get your head around. But that’s what we have to have - the school¬teachers being able to do that.
Ross Grove: Can I just throw a question in here?
Dr Jim Taggart: Yeah, please. This is a forum, sorry. I’m just getting it off; I want people now to run with people.
Ross Grove: I had a point I wanted to make as well. But with respect to child¬care, you know, Council and basically a lot of the child¬care industry is going through a lot of change. And that change, at least from what I’m seeing, appears to threaten the viability of child¬care as an industry. You’ve got more ratios, you’ve got more staff. I think the Feds have had an orientation towards transitioning to … rather than child¬care, calling it early child¬hood education, and basically skilling up four-year-olds so that they’re ready to enter Primary School with some better skills, and their brains are developing at the same time. I’m actually very concerned about the sustainability threat it poses to at least the Council’s child¬care services. There are probably a couple of things about having a Government-owned child¬care facility which also make that more challenging for us. But I think it’s worth putting out there, that there are probably a lot of people out there that would value child¬care as child¬care. They need to work, they need to put their kids somewhere. I think there are a lot of challenges facing the industry, and even the customers, as we’re looking at this transition phase.
Joan Stone: Yes. And I think, too, they’re coming out of educational institutions, and they don’t want to be nominated supervisors, because it’s quite a threat to them. And because of the business side and making a viable proposition to run the business on staffing, they’re freaking out. And I think we need to get the business side into them a bit more.
Ross Grove: I’ve got to tell you, just as a public sector mind¬set, it frightened the hell out of me. The good thing about Local Government is you’re in a position where you can have more direct insight into what the bureaucracy is thinking. It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve got university students who’ve come out of, you know, what is basically a very regimented school environment, going into a slightly less regimented but still structured University environment, coming into a real job. And I’ve got to tell you, one of my best assets and my worst liabilities is, I’m actually a university drop¬out. I think I actually gained a lot in not completing my education, because I saw a bit more private sector.
Professor Keith Kennett: There’s a word called “and”: let’s talk just for a second. We think continually in either/or, and yet the most important thing in life is “and”. Mathematics is either/or. You go to University, it’s either/or. But I’d suggest to you, at some stage in your life, you might find a program for university which is terribly beneficial, and the same time we talk about regulation. Apart from love, which I think is number one, I think “and” is number two, because we constantly think in either/or, and yet success in the class-room is “and” - demanding and controlling and guiding and teaching understanding. They’re not opposites. To have a disciplined class doesn’t mean to say you’re under the Nazi regime. It means you’re allowing children to extend their opportunity to learn, because they’re not being interfered with. And yet we need to have a structured early child¬hood program which allows flexibility, which allows for individual differences, which has clear definition. And if I went to any teacher in Primary and Early Childhood or Secondary today and said, “Tell me, what is the structure of your lesson?” they’d have no idea. If you haven’t got a structure to your lesson, how could you teach it?
Dr Jim Taggart: I can tell you. I know you very well. You’re very passionate about what you believe in. And that’s good.
Professor Stuart Campbell: It’s time I spoke in defence of the University. I will try and answer that question of what is the point of education. And I think for me, it is not as simple, as Keith said. And in a University where you really see this as a graduation: I always say graduation’s very sort of heart-warming. And the thing is, in a graduation, is you see the multiple purposes that the University is there for, when you see those people come across the stage. So you see a young person come on the stage who has been granted their PhD, and they read out the title of the PhD, and it’s so long you can’t understand three words of the whole thing. And what you’ve got there is that you’ve got some fantastic young expert who’s going to find a cure for cancer or something, and the University has given us that. And then you see an Aboriginal student who comes across the stage and picks up their degree. Somebody who’s come from probably a very, very difficult back¬ground; they’ve struggled through University, the University has the resources and helped get them there. That’s a totally different purpose for the University. It’s a mistake to think that there’s some old ivory tower model where the University is to turn out sort of upper-class kids with degrees who can earn lots and lots of money. I know that from my experience of the University of Western Sydney, and all Universities are now in the same position, where we teach a multitude of people for a multitude of reasons. They’re not, if you like, in the ivory towers of the upper middle classes, and they haven’t been for years and years and years.
