Welcome to Save our Colleges, Bring back TAFE Tasmania.  

 "If our aim is to help students become lifelong learners by cultivation of spirit for enquiry, then we must provide the same conditions for teachers."
 
Thomas Sergiovanni (1996)  Leadership in the Schoolhouse. How is it Different? Why is it important?       

"Its staff are, therefore, a TAFE provider's most important resource."

Building capability in vocational education and training providers: The TAFE cut page 13

"Reform is a collective achievement. One does not do it alone - not in this profession, at least."

Beare, H. (2010) Six Decades of Continuous School Restructioning

ACEL Monograph Series 46 

In a study of the best workplaces in Australia,  (Hull & Read, 2003), the quality of the working relationships, characterised by openness and trust, were central components of excellent workplaces. Certainly if school reform is to be sucessful then trust is essential (Silins & Milford, 2000)

Turkington, M. (2010:82) Leading & Managing Vol 15 No. 2

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This website has been developed to help communicate to the wider community the concerns the Australian Education Union - Tasmanian Secondary & TAFE division, its members and others have in the implementation of the Post Year 10 Tasmanian education and training reforms. To state the obvious, the reforms are a good example of what not to do when trying to reform any industry sector. Simply reading  Michael Fullan educational reform work could have informed the change leaders about what and what NOT to do.

This website has become necessary due to the incorrect, inaccurate or 'political spin' that the dominates the current reform debates. Teachers try to avoid being caught up in politics except when it impacts of their ability to provide a 'well rounded' education for their students or when their standard of living is reduced below their 'professional' status. see McKinsey's report - page 23

Teachers voiced their concerns about the reforms in the first few weeks after school resumed in 2009. They were told at the time that there were 'teething' troubles and were prepared to provide the reforms time to 'bed in'. These teething problems continued to a point when the AEU - Tasmanian division had no alternative but to seek quantitive data about the reforms in April 2009, to claify and substanciate the concerns raised. Ivan Webb was appointed to collected and correlate the data. See "Our Concerns" tab above for the results of this research.  

What is of MAJOR concern to many teachers is the lack of consultation about what reforms were needed and the most cost effective way for the tax payer to achieve the reforms. As Associate Professor David Loader indicated in his regular column in the December 2009 issue of Teacher, "Why does the teaching profession allow politicians and bureacrats to so heavily influence education in Australia? The medical and legal professions would not stand for it, so why do highly qualified and experienced educators allow it? " 

Past University of Tasmania Dean of Education emeritus professor Bill Mulford and former school principal Bill Edmunds have recently published a book "Educational Investment in Australian Schooling: Serving public purposes in Tasmanian primary schools"  In it they say,

"There are a lot of people who want to tell schools what to do," Prof Mulford said.

"This situation is unfortunate because many of those doing the telling do not seem to want to accept responsibility for their advice, are not around long enough to take responsibility for their directions and may even seek to prevent fair and open assessment of the changes they promulgate."

Prof Mulford and Bill Edmunds "encouraged school leaders to resist political pressures for top-down, short-term change and to make a stand together and be empowered to be independent professionals."

see more at this link

In 2007, the Mckinsley Report looked at the characteristics of the top performing schools and education systems in the world. It found that;

1. The quality of the education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.

2. The only way to improve educational outcomes is to improve instruction.

3. High performance requires every child to suceed.

It is interesting to note that the reforms have concentrated on the things that were 'doable' with relative ease. Change a name or an organisation, changing a business system (no matter how ineffective it is) , moving staff physically, etc are all easy. As the above international study and what Michael Fullan has directly experienced, the ONLY WAY to improve student learning is to increase the quality of the teachers and the resources the teachers have access to to support them in their teaching. This takes a HUGE amount of money and time and requires 'buy in' by teachers and other staff. Teaching is not just a job, it is a profession, a humanistic one. Effective teachers put their heart and their soul into their work because they believe it is worthwhile (Blanchard, K. & Bowles, S. 1998).

These reforms are about looking to do something about education. This emphasis is on 'looking' to do, not 'doing'. Make no mistake about it, these reforms are about political spin (and reducing total expenditure on education and training in Tasmania) and not about supporting ALL Tasmania access affordable and equitable education and training. If the Tasmanian government was serious about ensuring our children leave school with appropriate qualifications that allow for future pathways, it would have approached the process totally differently.

