分类： 教育

I have come across this article in SMH recently which you can find at All Sydney students to have guaranteed access to a co-ed high school.

Students living in Sydney’s single-sex public high school catchments will have guaranteed access to a nearby coeducational school under a plan being developed by the NSW Department of Education.

Families in the Georges River area were the first to be officially informed of the change. From next year, students zoned for the Penshurst Girls and Hurstville Boys’ campuses of Georges River College can also choose the co-ed Peakhurst campus.

Other catchments will follow once the department finishes the complicated process of assessing student numbers and re-drawing catchments, senior government sources said on the condition of anonymity because the policy has not been finalised.

SMH

The background of this is that boys schools, in general, have a falling attendance and interest and parents are increasingly opting to send their children to coed schools. It is also important to note that the same cannot be said of girls high school, the enrolment numbers tend to be kept strong. Randwick Boys and Girls High School is a prime example of this.

Similar plan had been proposed previously to merge the Randwick Boys and Girls High School together to better utilize the facilities. While it received strong support from the parents of the Randwick Boys High School’s students, it encountered strong resistance from the parents of the Randwick Girls High School, so the plan was eventually shelved.

I think the outcome will be case by case, not every single-sex school has close-by coded schools with available space. Merging them can also encounter strong resistance from some of the parents. So it may work well in some cases and in others can be very difficult. The process will likely drag on for years as well, so do not expect a quick and clean outcome for this plan.

Overall, I am personally in favour of coed schools and support the move as well.

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NAPLAN was cancelled for 2020 and it is back on this year. This year it will be divided into online and paper version. 2021 is also the last year that paper based test will be carried out.

2021 NAPLAN online version of the test will happen between 11–21 May.

2021 NAPLAN written version of the test will happen between 11–13 May.

I personally cannot wait for the new data to become available. Unfortunately, I will probably have to wait until early 2022 to get my hands on the 2021 data.

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There is a recent article about schools are banning wearable devices in one particular inner west school in Sydney. This is something bothering all parents and schools for the last decade or so. The situation got a lot tougher with all the new wearable devices in the last few years.

The primary school my children are attending ban the use of phones and also any wearable devices with an internet connection. On school trips, students can bring phones without sim card as a camera.

In the early days, smartphones are expensive and took a while before the hand me downs propagated from parents to the children. Girls seem to love social media and boys with games, availability of internet and devices means children are exposed to them at a very early age. I manage to talk the daughter into not sign up for any social media account until she turns 13, how I dread that day.

Most of the parents I know had struggles dealing with this issue. Particular as you cannot use a blanket bane on use of the device, as they need them to actually do their school works as well. With my daughter, I settled on the limit of half-hour a day and additional times as needed. Once they are in high school, they actually need a laptop for day to day work at school as well. I will just have adjust the policy as required.

I also had to set up sleep time on her tablet after I caught her using the tablet 2 am on the morning once. I highly recommend spend some time and set up proper parental supervision on your children’s device, saved me a whole bunch of headaches.

Thirty schools were evacuated on Tuesday and Wednesday, including students that were doing their HSC at the time. For people that are not familiar with the term, HSC is basically the university entrance exam in NSW, so it is a big deal.

Currently, it is confirmed that the emails came from Eastern Europe, so like many things internet, it will most likely be a black hole and we never found out who did it.

Now some personal experience, this happens frequently on both secondary school and university level. Most of the time around the end of the term examination period. I think this alone gives some hint on who benefits most from these type of incidents and the likely culprits.

I have never heard any of these turned into serious incidents. However, in the post 911 era, these tend to be taken very seriously all around the world.

A break from the usual depressing Covid-19 related news, we will look at the recent barrage of bad news that the now infamous Shore Grammar got.

It first started with the muck up day list which the detail I do not see the needs of repeating here, one can easily Google it if you want to. Muck up day in my high school days were pretty tame in comparison on what is on that particular list. Eggs fight and graffiti are the most common choice, however, my school crackdown pretty hard on it. So on my year 12, they basically threaten anyone caught doing the nasty on the muck up day will be banned from doing HSC. As a result of this, nothing much happened in my year.

The second article is someone chatted with a couple of kids from Shore and as a result, some suburbs are disparaged on. One thing people not from Sydney have to understand is that Sydney-siders can be very snobby. North shore is family tree-huggers, inner west is where the hippies live, Eastern suburbs are where all the ultra-rich, Western suburbs are all the bogans are, well you get what I mean. While there are some elements of truth to this, but the actual situation on the ground is a lot more nuanced. People love to stereotype and Sydney-siders are no exception to this.

There are also videos on the internet showing the immaculate facilities and the view of Shore Grammar. This is not really a secret, these are all public information. I was in Shore Grammer years ago on events for my kids, the site is truly spectacular, it is what you call million dollar view. Naturally, with the recent happening, many had brought up the question why a school charging more than 30k per students still receives significant public funding when it already has far superior facilities than any public school in Australia.

Taking the rich and powerful down a peg or two is one of the favourite exercises for most Australian and I suppose for many in other parts of the world as well. I would not be surprised to see more similar articles to pop up while this currently occupies the centre of the public’s attention.

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情况比上个星期有很大好转。我们从一周之内关闭的10所学校变成了过去10天中仅有的三所临时关闭。关闭的三所学校如下。

Lidcombe Public School
Kincoppal-Rose Bay School
Blue Mountains Grammar School

这种趋势非常令人鼓舞，希望我们可以继续降低感染率。

在澳大利亚范围内，今天总共有26738例确诊感染病例，与昨天相比增加了50例，相当于0.19％。维多利亚州今天在澳大利亚新增的新冠肺炎感染总数中占84％。

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