The Age has a piece surveying the progress of the so-called “education revolution”. As noted, there hasn’t been a lot visible on the ground yet.
But according to the article, profound changes are on the way in the primary and secondary sectors. As well as performance testing and “merit-based pay” – subjects that have been debated extensively within the Australian blogosphere in the past – one major reform is the gradual phasing-in of a national curriculum. The article suggests that this process has been proceeding relatively smoothly. However, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority’s web site doesn’t yet have much to indicate what is likely to be in that national curriculum, beyond what appears to the untrained eye to be this fairly general and bland discussion paper.
Frankly, the advantages of a national curriculum over state-based ones are less than obvious to me. But, be that as it may, does anybody have much of a sense of the likely contents of the resulting curricula? Is it going to be something that will actually improve educational outcomes in Australia’s schools, and, if so, how?
National curriculum has always seemed a bit useless to me – we’re not going to have every kid at grade five studying, say, the rum rebellion on Tuesday afternoon – its just not possible to schedule that sort of activity, and we don’t have enough library books on each topic for every grade five kid to do the same project! Meaning, when kids move schools, they will still be lost, and have the possiblity of repeating some things, and missing some parts all together.
Harmonising starting years and number of years in primary and secondary though, THAT I can see the arguments for.
You might not say that, Robert, if you have moved interstate during high school, or gone to an interstate university. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s the apocalypse currently or anything, but a national curricula and (hopefully) consistent marking review would make things a lot easier for a decent number of kids. The pain may be short-lived, but do you ever feel it so sharply than when you’re a teen?
The national Curriculum represents a shift in thinking from a “cram it all in & test” model of teaching to one which recognises that it is better to build a deep and comprehensive knowledge of fewer things. The idea is that by focusing on these few well selected “big ideas” we can teach kids how to think critically and make them self-reliant learners.
Much of the interesting detail is in the discussion papers on the individual subjects. for example In science, the reform recognises that there is a need to refashion science education so that people can make informed judgements about issues such as their own health, or climate change. To do that, people need to understand how science works, the “language” of science – or even the history of scientific thought as opposed to being able to memorise a few generic facts ( often out of context)
If you want to judge the relevance of these ideas, there is no more powerful test than how well students understand Darwin. The academic literature suggests ability to successfully recount theory of evolution or natural selection is possible for less than 10% of students. The reasons why are that not only is there little time in the curriculum for these important ideas, but that foundational concepts such as equilibrium theory have not been taught prior, and so students are likely to misinterpret what they are being taught. Spending longer on the few “big ideas” would allow students to fully explore and understand the necesary theories, testing them in practicals… rather than memorising a few facts and never understanding the fabric of the argument those facts rest in. ( Charles Darwin needed a whole book to spell out his argument- how can a teacher do it justice in 2 lessons?)
THis really is worthy of an article… ( but I am mindful that I am writing a reply
Suez: thanks very much for this.
BTW, I’d be very interested in a guest post on this topic – I was very much hoping to flush out contributions like yours!
Suez, by the way, are those subject discussion papers public? I can’t seem to find them on the ACARA website.
MsLaurie @ 1 – many parents who move interstate deliberately organise it so their children change schools at the end of the year. So we don’t need synchronisation on a daily basis, just once a year (once a term is probably asking too much).
Harmonising starting years I think is actually a much lower priority. Send the kids to school when they’re ready (physically, intellectually and emotionally) not because they’ve just got to a certain age – if anything public schools need to be more flexible about starting age, not less flexible.
patrickg @ 2 – lack of common final high school year curriculum definitely caused problems for students from interstate at uni in maths courses when I went through uni. We’d be taught things that they had already covered in year 12 and yet assumed to know things that they didn’t because we did them the previous year.
Happy to do it…. just need to know how.
If it encourages people to consider interstate universities (which it should) then it increases competition in tertiary education. That’s one obvious benefit. Better would be if we used the IB to make it easy and natural for students to consider international universities, but this is a step forward at least.
The initial rollout of the national curriculum is only up to Year 10.
From what I recall as a high school student I wasn’t overly impressed by the sound of the IB as a general-purpose school-leavers qualification. It seems to very much retain the heritage of its founding purpose – an education designed by diplomats for their kids to follow in their footsteps.
