Juggling Kittens: The six challenges facing Australian Schools
Nick Connolly: Senior Manager Test Development EAA
I’m always struck by how amazing schools are. It is sometimes hard to notice what special places they are when
you are inside one. Schools often form the centre of many communities in Australia and are key part of many
lives. A school of a thousand students is as complex a place to run as a large business. While a school may not
have as many employees as a large business it faces many of the same tasks of managing and motivating a large
number of people each day. But we all know this and partly this is why the complexity of running a school is often
underestimated – these are challenges schools have always faced and will continue to face so long as there are
schools.
Since the first formal schools were established in Australia they have adapted to and sometimes led social change.
Australia has not been static demographically, culturally or economically and schools have managed change in
various ways. By their very nature as institutions that concentrate in one place the youth of a community, schools
often find themselves at the centre of social change both overt and subtle. Schools may also find themselves as
the nominated agents of government policy either as appointed facilitator of change or in the hope that schools
will be a bulwark against it. In my original field of mathematics education I felt that most keenly when the
national curriculum was introduced in England in the 1990s. Ministers wanted to both halt the pernicious effects
(as they perceived them) of calculator use in the classroom while targeting mathematics teaching in particular as
a place where student would be introduced to the wonders of educational technology.
My work these days has much in common with my work as a teacher. I’m still preparing materials, I’m still
wondering whether students will find something engaging or not, I’m still frustrated by meetings getting in the
way of me getting stuff done. However a big change is the timescale I now have to think in. Increasingly I’m
having to consider what the assessment needs of schools will be in the next five or ten years. Luckily I spend two
hours on a train each day commuting from the mountains to the city – which gives me a lot of time to think. And
what I have been thinking about is 6 interconnected challenges. Challenges that each school and each school
system will face and which EAA in turn will need to respond to in various ways. These six challenges are not the
only challenges schools will face. I haven’t included climate change or mining booms or global financial crises.
But before I talk about each of those challenges in turn I want to talk about three drivers of social change that
were the starting point of my thoughts.
The first driver of change is economic change. In the past few years it has been
difficult to judge where our economy is heading. Between a resources boom
and a global financial crisis the certainties of the previous decade seem to
have been a mass of self delusion. However by “economic” I don’t mean
whether the Australian dollar will be strong compared to the Euro or whether
the demand for steel in China will continue at record levels. These issues do
impact on schools in some ways but by their very nature they are not ones
that we can easily plan for. I am more interested in broader and deeper
changes.
The first issue is a shift across the developed world, only partly halted by recent economic woes, to a more service
based economy. When much of our economic activity revolves around educated people providing services to
other educated people this has multiple implications for our
education system.
The other economic issue is one that we will keep returning to –
information technology is playing an increasing role in our
economy. The growth in use of computers has not always been
accompanied by a growth in productivity but it has been a major
shift in the way workplaces are structured that has occurred quite
rapidly over the past 25 years.
The second major driver of change that I’ve been considering is
demographic changes. Australia’s population is getting older. It
isn’t a steady shift and many factors play a role from immigration
to healthcare but clearly for schools the relative numbers of young
people in a population is a matter of great interest. And while we
are getting older Australia has also become more urban. One of the
most notable juxtapositions of Australia’s demographics is that
while it is one of the least densely populated countries in the world
if you simply divide the population by its area – it is actually one of
the more heavily urbanised countries in the world.
The third driver is one I’ve already alluded to – technology. Nearly
three quarters of Australian households had high speed broadband
in 2011. We are increasingly a networked population. We are also
increasingly using social network technology in our lives. According to the Australian Bureau of statistics 88% of
15 to 17 year olds make use of social networking on IT devices.
So, as I see it, we have these three forces at work. They aren’t the only drivers of social change – I haven’t
included cultural or governmental or ideological changes because I have no idea what twists and turns they will
take us through. However I do think these three areas will be inexorable and we will feel their impact regardless
of what policies we adopt. I see each of them as hidden engines of change that, short of world shattering disaster,
we will have to adapt to.
