University of Newcastle

Early entry offers: how doing things kindly can make change

May 2, 2025election priorities, widening participation and nurturing aspirationsAARE blog, AARE election priorities, Sally Patfield, University of Newcastle, widening participation and nurturing aspirations

This is the fifth and final day in our series of posts on AARE’s education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about widening participation and nurturing aspirations.

We have a long way to go to make higher education more equitable. Postcode, income, family background, and Indigenous status are still major determinants of who gains entry to university in Australia.

Thankfully, the incumbent federal government recently reaffirmed its commitment to equity as part of the Universities Accord. It states 80 per cent of Australians will need post-school qualifications to meet the workforce needs of 2050. It has also has proposed new participation targets for First Nations students, students from low SES backgrounds, those from regional and remote areas, and students with a disability by 2035.

Such goals have become increasingly important in recent months against a broader international backdrop of “anti-DEI” sentiment fuelled by the Trump administration. Equity is becoming heavily politicised and decades of progress already being erased in the United States.

Ensuring young people from underrepresented backgrounds have the opportunity to access university is important now more than ever.

Achieving these goals requires genuine structural reform. My research shows that early entry schemes offer some timely insights into what is needed.

Admission: A key piece in the puzzle

In Australia, the single most common pathway for a young person to gain entry to university is via an ATAR. That’s the scaled rank students receive at the end of secondary school based on their final exams and assessments.

However, young people experiencing disadvantage are either less likely to receive an ATAR at the end of high school or more likely to receive a lower ranking compared to their more advantaged peers.

Numerous studies have demonstrated this biased nature of the ATAR. It has even been suggested that the use of the ATAR as the major selection tool for university entry has directly led to the “replication…of the [university] student profile” over time.

To counter this lack of diversity, an increasing number of ‘alternative’ pathways to enter university have been developed. These pathways include, for example, enabling and bridging programs, portfolio entry, and articulation through a VET provider.

Such initiatives are designed to meet the needs, experiences and identities of a more diverse range of students. It also challenges conventional beliefs that ability, merit and talent are only expressed through certain forms of academic achievement.

University early entry: A contentious practice?

Many of these ‘alternative’ entry pathways support non-school leaver entry to university. Early entry schemes target Year 12 students by offering potential candidates a place at university using criteria other than (or in addition to) their ATAR.

By targeting this cohort, early entry schemes are seen as a “contentious practice,” sparking a moral panic. That’s based on the belief they cause students to lose motivation at school. This is because – as the name implies – students receive their offer well before main round university offers and sometimes even before their final exams.

Equity features in these schemes through shifting the dominant measure of achievement and ability beyond the ATAR. Instead, an offer might be based on a combination of Year 11 coursework, a recommendation from a principal, extracurricular achievements, a personal statement, or contribution to the community. Some schemes also target specific equity groups.

However, concerns have been expressed that early entry might actually work against equity goals. Why? More privileged students are also more likely to be able to accrue valuable extracurricular experiences and leverage their social networks. Early entry has also been called an aggressive “arms race” among universities. That’s based on the belief that universities use the schemes to simply meet their recruitment targets.

To counter some of these issues, new guidelines were put in place by the federal government in 2024 to restrict the timing of early offers. A new national framework is currently being developed.

A chance to do admissions differently

Instead of seeing early entry as a ‘contentious practice’ because it is disrupting tradition, we should think differently. What if such schemes actually offered a genuine chance to do university admissions differently, ensuring university is accessible to all?

As part of a research study I led in 2023, I conducted interviews with school-leavers from underrepresented backgrounds who had gained admission to university via early entry. These students described complex home lives, forced displacement, struggles with physical and/or mental ill-health. They experienced intersecting forms of material and social disadvantage. Underlying their stories were four key principles inherent in early entry that played a significant role in widening access to those most in need. These included:

· Recognition of broader forms of success and different kinds of capabilities, opening up the possibility of higher education.

· The certainty of having a university offer much earlier in the calendar year. That alleviated the pressure and anxiety commonly experienced during senior secondary school for both young people and their families.

· A sense of care for young people’s health and wellbeing, treating these as genuine concerns.

· Empathy for the complexities of young people’s lives, helping them to make a more positive post-school transition.

The future

As we look towards the future of university admissions, we must move beyond the damaging depictions of early entry. These condemn young people for using these pathways. Instead, we must consider how these principles can foreground reform in this area, and how admissions processes can continue to evolve to better meet the needs of all Australians.

Sally Patfield is a lecturer in the School of Education and member of the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre at the University of Newcastle. Her research focusses on issues of equity and social justice across formal schooling and higher education, particularly in relation to educational and social inequities connected to social class, rurality, first-in-family status, race, and the changing nature of the education system.

