As Australia’s 4 million school students return to the classroom experts are sounding the alarm about the number of pupils failing to master basic skills. And their message to parents is to emulate the success of students from language backgrounds other than English who are outperforming their peers.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Parents really shouldn't be in the dark about just some of the problems facing our school
00:05systems. Right now, one third of students are failing to master basic skills in literacy
00:11and numeracy, and about half a million are so far behind they're in the bottom rung for
00:15performance. Now, this affects all of these students, not just the ones that have ambitions
00:20to go on to do further study. These are really basic skills, the kind of things that you
00:25need to navigate through adulthood, and the evidence is really in that if you don't master
00:29them, your life outcomes are going to suffer. We have really excellent data now that students
00:34from language backgrounds other than English are outperforming their peers. This is a consistent
00:39trend in NAPLAN and just about every other measure of performance we have, and it's a
00:43really interesting statistic because it's not the case most places in the West. In many
00:47other countries that we would compare ourselves to, students from these backgrounds often
00:52struggle to keep up, but in Australia they're outperforming their peers, even in English
00:57language assessments, and by year nine, they're one and a half years ahead in numeracy. There's
01:02a lot we can learn there. This is a big group of students. We're talking about one third
01:06of the student body in New South Wales and Victoria, the two biggest school systems,
01:11so while there's a bit of a case that drawing too many lessons from it is a generalisation,
01:17experts say that one thing many of these families have in common is that they place a huge premium
01:22on education, they value it at home, and they're highly engaged in their children's schooling,
01:27and they're urging other families to do the same as the new school year kicks off.