The '2008 Annual national report of the Australian VET system', quietly released on the DEEWR website last December, reveals there were over 40,000 unsuccessful applications for post-school VET - up 3700 on the previous year and almost 5000 on the year before .....The report, which focuses on government-supported VET – any training by TAFEs and government-funded training by private or community providers – also shows that expenditure rates have continued to decline across the country. An average of $13.10 per hour was spent on government-funded VET in 2008, down 11 per cent from the $14.80 spent four years earlier....."But funding for student learning is declining despite the rhetoric about greater investment. The DEEWR report uses Orwellian language to describe this as greater efficiency rather than cutbacks by stealth. In the end, this must affect quality......

“In most sustainability and business plans of TAFE institutes, polytechnics and colleges across Australia, the government-funded component is diminishing on an annual basis" said CEO Wayne Collyer of Polytechnic West.

Why the Reform? (source)

Tasmania Tomorrow is a Tasmanian-government experiment* to improve the post-secondary education experience of Tasmanians. This initiative commenced 1 January 2009, and includes the restructuring of Senior Secondary Colleges and TAFE Tasmania. The restructuring will take place over a period of time, to enable institutes to come on board with the initiative when their local community is ready, with an expectation that all colleges will have made the transition in time for the start of the 2011 school year.^[1]

The institutes that will come out of this initiative are:

• The Tasmanian Academy - this institute will focus on academic learning, with a curriculum and academic pathway for Year 11 and 12 students seeking university entrance.

• The Tasmanian Polytechnic - this institute will focus on practical learning, with a vocational pathway, supported by academic courses as well, for both Year 11/12 and mature-age students seeking possible employment outcomes or university articulation. Career changers and return to the workforce students would also attend the Polytechnic. (It has been indicated that there will be a priority enrolment at the Tasmanian Polytechnic with 'entitled' students (read Grade 11 & 12 students) having the highest funding priority. See Frequently Asked Questions for further details.)

• The Tasmanian Skills Institute - this institute will focus on skills development for employees in enterprises, in line with their enterprise’s skills needs. (This statement is not 100% correct. There are examples of employees having to go to the Tasmania Polytechnic because The Tasmanian Skills Institute could not make money from their course.) Make no mistake about, the Tasmanian Skills Institute is about making money from education and training. It is not funded by Skills Tasmania to improve society through affordable and equitable education and training (despite having the majority of traditional trades staff with the skill and experience to provide the training required by industry.

 See a brief article about the changes from The Australian, 24 Jan 2009.

"The Tasmanian Tomorrow reforms, he says, are the supply side of the equation. 'That is, provide better pathways for kids in more interesting setting, with real work component, with better pathways to university, with better pathways to further education'.

'The demand side is about Guaranteed Future. That's about extending the Year Ten year through until the end of the year, making a compulsory learning age of 17, providing pathway planning for all Year Eight, Nine, Ten students. '  

'The Skills Connections (Tasmanian Skills Insititute) element is about spending more public money on providing courses that are going to make  the difference in our economy, and therefore providing the most opportunities. We're doing a ten year skills plan for Tasmania so that we can actually start to plan out how that spend is going to happen and where it's going to make the most difference, focusing on industry sectors that are going to make the most difference."

"They're all the things we can do as public policy. But mostly what needs to happen in Tasmania is a cultural change, that's been built up over our 200 years of history. We were an agricultural society, so going past Grade Nine didn't matter becuase you worked on Dad's farm - and Dad didn't go to school past Grade Nine, and Dad's dad didn't go to school past Grade Nine, so why bother? And that culture still permeates." 

Premier David Bartlett, page 5 UTas Alumni News Issue 35, March 2009

 Read what TAFE TAsmania told their 2008 students......here

Was this necessary?

In a word, NO ! - It is well recognised that students drop out of school or education for a number of reasons.

The recent Grattan Report has found that 30 % of Australian Grade 9 students only have very basic literacy skills. Ironic isn't it, that this 30% figure is similar to Tasmania's Grade 10 - 11 retention figure of 30%.

