Smarter Schools: CoAG National Partnerships Round Table
Monday 9 November 2009
Jointly presented by the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education and The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre
Sponsored by the University Aspirations Project: A UniSA project funded by the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR)
Audio recording now available (mp3 format 31MB)
Recently the Council of Australian Government's (CoAG) agreed to three
new "Smarter Schools" National Partnerships which aim to improve the
outcomes for students and the skills and qualities of teachers and school
leaders. These three National Partnerships are for Literacy and Numeracy,
Improving Teacher Quality, and Low Socio-Economic-Status (SES) School
Communities.
The federal government funding commitment with co-contributions from the South Australian government and non-government education sectors aims to bring about systemic and sustained educational reforms. A commitment to collaboration between the three schooling sectors in South Australia means that there is widespread interest in related matters.
The event will adopt a roundtable format and focus on the CoAG National Partnerships. The panel members include: Professor Lori Beckett from Leeds Metropolitan University, UK (low SES School Communities), Professor Barbara Comber from UniSA (literacy & numeracy), Professor Tania Aspland from Adelaide University (Improving teacher quality) and respondent Professor Alan Reid.
Speaker profiles:
Professor Lori Beckett (visual presentation - pdf format)
Lori
Beckett took up her professorial appointment at Leeds Met in 2006, and on
arrival began to organise and edit the centenary book, City of Leeds
Training College 1907-2007 Continuity and Change, published by the
university in October, 2007. Having led a team of twenty four people to
bring the project to fruition, she was honoured to be nominated by
Vice-Chancellor Professor Simon Lee for the newly established Winifred
Mercier Chair of Teacher Education, in memory of the first so-called Lady
Vice-Principal. In her first year, Lori also worked to establish
school-university partnerships in inner city Leeds, forging inquiry
communities where academic partners work with teacher partners to support
professional learning and development focused on teachers' work practices.
The 'Patterns for Learning' project, successfully trialled in Little London
Community Primary School (LLCPS) in 2006-7, was rolled out into its family
of schools in 2008 as 'Side-by-side learning' with one year TDA funding for
CPD in Challenging Schools. This enabled the university to establish a
connection with a network of disadvantaged schools and while we continue
partnership work, we are developing a Masters of Practitioner Research,
leading to the EdD and Phd studies. Lori is currently working to complete
her book, Teaching in Tough Schools, which brings together the voices from
our inquiry communities in disadvantaged schools in England and Australia,
where she worked with schools on the NSW Priority Action Schools program.
She has co-presented with teacher partners Jill Wood (LLCPS) and Kathleen
Gallagher (City of Leeds High School) in numerous forums, including the DCSF
2009 spring workshops on the Gender Agenda.
Smarter Schools and Smarter Systems
The CoAG National Partnership for Low Socio-Economic-Status (SES)
School Communities is to be applauded. There is an outstanding need to
coordinate partners locally and nationally, in all sectors and systems, as
they aim to embed educational reforms that meet the needs of schools serving
students, families and communities with deep needs. This means that
partnerships need to be well considered, and there is much to be done to
secure a shared understanding of partnerships focussed on school practices
as well as classroom practices. Research and practice in disadvantaged
schools have much to tell us, and indeed Australia has a particularly solid
reputation in this regard. However, challenges remain, not least about ways
to build schools and systems as learning communities able to sustain
long-term development projects in disadvantaged school-communities. This
contribution draws on experiences of such work in Sydney in the NSW Priority
Action Schools program up to 2006, and subsequently in the 'Patterns of
Learning' project in inner-city Leeds. In this work, the school is the locus
of action, with school Heads, academic and teacher partners, and support
staff working together to identify issues of concern, engage in
knowledge-building, develop a shared vocabulary, and institute authentic
changes. This way of working has proved particularly successful, but
partnerships require support to grow, in the school and then beyond into its
community, its family of schools and district/local authority network/s.
There needs to be opportunities for joint work, notably teacher-led action
inquiry, which in turn facilitates the professional learning of all
concerned. This then calls into play the real politik, not only the reforms
couched in philosophical or theoretical terms, but the indicative actions
underpinned by practical and material considerations.
Professor Barbara Comber (visual presentation - pdf format)
Professor
Barbara Comber is a key researcher in the Centre for Studies in
Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures in the Hawke Research Institute at
the University of South Australia. Her particular interests include literacy
education and social justice, teachers' work and identities, place and
space, and practitioner inquiry. She has worked collaboratively with
teachers in high poverty locations focussing on innovative and critical
curriculum and pedagogies which address contemporary social challenges. She
has recently published 2 books Literacies in place: Teaching environmental
communication (Comber, Nixon & Reid, 2007) and Turn-around pedagogies:
Literacy interventions for at-risk students (Comber & Kamler, 2005).
