The Age Schools Summit LIVE updates: Grand Hyatt Melbourne hosts annual education meeting in Victoria

Thanks for joining us at The Age Schools Summit today. We hope you found the discussions interesting. Here’s a recap of some of the key things that came out of today’s event:

• The teaching shortage equates to one vacancy per school, said Education Minister Natalie Hutchins.
• Joanne Camozzato, principal of Edgars Creek Secondary College, said teaching might not attract people the way it used to. “They have friends the same age who can now work from home two days a week ... there are grads who are travelling to work 30 kilometres every day and the cost of fuel is increasing, they have tried to buy townhouses, but the interest rates are increasing.”
• Aggressive parents are pushing some teachers out of the profession. Almost one in four teachers told a recent Monash University study that they did not feel safe at work. Parents are increasingly calling in lawyers to challenge a school’s decision to suspend or expel students.
• Catholic schools are “leaning into” artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT, and the ban in state schools could be lifted.
• Teaching degree enrolments are down 15 per cent and there are still 4000 to 6000 positions available across the country.

We’ll have more stories about the summit in the coming days. Thanks for attending, reading and commenting.

Parents are increasingly calling in lawyers to challenge a school’s decision to suspend or expel students, according to Heathdale Christian College principal Yvonne Harvey.

“Parents may reach for the lawyers a lot quicker than they once would,” she said.

“Legal companies are citing an increase in parents contacting them about suspensions, detentions and expulsions... and their right of reply if the parent believes their child would not have done what the school believes they have done.”

She said forming good relationships with families helped avoid this conflict.

“Getting in early is key,” she said. “If you don’t have a relationship with a parent and something happens, the parent is going to be defensive.”

Montery Secondary College Peter Langham is speaking about the impact of COVID-19 on student behaviour at his Frankston North school.

“We are dealing with greater dysregulation,” he said.

He said the pandemic had led to an increase in domestic violence and sexual abuse in the community, making it harder for students to be engaged at school.

He said teachers needed to take more time off work when students acted out. Langham’s school uses trauma-informed positive education to support its students.

It started with a simple question: do you feel safe at work?

But the responses to the Monash University survey painted a complex and grim picture of the state of our education system, with almost one in four teachers saying they felt unsafe at school in 2020. This was up from around 19 per cent in 2019.

Monash University education expert Fiona Longmuir is presenting her latest research on teacher safety to the summit.

Here’s a taste of what some of the teachers who responded to Longmuir’s survey said:

The rules don’t really protect teachers, if a student goes crazy I am always unsure if I should try to stop them or worry that I would get in trouble from accidentally hurting them.

Parents are verbally abusive, threaten to take staff to the department, constantly say they record you etc, also threaten physical violence.

The 7000 teachers who took part in the research also put forward solutions to make their workplaces safer. They recommended reducing their workload, changing community expectations and smaller class sizes.

They’ve been rolled out in schools across the country, but experts are divided on the benefits of open-plan classrooms.

Grattan Institute education program director Jordana Hunter told the Age Schools Summit that open-plan classrooms had created an “auditory burden”, making it difficult for students to hear their peers and teachers.

“There may have been a bit of over-enthusiasm for open-plan classrooms,” said Hunter, who recently completed research on open plan classrooms.

“It is concerning when you have younger children struggling with those auditory challenges.”

But Albert Park College principal Steve Cook said he’s in favour of open-plan learning.

“One of the great things about open-plan learning is that it makes learning visible,” he said.

He said principals should be appointed to new schools at least 12 months before they’re built so they can personalise the design for their community.

We’re back from lunch and our latest panel is discussing how to seamlessly integrate vocational pathways into schools.

We’re hearing from diesel mechanic Ashley Beeby, who combined the VCE along with VET and achieved an ATAR of 95.

“Even now when people learn what my ATAR was and what my career course is they say, ‘it doesn’t make sense’,” she said.

“But it’s great to know that there are places where that perception is changing.”

She’s supportive of new reforms to vocational education in school, including the VCE Vocational Major, which has replaced VCAL. She hopes these changes help students avoid timetable clashes and give them the time they need to complete their academic and vocational studies.

Beeby had to complete work experience while on school holidays and often missed out on course work for her VCE subjects due to clashes with her VET studies.

Education Department assistant deputy secretary senior secondary pathways Scott Widmer said we need to change our idea of what success is.

“25 to 30 per cent of students go through a vocational pathway,” he said.

If you went to primary school in Victoria, chances are you spent a lot of time learning about the gold rush. Perhaps you even went on a few excursions to Sovereign Hill and panned for specks of gold?

Kids panning for gold at Sovereign HillCredit: Tamara Dean

Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority chief executive Stephen Gniel said while the gold rush is important history, it needs to be integrated carefully into the curriculum to ensure there’s not too much repetition.

“We don’t want kids doing the gold rush in year two, and then year three and then year four,” he said.

Jordana Hunter, the Grattan Institute’s education program director, is outlining the extensive work that goes into designing a curriculum.

“It takes 500 hours to create high-quality teaching material for a single subject,” she said.

“That is a lot of time and a lot of teachers don’t have anywhere near that amount of time.”

She said schools could save time by coming together and refining their existing curriculum, rather than reinventing the wheel every year.

Annabelle Marinelli, the deputy principal of Trinity Primary School in Richmond, said a good curriculum taps into the needs and interests of students.

“I think one program or one link which can be quickly accessed through social media or through Google is nothing but a quick fix. It doesn’t actually meet the needs of students.”

The discussion has once again shifted to artificial intelligence.

Margaret Vingerhoets, the literacy team leader at the Melbourne Archdiocese of Catholic Schools, said her sector was optimistic about the opportunities for AI.

Unlike state schools that have banned AI, the Catholic sector is encouraging its schools to harness the technology for teaching and assessment.

“We’re looking at how we can integrate this into our teaching and learning space in a safe, responsible and ethical way,” she said.

Deakin University education expert Lucinda McKnight said we should assume that any piece of text – unless it is written by hand or on a computer in front of us – is potentially generated by AI.

She said teachers needed to learn how to use AI so that it could be used appropriately, ethically, sensitively and creatively with their students.

Deakin University education expert Lucinda McKnight said the declining quality of student writing had coincided with the period that NAPLAN had been in place.

She said too many teachers were teaching to the test and students were not learning how to be flexible, agile writers.

Is NAPLAN “a really important tool” for assessment or a recipe for “formulaic writing”? Education experts are divided.Credit: Pat Scala

“They have not been taught to write, they have been taught to produce this formulaic writing,” she said.

But Australian Education Research Organisation chief executive Jenny Donovan said she didn’t believe NAPLAN was influencing the way writing was taught in schools.

“NAPLAN is a bogeyman with an image problem,” she said. “It’s a really important tool and opportunity to gain insight into how successful we are in teaching the curriculum.”