From these three engines of change I’ve been thinking about six challenges. I like lists but being of a mathematical
bent I like circles as well and so I’ve put them all in a circle (partly because it looks nice but also because each of
these challenges are interrelated).
I’ll start with the obvious one first: technology.
There are many obvious opportunities with ICT in schools and schools have been
exploiting those opportunities in multiples ways for at least two decades. But there
problems as well – under-utilised hardware or tokenistic use of IT to add
technological glamour to tasks that are as easily accomplished by more traditional
means. A more substantial challenge to schools is that it is difficult to show that the
spending on IT results in a commensurate improvement in learning. There is
nothing unusual about either IT or education in that regard – it is difficult in general
to show that a particular approach or technique results in across the board
improvements in learning. Likewise it is hard to show that the wide scale adoption of computers in industry has
led to a corresponding improvement in productivity. In part this is because while computers support many
existing areas of learning they also bring new areas of learning and new kinds of learning into schools.
Technology can also present an almost contradictory response from policy makers. I mentioned earlier the
contrasting demands on mathematics teachers who must play a role as defenders of traditional pencil-and-paper
techniques but also be advocates of a new world of mathematics that was born from the birth of the digital
computer. Nor is this confined to technical subjects – the nature of our spelling ability has been profoundly
altered by the spell checker. More deeply the simplest word-processing application allows us to build an extended
piece of writing in a modular fashion that marries planning and composition into quite a different cognitive
process. Schools will be expected to continue to find ways of squaring this circle – both supporting skills
undermined by technological advances whilst being advocates of those same technological advances.
In addition new opportunities lead to new things that need to be taught. While it is now easier than ever to film
and edit a video on a handheld device, the ease with which students can be asked to incorporate video into their
school work means that advice on the structure and aesthetics of film becomes a more important part of the
curriculum.
Decision making about IT is difficult and it is easy for schools and indeed whole system to get left behind as
technology changes. The iPad is a very different learning device to a laptop and in five or ten years time we may
have had similar shifts in styles of device or software platforms. Public spending on IT in schools is often high
profile and used by governments as a way of signalling a tangible improvement with something relatively
concrete. In short we can expect the ground to keep shifting for school and IT with high expectations but many
obstacles in meeting those expectations.
This takes me to the second challenge: accountability. In the UK many changes to
schools and schooling took place at the end of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s: A
standardised curriculum, a new school inspection regime, national testing in England
and new styles of schools. Similar changes have occurred in Australia and the US
although over different time periods and to different extents. The USA has
experimented more with styles of schools and has higher stakes testing in schools –
but doesn’t have a national curriculum or even a national test. However the emphasis
on many of these changes can be characterised around the ideas of choice and
accountability. From my perspective as a student teacher in the late 1980s it was easy to see it as purely
ideological – the nasty (from my perspective) Thatcher government trying to impose market forces on public
education. However underneath the politics there is, I believe, a more general shift towards demands for greater
accountability from schools. This shift comes from the trend I mentioned earlier to a more service based economy
– and a consequent growth in people perceiving themselves as customers. In a service economy people have a
greater expectation of service. Naturally parents, and in some case students, are more inclined to see themselves
as customers receiving a service from schools. In that mind set both choice and accountability become natural
expectations. Whatever governments may do I believe we can expect parents and students to increasingly want
to know more about their schools and the relative performance of schools in their area. People are becoming
more sophisticated consumers of education.
This wasn’t intended to be a speech about economics but having just talked
about the consumers it is a naturally next step to talk about the producers. The
next challenge on the circle is recruitment.
I mentioned earlier that Australia is getting older – well the teacher population
is getting older too. Not only is getting older it is also getting less male with the
balance of men and women in the teaching population shifting further to
women.
Two drivers are at work here- demographics and a shift to a service economy.