Professor Keith Kennett: But what I would like to say is, if we’re talking about the purpose and definition of education, what is the structure in which we talk about? It’s great to say it’s preparation for life; why do people fail? But what’s our structure? Now, I would think the whole purpose of education has a structure. First of all, to pass on the cultural values and concepts of a group of people called a society. Now we have an Australian culture, but we never talk about it; we talk about multi¬culturalism. No such thing can possibly happen because a culture says it’s the main determinant of a general concept. Now we’ve got 24 varieties. So what we have to talk about is an Australian culture which has heritage, British culture, language, British law, into which, like every culture, being an active process, we interface other concepts of Islam, of Asian, Middle East. But they have to fit in so we’ve got a culture. So there’s a confusion there; we have to clarify that.
Dr Jim Taggart: Ralph if I could just turn to you. You have run very successful businesses. What’s your perspective on this?
Ralph Anania: Well, just quickly, I just wanted to say that I was brought up in an area where it was basically putting food on the table. So my parents were immigrants; I went to school, worked before and after school and weekends. And school was hard for me, because it was about putting food on the table. So from a different perspective, I never finished school, but I ended up going to TAFE and doing an accounting or started an accounting degree that I never finished, and I hated it. And that was because my parents didn’t really want me in the industry, they wanted me to go and do something better. But I had never really exceeded at school. And I think education is learning; it’s teaching what we want our kids to go out and become. But then we don’t really teach them what to become out in the world, and we take them to the end of their schooling year, and they spend a couple of weeks in work experience at something. And what is that something? I don’t think they get the experience of what life is really going to be about. And they get to a point where they don’t know what they want to do, and then they go out and get a job if they haven’t become a lawyer or a doctor or whatever it may be, and they don’t enjoy the job. And then they find themselves in this circle of in and out of something that they don’t really like doing.
Professor Stuart Campbell: Can I just jump in here and just go back to something. What you’re saying resonates with something I believe quite strongly nowadays. I’m quite ancient, right, 62, and I’ve lived a life where there were a lot of certainties, you know. I was a Union member for many years; the world worked in a certain way. And in the last 10, 15 years, all those old certainties have been swept away. And for young people now, the expectation of a steady job, a steady career, something that will tick over, on and on and on, with a nice super at the end, probably doesn’t exist for many people. And a lot of young people don’t know about it and don’t even want it. And I think what is missing in education, and generally about children, is the idea of a preparedness to be entrepreneurial, and to understand what that could possibly mean. That you can go out and you can establish your own business, your own way of doing things, and you don’t have to conform to a set of old rules and uncertainties that don’t exist anymore. But there’s nowhere where that is more clear in the whole social media where whole new industries and careers have been established that are unrecognisable to many people who are over about 40, simply unrecognisable. There are entire businesses based on clicking nowadays; monetising clicking, right. And that’s part of entrepreneurship. And I think that for my money nowadays, where I would prefer my grand¬children to grow up with, is an attitude that said, “There’s a world out there that I actually can go and conquer using my own intuition and my own smartness, without somebody else helping me.” Because there’s nobody to help anymore; the help is all gone. The old certainties are not there.
Michael Walls: You said Universities are important. So how does the concept of entrepreneurialism concept connect to traditional university values?
Professor Stuart Campbell: Oh, well, it’s a very complicated world that we live in.
Professor Keith Kennett: Use the word “and”. Use the word “and”.
Technology and education
Dr Jim Taggart: I’d like to move on now to the next question which is have educators adapted to the mass of technology options available? And the question that stems from that, has technology enabled a higher standard of teaching and learning? And Ralph, I might go to you, if I could. I know it’s a hard one probably, but surely it’s got application to the business world.
Ralph Anania: Well, making it more interactive and less boring, I think by way of webinars, online programs, short courses, enables people to specifically focus on an area that they want, rather than the whole educational process.
Professor Stuart Campbell: I actually know a little bit about this. It’s true, educators have adapted to the huge amount of technology around, and there is enormous investment in technology in schools, colleges, universities, and so on. I think what it’s really done, I think, on the whole, is allowed some of the students to learn things that don’t have to be taught in the class¬room necessarily. I think that the interesting thing about this is that whatever you do institutionally in setting up technology, your students will always be ahead of you. And I think Peter might agree with this, that we’re now in the era of the hand¬held. If you look at most Universities, TAFE’s and so on, there are very large and perhaps somewhat clunky enterprise systems for looking after e-learning and so on, when students are really looking at this kind of stuff.
Peter Wade: And I think what we’re doing is coming back to social competencies; we’re gaining in one way, and technology is wonderful, we couldn’t do without it today. On the other hand, there are so many dangers in terms of going to a meeting a couple of weeks ago with the Federal Police on bullying, where every High School in the region I live in, students go to school with a mobile phone; they don’t listen to anything in the classroom, they’re texting everybody. And it was interesting on television, a week ago, someone was saying in a restaurant he ran, he said, “I used to talk to my customers.” He said, “I can’t talk to them now. They’ll sit down, there’ll be three people sitting down having coffee, and not even talking to each other; they’re texting.”
