Archives for Australia

Exams, Engagement or Enterprise : What Really Counts?

Tweet For the past 10 weeks, we’ve been working with schools and teachers in three countries: China; India and Australia. During that period, the 2012 PISA results were announced, triggering a renewed bout of angst in Western countries generally, giving way to more strident calls to work our students harder, along with some intensive teacher bashing. In this post, I’d like to share some impressions I formed in those countries, aligned with political and mainstream media representations, post-PISA. It can only be a small, selective sample, but I’ll share other learnings in subsequent posts. Indian Inspirations Our week in one …

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Australian Educational Policy – Starting to Listen?

Tweet Having now spent 3 weeks working with Australian Principals, teacher trainers, teachers and student, and talking to press and media people, I feel like I’m starting to get a handle on the issues currently at play. The debates around education, for a Brit, are similar to almost all aspects of Aussie life: familiar and yet, unfamiliar, at the same time.   I wrote earlier about the Australian take on the ‘accountability framework’ – it seemed like publishing student/teacher results on a national website was bound to lead to league performance tables by any other means. A week later – …

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Back To Front Down Under On Education Policies

Tweet I spent quite a bit of October in Australia, giving talks on education, music and technology. It was my first time in the country, and all the people I met who were working in schools, colleges or universities were unfailingly generous, enormously gracious and deeply thoughtful – about as far away from the ‘ocker’ stereotype as you could get. I also met many people who were frankly bewildered that the Labour government there appeared to be considering the same education reform strategies the in-coming New Labour administration did in the UK in 1997. Most educators in Australia are well …

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