How many more reports does it take to realise there is a growing crisis in Australian schools? For all the comfortable rhetoric about Australia's world-class education system, for all the political brawling about the level of overall funding, the problems in the curriculum, compounded by the approach to teacher training and teaching standards, are only becoming more obvious.
The latest report on schools from the Grattan Institute, for example, finds that a high percentage of students are quietly disengaged from what's going on in the classroom. They may not be causing trouble in the traditional sense of disruptive noisy behaviour but, as the years go on, the impact on their ability to learn and to progress is just as profound.
Now the idea of children's attention regularly drifting off and out the school window is hardly a new phenomenon in any country, and certainly in Australia. The advent of mobile phones and data available anytime, anywhere only makes that distraction far more possible and even more appealing. As any parent knows, maintaining their children's attention span or concentration on one topic is an increasingly rare feat in a world where technology multi-tasking is as natural as breathing.
Some of the increased concern about the lack of focus on lessons is also because the issue is actually being studied these days in reports such as Grattan's rather than being ignored.
Depressingly consistent
But all countries have the same issues with their students' tight embrace of mobile technology affecting classroom behaviour and students' thought processes. Yet it's Australia that continues to slip inexorably down the ladder of international rankings and results in the most fundamental areas of learning in subjects such as English, maths and science.
These international rankings, now depressingly consistent, cause an outbreak of political and parental angst each time but far too little evidence of any practical change of behaviour or approach within the education system.
The lack of engagement in the classroom was also before all the Australian focus on greatly increasing spending on education as part of the need to deal with the growing achievement gap between the highest and lowest performers. It was also often addressed in previous decades by teachers skilled at getting their students' attention, sometimes using methods of physical discipline that are, rightly, no longer condoned.
The difficulty now is that too many teachers in Australia have far too little experience in keeping the attention of students and managing a classroom effectively in today's world. Their training simply doesn't prepare them for it. And once in a school position, too many new teachers don't receive the mentoring they need from more experienced teachers.
The Grattan report – Engaging students, creating classrooms that improve learning - finds that 40 per cent of students at primary and high school level are not learning because of disengagement, leading to them being one to two years behind. Not surprisingly, this is more evident in lower socio-economic areas.
Instinctively skilled
Yet the training and school experience does not equip teachers to deal with this at all well. There will always be terrific teachers, even of minimal experience, of course. They are instinctively skilled at getting the most from their students. The more important point, however, is that the system doesn't do enough to encourage even naturally good teachers to become even better, while it leaves the majority who need considerable help to flounder.
The report's author, Peter Goss, says many of the techniques promoted in textbooks or courses aren't backed by any evidence, despite the fact there is plenty of research on what does work best.
The results are clear to the graduates once they hit the classroom. Only half say their initial training course helped "in managing classroom activities to keep students on task". Only a third feel their courses had assisted them in dealing with "difficult student behaviour".
That is clear to school principals as well. Only a third believe new teachers are well prepared for managing classrooms.
Some of the solutions for this are so basic it's actually more remarkable they are not matters of routine in Australian schools. Giving trainee teachers more supervised time in the classroom, for example, especially at the start of the year, seems no more than common sense. Ensuring there is a strong mentoring system taken on by more experienced teachers should similarly be considered a no-brainer.
Protracted arguments
There's little doubt that a flawed curriculum that has too long ignored basic building blocks of learning still plays a major role in this impasse. Witness the absurdly protracted arguments in education circles about the use of phonics to help children to read. This, too, is only being addressed far too slowly.
But that just makes it more disturbing that the primary political focus remains on the fight between a federal Coalition government and the states over how much money the states should be given over the last two years of the current six-year funding model.
Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham is negotiating with the states on a new funding deal and on how to lift standards. There is still no agreement on either.
The education unions in particular are against any idea of rewarding teachers for performance rather than for seniority. Principals in some states such as Western Australia have more autonomy in choosing their teachers as part of a popular experiment in having "independent" public schools. Most do not, meaning that the idea of encouraging excellence in particular schools, even those that need it most, becomes a very haphazard exercise.
That suggests that putting in ever more funding on the same basis is going to end up with predictable results. Far too many F's.