Rob, I think the papers that Suez is referring to are available in the Past Papers section of the ACARA website
http://www.acara.edu.au/engagement/past_papers.html
The Science Framing Paper is at
http://www.acara.edu.au/verve/_resources/National_Science_Curriculum-Framing_paper.pdf
The input from luminaries such as Fensham and Tytler looks promising!
Fascinating topic by the way. Would love to hear more!
Suez, given you’ve had to submit a valid email address in order to comment here, I’m sure you can expect to be contacted soon. I for one would like to hear more from someone in the know…
All our kids were educated in the NT, Vic and WA. They were lucky to be bright enough to catch up on missed bits and lucky to have a teacher mother to help with things they didn’t know. Above all they were lucky enough to have a mother who could work out what year they should be in and was able to win the argument when the new schools tried to put them in a year below the one they should have been in. We got sick of states that believed their system was better than the one we came from.
So yes, I think we need a national curriculum to help kids who do move from state to state and school to school. The risk is that we will lose the spur to experimentation that running curriculums in parallel gave us to a limited extent.
“So yes, I think we need a national curriculum to help kids who do move from state to state and school to school.”
Yes the “school to school” hook up is also important. The compulsory amalgamation of schools in our area has lead to bored students required to cover material they have already studied in some subjects and needing to catch up in other areas.
The first link is broken. A stray + in the tag.
I guess I should have figured that Wordpress wouldn’t parse and display that correctly.
Now for an on-topic remark: the national curriculum is a bloody stupid idea. If you think state bureaucrats can cock up education, wait until you see what the benevolent masters in Canberra can cook up over the coming decades.
Centralisation will intensify, not diminish, the interminable shitfights about what should be taught and how it should be taught. Roll on, culture wars. Roll on, stupidity. Roll away, innovation.
The only argument I ever see advanced in favour of national curricula is portability between states. But there is already a well-known portable educational scheme in the International Baccalaureate (IB). It’s portable between states and between countries. It’s rigorous, smart and more highly regarded by universities than any state-level equivalent. It also avoids a lot of stupid culture war arguments and has a frankly superior and more objective set of assessments.
In the position of a state education minister I would allow public schools to offer the IB as an alternative to the local stuff, with an eye to eventually converting to the IB system-wide. It would prepare students better for university and allow them to continue studies anywhere in the country or the world. It would also allow me to reduce the number of shinybums and failed teachers in the education bureaucracy. A win for all parties.
The work is going on behind the scenes. I’m told the maths one kicked off last October with a national meeting in Melb.: teachers, Principals, lecturers, Profs, State education folk…. several hundred participants “workshopping” various aspects. Framing paper ….
One of the sharpest contributions was from Professor Kay Stacey at Melbourne Uni who (inter alia) suggested curriculum documents should be so clearly written that a first-year-out graduate could understand them (the very idea!!) She also suggested that existing curricula tended to be “bitsy” – a topic gets re-visited every year but not much progress is made when it’s re-visited.
Pythagoras:
1. first visit, given a and b we find c.
2. next visit: given a and c we find b (could have been done in 1)
etc
etc
If they get the right people developing the curriculum it could be very good. Then the new textbooks will be needed, etc.
cheers
Real issues
http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/schools-face-struggle-to-find-new-teachers-20091130-k18q.html
not being addressed.
A real revolution would have involved massive investment in teachers. Everything else appears to be nothing more than the usual fiddling that is part of day to day government business.
Armagny @ 17 – and at the same time we have news articles (and I’ve heard directly from some teachers as well) about teachers complaining they can’t get jobs, especially permanent positions. Here’s just one example.
I don’t see how both situations can be true
As a teacher these are my views. Most teachers don’t care if there is a state based or national curriculum. What most do care about is having properly resourced schools, being paid a professional wage and having disruptive students removed from classes so that the decent kids can learn. We don’t care who runs the curriculum.
In Qld, Bligh has underfunded schools for years. Some schools are literally falling apart. Schols in Logan are an absulute disgrace and would simply not be tolerated by parents in wealthier areas. Teachers remain underpaid. Bligh remains unwilling to reclaim schools from the thugs and the whinging parents who have left many state schools run by aggressive fools in the student population.
The state system also stands for little and attempts to be everything to everyone. I teach in a tough school in the state system but I will be sending my kids to a private school where there is the will to expel disruptive kids and promote high unflinching standards. This is what is lacking in the state system. Too much pandering the the lower end.
