Deep cleaning can be a headache. But with a Tennant ReadySpace cleaner, you can have carpet that’s clean, dry and ready for foot traffic in just under 30 minutes.
An important schoolyard asset
While other static playground equipment provide significant play value, no equipment allows children to climb so freely, safely and as high as rope structures do, according to adventure+. Read more
Doin’ Time author Rachel Porter shares insights into troubled youth
In her new book, Author and General Manager of Whitelion (a charity supporting Australia’s vulnerable young people), Rachel Porter delves into the lives of nine Australian men from troubled backgrounds who have lived through incarceration and managed to change their lives around. Read more
The Australian’s Your School publication highlights divide
The Australian’s Your School publication highlights divide
Using the recently released NAPLAN results to create a ranked list of Australia’s schools, The Weekend Australian‘s Your School analysis demonstrates a clear divide in the results of high-fee private schools compared with those of their public school counterparts.
The publication provides information on over 9,000 schools nationwide, including state-by-state rankings of schools, which can be sorted by secondary, primary, most funded, least funded and more.
Independent schools currently make up three-quarters of all high schools in the top 100 according to overall performance.
The Your School analysis arrives at a time when the school funding debate appears to have been rekindled in maintstream media, recently stoked by comments from the Federal Minister for Education, Senator Simon Birmingham on ABC’s Q&A programme.
However, social and financial disadvantage have significant influence on education and, as Senior Lecturer in Research Methodology, Education Assessment and Evaluation at Sydney University, Rachel Wilson told The Weekend Australian, NAPLAN ‘was not a particularly sensitive test and was designed to set up benchmarks to identify schools that were performing poorly’.
As an example, Ms. Wilson points out that “Tasmania has a much lower income per capita and much higher levels of disadvantage and that’s reflected in their poorer performance”.
Australian Education Union president, Correna Haythorpe concurred, saying that public schools are “performing as well as private, once socio-economic background is taken into account”.
Productivity Commission: Education spending hasn’t raised standards
The Productivity Commission has released a new draft report about the national education evidence base, indicating that increases in education spending hasn’t resulted in a positive uplift in standards. Read more