Ross Grove: Can I just give three case studies locally? At Holroyd High School, if you’re running late to school or if you’re not at school, your mum gets a text. And that’s had a demonstrable impact, uplifting, well, it’s sky¬rocketed school attendance rates. At Merrylands East Public School, they have a closed form of social media where the school monitors it, they restrict the access in, and I think it’s currently in its experimental stages, where it’s an inter¬action between students and teachers and the like. But that’s all in-house; you can’t access it from outside the system.
Joan Stone: Yeah, very good.
Professor Keith Kennett: If I was teaching a Year 11 or 12 class, I would tell you now, they’d be that far ahead of me on technology, I would get them demonstrating to other peers in the class as a teacher, and I’d learn with them. And I would say, “I’m learning something with you,” because this interaction. I mean we talk about peer support, but in a classroom, it’s a combined learning experience. And even at Year 3, there are some children who have an experience. So what I’m saying is, it’s a co-operative learning experience. And students demonstrating their strengths grow in stature. They want to be involved.
Dr Jim Taggart: Peter, if I can ask you, technology in general, what about the challenges you’re facing with technology, either at a teaching level or at the child level, at the student level.
Peter Wade: Look, my first cautionary note is, I cannot stand people when we get into deficit models around, they’ll get the access into this and access into that. And we just teach our kids, so I encourage students to have their own devices in school. I don’t care about platforms; we have Macs, we have PC’s, we’ve got kids with tablets and iPads and so on. A lot of the kids with the Smartphones; we just put an app on for our students at the moment which we’ve bought into; kids love it, it gives them an alert. If I’m a Year 10 student, I put in my name, I select the subjects that I’m doing, that’s then connected to our calendars and assessment tasks and so on. They get an alert when there is an assessment task that is coming up and due, which they can also link into their calendar. We use Moodle at our school.
Professor Stuart Campbell: Peter said earlier about Mathematics and the idea of the 200 hits. There’s this notion of memorisation and repeated learning. And the reason it’s always stuck with me is because my first degree was in Russian language and Arabic language, okay, four years of Russian and Arabic. In order to learn either of those languages as a non-native speaker, you have to memorise a hell of a lot. And I spent four years memorising thousands and thousands and thousands of words. Most of it I did on the bus going to university in little note¬books, and memorising, memorising, memorising. It’s not done much in education nowadays; there is a notion that you can experientially, by osmosis, and those skills of learning are not there. For Chinese speakers, it’s there because they’ve learnt characters. English speakers don’t learn characters, we just learn 26 letters. So we’ve lost all of that. This is one area where technology can actually be quite useless, especially in the area of mathematics. If you have a well-constructed mathematics technology where you can have repeated problems of a type presented to the student over and over, modified somewhat, then you’ve got a fantastic benefit for technology. So this is my little plug for mathematics, okay, which I think is one of our crises in education in Australia right now. Every single level is our failure to keep up in Mathematics.
Dr Jim Taggart: Thanks, Stuart, Peter.
Peter Wade: There is a really great app available from the New South Wales Department of Education. It’s got a Maths app in there, and it’s fantastic; if you want a definition on something, on subtraction, addition, and so on, it’s got a definition. It’s got video clips, it’s got worked examples in there, which you can go back into whenever you want. So you want to learn a bit about Pythagoras, you can go in there. So it’s indexed, and it’s just called School A to Z, and it’s free. There’s English, Maths, Technology, Spelling Bee, Maths Monkey, and Assignments, and then feedback that you can give them. But it’s an app that every student can have, every parent can have. And so if you’re a dad and your child’s doing Pythagoras and you’re thinking, “Gee, I’m scratching my head. I haven’t done that for a while,” you can go back in there and you’ll see a worked example, and there are video clips for a lot of them as well.
Preparing for the world
Dr Jim Taggart: I’m going to jump a question, if you don’t mind, because I think the next question that I’d like to pose to everyone, is the question of schools providing programs that enable people to be ready for the work¬place?
Ralph Anania: Or Universities as well?
Dr Jim Taggart: Yeah. And in a very generic sense, the question is, are we preparing kids for the work¬place? Or sorry, not kids, let me rephrase that. Are we preparing people for the work¬place?
Ralph Anania: In short, I don’t think well enough.