I don’t think a national curriculum will change this. Until we stop the slide in standards behaviourally and academically, nothing will improve.
Merit pay… Shouldn’t we be calling it a devolution?
As for the national curriculum, I can’t say much because a) I can’t remember too much and b) it was in confidence, but the History curriculum will be much more world history orientated, will lose a lot of the “great Australians” nonsense and will be looking a lot more at Asia and decolonisation.
MsLaurie @1: It doesn’t strike me as being quite so prescribed. The current state curricula are quite vague, and I think it will be even more so with the national.
Spana @19: Expel the difficult kids eh? You must be an awesome teacher…
(Disclosure: I have a child in a NSW public school and work in TAFE)
As usual, the devil will be in the detail. Firstly, NSW no longer has single-year curricula except for Kindy: we have two-year Stages for the rest of primary. That is, your child will learn decimal notation sometime during Year 3 or Year 4. Makes it easy to arrange composite classes, but I am not sure what other advantages it has.
When it comes to particular subjects, each State wants to preserve its strengths, and even its own weaknesses, as retraining teachers takes time/money. Implementation is unlikely to be straighforward, especially if States expect teachers to get up to speed on the new curriculum without offering them time to do it — cue industrial action.
I will be keen to see how they deal with gifted children — how will acceleration be handled? (In some states, it’s almost impossible to have a child skip a year, for example, but there are a raft of ways to accelerate, and it would be a shame if the national curriculum reduced the options instead of broadening them in line with the evidence of benefit.)
And will the senior curruculum be geared to university entrance, or will it be broadened to include suitable approaches for the non-academic types? We’re using this approach in NSW — high school students can do a TAFE course as part of their final years of school. The students I see seem to like the more grown-up environment of TAFE and the obvious relevance of vocational education. However, the TAFE component doesn’t count towards university entrance, so in choosing a VET course at age 16, you are choosing NOT to go to Uni. That seems too rigid to me.
That’s all I can think of quickly.
Rockstar philosopher, spoken as someone who I bet has no idea about young people. Let me guess you are not a teacher. I work in possibly the poorest area in Brisbane by choice. What is terrible to see is the majority of decent kids having to put up with bullies, violence, aggresive language and constant disruption by a minority of disgustingly behaved kids.
Schools cannot solve the problems of social dysfunction. Yet, too many people want the majority of good kids to have their education ruined by teenagers and parents who simply don’t care less about anyone else. I bet if your own smart child was forced day in day out to sit in a room where chairs were thrown at other students, where smart kids were mocked or where resurces were vandalised you might change your mind. I can safely bet that you would never send your child to the school where I work because you would not want them putting up with these things. So why do you condemn other kids to it? Why do you imply that a teacher’s main job is to cater to the bottom end and ignore the rest or let them teach themselves. No way mate. The well behaved and smart kids deserve better.
Spana, when you start dividing kids into ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’, it’s time to take some long service leave. Seriously.
Wouldn’t it be good if reducing the size of our underclass was a formal goal of government?
Chookie, totally agree about class sizes. This is another area of shame for the Bligh government. They talk about the smart state but fund the dumb state. But as a society we have lost focus as to what schools are. They are not meant to be places where all the problems of society are solved. There are not able to solve serious behaviour problems. If you are not mature enough by 13 to respect other kids then go elsewhere. Are you arguing that all the smart kids who respect each other should just shut up and put up with the thugs, the bullies and the gangs that operate in these schools. Would you put up with it as an adult? Would you go to your work place to have chairs thrown at you? Then why should a 15 year old have to put up with it. The difference is I treat kids as being ablr to make decisions and also take responsibility for their decisions. I don’t baby them. I don’t accept that because a kid is born in a tough area that he should be bullied at schools run by gangs. No way. If you believe that you have lost the plot.
Gifted children, Chookie?
ifdef RANTIf they’re lucky, handed a book (or, these days, pointed at Wikipedia) and asked to be quiet.
#endifTotally agree Robert. Gifted children have little extension, at least in the public system. Teachers are over run dealing with behaviour issues. I don’t blame the teachers. This is a constant topic around the staffroom. Wouldn’t it be nice to have time to actually teach, especially the top kids which Bligh’s underfunded system pretty much ignores.
Again, if we insist on having a system that has as its priority social work and getting everyone through despite their attitude then the top kids will continue to be neglected whilst the thugs and bullies take all the teachers’ time.
