COVID and schools: Rachel Wilson and Giuseppe Carabetta report why Australia is about to feel the full brunt of its teacher shortage The Omicron wave is likely to exacerbate Australia’s existing teacher shortages and demanding workloads. As school starts at the end of January and beginning...
For many of us, learning from home has been the norm for quite a while. There’s no doubt that new routines have been tried and tested, and you’ve probably learnt things about yourself as a parent. However, it’s time to get back into familiar routines as...
Paediatric infectious disease experts, Fiona Russell and Robert Booy, explain why. With Omicron daily infection rates in the tens of thousands, there have been calls for states to delay the start of the school year, which begins at the end of January. The vaccination program for children...
Let’s be honest, writes Hamish Curry. Indonesian language studies in our schools have plummeted in the last decade. Just 755 students now graduate high school speaking Indonesian across all of Australia. That’s half the number compared to a decade ago. This should be of great concern to...
A failure at 6? Children go from playing to being tested in the blink of an eye, reports researcher Martina Tassone. Children’s early years from birth to the age of eight are crucial for their social, emotional and intellectual development. However, early years education in Australia...
Yes, Australia’s PISA test results may be slipping, but new findings show most students didn’t try very hard, reports Stewart Riddle Most Australian students who took part in the last OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) said they would have invested more effort if the...
Alexandra de Gendre and Nicolás Salamanca, tried to find out why. Who you go to school with matters. Almost all of us, as children or parents of children, have felt the influence of good, and bad, classmates at school. There is a large body of research...
Jane Nursey, Professor Helen Cahill, Professor Jim Watterston and Professor Lisa Gibbs look at the changes to schooling needed to respond to the current challenges in learning. Since early 2020, Australia’s bushfires and then the pandemic have rapidly altered our ways of living and learning. As...
It’s a trustworthy source writes Rachel Cunneen and Mathieu O'Neil At the start of each university year, we ask first-year students a question: how many have been told by their secondary teachers not to use Wikipedia? Without fail, nearly every hand shoots up. Wikipedia offers free...
Is there any benefit for my child? Asks Leon Benade Some schools around Australia, and elsewhere, have replaced individual desks with circular booths and shared tables for collaborative work. But what does the evidence actually say? Do flexible learning spaces improve students’ ability to work together, as...