What teachers can do when misinformation goes viral

March 3, 2025civics and citizenship educationAARE blog, civics and citizenship education, David Nally, University of Newcastle

This week has borne witness to the destabilising impact of misinformation. We had the perfect example in the fiery meeting between Volodymyr Zelensky and the Trump administration. At every opportunity, Donald Trump and JD Vance spread misinformation. How could teachers deal with that kind of behaviour in the classroom?

Reports on the results of Australia’s most recent national civics and citizenship tests presented an opportunity to educate the public about models of engaged citizenship.

Nearly all of the coverage failed to articulate this priority.

There were several questions gauged to determine what the most prominent concerns of Year 6 and Year 10 students were. Although climate change, racism, discrimination and diseases ranked high on this list, disinformation, misinformation and malinformation were all completely absent.

The current implementation of Australian and state-based reforms are opportunities for curriculum-led responses to these concerns.

A combination of drivers

Some findings from my research into misinformation (as a sub-set of post-truth) suggest a combination of drivers needs to be in alignment.

As starting points:

– Community-formed understandings (such as Sustainable Development Goals, or forms of Entrepreneurship) that are locally relevant need to be integrated into curriculum implementation;

– Teacher agency needs to be balanced with expertise in how to employ it;

– Value and purposeful use of knowledge;

– Treating classes and cohorts as micro-communities: teachers and students constructing a climate of a specific “why” for their subjects, choices of factors enabling learning (materials, environments, strategies), and ensuring these understandings align with professional standards relating to the content being delivered in schools.

A prospective threat

These considerations mean misinformation is treated as a prospective threat to the idea of an educated citizenry, without distracting from other civics and citizenship concerns.

The new syllabuses being implemented over the next few years in all states and territories in Australia provide opportunities to deal with these issues through a lens of inquiry and community-oriented learning. These range from determining ‘value and limitations’ of source material in the Histories, Integrated Humanities and Social Sciences, interrogating the epistemology of theories in Sciences, as well as problematic issues with representation in language for English subjects.

Individual Trees make a Forest

In our current context, the place of individuals, among more global considerations, is represented as insignificant. Calls for educational initiatives to address misinformation have grown exponentially in light of growing anti-semitism, the failure of the Voice to Parliament, the removal of factcheckers on social media platforms and a propensity for misinformation to go viral through public discourse. They are also a key part of a discussions by a recent panel assembled as part of the Inquiry into Civics Education, Engagement and Participation in Australia.

The logic of what people can do therefore needs to be reversed.

As Nikki Brunker put it in an interview elaborating on her paper, Dissonant Glimmers: Individuals always have agency; The choice is whether they choose to believe it, or they are made to believe that they don’t have it.

Localised responses and expertise in handling misinformation can only be developed if there is curiosity, reflection and a gumption to build batteries of test cases to move beyond poaching and recycling ideas from other contexts. Approaches to differentiate practice via media literacy, data and AI literacy, gifted and talented, civics and citizenship, as well as industry-oriented practices, to name a few, need to be aligned with responding to emerging, contemporary circumstances. These responses will help address forms of misinformation as they evolve.

Strategic thinking required

Strategic thinking is therefore required which reconciles assessment tasks with community contextual needs and transparency, to generate cultures of trust and cohesion to work towards individual and shared goals in educational contexts. In this way, the form and types of learning might be more closely aligned with the intended impacts.

These adjustments might then mean that equity in education can be defined withrelational characteristics that develop a readiness for learning. That includes development of dispositions such as curiosity and an ethic valuing fuzzy logic and “hard” problems. Bruno Latour’s concept of respectful critique and a desire to debate ideas are all examples of this. Such aspects of professional practice significantly underpin – and enhance achievement in – more easily measured, fiscal elements.

In turn, each class can be defined more in terms of a micro-community. To make this social contract work however, everyone has to have buy-in. Notably, significant scholarship is being produced about the integration of Indigenous Knowledges (via the Learning from Country framework) to provide a model for what this ideal might look like in practice.

So what are my next steps?

One challenge for educators will be in designing learning experiences that build relationships with community, cultural and business contexts. At one level, these relationships can be leveraged by teachers having knowledge about the provenance of their curriculum. Some analysis that Heather Sharp and I conducted showed that in the new curriculum revisions, there are traditions of democracy embedded in curriculum documents. These ideals may not always be translated into practice.

These considerations that shape instruction however, need to be complemented by a culture that cultivates active contributions to community endeavours. At his book launch in Sydney during 2024, Lee McIntyre noted that even as denialism and misinformation are harmful to democracies, disproving these phenomena are reactive. Relational trust between different aspects of communities allows proactive inoculation against misinformation.

