NAPLAN paints a dark picture of our kid’s future
If there’s one thing parents should take away from this week’s disastrous NAPLAN results, it’s that the way forward for our children is even more unclear than ever before, writes Louise Roberts.
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While digesting your child’s NAPLAN results, it’s likely you had a moment when you wondered: what is next?
The NSW stats tell us that our foundations are rotten. That our students are no better than 10 years ago because fewer in Years 5, 7 and 9 made the national minimum standard for punctuation and grammar compared to 2008 when the controversial tests began.
A minimum standard in reading is also down in Years 7 and 9.
Experts have blamed this year’s NAPLAN embarrassment on reliance of the auto-correct tool and skim-reading on screens.
Systems telling our kids they’re wrong — rather than them learning it the hard way — are doing a massive disservice to our kids.
And so to the parent fantasy that after HSC there’s university and a fat salary because that’s the trajectory our kids deserve. Degrees and jobs aplenty once they’ve chucked a mortar board in the air and done the obligatory gap year around Asia. Fantasyland indeed.
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When it comes to university education equals employment in this country for our kids, it’s now dangerous territory to assume any guarantees.
Shambolic NAPLAN results are the lit match we are tossing on the bonfire of our kids’ employment future. In fact, I cannot recall ever seeing the term NAPLAN without the word ‘fail’ next to it.
Without a solid educational foundation, university is a waste of time, energy and cash. Both for the taxpayer and the individual.
Figures also revealed the Federal Government has budgeted a mighty sum of $21.4 billion funding for state, Catholic and independent schools.
It’s little wonder we have a small army of professional university students who choose to spend many years “studying”, and avoiding the leap into adult life and work. They amass HECS bills that will likely never be paid.
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And what about those who do go to university ill-equipped and fail subject after subject?
One of Gough Whitlam’s legacies, and there were many apart from that eviscerating speech about John Kerr in 1974, has been as the assumed godfather of free higher education in Australia.
Back then the arts and politics grads were playing a prominent role in the social earthquakes splintering Australia.
Whitlam, the narrative reveals, had a “genuine vision for education from the cradle to the grave … creating citizenship and opportunity for everyone was central to his thinking.”
Between that year and 1986, university fees were non-existent save for a $250 admin fee Bob Hawke introduced. The inevitable spectre of HECS was not on the horizon.
Labor’s user pays education model was crafted to accommodate cuts to government spending by pushing costs onto students. Well, their families really.
And of course Julia Gillard was to later become the godmother of the demand-driven system introduced 34 years later.
But this egalitarian movement aside, the idea that university is for everyone is fundamentally flawed and not just from an academic point of view.
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Earlier this year it was revealed that the average university student will clock up $20,303 debt with more than 150,000 graduates each $50,000 in the red.
The problem with HECS of course is that it does not live up to its promise. It doesn’t create the skills business needs because there are simply not enough jobs in elite professions which graduate qualifications supposedly match.
And so the HECS debt balloons, eventually skewering the aspiration that kids from poorer backgrounds can patronisingly ‘better themselves’ by aiming for a graduate career.
If only we embraced our trades and the vocational training system which is such a tremendous success in countries like Switzerland. There, the students are streamed into vocational or academic pathways from year 8 and the training is seen as a vital part of the Swiss economy, bereft of the snobbery you’ll often find attached to the university mission here.
From this tender age, Swiss students are also taught which careers are growing or stagnating in the academic and apprenticeship routes. Plus there’s nothing preventing vocational students from applying to university — they never see themselves as inferior.
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The Vocational Professional Education Training (VPET) system means the employer partners decide the program content to meet industry standards and match employment opportunities.
Therefore they hire a productive worker from day one, not a multi-degreed individual ‘slumming it’ in a back-up job.
Meanwhile in Australia we are still giddy about the prospect of universities enrolling according to demand.
Shouldn’t we be ploughing money into fixing our education system at the basic level? Otherwise university is nothing but an exercise in throwing good money after bad. Our children need to be prepared for everything beyond high school.
And that means being able to structure a grammatically correct sentence, read effectively and use at least basic maths.