Month: May 2017

I read this article Fixing disadvantaged students key to fairer, better economy by Ross Gittins a few days ago and could not agree more on this issue with him.

The first step in ensuring all our children get a decent education is better early childhood learning – a vital issue I’ll leave for its own column.

The next step is ensuring the money governments spend on schools is biased in favour of those students needing more help, not those schools that have managed to screw better deals out of the politicians over the years.

The advent of many modern technologies has destroyed old jobs and created news just as rapidly. We are entering a new phase of automation for many mundane tasks. You just have to look at things like washer machine, robot vacuum cleaner, manufacturing robots etc. Not just manual and manufacturing landscape are quickly changing even the relative new industries such as computer software etc are also changing, testing, deployments and many other aspects of it are getting automated as well. What happens is we need less manual software tester, more automated testers who can write code and maintain the automated tests. This is happening every in the Australia and the whole world.

Education is a key factor to facilitate this change, just to be able to read is maybe enough 50 years ago to gain useful employment, it is no longer the case for much more technically oriented jobs. We need to make everyone understand that education is important and also make it relevant to modern society. One interesting example of the success of East and South Asia immigration groups, one of the key is the value they put on the education of their children. Not everyone who is good education will be successful, but proportionally more of them will be so compared to the ones who are not.

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By now your guys must be really excited to see another blog entry again about school funding. Unfortunately, things like these actually can have a major impact on Australian Education down the years. We are getting information in a drip feed fashion. Reading the SMH article this morning Revealed: the high-fee private schools to win big under the Gonski 2.0 changes, it certainly did reveal some more information.

Federal funding for some of Sydney and Melbourne’s most prestigious private schools – which charge fees up to $34,000 a year – will soar over the next decade under the Turnbull government’s “Gonski 2.0” changes, while others will have their funding slashed.

The government has committed to funding all non-government schools at 80 per cent of their needs-based funding entitlement.

I think on this point I agree with a lot of people, we need to have a better understanding how the needs-based funding entitlement is calculated and designed. One of the argument by private schools is that if we do not fund them then public schools will have to handle more enrolments. That being said most people who go to the high-end private schools would be very unlikely end up back in the public school system. Certainly, for the private schools charging fees in the range around 30k, there is little argument to further boost the public funding. Public funding for schools needs to be taken into consideration how much fee and revenue the school in question already generating.

Following are example taken from the above mentioned SMH article

High-fee private school winners in Melbourne under Gonski 2.0

Caulfield Grammar School

• SES Score: 117
• Senior school fees: $29,355
• Per student funding 2017: $4658
• Per student funding 2027: $6864
• Total 10-year increase: $34.8 million

Wesley College, Melbourne

• SES Score: 120
• Senior school fees: $29,720
• Per student funding 2017: $3842
• Per student funding 2027: $5282
• Total 10-year increase: $22.1 million

Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Burwood

• SES Score: 115
• Senior school fees: $29,924
• Per student funding 2017: $4872
• Per student funding 2027: $7390
• Total 10-year increase: $17.9 million

Methodist Ladies College, Kew

• SES Score: 123
• Senior school fees: $29,700
• Per student funding 2017: $3148
• Per student funding 2027: $4435
• Total 10-year increase: $13.1 million

Scotch College, Hawthorn

• SES Score: 123
• Senior school fees: $30,528
• Per student funding 2017: $2904
• Per student funding 2027: $4309
• Total 10-year increase: $13.6 million

High-fee private school winners in Sydney under Gonski 2.0

The King’s School, Parramatta

• Current share of Schooling Resource Standard: 77%
• Senior school fees: $34,323
• Per student funding 2017: $4527
• Per student funding 2027: $7278
• Total 10-year increase: $19.3 million

Santa Sabina College, Strathfield

• Current share of Schooling Resource Standard: 69%
• Senior school fees: $21,975
• Per student funding 2017: $5048
• Per student funding 2027: $8148
• Total 10-year increase: $19.1 million

Newington College, Stanmore

• Current share of Schooling Resource Standard: 75%
• Senior school fees: $31,662
• Per student funding 2017: $4178
• Per student funding 2027: $5948
• Total 10-year increase: $18.9 million

Knox Grammar School, Wahroonga

• Current share of Schooling Resource Standard: 78%
• Senior school fees: $30,600
• Per student funding 2017: $2300
• Per student funding 2027: $3228
• Total 10-year increase: $13.1 million

Sydney Church of England Grammar School, North Sydney

• Current share of Schooling Resource Standard: 76%
• Senior school fees: $29,940
• Per student funding 2017: $2029
• Per student funding 2027: $3423
• Total 10-year increase: $11.5 million

One principle from another private school said that they are certainly got used for the fund for swimming pools. How if you already collecting average close to 20k per student in yearly fee and also collecting over 4k per year in public funding per student deserve more than double the increase within next ten years for public funds. I was mostly supportive of reform of school funding previously but seeing more details coming out parts of it is becoming more unfavourable. Progressively over the years in Australia is Public Schools are saddled with students from lower social economic background and corresponding responsibilities. I think we deserve a better look at how the public funding model for private and private schools. The more informaiton being made available for public better the chance we will have a fair debate about this.

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I read an article on SMH to do with the topic of demountable classrooms in NSW schools. So I did some diggings and here is what I found out some interesting stats from NSW Department of Education’s own site.

As at July 2016, the Department of Education has a stock of 6,171 demountable buildings (classrooms and specialist spaces). Of these 5,192 are currently located in schools and the remainder is being repaired or is in storage waiting refurbishment. The Department has just over 44,767 teaching spaces in schools. Approximately 9.5% of these are in demountable buildings.

In fact, if you look at stats on the number of the demountable classrooms in NSW, this number fluctuate up and down a little, but overall they stayed about the same. I dug up the stats going back to 2011 and look like the percentage of demountable classrooms stayed about 10 to 12 percent of the total number. From memory in mid-2016 NSW was planning to build 1100 classrooms in the next four years. So even if there is zero increase in enrolment number this would only replace roughly 20 percent of deployed demountable classroom that are in NSW schools today. When you taking into consideration of expected increase in enrolment of both primary and secondary students, we will probably see the number of demountable classrooms increase not decrease over the next few years.

So we will continue seeing shrinking playgrounds and open spaces for the near future in NSW.

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Following the recently proposed changes to the Federal government education funding model. the secretary of the NSW Department of Education Mark Scott has contacted all NSW school principles and warned them about the new Federal Government’s funding calculation. NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes has also questioned the accuracy of the new school funding model. The Federal Minister for Education and Training Simon Birmingham has come out and contradicted his NSW counter part’s opinions.

Regardless which side is correct, there are some good points raised such as the need to make public the data and method used to arrived at new education funding model etc.  That being said, overall speaking I personally think the new change is a big step towards the good direction relating to the funding issue. It is interesting that Labor lacked the courage to properly change the extremely broken private public education funding model. On the other hand, there is little risk of this change by the Turnbull’s Liberal Coalition government of losing votes on this issue. Regardless of potential gain or risk, it is refreshing to see some concrete good moves on the issue of education funding.

However being that the recent Australian domestic politics has been most short-sighted and good as this maybe, it may never get anywhere at all. We will just have to see how this turns out.

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There are a couple of new article on this topic recently, so I read up on this on the internet. This is what I learned which is from 2020, students in NSW must meet the minimum standard of literacy and numeracy to be eligible for the HSC credential. The reason why this is done is so for the following reason.

The minimum standard is part of a broader NSW Government strategy to boost student literacy and numeracy across the state.

What is this standard? Again check the following points which taken from Department Education’s website.

