Greg’s Blog – principal (le?) learning

Kids who struggle and need support to make progress in their school work often require a lot of support to make progress and ‘catch up’.  This morning Terry Crooks has done similar but more detailed sums than mine:

“The Government keeps making the assumption that once poorly performing kids are identified, that that can be solved,” Professor Crooks said.
“The evidence suggests that it’s extremely hard to overcome major deficits of achievement.”
….. and ….
The Government has promised $36 million of extra funding over three years to help pupils found to be struggling under the standards. The funding is on top of existing money for teaching literacy and numeracy.
Education Minister Anne Tolley said yesterday that officials were preparing advice on the best use of the $36m.
The policy was designed to help the one in five pupils leaving school without the basic skills they needed, she said.

Official figures show 20 per cent of primary and intermediate children would represent 86,971 pupils.
When the $36m is spread between those pupils over three years, each child would get $138 a year.
Professor Crooks said that would pay for less than half a day of tuition each.
“You can’t do anything with that.”

Ten times this amount would give these kids half an hour a day for a term of 1:1 support.  Then we might begin to make some progress.  Are we going to see this level of support for our children who really need it …. don’t hold your breath? The special ed review might free up some money if they cut GSE overheads and bureaucracy but this should go into the therapists who actually make a difference to kids, not cutting services.  It is already pretty impossible to get help for kids with any sort of therapy (Speech, physio, occupational therapy) needs.

Reading recovery can be for up to 20 weeks (two terms) at this half hour level of support and is specifically for those who are ‘failing’, or not achieving the standards in reading.  Why should any other literacy or numeracy issue be easier to resolve than it is for reading?

So are teachers in for a lambasting in the future because millions of dollars haven’t been able to fix the issue of underachievement so it must be those ‘crap teachers’? Dig a little deeper and we are on a hiding to nothing on this one.
An increasingly precise description of the problem with nothing or little put into addressing it is not remotely helpful!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 11:29 am and is filed under Learning and Teaching, Uncategorized, opinion, political, school leadership.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.