'Way above the basics': Investing in literacies and numeracies
that matter
The CoAG National Partnerships properly focus on key priorities for the
schooling sectors: teacher quality, literacy and numeracy and low
socio-economic school communities. Indeed it is hardly possible to talk
about these areas separately and it is the relationships between these areas
which are crucial to designing the new partnerships. For several decades all
of my work , and a great deal of that of my colleagues and the educators
from school systems we work with throughout Australia, has been directed at
improving the teaching of literacy (and more recently numeracy) in low SES
communities. So what's new here? To what extent is there reason for optimism
in the Smarter Schools Agenda? For teachers of literacy and numeracy in
schools and universities around Australia what are the risks and
possibilities? The teacher-researcher quoted in my title insists that the
work they are doing in her highly culturally diverse school community is 'way more sophisticated' than anything which might be described as basic. In
these new partnerships we need to ensure that the literacies and numeracies
available to young people are way above recycled old literacies and
numeracies for yesterday's worlds of work, leisure and communication. These
collaborations need to allow for serious investments in critical, complex
and engaging learning for all young people. In terms of scaling up
interventions that work the focus should be upon supporting the people who
negotiate the curriculum in our most challenging places. In scaling up we
need to avoid abstracting out the realities of life and work in real
communities. We need to re-define teachers' working conditions so that
collaborative research focussed on making a difference to students' learning
is part of the job description.
Professor Tania Aspland (visual presentation - pdf format)
Professor
Tania Aspland is Professor and Head of the School of Education at the
University of Adelaide. She has been employed in the university sector since
1980. During the past ten years she has focused her expertise around several
areas of scholarship. These include:
- teacher education
- curriculum theory
- curriculum development and evaluation
- higher education curriculum studies
- curriculum leadership
- postgraduate pedagogy
- community capacity building
- thesis supervision of international students
- professional development
Improving Teacher Quality: Concerns, contestations and challenges
Public interest in pre-service teacher education programs in
Australia has been prompted by many factors such as: current school reform
literature; technological change; issues of globalization; the predicted
crisis in teacher supply; the intensification of teachers' work; changing
pedagogies; and new education organizational structures. As a result,
teacher education in Australia is reconstituting itself in new ways in
response to government initiatives, sector demands and public scrutiny and
universities are designing an array of new programs that will better prepare
quality teachers for new times.
Despite this changing context, Government in Australia has expressed grave concerns about literacy and numeracy standards across Australian schools and held "poor teacher training" responsible for such outcomes. It is the contention of most teacher educators that such a statement is ill-informed and based on evidence that is largely anecdotal, emotive and politically motivated. The current intense interest in schools, the quality of teacher graduates and teacher education is nothing new.
The QTNP Teacher Quality reforms are designed to educate and train quality teachers with a view to enhancing student outcomes in literacy, numeracy and science. The focus on attracting the best entrants to teaching, reward payments for teachers, the development of a set national competency benchmarks against which teachers will be assessed and the generation of a national teacher registration authority and a national teacher accreditation authority are proposed within the QTNP as ways of enhancing the quality of graduate teachers and practising teachers.
This session will raise a series of dilemmas and contestations around key issues central to the co-existence of projects designed, on the one hand, to achieve a greater professionalization of the teaching force in the interests of quality; while at the same time, initiatives, designed to regulate the nature of teacher education and the shape of teacher graduates through standards and competencies, are unfolding.
Professor Alan Reid (Respondent) (visual presentation - pdf format)
Alan Reid is Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of South
Australia. His research interests include education policy, curriculum
theory and the history and politics of public education, and he has led a
number of state and national curriculum initiatives. The Australian Council
of Educational Leaders (ACEL) recently named him as its 2009 Gold Medallist
in recognition of his contributions to education and educational leadership.
Connections to National Curriculum
In his response to the three panellists Alan Reid will locate the
three National Partnerships inside the so called 'education revolution'
agenda, making particular reference to the national curriculum. He will then
undertake a critical analysis, arguing that although equity is claimed to be
central to the agenda, there are many aspects of it that are/will be
counterproductive to equity.
The National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education
The Centre has been established by the Australian Government to
produce and disseminate knowledge about the inclusion in higher education of
socially and economically disadvantaged groups, and to facilitate dialogue
and exchange among relevant researchers, practitioners and policy makers. It
also provides advice on student equity policies and practices to
institutions and systems across all education sectors.
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While the views presented by speakers within the Hawke Centre public
program are their own and are not necessarily those of either the University
of South Australia or The Hawke Centre, they are presented in the interest
of open debate and discussion in the community and reflect our themes of:
strengthening our democracy - valuing our cultural diversity - and building
our future.