By Robyn Grace
Senior students learning from home, four-day weeks for teachers and a shake-up of standard 9am-to-3.30pm school days are among the radical solutions being touted to better prepare young people for the outside world and deal with worsening teacher shortages.
Education experts say our secondary schooling model is outdated and stuck in a traditional structure, rather than using lessons learnt from the pandemic to keep pace with modern living.
Self-led study could help senior students prepare for the challenges of university and work, experts say.Credit: Getty
Two Catholic secondary schools will next year introduce a more flexible learning schedule, including self-led study time for senior students, but Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals president Colin Axup said government schools were hamstrung by departmental policies, which limited opportunities for change.
“There’s a reticence within our system to acknowledge that as a legitimate pathway,” Axup said.
“If we’re going to prepare students for the future, don’t we have to provide some flexible learning for them? We keep students right up until year 12, and they’re in school the whole time. And four months later, they go to uni, and we expect them to cope.
“It’s about providing the flexibility for principals and their communities to have a discussion about what works best for their students. We need to have a more flexible approach to how we offer schooling.”
Sacred Heart College in Geelong will introduce an experimental timetable next year that aims to encourage greater student independence.Credit: Eddie Jim
Victorian public schools have one of the longest school days of all OECD countries, with the average 6½ hours compared to a maximum of five hours in Finland and Estonia, which both outperform Australia in international PISA rankings.
Axup said COVID lockdowns had proven many senior schools could consider a reduction in face-to-face lesson time without a direct effect on results.
Educators say a break from the 9am-to-3.30pm, classroom-based model could better prepare students for the challenges of university and working life, and free up resources to address the worsening teacher shortage. Greater flexibility could also help retain teachers, allowing them access to four-day weeks and the remote working seen in other industries since the pandemic.
Public school job vacancies reached 1855 this month, 90 per cent more than at the start of the year.
Axup said the shortage would worsen next year, when a new workplace agreement for teachers further reduces classroom time.
He said the government needed to lead a conversation on how schools could better cater to modern students and families, while considering creative solutions to its staffing crisis.
“Principals need more flexibility to manage the crisis and more guidance from the department to enable innovation to deal with it,” he said.
Professor John Hattie, one of Australia’s most influential education academics, said the workforce problem was one of retention rather than supply, and schools needed to offer flexibility for the profession to remain appealing.
He said more teachers could be given a four-day working week with creative timetabling of non-academic subjects, as was already done in Singapore. Teacher’s aides could also relieve their workload if they were trained to help with marking and other administrative tasks.
Sacred Heart College in Geelong is one of the state’s flexible learning trailblazers.
From next year, the Catholic campus and its brother school, St Joseph’s, will transform their timetables to develop flexibility and independence from year 7. Students from year 10 will be given more self-directed lessons in an effort to prepare them for life after school. Eventually, if the data supports it, students could incorporate a day of learning from home.
Melissa Riley, deputy principal of pedagogy, learning, design and innovation, said while it could also assist with staffing, the program was introduced to teach students to be more self-sufficient and adaptable.
Students at Sacred Heart College’s learning centre.Credit: Eddie Jim
“It does seem radical, but it’s not,” she said. “I think that it’s just taken something like COVID for us to really realise that our young people are much more capable than we give them credit for. And if we give them the opportunity to move into spaces where they do have to be more independent, they may feel uncomfortable at first, but we all know that’s where learning happens ... that’s where they grow.”
Riley said many educators were talking about building in flexibility for senior students but systemic change “takes a little bravery by some schools to take that first step”.
“The nature of the education system is that it is resistant to change and it’s always been that way,” she said. “I’m really hopeful that we will start to see some really not radical, but really positive shifts happen in education.”
Dale Pearce, principal of Bendigo Senior Secondary College, said the public school had considered flexible timetabling options but legal and industrial obligations were a major obstacle.
Bendigo Senior Secondary College principal Dale Pearce.
Pearce said flexible hours could suit many students, teachers and families but as a regional school, logistics including public transport needed to be considered.
“We would absolutely be open to experimenting with different arrangements if that was possible,” he said.
VicSRC student executive committee member Oak said self-led learning would be beneficial with the transition from school to uni or work, but it could also be useful for those who didn’t learn easily in classic classroom settings.
They said flexible learning should be implemented in early high school and then expanded in senior years, so students could explore their learning needs at a younger age.
“Classrooms need to be flexible as each and every student’s learning needs may be different,” Oak said. “The main thing is helping students realise what they, as an individual need, and how to communicate and advocate for that.”
Students in public schools can access some variation to traditional schedules through VCE vocational majors, which allows them to complete schooling while spending time in paid employment.
An Education Department spokesperson said: “We have no plans to change the school day.”
Dr Emma Rowe, a senior education researcher at Deakin University, said the real issue that needed to be addressed in schools was teachers’ working conditions.
“Altering school timetables is a short-term, bandaid solution for a much bigger problem,” she said. “And allowing students their own independent learning opportunities really is a euphemism for not having teacher support.”
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