A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
As the global climate crisis accelerates, early childhood teachers and researchers are considering whether and how to approach the issue with children. Should we talk openly about the crisis and encourage children to change their daily practices? Or is there a risk that in doing so, we are inflicting anxiety on young minds, still in [...]
Class act: principal executive Anthony Seldon, Photo: John Lawrence Thomas Gradgrind, the notorious school-board superintendent in Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times, is alive and well and running education systems around the world, it has been claimed. That is the view of Sir Anthony Seldon, historian, biographer and vice-chancellor of the UK’s only not-for-profit [...]
Grace Pletas dropped out of school early, saying she should have been offered more flexible study options. Photo: Penny Stephens One in four Australian students fails to complete a year 12 certificate or vocational equivalent, and nearly 30 per cent of year 7 students are falling behind international benchmarks in reading. A landmark national study by [...]
Amid debates about budget cuts and the rising costs of schools and degrees, there is one debate receiving alarmingly little attention in Australia. We’re facing a slow decline in most educational standards, and few are aware just how bad the situation is getting. These are just six of the ways that Australia’s education system is [...]
One aspect of education that is increasingly worrying parents is the place of Special Religious Instruction (SRI) in Victorian government schools: 42 per cent have withdrawn their children from SRI over the last 12 months, leaving fewer than one in six enrolled (The Age, 21/12/2014), after the government issued a more detailed "opt-in" form to [...]
Teachers are spending a significant amount of class time dealing with problems related to weekend alcohol and drug abuse, according to the results of a national survey. The report by the National Council on Drugs reveals an education system where teachers are battling to get students to pay attention in class after weekends of partying. [...]
Strengths-based-approaches are nothing new in education. Tap into what I student is good at, and use that to leverage their ability across the curriculum. But what if I asked you, “What is a strength? What are your strengths?” As adults we sometimes find it hard to articulate. What do you mean strength? Do you mean [...]
PISA panic and politics could really damage our schools. In the aftermath of the OECD releasing the 2012 results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Federal Education Minister, Christopher Pyne’s declared that, “PISA shows us that our education system is high-equity where socio-economic status matters less when compared to other OECD countries” Anyone [...]
The world is changing in front of our eyes. Globalisation and the impact of technology means that, in many ways, the world of today is barely recognizable to that of twenty or thirty years ago. This is particularly true of the workplace. We’ve long been aware of the concept of offshoring the work [...]
With recent focus on emotional intelligence, it seems now is the perfect time to analyse whether we are doing enough in classrooms to support our children through the process of grief recovery. As an educator, I believe our Early Childhood, Primary and Secondary Institutions should be implementing (PGR) Proactive Grief Recover - addressing grief related [...]