“Is it going to be something that will actually improve educational outcomes in Australia’s schools, and, if so, how?”
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I’m with Jacques on this — it’s an absolute disaster in my books. What it is going to do is take away the obvious between-state data that we currently have, and we will be left with far less meaningful between-country data. What I mean by this is that at present, we have a little natural experiment going on, where each state does slightly different things and we can see the often non-obvious outcomes. This is very important, because if you look at the state data, then what you find is that there are massive differences between states — some due to factors out of anyone’s control (like anything to do with data from the NT), but others due to factors that are certainly within control of governments (e.g., NSW vs WA).
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Given this, I can’t see how a bunch of bureaucrats in Canberra is going to do a better job even if it was possible to employ a better group of curriculum developers than the states have (and there’s no reason to suspect this, given that lots of really smart people won’t want to move to Canberra). The basic problem they are faced with is that centralization will remove a super source of comparative data, and, in addition, that there may be state specific things that they won’t be aware of like people working in particular states.
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Perhaps if people are really keen on the idea of a federal curriculum, it might be better if they simply specify some broad minimum standards in certain areas, rather than take over too many things.
Spana, what an outrageous suggestion that students who want to learn should cease to be the puching bags (verbal and physical) of their angst ridden peers.
Sign me up for long service leave too.
3 questions. Well, two and a half:
1) Is there necessarily a problem with having trials of innovative curriculum under a nationalised system?
2) Is that sort of thing working well as it is, with the system we have?
2.5) If not, why not?
Conrad, but that experiment comes at the cost of the losing states! I largely agree with Spana that education has far more serious problems, however this seems like a bit of a gimme and a great opportunity to clean a lot of bullshit off the curricula.
Jaques, spoken like a libertarian most definitely not as someone with any experience of education departments and the people who actually set curriculum. These are not idiots; these are highly qualified people typically very plugged into the latest research both nationally and internationally.
Education policy enacters are typically dealing with the shitty shitty hands they are dealt with. It’s very easy for us to cast stones, but we should remember that we are an elite, and the bulk of the public does not seem to care for better education at the price of higher taxes. Likewise, calls for an IB system are again putting the needs of the elite above the needs of the majority.
I feel the same about teeth gnashing for gifted kids. I went to a country high school and would have given my eye teeth to go to a specialist high school like Kelvin Grove or Fort St in Sydney. Or even a school that offered ancient history ffs. Frankly, however, it’s not kids like me that need any goddamn help; I was fine, went to university, got reasonably good marks etc. It’s the kids who can’t read, who will be woefully underprepared for either a vocational life with basic skills or the low-end degrees (ironically like education degrees nowadays) that *need* and deserve the help.
Truly, I worry that selective schools do promote education ghettos, particularly in areas like where you teach spana, that are already disadvantaged. I would much prefer extension classes or the like.
Where’s Brian? I would be very very interesting to hear his perspective as someone who I believe has worked on both sides of the fence.
Spana: I’m a teacher. Where should we send the dysfunctional kids? Straight to prison maybe? If you were worth your salt you’d be up in arms for more resources to deal with problems kids, not wanting to kick them to the curb.
I wouldn’t teach in the private system, let alone send my kids there.
I guess we come from different ends of the spectrum. Probably because I’m young and haven’t been disillusioned yet, but I believe in the transformative and equalising powers of education.
They are not meant to be places where all the problems of society are solved. There are not able to solve serious behaviour problems.
Actually, I’d argue that’s exactly what a large part of the job entails. Who else is going to help these kids? Their parents certainly aren’t. You clearly don’t respect these kids, why should they respect you? If you take the time and effort (something lacking amongst far too many teachers, but that’s what you get for the money) to find out why a kid is chucking chairs, you may be able to do something about it. Kicking them out of the classroom is just palming the problem off onto the rest of the school/society.
School should be about giving everyone the best opportunity to succeed, not instilling a sense of entitlement amongst a select group of elites. We have the rest of society to do that for us.
If you are not mature enough by 13 to respect other kids then go elsewhere.
Go where exactly?
Again, if you don’t respect your class, there will be no respect in your class. I’ve had students others have said were unteachable that just need to be not spoken down to.