Dr Jim Taggart: Well, I’m asking you because this is an area and you’re getting the end product.
Ralph Anania: I don’t think they are. I don’t think, not well enough.
Dr Jim Taggart: Can you elaborate?
Ralph Anania: Well, in my years I’ve seen a number of people and I always try and encourage the younger generation to come through, because I’ve always been an inspirational leader; that’s just how I lead. I always like to inspire young people especially, and encourage them. And they just miss the fundamentals, just the simplicities of the transition from school to the real world, regardless whether it’s the work¬force or not. Just the simple things of understanding why you need an accountant, why and how you go and open a bank account. Even just as much as the understanding of voting; why they need to vote. I ask one thing that I ask kids all the time when they come in and they have to vote, and I go, “Do you know what you’re voting for? Do you know why you have to vote?” And the answer is always, “No.” “And who are you voting for?” They’re voting for whoever is popular at the time or whoever their friends are going to vote for. I think the base of that has to come from school. There’s got to be some education around the transition. It’s the transition that is really lost.
Ross Grove: Except in Holroyd they know who to vote for.
Ralph Anania: That’s correct, yes.
Ralph Anania: What I’m saying, it’s a transition. It’s from school, then there’s education that goes on after that. But it’s just that transition of getting them from school and prepared for the work¬force. And just the simple things, like knowing that when you walk into your place of employment, just to greet the boss or greet the manager, just doesn’t even happen.
Michael Walls: How much of that falls back to the family situation, though?
Ralph Anania: A lot. A lot.
Professor Keith Kennett: But we can only control the school. And the school has I think an enormous responsibility in this area. And I agree with you in the sense that you talk about these things. Like, take what happens to Year 12 students. They abuse teachers, they’re rude, they throw paper at them, they have no respect for them. And then at the last month, they go to that teacher and say, “Will you write a reference?” Why doesn’t the school tell them in Year 10, “Your behaviour and your actions are going to influence your reference, because that’s important”?
Michael Walls: Do they write it? The reference?
Professor Keith Kennett: Of course, they’re stupid enough. But you come back to voting. If you did a survey in Council next time, you ask them, “What are the three methods of voting?” And I think some of your councillors would have no idea between first past the post, preferential, and proportional. And yet it’s so essential. Why do we have compulsory voting? We’re one of the few countries in the world that have it. Now I support it, because I say, “If I want to be a member of the RSL at Castle Hill, I have to pay a membership fee. If I want to live in a democracy, I believe I should take at least the fundamental responsibility and enjoy the right to vote in a democracy.” Now, other people argue with me on this, but I just feel that if you’re going to live in a democracy, we really should know something about it. And I agree with you.
Michael Walls: Talk about things like basic economics. Like what’s a home loan? How do you apply for a home loan?
Professor Keith Kennett: You have to have a home first.
Ralph Anania: We’re setting them up for failure. We’re setting them up for failure.
Dr Jim Taggart: Can I just ask a question about something I know very little about? But a couple of years ago it was a fashionable topic in education, and it somewhat ties back in to what we’re talking about now. The issue of male teachers and male role models in our schools and other institutions, I just was curious. I know it was fashionable at least five years ago to talk about, “we need more male teachers.” Has anything come of it?
Professor Keith Kennett: Let me say to start off with that Australia has, if not the highest, one of the highest male adolescent suicide rate in the world. Now if you come back to when I was teaching, there was an equal balance of male/females in Primary, in Secondary. Today, the only person who may be a male is the Principal, who’s about the retire. In High Schools, at least 70-80 per cent of all teachers are females. And even worse, if you look at psychology today, 75 per cent plus are females. What I’m saying to you, and I think you’re right; if you were back 20 years ago in the High School Certificate, you’d have had five or six males at least, and three or four females. Today you’ve got eight or nine females and one male.
Michael Walls: What is that doing, Keith, to our young men?
Professor Keith Kennett: I think it’s destroying the whole concept of masculinity. In other words, there are no male models generally in our primary schools. And of course start off with, we send males and females to school at the age of five. Well in actual fact, we’re sending them, in terms of their development stage, we’re sending four-year-olds, males who are five years of age in comparison to girls. So boys are always lagging a year behind, right through up until they’re 18 or 19. The concept of a classroom has always been kind of a more female, kind of be nice, and all those kind of things; whereas boys are a bit more rough and so forth. Girls are now becoming in the same category in terms of bullying. But the point is that unless we have male models in our schools, how can an individual male who comes from a single family parent, female, has gone through a totally female-dominated Primary School, a totally dominated Secondary School, have any concept. We need to have more males. We must have more males training in Primary and Secondary education. We must have a concept of a balance. And if you go back to the 1980s, the Government in its wisdom gave positive discrimination to females in Maths and Science. As Dean of Education, I asked the Government, were they going to give positive discrimination to males who lagged behind in English? And the answer was, “Oh, no, no, we’re just worried about girls at the moment.” And so we’ve actually unbalanced the system. And I think it’s pretty frightening. And in reality, I think women in the next two generations are going to be as disadvantaged, because they’re not going to have a real husband who’s a male; they’re going to have someone who pretends to be a male.
Dr Jim Taggart: Stephen, you’ve helped 40,000 students over the last 20-odd years. Are schools preparing students for the work¬place?
Steve Frost: No. A number of the students that have a mandatory work placement as part of their vocational studies, not the work experience but the work placement students, shouldn’t be sent out to the work¬place. According to the Board of Studies, one of the things; pre¬requisites before attending the work¬place, is to be ready for the work¬place. But because it’s a numbers game, and it’s a tick and flick; “this is the week that’s been allocated”. Then we get phone calls that say, “they’re not ready for the work¬place.” Have you got somewhere sheltered that we can send them after?” And they’re the RTO. They’re the ones that sign off in the end that they’ve met the Board of Studies’ requirements; they’ve met the Registered Training Organisation requirements. But they’re not. So I think that we are setting the kids up for failure.
Joan Stone: When I was teaching careers we had a day before they went on work experience where they had to go dressed up.
Steve Frost: Doesn’t mean that they’re ready to go out. You can tell them, but it doesn’t mean that they’re going to do it.
Dr Jim Taggart: What are some of the elements then, Stephen, in terms of, it’s good for me to hear the things that you believe they’re deficient in, not ready for? When you say not ready, what do you mean?
Steve Frost: Look, they don’t want to be there for a start. A lot of people say it’s free labour, and the students say, “well why should I go? They’re not going to pay.” I think if you factor $150 a week in supervision costs to the employer, you’re doing the employer an injustice; but that’s what I factor in when I do calculations for any kind of contributions from employers and and the down¬time of supervision and all the rest of it; particularly when that person’s only going to be there for a week. But when a student turns up, that they show the attitude that they’re not interested, and then they say, “but I don’t even want to do this subject, but it was the only thing left on the subject line.” We hear that so many times. “I don’t work with your school, so I can’t talk with yours.” And I’m afraid that with the National Curriculum and what’s rolling out around the country, the New South Wales education system will be dragged down rather than the other states being brought up. Because that’s what the easiest denominator is, to bring us down. I do believe New South Wales has the highest standard, and we are the only state that has mandatory work placement. But people who can’t speak the language are not being trained to go out, or information isn’t being passed on. What are they going to do in an industry unless they speak the language, or that company speaks the language of the student that’s going there? That’s not pre-matched, quite often. Regarding kids, with the raising of the leaving age, there’s more people staying on at school who would have left. A lot of those students are taking vocational subjects. And you get a lot more people with disabilities or multiple barriers. And once again, sometimes they don’t disclose, because if the parent doesn’t want to disclose, if the student doesn’t want to disclose, the school can’t disclose. There’s risk of sending out a student to workplace that is unsuitable. You know, if the work¬place is informed of the student’s limitations, you can give the heads-up to the employer. You know the ones that are supportive of a wayward kid because they were a wayward kid themselves, or they’ve got a son who’s got a disability or a daughter who’s got a disability. So there are good people out there. But unless that information has got across, you’re setting the kids up to fail. With the program that we’ve got with the kids that are a bit wayward – they’re not naughty, they’re not the bad kids who are expelled and got all the issues, they’re the quieter ones – now we actually go in there and teach them how to do the hand¬shake. But it’s not just a one-day, one-lesson.
Michael Walls: You teach kids to shake hands?
Steve Frost: Yes, how to physically hold a hand firm, and shake, you know. Not the secret handshake. And to look in the eyes, all that sort of thing and just simple manners of saying, “thank you.” at the end of the week.
Male Speaker: How old are these kids?
Michael Walls: They start in Year 10, but they go up to Year 12.
Dr Jim Taggart: That’s amazing. Thanks for sharing that Stephen. Time is really getting away from us. I’d like to propose to the group that we conduct an education roundtable part 2 because we really have not touched many of the issues. Thank you all for attending today and we look forward to welcoming you to the next round table.
See April edition of WSBA for part 2 of EDUCATION – FUTURE PRIORITIES.
