Education debate: Should Year 7 be left in primary school or move up into secondary?
EXPECTING to face resistance, Endeavour College planned to add two Year 7 classes this year but ended up with four – and enrolments for next year are already full. VOTE NOW
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READ DEBATE BELOW: Should Year 7 move up into high schools?
ENDEAVOUR College was expecting some reluctance from parents when it added Year 7s this year.
The Lutheran secondary school at Mawson Lakes planned for two Year 7 classes but, to its surprise, ended up with four – and its enrolments are already full for next year.
Principal Heather Vogt says so far the shift has been a great success, evidenced by the results of surveys done at the end of Term 2.
“We were really extremely overwhelmed by the positive response of both students and parents,” she said.
Endeavour is among the growing number of independent colleges moving Year 7s into high school in South Australia, while half of all Year 7s in the Catholic system are already taught in middle or high school settings.
Catholic Education SA this week wrote to parents reconfirming its decision, revealed by The Advertiser last year, to move most remaining Year 7s into secondary schools in 2019 and 2020.
The shift in the non-government sector leaves SA’s public system even more isolated as the only one in the country that mostly keeps Year 7s in primary schools.
The Opposition favours the move to high schools but Education Minister Susan Close says there is no evidence to justify the $300 million it would cost to build the classrooms needed to accommodate Year 7s.
More than half of respondents to a Sunday Mail survey last year backed the move of Year 7s to high school, up from about one in three the previous year.
Endeavour College made a collective decision about the change with its three main feeder primary schools four years ago.
“It gave us that period of time to plan and properly prepare for shifting the Year 7s (this year), allowing us to consider the concerns of parents and prepare for the programs we wanted to run for our middle years students,” Ms Vogt said.
Ms Vogt said many Year 7s who turned 13 by the end of the year needed to be with other adolescents and older peers, while the Australian Curriculum had many subjects aligned to a secondary setting.
“It’s much more advantageous for them to have laboratories and things like that. Kids enjoy going to design technology and food technology in specialist facilities,” she said.
“(And) Year 7 maths starts to demand the skill set of secondary teachers.”
Ms Vogt said students also benefited from the passion specialist teachers brought to their subjects.
Endeavour helps Year 7s transition to secondary schooling by keeping them with a “core” teacher for about two-thirds of classes, reducing to one-third in Year 8.
They are part of mixed Year 7-12 home groups so they get to know older students, and are mentored by Year 11s in peer support programs.
“It’s amazing how quickly those (Year 7) students integrated with the others,” Ms Vogt said.
THE CASE FOR
PETER MADER
SA SECONDARY PRINCIPALS ASSOCIATION PRESIDENT
IMAGINE if our two South Australian football teams signed up to the national AFL competition all those years ago and chose to play to a different set of rules from their interstate competitors. It would be laughable! Yet such a folly has been allowed to occur in our state’s education landscape.
When SA signed up to the national curriculum it understood that Year 7 was a contested space. Governments in Queensland and Western Australia recognised this, and moved quickly to address the disparity between themselves and other states and territories.
This leaves SA as the only jurisdiction to retain Year 7 predominantly in the primary years (acknowledging that some of our schools create a Year 7 secondary experience within a Reception to Year 12 model, or in a few stand-alone Year 7 to 12 schools).
So, why did Queensland and Western Australia align with other states and territories and make Year 7 the first year of secondary schooling rather than the final year of primary schooling?
First and foremost, it was due to the demands of the Year 7 national curriculum, particularly in specialist areas of maths, science and the more practically oriented subjects such as technology.
Secondly, there was the expertise of teachers to confidently provide that specialist instruction.
Thirdly, it was their understanding of the emotional, physical, personal and social development of a 12-year-old Generation Z student. They recognised that the typical adolescent experience of the information and technology age has produced an increased readiness for junior secondary education.
Finally, in Queensland anyway, it was the compelling feedback from parents and students involved in the 20-school Pilot Program (2012-14), in which the Year 7 in secondary arrangement was so successfully trialled.
However, such a primary-to-secondary transformation would not have been possible without a significant infrastructure investment ($328 million in Queensland, $265 million in WA).
In February 2016, the board of the South Australian Secondary Principals Association formalised its position on the Year 7 matter.
That position was informed by our growing appreciation that having a national agreement on a national curriculum should logically extend to having each member state and territory provide the same fundamental set of conditions for the teaching and learning asked of it by that curriculum.
This includes a Year 7 specialised secondary experience so that all Australian students, regardless of state or territory, can experience six years of high school education as preparation for transition to university, further training or employment.
THE CASE AGAINST
PAM KENT
SA PRIMARY PRINCIPALS ASSOCIATION PRESIDENT
STUDENT learning must be the foremost consideration in the debate over the best place for Year 7 students.
Middle schooling philosophies and pedagogies that specifically target early adolescence must be the focus of this debate – it’s not simply about moving a group of students and having the facilities to cater for them.
Early adolescence begins at about the age of 11 and is a period marked by physical, psychological and academic changes. The middle schooling model addresses the educational needs of students between about 10 and 15 years of age.
With a few exceptions, SA government schools do not have specific middle schooling campuses or clearly defined pedagogies to fully accommodate and address the needs of pre-adolescent/adolescent students. If they did, this issue would not be as controversial.
The current research that compares the learning outcomes of Year 7 students in primary and secondary schools is inconclusive. Other arguments against moving Year 7s are:
SOME small primary schools would be at risk of closure;
THE move would be cost-prohibitive – at least $300 million – for setting up middle schooling facilities in all secondary schools and providing the necessary professional development for teachers, including training secondary teachers to teach 11- and 12-year-olds;
IT IS important to educate the whole child, socially and emotionally, and primary schools do this well, especially with the close relationships formed between students and their class teacher;
QUALITY learning is about effective pedagogy, not about specialist facilities, and Year 7s are already involved in quality maths and science programs;
NOT all secondary schools have room for more students;
MANY parents are concerned at the idea of their children going to secondary school so young, and some children would not be emotionally or physically developed enough;
SOME Year 7s would not cope well with moving from class to class, being split from friendship groups and not developing a close relationship with a class teacher, risking their disengagement.
However, the SA Primary Principals Association acknowledges there are arguments in favour of moving Year 7s, such as aligning with other states and the greater federal funding that is attached to secondary students. And some students would relish moving from class to class.
The reality is that shifting Year 7s away from primary schools will inevitably happen in SA. But it would be ideal for the change to be strongly focused on effective pedagogy and to be gradual, and not used for political point scoring.