Rockstar Philosopher. I have extremely high levels of respect in my class. I am well like by many students and perhaps disliked by a few of the thugs because of my uncompromising line on bullys and violence. In my nine years of teaching I have had many requests by parents to the school for their child, often boys, to be put in my class. I have had only one parent remove a child to another school because I was too tough. Mum thought that he should be able to punch desks and scare other children. I said he had no right to do so and that I would protect the other children in my class from his violence. She disagreed so he left. The rest of the kids were a lot happier. And other border line thugs learnt a lesson that bullying would never be allowed in my class.
The problem with your view is that it condemns the majority of decent kids to a mediocre education in an aggresive atmosphere. I don’t know where you teach but in my area aggression, gangs and bullys would run the show if theu were accomodated. I will not have decent kids lives being ruined by bullys and thugs. You would sacrifice the majority to accomodate the thugs. I will not. I believe that a kid attending a rough school in Logan has the right to the same level of respect and education as a kid in Grammar.
As for where they should go, there are a number of issues. I have been involved with the union for campaigning for increased behaviour schools where these kids aggression can be dealt with without ruining other kids lives. So yes, I have been up in arms. I just will never allow bullys to set the agenda and ruin other kids lives. In past societies 13 year olds had vast responsibilities. Excuse making and pandering to thugs just creates immature and foolish young people. Show them some respect and treat them like adults.
“however this seems like a bit of a gimme and a great opportunity to clean a lot of bullshit off the curricula”
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The problem with this assumption is that there is no a-priori reason to believe Canberra is going to be better than the states (what’s good according to you might be bad according to someone else), and if everyone does the same thing, it’s going to be much harder to identify what’s good and bad. It’s worthwhile noting here that whilst you think someone has to be the loser, since, in many areas, there is no obvious way to identify what is the best way, the fact that someone is the loser is good — it means you can update the loser’s curriculum based on the winners. This is good because you have continued incremental development, and you can evaluate it against past experience and the current experience of others. Thus, having lots of different system going at once is good for evaluative purposes. Obviously there must be some limit to how many systems there are, but I don’t think the optimal number is one.
Funding to the public schools has been reduced in real terms for more than a decade. Politicians like policies which measure, test and take account, rather than actually investing more in human resources. If state schools are expected to take on all-comers, including for eg 13 year olds with drug and alcohol issues, specialised or additional skilled staff are needed for one on one support and withdrawal scenarios. Funding for this support is inadequate and no amount of performance pay will fix the problem.
Social problems in state schools are growing while schools are underfunded. Go figure.
Slim, can you point to where you derived the data that supports that claim?
According to OECD statistics, nominal government spending (both state and federal) on upper secondary education grew by 7.8% in 2002, 8.6% in 2003, 4.4% in 2004, 5.4% in 2005 and 9% in 2006 (the last year for which there is data in the OECD database. These are all well above inflation in those years, so education spending was growing significantly in real terms during that period. For lower secondary, the growth rates are lower, but also well above inflation, and for primary, spending growth, was, on average, similar to that of upper secondary. Note, that over the 8 years from 1998 to 2006, total enrollment at the upper secondary level fell by just over 6%, while total enrollment at the lower secondary level increased by just 3%. So, public funding for public schools increased significantly when calculated on a per pupil basis at a secondary level.
Now, this data includes all types of government education spending (salaries, capital works, etc), so doesn’t give the complete picture, and we know that public funding for non-government schools has increased significantly over that period, but it is simply not true that public schools, on average, have failed to see real spending growth per pupil over the past decade.
It seems unlikely to me (considering the empirical evidence) that the problems in some public schools are primarily due to inadequate aggregate funding.
As for the national curriculum, it would be nice if the IB were more widely available, but that is a qualification suituable for only a small proportion of total secondary students.
Suez, I found your remarks interesting. How confident are you that what is eventually implemented will resemble the learning approach you described? A deeper and more analytical approach to teaching science sounds better than the current approach, but what proportion of science students do you think will be able to grasp what are actually quite difficult and complex ideas? And do you think the current stock of teachers will be equipped to teach those ideas? Thinking back to my own education experience (yes, only an anecdote) I could imagine only a small proportion of the teachers I had being capable of undertaking such a task well.
Also, is a national curriculum required for such a change? It sounds like the sort of thing that could have been implemented at a state level.
The thing that worries me most about a national curriculum is that it separates policymakers and the governments responsible further from students, parents and teachers. I worry that it will the process more bureaucratic and the system less responsive to the needs of the people most affected. Perhaps that concern is misguided.