If the Premier had bothered to ask the Tasmanian community what they thought the issues on student retention were, he would have been told exactly the same thing. Thirty percent of out Tasmanian students and more in district high schools are illiterate for the 21st century. International research has found what we all know, students don't hang around school if they cannot read, write, comprehend and use mathematics to access numeracy tasks. (This is why quick fixes like extending the school leaver age through legislation is and will be a failure - even when teachers are told to dumb down their courses so that everyone can win a prize!)

"Low academic achievement (Pienaar, 2006; Marks, 2007) and overall motivation for schooling / education (Dowson, et al. (2005) are major drivers for students leaving school early." source

 "Efforts to increase the school leaving age will further mask unemployment levels in the short term." Dr Lucas Walsh, Director or Research, The Foundation for Young Australian.

 

"The plateau in attainment is due in large part to ingrained low engagement in and aspirations for education in some communities.  It is proving difficult to continue to raise attainment because it is proving difficult to change deep-seated cultural differences in attitudes to learning." Learning from the Extremes - Charles Leadbeater and Annika Wong (2010)

"Weaker literacy skills lead to disengagement, which leads to poor school achievement--which ultimately leads to dropping out. These, however, are only school-related problems; this achievement deficit has far-reaching ripples. Consider these facts: Adolescent boys make up the largest group of dropouts and delinquents, which makes them vulnerable to underemployment and unemployment and, far worse, puts them at a higher risk of becoming criminal offenders." To Be a Boy, To Be a Reader William Brozo : International Reading Association 

 

However, the history of Australian education is that inequalities are reproduced through education. Wave upon wave of research reveals that low socio-economic groups, young Indigenous people and young people in rural and remote areas of Australia are less well-served by our education system than others (Teese & Lamb, 2003). Recent initiatives to increase rates of educational participation are motivated by a desire to see that all students have the benefits of an education. But in our socially and economically divided society, simply pressuring young people into spending time in institutions that they do not relate to is not likely to create the desired improvements. Connecting young people who are disengaged from education to formal learning often confronts what Massey (2005) calls ‘the facts of difference’. By this, she means the tangible ways in which schools fail to acknowledge historical legacies of disadvantage (for example, reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians).Page 34 http://research.acer.edu.au/aer/9

Parties urged to improve school retention rates

The Tasmanian Council of Social Service (TASCOSS) has asked the state's political parties to be up-front about their intentions for the public education system.

TASCOSS spokesman Tom Muller says focus needs to move to the whole system and not just on secondary grades and the Tasmania Tomorrow changes.

Mr Muller says poor retention rates and results begin earlier than Year 10.

"From our perspective we just need to have a debate that starts looking at the education system from kindergarten onwards," he said.

"We have got to have a look at what's happening in our primary schools and we've got to have all the political parties talking about not just what's happening in years 11 and 12 but start telling Tasmanian parents and students what they're going to do to ensure that school is a place where kids want to be."  source

 

However, the history of Australian education is that inequalities are reproduced through education. Wave upon wave of research reveals that low socio-economic groups, young Indigenous people and young people in rural and remote areas of Australia are less well-served by our education system than others (Teese & Lamb, 2003). Recent initiatives to increase rates of educational participation are motivated by a desire to see that all students have the benefits of an education. But in our socially and economically divided society, simply pressuring young people into spending time in institutions that they do not relate to is not likely to create the desired improvements.

Connecting young people who are disengaged from education to formal learning often confronts what Massey (2005) calls ‘the facts of difference’. By this, she means the tangible ways in which schools fail to acknowledge historical legacies of disadvantage (for example, reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians). Touching the Future: Building skills for life and work Johanna Wyn, Australian Council for Educational Research, Australian Education Review http://research.acer.edu.au/aer/9  First published 2009

 

"Students' social backgrounds have a greater influence on educational results than in higher performing countries such as Finland and Canada. ‘Investing in Teacher Quality: Doing What Matters Most’, written by Stephen Dinham, Lawrence Ingvarson and Elizabeth Kleinhenz 

 

Read more this link  

The suggested and preferred educational model is to develop Tasmanian high schools into a Grade 7 -12 institutions.  All other Australian states have this model (the ACT is not a state last time I checked!). The Academy / Polytechnic / Skills Institute model was chosen because of a number of reasons, some budgetary, some ego and some 'Yes Minsiter' bureaucrats who saw the opportunity to climb the promotion ladder and be paid more!  This model was not supported by any research...we are still waiting Mr Bartlett...........anytime now will be fine............

So the colleges and TAFE Tasmania were seen as easier targets.....and the legislation passed with a bit of articulated incompetence .

It is interesting to note that the Tasmanian community were told lies about the merits of the three institution model......................

At last year's national AATE/ALEA Literacy and English Conference held in Hobart from 10-12 July, two international keynote speakers expressed their opposition to the separation of 16 and 17 year old students into technical and academic streams as in Tasmania Tomorrow. Pirjo Sinko, the Counsellor of Education for the Finnish National Board of Education, said that Finland’s education system leads the world and it would never introduce a system like Tasmania Tomorrow that required students to make a choice  between academic and technical education because they were still too young. She also said that the proponents of Tasmania (Mr Bartlett) had misrepresented the Polytechnic system in Finland because students entered the polytech system when they were eighteen years old ie after they completed Year 12 of comprehensive education.

“Finland as a society has a positive attitude towards education. Only about one per cent of an age cohort are left without a comprehensive school leaving certificate, and half of these acquire it later in one way or another and possibly also some form of further qualification,” Minister of Education of Finland, Henna Virkkunen

AND THE LIES - The Tasmanian Polytechnic CEO is on the record as saying......McLennan said the changes borrowed from overseas models. “Looking at Finland, Ireland, Singapore and other places that have gone down a similar path, they’ve engaged many more people. Because they’re offering diversity in learning opportunities, rather than a one-size-fits-all model – which has been pretty much the history of the senior colleges and TAFEs in Tasmania, and hasn’t necessarily given us the results we want. source

David Pearson, Dean of the Graduate School of Education and Professor of Language and Literacy, Society and Culture at Berkeley said that a better alternative to Tasmania's polytechnic model would be academies that prepare students for a technical career but do not give up on academic courses. "It assumes that kids at a certain age have a clear idea of what they want to do for the next 10 or 12 years and a lot of kids just don't know," he said. see more here...

 

Data from PISA suggests that there is no clear statistical relation between the degree of institutional differentiation of school systems (the use of tracking and streams in the school system) and average student performance. There is, however, a clear statistical correlation between the degree of institutional differentiation on the one hand, and variance in student performance on the other hand.Explaining Student Achievement – Danish Technological Institute 2005 http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/5/45/35920726.pdf  More at this link

What are the problems?

Wright said the union also had concerns about the fundamental approach. “There’s no evidence to show this will work. How are we going to measure whether it’s working? If you want to improve retention, you do your work very early on – before students stop succeeding, before they become disengaged. It’s very hard to get them back once they become disengaged.” source

The Tasmania Tomorrow implementation was rushed with no adequate planning, including the lack of implementation risk assessment taking place. Someone had a big idea, but didn't not worry about the detail. This didn't matter, Tasmanian taxpayers have plenty of money for a trial and error approach. 

Urgency was replaced by haste and the results are education and training systems in disarray. Effective systems allow teachers to education our next generation with direction and purpose.

The AEU's observation is that the Tasmanian Polytechnic has inherited TAFE Tasmania business systems (including an obese middle & upper management structure), while the Tasmanian Academy uses similar structures to their old college structures. (this is why there are so few Tasmanian Academy issues compared to that of the Tasmanian Polytechnic and Tasmanian Skills Institute and I quote a Tasmanian Polytechnic Change Leader "looking for someone in the Polytechnic who would consider acting as the Poly's AEU rep to assist her as the issues, problems, award and structure differ so much from the Academy)."

Granted that the reforms included a three year implementation timeline, many of the issues have resulted due to a lack of consultation with those at the coal face and reactive management techniques. This model contradicts a proven model by Michael Fullen.

Another major problem is that although the Polytechnic CEO, Belinda McLennan, keeps saying that secondary college pedagogies and pastoral care programs will form the basis of teaching and learning programs in the Polytechnic and that former college teachers will be important in providing professional learning about these TQA Foundation subjects in which college pedagogies are embedded, they have been allowed to disappear, and former college teachers are being forced to adopt TAFE teaching methods and practices, developed by Polytechnic managers that currently do not meet teacher registration criteria, as defined by the Tasmanian Teacher Registration Board.

Student Retention - An observation

One of the main reasons sprouted time and time again to support the PY 10 reforms relates to 'student retention'. The figures a correct. Retention was low in Tasmania and is historic. There are two main reasons for this history.

1. Students, that due to family background, see no point to further education and most probably will not seek employment that requires a high level of education. This is a generational issue that needs to be approached from a whole of society position. Hoping a 'carrot' will re-engage this type of student demonstrates a sad understanding of the causes of retention by Mr Bartlett and other 'leaders'.

"The plateau in attainment is due in large part to ingrained low engagement in and aspirations for education in some communities.  It is proving difficult to continue to raise attainment because it is proving difficult to change deep-seated cultural differences in attitudes to learning." Learning from the Extremes - Charles Leadbeater and Annika Wong (2010) page 10

2. Availability of jobs. If you review the past 8 years of Tasmania's economy, you will see that there has been a high demand for employees due to favorable economic conditions.  It stands to reason that if you have not enjoyed your past 11 years of schooling, you will not hang around in education if there is a job available. And this is what has occured. The Global Financial Crisis has resulted in a significant reduction in non skilled jobs available and as a result students have remained in the eduaction system. The GFC's timing has been VERY convenient for Premier Bartlett and Mr Smyth and their PY 10 reforms. If 2009 student retention increases, it has more to do with the GFC than a more relevant and engaging pathway provided by the Tasmanian Polytechnic.   

Before these sweeping reforms were begun, you would have thought a more target response would have been used. Not only would this type of support would have helped those communities most in need, this approach would have been fare more cost effective than the sweeping, one size fits all approach to fixing the retension issue. Retention data by region is easily obtained. Why wasn't this data used to inform what and where community need was most great? (it is obvious that these reforms have nothing to do with 'retention'. Rather, they are designed to clean out the educational cupboards, in a slight of hand way.)

 You will notice from the above chart that the blue line started to head downwards from 2004. This downwards trend can be directly related to economic prosperity in the state during this time.  2010 ABS retention statistics should indicate a blue line upward trend about the same time as the global Financial Crisis (GFC) occured in 2008. This has also occured in the USA. See report at this link. CEO of the Tasmanian Academy also acknolwdged that the GFC has influence students returning to education.

No doubt, Premier Bartlett will spruke that 'his' PY10 reforms have had a hand in the blue line upward trend when it is published by the ABS in 2010. If this is the case, we could also contibute Labor's mismanagement of the Tasmanian Education portfolio to cause the downward trend from 2004.  If governments could change trend data so easily, why don't they do this globally? Because, as any educated person knows, governments are only a servants. The master is the global market and big business. Goverments can only react to what business does or wants. S

Foundation for Young Australians - How young people are faring '09  

see also Black, R.

It is also interesting to note that.......

What really cements the case for a retention whitewash is the recent OECD report on economic prosperity through a country's educational obtainment. The OECD has found that "The relationship between cognitive skills and economic growth has now been demonstrated in a range of studies". Page 13 It goes on to claim that "it is the quality of learning outcomes, not the length of schooling, which makes the difference".

In the developed world, better schools, on their own, will not break through the ingrained cultures of low aspiration and ambition that underlie persistent inequalities in educational performance. Nor will traditional schools provide the 21st century skills and capabilities people will need to work in an innovation-driven economy, saturated with new technology, in which participation and collaboration will be ubiquitous.

For that reason, societies will need to invest more in the other three innovation strategies outlined in this paper. They will need to:

• Supplement schools with innovative approaches to community and family-based learning of the  kind that Reggio Emilia, Harlem Children’s Zone, and Pratham have pioneered.
• Reinvent schools to provide many more diverse kinds of learning.
• Transform learning by providing alternatives to school using the “pull” approaches pioneered by  social entrepreneurs, particularly those that deploy new technologies. Learning from the Extremes - Charles Leadbeater and Annika Wong (2010)

