It’s no secret that education is one of Tasmania’s biggest social issues.
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The state’s poor education results have been consistently reported by both national and international surveys and rankings for years, a millstone around the neck of state governments.
But looking at education results just based on testing or counting the financial costs misses out a huge part of the conversation.
Even the word ‘education’ can minimise and misrepresent the issues.
Intense debates about the financial cost of school funding, as we witnessed through the federal government’s co-opting of Labor’s Gonski needs-based funding model, risks reducing the value of education to a purely monetary one.
The political debate focused almost exclusively on how money would impact schools, but only briefly touched on how people impact schools.
Talking about education consistently in the negatives – poor NAPLAN results, low OECD rankings – ignores the good being done, the hard work of principals, teachers, students, parents and everyone involved in helping generations of Tasmanians learn.
At the recent Education Transforms 2017 symposium in Hobart, Queensland Professor Bob Lingard spoke at length on the need to address socioeconomic barriers in the state’s conversation about where education needs to go next.
He also highlighted the “enormous goodwill” he witnessed from across sectors, principals and schools, political parties, and in the community, to get Tasmania’s education system right.
Limiting the conversation about what education is closes the doors on opportunities to include more voices.
After all, everyone has had an education – whether it’s thirteen years in the school system followed by university, or homeschooling, leaving at Year 10 to pursue vocational education, or any other combination of learning.
Everyone has an experience that is worth listening to and learning from.
There’s a sense that the Gonski 2.0 funding is a chance to reset and refresh, give schools the chance and the responsibility to make the changes they need for individual students.
As a journalist, it’s my role to take part in the conversation, moving it further from the what to the why: why are we struggling and how can we all help Tasmania’s young people get the best education?
Education isn’t something that finishes when you leave school.
But being in school, or being homeschooled, or in TAFE or studying online – they are the important hours in which foundations of self-motivation, introspection, critical thinking, and a deeper understanding of our world are built.
Not to mention literacy and numeracy, preparing students for a digital-focused future we barely comprehend.
Equipping young people for the future should not be a conversation reduced to how many hours children spend in school, how much money their schools are allocated, or who is allocating it.
The conversation needs to go beyond that: equipping children to take part in their community, to build bridges from the school gate to the businesses and organisations, mentors and friends.
Making that conversation happen, however, means we need to step beyond talking about education as a schools issue, and capitalise on that goodwill to drive some serious, thoughtful, and positive changes to how we learn.