Popular politics is holding back Australia’s education system, UNE’s Dr Joanna Anderson argues, so that one of the world’s wealthiest countries is failing to adequately support many of the students who would most benefit from education.
A teacher and school leader for more than 20 years before becoming an academic, Dr Anderson is chiefly concerned with access and equity in education. In these areas, the data indicates that Australia is regressing.
“The problem is partly to do with our funding model, which consolidates the public-private school divide,” says Dr Anderson, who leads the Globalisation, Leadership and Policy department within UNE’s School of Education.
“But it’s also about structures within schools. The data very clearly shows that certain cohorts of students continue to have poorer outcomes at school, and poorer outcomes in later life.”
“Rather than rethink how we manage a more inclusive education, we’re once again starting to segregate students. In Queensland, for example, they are continuing to open more special schools, and across the spectrum students are being segregated into different classrooms according to fixed notions of aptitude.”
