Casting a wider net.
Some brief thoughts on the National School Reform Agreement review.
Listen to the podcast segment of Ideology in Education (at 5:52) based on this blog post for the Teacher’s Education Review below 👇.
You may or may not be aware of the Productivity Commission’s recent review of the Nation School Reform Agreement (NSRA). The review aims to assess the effectiveness of the NSRA in meeting its objective to see Australian schools provide high quality and equitable education for all students.
I have previously posted about the Productivity Commission. More recently, I have done my best to engage with their recent work by providing feedback to their 5-year Productivity Inquiry Interim Report.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has been quick to address the review in a media release and a number of interviews (you can review these here).
There are a great many things that one could focus on when reviewing this report, but I have decided to centre on one intriguing aspect. The (re)turn to wellbeing.
Casting a wider net.
When it comes to educational policy documentation such as this, education is often framed in limited ways. Schooling is commonly described as a means of achieving particular outcomes for the functioning of society (such as industry and the economy) and is subsequently held accountable for these.
However, what I find interesting in the NSRA review, is the consideration of broader aspects important in the education of young people rather than simply improving results. In particular, references to the importance of well-being as an important educational outcome in its own right for our students is a welcome change from the narrow focus of performance in international (PISA, TIMMS) and national (NAPLAN) standardised tests that so often dominate Australian education discourse.
Cynically, we could consider this move as just another attempt to control a variable that is hindering progress on international education league tables, but the report does make a clear value statement that wellbeing is in fact ‘a desired outcome in itself, as well as a means of supporting student learning’ (PC, 2023, p. 9).
I most certainly agree.
It is time to consider what is desirable.
In the current climate of Australian education where what is valued in schooling is at best assumed, it is quite rare to see documents such as this explicitly making a judgment about the value of wellbeing regardless of any reference to external evidence to justify its worth.
What I find encouraging here is that although we may not even know the full impact of initiatives that seek to support individual wellbeing, there is a sense in this report that even if student learning performance does not increase, wellbeing is still valued as an important aspect of education and schooling. In fact, it is a desired outcome of schooling.
It is my hope that this may be the start of more conversations about what is desirable in education, rather than what is simply effective or “evidence-based”.
I might be a little optimistic. Time will tell.
References
Productivity Commission (PC). 2022. Review of the National School Reform Agreement: Study report. Retrieved from Study Report - Review of the National School Reform Agreement - Productivity Commission (pc.gov.au).
Would be great if we could do this, our Vic DOE has listed 3 aims of schooling - Achievement, Engagement and Wellbeing. My school was sort of alternative and focused more on Engagement &Wellbeing & we attracted many students from neighboring schools where the focus was myopically on Achievement. However, regional managers put pressure on us to change our focus to Achievement. In those reviews it was apparent only certain measures of achievement mattered i.e., Y12 & wellbeing/engagement did not matter. In addition, going through all the surveys on engagement/wellbeing I realized we need some way to robustly measure these. The overall Student Survey does not capture accurately, in our case DOE Student survey was not gr8 (less than 50% student completed it too) whereas the PIVOT survey's focusing on the specific teacher for a specific class were outstanding (95% students completed) - guess which survey the regional boffins used? There maybe some hope with Jason Clare - https://www.miragenews.com/half-billion-dollar-investment-into-student-939644/