Month: April 2017

Should you hold back your child one year before starting on school?

I just read the article “Holding them back: What age should kids really start school?” on news.com.au. This is a very interesting one and worth a read, particularly for prospective parents with children that are about to start school. The area where I lived the majority of my life at, most people I know normally send their kids to school as soon as they legally qualified to do so. One of the most important factor I think is to do with cost as well, one less childcare cost to bear is actually a big deal for a lot of families. I recently moved to a more affluent area and from what I can observe most of the parents hold their kids back one year.

I do agree with the article’s conclusion that whether to do so is a personal one and differs from child to child as well. My son is the second youngest in the whole class and there are children that are closet o 18 months older. He is a socially active boy, so fitting in was never an issue for me. We did have to spend significant more effort in learning words and working on reading compare to my daughter in her Kindergarten year. He is doing well now academically but still, lags in sports. If given the choice again when choosing whether sending him to school or not, I most likely will actually hold him back one more year.

Share this post:

Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA)

Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage as normally reference as ICSEA is created for following purpose as described by Myschool. This is often thrown around various of sites and news but mostly without a detailed explanation on what it is and what does it mean.

The index of community socio-educational advantage (ICSEA) was created by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) specifically to enable meaningful comparisons of National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) test achievement by students in schools across Australia.

As shown above, the ICSEA for school is made up by only following four factor.

Parents’ Occupation
Parents’ Education
Geographical Location
Proportion of Indigenous Students

The previous version of ICSEA use to use the census data and this is no longer the case. Another important thing to note is that income is not part of equation in calculating the score. Neither is the wealth of the school be taken into account when calculating the score. What this means is that ICSEA may not be such a good score to measure general social economical advantage between schools as some might traditionally think.

It maybe even the case that wealth of the parents have little affect on student’s academic performance, I will have to do more research and to see if there are existing study on this in Australia.

Willoughby Public School Long Over Dued Expansion Plan

It is apparent to anyone who had visited Willoughby Public School recently which is that the school itself is really crowded. There are demountable everywhere and hardly any grass to be seen. I happen to be a frequent visitor so know this particular school very well. A real nice tree next to the sandpit had to be cut down last year to fit in one extra demountable classroom. Another one had to be fitted on the same playground next to the library taking up valuable open space. Existing school layout look like following

The previous extreme short-sightedness of NSW state government who closed and sold a number of schools in Sydney had come back and bite us in a real nasty fashion. Now with surging enrolment in the state particular many suburbs of Sydney, the new school had to be constructed and existing one expanded. Despite the significant investment recently by the state government, there is still a massive amount of shortfall in the existing school, not to mentioned the expected continue to increase in enrolment in the future.

Willoughby Public School is pretty much a case study of what had and is happening in NSW and Sydney, over last 20 years till now. Massive increase in population and demand in the North Shore area in Sydney had put increasing demand on the local schools. With increasing medium to high-intensity residential development in the local area, there will be increasing pressure on enrolment number for Willoughby Public School. I have already done a previous blog post about Willoughby Public School which you can found as following.

Willoughby Public School

I have read the recent local newspaper and saw the proposed upgrade plan and it is great to see something finally is going to be done about the overcrowding of the school and cater for the future increase in enrolment as well. More information can be found directly on Willoughby Public School’s website.

Demolition Plan

Concept Option 1

Concept Option 2

Concept Option 3

The preferred floor plan is as following.

Preferred Concept Option Floor Ground

Preferred Concept Option Floor One

Preferred Concept Option Floor Two

Share this post:

Is NSW Selective Schools Becoming Bastions Of Inequality

I read this article ‘Bastions of inequality’: selective schools increasingly cater to the most advantaged students by Christina Ho on SMH about a month ago and have not had time to write my thought about it until now.

First to summarise what the article had been trying to convey which is roughly the following

As public schools designed to cater for gifted and talented students, selective schools should be accessible to high achievers regardless of family background. The MySchool figures raise serious questions about how accessible or meritocratic selective schools really are. They have become more inaccessible in recent years, almost completely so to the most disadvantaged groups.

Selective schools were set up to provide opportunities to the gifted and talented, not just the wealthy, gifted and talented.

While I agree with the who gains entrance to our selective schools, this is not in dispute by either hard facts and personal experience as well. However what need to be said is that enrolment into the selective high school purely based on examination result is arguably the fairest method of doing so. As the Christina had pointed out in the article that selective high schools as a public school are designed to cater for gifted and talented students. How else can we judge and determine who is more gifted and talented?

We can patch the issue by creating quotas to admit students from different social economic backgrounds. This does not solve the fundamental cause of students from high social economic background performs betters than their counterparts from the lower social economic background. I am a big believer of admittance purely based on examination result which despite its flaws still is the fairest and best way to go. What we should be doing to why this is happening in our education system and what we can do to minimise it. It is impossible completely eradicate this phenomenal, but we can most definitely improve on what we have currently.

Share this post: