Category: General Education

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.

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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.

1. Parents’ Occupation
2. Parents’ Education
3. Geographical Location
4. 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.

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.

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I came across this article Girls, children from Asian and wealthy backgrounds do more homework on SMH. The basic finding of the survey is that

Australian students aged 10 to 13 do an average of four hours of homework a week: 37 minutes on a typical weekday and almost an hour on weekends, a Roy Morgan survey has found.

That’s an increase of 40 minutes since 2007, but still one-third of the time they spend watching television each week. Australian tweens also use the internet at home for an average of 10.5 hours a week and play computer or console games for 5.5 hours.

The 2015 survey of 1628 children also found girls, only children, and students from Asian backgrounds and wealthier families did more homework than average.

The article does not go into why some students do more homework than the others. I think the reason why children from different background doing differ down pretty much to parental involvement. Parents with Asian background tend to value academic result highly and in my experience in general wealthier parents also tend to be more involved with their children’s education. I think the point I try to make is the biggest contributing factor to children’s academic perform is probably parental involvement than anything else.

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