People who finish college with qualifications in education have more alternative choices to teaching than in
previous generations. In conjunction with an aging population this makes leads to the overall aging of the
teaching population not being offset with sufficient younger teachers. Further while teaching wages are
comparatively OK for graduates, teacher wages compare less well for people in mid-career. A government study
in the early 2000’s found that many people with teaching qualification were working in property and business
services. Declines in the housing market may have helped teacher recruitment in the short term but long term the
reality is that people with the educational and personal skills to be effective teachers have many more choices for
alternative careers than was the case in the past.
Worse yet is the difficulty in recruiting teachers in maths and science. There is also a danger here of a vicious cycle
in which a shortage of qualified mathematics teachers leads to fewer students entering mathematics courses at
college. This in turn relates to the idea of students as more sophisticated consumers of education – mathematics
is not always the optimal choice for maximising marks for university entry.
In addition the drive towards greater accountability for schools and teachers places additional burdens on
teachers. While the financial rewards for teaching are not great any additional pressure of work on teachers
means that those teachers with the greatest alternative career choices are the ones who are most likely to leave
teaching and move to other professions. This can lead to a paradoxical situation that measures intend to improve
the quality of teachers may result in an overall decline in teacher quality.
One solution is to look for teachers from other places. Indeed when I began teaching in London this process was
already established with a thriving industry surrounding recruiting teachers from Australia.
This leads me to the next challenge: internationalisation. A consequence of the
Internet and improved connectivity is our ability to share and access educational
material from around the world. My son sat down the other night with an iPad to
revise for a mathematics test by accessing the BBC ‘Bitsize’ revision website – a
resource designed for British students to revise with. Aside from one question about
estimating the distance from London to Edinburgh and the use of the term ‘cuboid’
rather than ‘rectangular prism he could easily find his way to the relevant bits of maths
he had to revise from the list of test topic he had been given by his teacher – all framed in terms of the NSW
curriculum.
Not only can we more easily access information and ideas from other countries we can more easily compare
ourselves with the education systems of other countries. Large scale international studies such as PISA, PIRLS and
TIMSS provide numerical data by which we can compare relative performance of school systems in different
countries. Curricula are becoming internationalised also. The International Baccalaureate is one obvious example.
This is a trend that means that students, parents and teachers have not only more access to resources but they
are also likely to see a greater range of models for educating than past generations. It also means that there will
be a greater demand for the ability to match resources from one system to the curriculum demands of other
systems.
I mentioned one of the important drivers of social change was increased
urbanisation and I also mentioned the growth in demand for school choice –
driven both by ideology and by changing attitudes. Together these trends have
resulted in greater diversity of kinds of schools. The UK, the US and Australia
now have many kinds of schools. We can make simple divisions between
‘public’ and ‘independent’ but these labels tend to exaggerate some
differences while obscuring some similarities. A Catholic system school in
Australia may technically be independent but in other ways closely resembles a
Catholic school in the UK which technically may be regarded as public. In both
countries there have been policy changes which have resulted in greater financial independence for public school
combined with new ways of publically funding and regulating independent schools. This blurring of distinction
will, I believe continue regardless of whether it is a good thing or a bad thing.
A more urban population can support a greater diversity of school types and can allow greater specialisation
within schools. In turn new technology can allow schools to cooperate in ways that would have been impractical
in the past.
This takes me to the last of the six challenges. Of course this is always the predominate challenge for a school:
how to best accommodate the needs of all its students in a way that is both equitable and tailored to them as
individuals. The students of the coming decade will be students with access to the whole breadth of human
knowledge in their pocket but will also have fewer certainties about their future place in the world than ever
before. When they reach adulthood many of them will end up working in careers that didn’t exist twenty years
ago. They and their parents will know more about their school than ever before but conversely their schools will
know more about them. They will be faced with more choices and more opportunities but also more complex and
novel challenges. They may be more part of a global community but perhaps less a part of their local community.
The challenge for schools is to manage this task - task that will be frequently painful but which will have to be
handled with utmost skill, care and sensitivity. A task I liken not to merely herding cats but to juggling kittens.