Long time no squabble Bronwyn. Welcome back. Hope you hang around.

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Could the biggest problem of all in our education system be just the same problem as with many other services and infrastructure?

That is; funding not keeping up with rapidly increasing demand.

For all the increases in funding being poured into education, and all other services, our rapidly increasing population is just overwhelming it. We are basically just pouring money into the expansion of education services for ever-more people, without increasing the quality for the existing population.

When things start to become stressed and appear ominous, we start to get all sorts of inequalities appearing, with people looking for other ways to fund themselves, some of which might be a bit unsavoury.

I’d suggest that if we were to reduce immigration down to a very low level and head towards a stable population, our education system would start to come good, simply because the money being poured into it would then have a real chance of resulting in improvements, instead of tail-chasing.

If we just continue to accept that the demand for education services will rapidly increase with no end in sight, then there is little that we can do to improve the whole system. The best we could hope for is some improvements in some places, in a totally unequal manner, which would only lead to greater tensions in places that get left out.

Ludwig, there is more to it than 'overpopulation'.

I agree with Chris Bonnor's take here:

"How did we get here? We are almost three decades into creating a lopsided free market of diversity, competition and choice - the legacy of Milton Friedman, his early apostles Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and their descendants, including Tony Blair and Bill Gates.

"The free market was supposed to deliver quality for all because parents could vote with their feet and underperforming schools would lift their game. The My School website is largely built around these assumptions.

"It hasn't worked. True, we have a wide choice of schools - at least for those with the resources to choose - but school competition has not delivered any significant increases in quality. Nor has it delivered better schools: when all other factors are equal (which they aren't), PISA shows no significant difference between government, Catholic and independent schools. What a let-down - we have invested years extolling the virtues of one type of school over another, now to discover it would not matter if we were not creating clusters of advantage and disadvantage."

See the whole lot:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/misguided-schools-market-sees-us-slip-down-the-ranks-20101208-18pq0.html

But Bonnor omits Hawke-Keating, Beazley, Latham, Rudd, Gillard and the entire ACTU from that charge of being Friedmanites, which I would add in.

I agree with all of your viewpoints Antiseptic and regarding your wonderful donation gestures [this happened to a trades girlfriend/Mum of mine when my kids were in primary school] too.

She offered to fully landscape the school and build necessary items to benefit 500 school children and their teachers. All offers refused and years passed whereby nothing was done thereafter.

As for teachers, some exceptional most giving intelligent teachers with common sense, others should not have chosen the vocation or realised down the track to exit.

Forrest

"It is good to see that after eleven months to the day Bronwyn has returned to her keyboard on OLO."

Ah, dear Forrest, it's good to see you're still in such fine form!

And you too, Antiseptic and Ludwig - still both masters at manoeuvring the discussion to accommodate your pet topics I see!

Thanks for the welcome though guys - and yes it's nice to be back.

Lexi

Lovely posts - a familiar style - mmmn ...

The Blue Cross

Loved hearing Judy King on RN the other day too. I agree, we need more leaders of her calibre in education today.

"Yes, never mind the 'invasion' by boat, there is a very healthy invasion via our uni system."

Bit concerned at the use of the term 'invasion' here.

Agree with many of your observations on education in Queensland though. Are the education systems in other states really any different I wonder.

Many good points made in this thread.

Hasbeen

Glad to see you have all the answers as usual. Nothing has changed.

Yes, fancy thinking that decades of teaching might actually qualify someone to manage a school. How silly is that.

we are unique, I have wondered about the schools' reason for not accepting the donations. Perhaps they have some policy or other that I'm not aware of, but if so, it seems pretty poorly considered.

I will make a correction to something I said earlier. The chaplain at my daughter's school is not also the guidance officer. Apparently my daughter was approached by the chaplain a couple of times to offer her his services but she has not taken him up on it. I met the chaplain at a parent/teacher night and I may have misinterpreted some of his remarks on the night. Sorry if I gave anyone conniptions.

Ludwig, I don't think the problems with education have much to do with population size. The original poster made a far stronger case for the culpable role of teachers with his/her outburst in their second effort. What a revelation of character that was. When added to the minimal literacy displayed by the same poster, what chance would a child have of receiving a high-quality education? Obviously the contributions of other older, wiser teachers like otokonoko show that there are dedicated people around, but they tend to be swamped by the careerists and the time-servers in my experience.

Bronwyn, I prefer to think of myself as raising subjects of personal interest within the context of the discussion. Soemtimes those personal interests strike a chord with others; other times, sadly, they don't.

Still, I don't mind being a master at maneuvring, as long as it's not the maneuvre of running away with my tail between my legs.

Antiseptic, good to get to the bottom of the dual roles.

However, you still raise serious issues there.

You clearly had no information on the chaplain, their role, and whether or not your child should have access to them.

Chaplains are not to tout for business as you described.

You must find out if a consent form was ever issued and signed.

Probably not, but that is a requirement.

My school knew nothing about them, so I wrote my own very clear one and sent it to the principal and regional office.

Next thing they were issuing consent forms about three years after the policy requiring them to.

Bronwyn, there is an invasion of our public schools going on, via Kids Hope, a Baptist program bought from the USA, designed to worm xtian 'mentors' into schools to work with lone students, particularly the 'halt, lame and infirm' as the Book says.

On top of that crew, there are all the Hill$ongites who creep around our children, talking up Jesus and taking girls off to 'Shine' parties at the local churches.

This is how Bligh and Gillard see the future of education in this state, poorly trained teachers, untrained principals, brain dead HQ managers supplemented by the church and parachurch bodies, on the cheap, in exchange for opening the doors of our public schools to the recruiting teams of evangelisers and proselytisers.

Plus the school chaplains, a bunch of untrained people who refuse to follow any policies.
You may well approve of that run down of education, I do not.