Researchers using Relative Risk Aversion theory to explain the continued association between social class and higher education argue that inequalities in educational attainment persist because students are more concerned with avoiding downward mobility than with achieving upward mobility (Breen & Goldthorpe 1997; Goldthorpe 1996; Goldthorpe 2007; Goldthorpe & Breen 2007; Holm & Jaeger 2008). Breen and Goldthorpe (1997: 283) argue that parents seek to ensure that their children ‘acquire a class position at least as advantageous as that from which they originate’. Van de Werfhorst and Hofstede (2007: 403) tested RRA theory finding that children from all social backgrounds were equally concerned with maintaining their social position and avoiding downward mobility. Page 6 http://cepr.anu.edu.au/pdf/DP637.pdf

That is, if the costs associated with university fees and resources, foregone earnings and the risk of failure, outweigh the benefits of moving into a higher social class there is little incentive for working class students to pursue higher education (Holm & Jaeger 2008: 200). Page 6 http://cepr.anu.edu.au/pdf/DP637.pdf

Maximally Maintained Inequality theory argues that before the impact of social class on educational attainment can be reduced, ‘saturation’ among the privileged class needs to be achieved (Raferty & Hout 1993: 57). Therefore, educational expansion will not necessarily reduce educational inequality. If the increase in opportunities only allows more students from the privileged class to enter higher education, there will be no change in the relative proportions of students from the various social class positions (Arum et al. 2007: 31). An increase in the number of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds will only occur when all of the students from the privileged class are accommodated and supply of university places continues to exceed demand. That is, when ‘saturation’ is reached and the expanding sector needs to attract greater numbers of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds to fill universities. Page 7 http://cepr.anu.edu.au/pdf/DP637.pdf

RRA theory predicts that people will only invest in their education to avoid downward mobility (Breen & Goldthorpe 1997; Goldthorpe 1996; Goldthorpe & Breen 2007). Students from the privileged class have higher educational aspirations than students from the working class because they need to study longer to acquire the credentials required to maintain their social class position. Putting these two theories together can explain why the expansion of higher education has not negated the relationship between parent’s education and child’s education and why women have been taking up higher education in increasing numbers. Page 17 http://cepr.anu.edu.au/pdf/DP637.pdf

Retention rates increased dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s and by 2006, 75 percent of students completed high school (ABS 2007). In 2006, the completion rate for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds was 59 percent whereas around 78 percent of students from high socioeconomic backgrounds completed high school (Bradley et al. 2008: 27). page 5 http://cepr.anu.edu.au/pdf/DP637.pdf

Push to keep kids in school could backfire

Posted Fri Apr 30, 2010 5:49am AEST

An education expert says she is worried the push to keep young people in school longer could turn some off the entire education system for life.

It has been one year since the Federal Government, along with state and territory leaders, agreed to a national target of a 90 per cent year 12 retention rate by 2015.

The plan, known as the "learn or earn" scheme, is a push to get all Australians under the age of 25 either working, studying or training.

Dr Kitty te Riele told a public forum at the University of Technology Sydney last night that raising the school leaver age will not have the desired effect.

"If you force kids to stay in school who would rather leave, then it can turn what can be fairly neutral feelings about education into really negative feelings, and a wish never, ever to return to education at all," she said.

Dr te Riele says the school system needs to become more flexible.

"So that if young people for some reason leave the education system for a while, we have pathways that get them back into the education system at a time that suits them," she said. 

Students’ identities and community membership—including the attitudes and experiences of their families and communities—contribute to their behaviour and beliefs about undertaking formal education and training. Understanding these influences is a key element in successfully engaging rural and regional learners in education.

Students are likely to succeed at their studies when their families and communities support their education.

Learners who successfully reconcile their studies with their identity and their community membership make use of a range of strategies. These include: accessing a supportive and recognised group in the local community; negotiating their study off campus; negotiating practical components in a known workplace, with local experts; and rehearsing ways to explain their study to their peers and community.

 

Reluctant learners: Their identities and educational experiences by Ruth Wallace

 * The term "experiment" was used by TOM KARMEL, (Managing Director for the NATIONAL CENTRE FOR VOCATIONAL EDUCATION RESEARCH ) guest speaker at the Polytechnic Education Conference on 8 May 2008 at Bellerive, Hobart. See paper at this link (page 3)