The minimum standard is set at Level 3 of the Australian Core Skills Framework (ACSF), a nationally agreed standard of functional literacy and numeracy. Federal and state government ministers have endorsed the ACSF.

At ACSF Level 3, students can do things like:

1. Find the time and date of a music concert on an online ticket website.
2. Calculate the quantity of paint needed to paint a room.
3. Estimate distance, travel time and costs for a transport route.
4. Take notes from a lecture or training session.
5. Create a personal weekly budget in a spreadsheet.
6. Measure quantities to follow a recipe.
7. Follow safety instructions in an equipment manual.
8. Enter data in a computer-based management system.

 

More information on this standard can be found at Australian Core Skills Framework on the site of Department of Education. What read is roughly half of the students will fail to reach this standard at Year 9’s NAPLAN test and will require to sit through and pass online tests in the following years in order to be eligible for HSC Credential.

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With the Federal budget for 2017 that had been released tonight, it is interesting to go in a bit more detail with the school funding issue. This article I have read a couple of a couple of weeks ago and is a good illustration of how warped the current system became since the Howard years. During the Howard years the free flowing mining money covered this issue, with the first Gonski implementation, Gillard simply lacked number and political capital to properly implement it. I do also think Gillard’s Labor government also lacked political courage in hoping not to alienate potential voters. The proposed Coalition changes to the funding go someway to fix this issue. However given the preliminary information we have gotten, the changes likely not going far enough to properly address this issue.

Following are some extract from the AGE article ‘The inequity is worsening’: a tale of two schools and a school funding debate.

Here are two schools, from two sectors, that are two kilometres apart.

They serve the same diverse community in Cranbourne and enrol students from similar backgrounds. But according to the latest data, the state school Cranbourne Secondary College received $10,954 in state and federal funding per student while the Catholic school St Peter’s College Cranbourne received $12,765.

In the “Education State”, a student at an independent school with the average socioeconomic make-up received an average of $11,938 in government funding. This compared to $11,064 for a student at a similar Catholic school, and just $9547 for a student at a comparable state school.

One argument laid out by Independent school is that government’s capital income is not included in this number and add on top. Now ‘et’s work the number, there are 932,107 students enrolled in Victorian Primary and Secondary Schools. In the last three Victoria State budget as far as I can make out from the state government’s budget website, it had and planning to spend 2.5 Billion dollars on new and upgrading schools. Given the previous number, this comes down to about $895 per student per year.

St Peter’s College Cranbourne charge about $4,700 per year in 2017 from the information I gather on its website. So if my assumption is correct with the example mentioned in the above, Cranbourne Secondary College get a tad less than $12,000 per year and St Peter’s College Cranbourne get about $17,500 per year.

The funding question is a very complex and need detailed study and investigation on how best we spend and distribute the money to make the best use of our limited resource.

Note: I make a lot of assumptions and there likely be inaccuracy in how the numbers stack up.

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NAPLAN test dates for 2017 are Tuesday 9 May, Wednesday 10 May and Thursday 11 May in Australia. Taken the information from National Assessment Program’s website, the following is the timetable.

Tuesday 9 May 2017	Wednesday 10 May 2017	Thursday 11 May 2017
Year 3	Language conventions 40 minutes Writing 40 minutes	Reading 45 minutes	Numeracy 45 minutes
Year 5	Language conventions 40 minutes Writing 40 minutes	Reading 50 minutes	Numeracy 50 minutes
Year 7	Language conventions 45 minutes Writing 40 minutes	Reading 65 minutes	Numeracy 60 minutes
Year 9	Language conventions 45 minutes Writing 40 minutes	Reading 65 minutes	Numeracy 60 minutes

There is also an article on SMH NAPLAN – What you need to know which is a good article answering a lot of common questions for NAPLAN and new changes as well in 2016.

My daughter is going to take part in the NAPLAN starting from tomorrow, my wife has already run her through some sample tests to get her use to the format. So it should be interesting to see how she does.

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