Overall, I wouldn’t describe the reforms in train a revolution – that was always just a rhetorical device used by Rudd to a) play on the concerns of those that didn’t think the existing system was working well that change was on teh way and b) give the impression that the changes were more fundamental than they in fact are.
I’m a teacher in a country victorian high school. I only have 3 years experience but see teachers with masters degrees and 40 odd years in the classroom struggling with poor behaviour. Wealso need tech support and are in buildings meant to be decommissioned 30 years ago. This revolution means new computers and stuff all else. Sign me up for long service too.
What the National Curriculum is mandated to do is to specify the minimum entitlement of Australian students to education in each of the 8 key learning areas.
In most areas, it is meaningful and fairly easy to look around and see who is getting the least provision and call that the minimum. At least it would stop us from backsliding.
In LOTE (Languages Other Than English), that is not an option because of the huge number of children currently receiving nothing at all.
We do not have, and will not conceivably have, enough LOTE specialists to provide every child in Australia with one.
Furthermore, even if we could, it would only be investing more in the ‘model of provision” which DEST recognized was “unlikely to succeed regardless of the amount of money invested in it” in 2002.
The model of provision that works in primary schools is for generalist primary teachers to teach young children in frequent short lessons. Our ultimate target languages are too difficult for teachers to deliver in this way, much as calculus is beyond many primary teachers who nevertheless deliver the arithmetic and other bases which allow specialists to teach calculus effectively later.
In a similar way, primary teachers can teach bilingualism and intercultural perspective using a new program “Talking to the Whole Wide World”. Once the children have overcome the ‘monolingual mindset’ identified by Professors Michael Clyne and Joseph Lo Bianco as the principle barrier to Australian multilingualism, they are prepared to make much more efficient use of the scarce supply of quality language specialists in high school.
This is a meaningful offering for all Australian students which also solves the tricky challenge of providing a broad intercultural education along with an uninterrupted cumulative LOTE education, whichever state we’re in.
I think a bit of state-based differentiation is a good thing. Kids in WA should learn about Forrest (but who would be of no interest outside WA), South Australia about Hindmarsh, Victoria about Batman and so on.
I think there’s some middle ground between the spana and rockstar approaches, above. I agree with the observation that letting violent behaviour go on in rough areas just victimises the underprivileged, it’s an observation with wider application in terms of violence, the courts, and the traditional location of leniency and defendant-empathy with left wing ideas.
However it’s all in the detail and degree. When we say disruptive, are we talking about a kid hitting other kids in the head with a metal ruler, or just being cheeky, breaking a few incidental rules and getting up the nose of an overly-controlling teacher?
We can’t just dump kids out in the ether, and while I agree with Spana to a degree that they should just be left to their devices in the worst cases, there needs to be something- a well resourced, specialist program with teachers trained to do what is, absolutely, part of the teaching job- to send them to.
When I read the apologia from that Principal in Caroline Springs minimising the unbelievably vicious bullying carried out on the blind kid, I find myself baying for blood along with the rest of the Herald Sun readers. The bully who picked on him should be receiving psychiatric treatment right now.
Spana @24, I said UNDERCLASS size — this is the source of your problems, not class sizes!
I have a gifted child in the local public primary school. Our area is very multicultural, with 94% of students from a NESB, and it’s not a wealthy area (the Geek and I probably have the highest household income in the suburb — he’s a software developer and I’m a librarian). We have a 3-days-a-week teacher to support disturbed children in addition to a 3-days-a-week school counsellor.
In NSW, the principal is responsible for the accommodation gifted students receive (therefore, complaints to the Minister on the topic will invariably fail! I am aware of the problems of this system). But we’ve fallen on our feet. English and Maths are taught in ability groupings, and homework is ability-grouped too. Now I must say that my son is not one of the real outliers of the Terrence Tao kind — this method has been quite successful for the Twig, but would not be adequate for a Profoundly Gifted child.
But what I wanted to point out was that our school has a lovely atmosphere. It is warm, accepting of difference, and bullying is just not an issue. I know that the tone of the school is something that the staff work hard to achieve, but it can be done, and the principal is the driving force. I have seen the firm but loving treatment received by a disturbed child in my son’s class; a few years on you wouldn’t know the kid. And this is happening in a state where, frankly, the lines of communication between Education, DOCS, Health and so on are nowhere near what they should be.
Spana, is your principal letting you down?