These opportunities recently had a form in Sydney Catholic Schools’ Authentic Learning initiative (2016-2020). More recent initiatives have included UpRising Designers’ inter-system focus on sustainability projects, and the AISNSW’s Deep Learning program on generating localised case studies of disciplinary expertise and evidence-based practice.

What a “better” society might look like

Such civic ideals have also had their demonstration in projects which started in local communities. A variety of projects which are gradually restoring the Cooks River in Sydney has involved networking local businesses, recreation groups, environmental centres, university research projects and schools, to develop solutions to local issues in this catchment.

Both strategies and community need to work in a coordinated effort, to provide the concepts, language and models for what a “better” society might look like, to address challenges that face present and future generations. Then, learning about civics will be tested, but the metric will be factors that enable the change students, teachers and communities want to see in the world.

David Nally has previously held roles coordinating HSIE Faculties and Gifted and Talented Programs at various schools in Sydney. His PhD research, based at the University of Newcastle, focuses on Post-Truth, the impacts of its related issues (such as misinformation, inequalities and AI) on education, and how educators can address them.

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What’s in a name? Enabling education in Australia 

February 17, 2025Changes to higher education, equity in higher education, Participation in higher educationAARE blog, ANU, Curtin University, Emma Hamilton, enabling education, higher education, James Cook University, Kieran Balloo, Matthew Bunn, Sally Baker, University of Newcastle

The Australian Government announced significant changes last year to programs that enable students from non-high school pathways to transition into university. These programs began in Australia 50 years ago and are broadly referred to as enabling education. There are 48 programs now operated by universities across Australia. Enabling education is defined legislatively as a course “provided to a person for the purpose of enabling that person to undertake a course leading to a higher education award”.

Enabling education operates free-of-cost to domestic students who don’t meet current entry requirements to enter an undergraduate level program. These programs are key to widening educational participation, especially for students from recognised equity backgrounds.  

The government renamed those programs “FEE-FREE Uni Ready”, including $350 million in increased funding and increased student places. It also committed to work with providers to “professionalise and increase the quality and consistency of courses” and improve their “portability”.

Same goal, different names

In the course of this short announcement, the terms ‘enabling’, ‘pathway’ and ‘preparatory’ were used alongside FEE-FREE Uni Ready, and other terms are also associated with this field of education including ‘foundation studies’, ‘bridging programs’ and ‘access courses’. Different programs also utilise program names that incorporate these terms or others such as ‘steps’, ‘track’, and ‘link’. Ostensibly, these courses share the same goal.

Recent benchmarking by the National Association of Enabling Educators highlights these programs usually include explicit teaching of study preparation. They also usually include communication skills, academic literacies and/or numeracies. But providers do not use the same language to refer to the programs they offer. Even when they use the same naming conventions they are not necessarily referring to the same program types. There is variation throughout the sector over length of study time, use of fees and program entry requirements, for example. The variation in terms, and whether the same program name even means the same thing between providers, is mind boggling! 

Current benchmarking exercises seek to make sense of the various naming conventions around enabling education. They rely upon a shared understanding of what enabling education is: a pre-Bachelor course of study enabling university entry. However, we know that this is not the only way that enabling education can be constructed. The government’s advice to university providers says this: “A provider’s purpose in enrolling a student in a course of instruction determines whether it is an enabling course. Therefore, a course of instruction may be an enabling course for only some students undertaking it.”

It continues that even courses that bear credit can constitute an enabling course, though credit bearing courses cannot constitute the majority of the program of study.

The eye of the beholder

It seems, then, that what constitutes enabling lies in the eye of the beholder. It is likely that enabling funding is used diversely. For example, it may be used for programs sitting within or alongside undergraduate level study. It may also be used within high school outreach programs that assist students to transition out of secondary education and into a further enabling program or directly into undergraduate study. As this is not commonly understood as ‘enabling’, it is not necessarily captured in national typologies of enabling education or in benchmarking.

Importantly, it is not captured in our conversations about whether enabling education is best understood as a field of education that assists students not only into higher education but also through an often-non-linear educational journey that continues beyond the entry point of undergraduate study. 

Our nomenclature shouldn’t limit our understanding of where enabling should ‘sit’ as a mechanism for supporting students and improving outcomes.

The term ‘enabling education’ is not commonly used outside Australia. And other terms do not adequately translate into an international context. For example, “preparatory” is the term proposed by the Australian Universities Accord to replace enabling education. However, this can create a problematic and false equivalency to American preparatory schools, whose function is entirely different to ‘preparation’ in an Australian enabling context.

Within Australia, the use of distinct naming conventions for different programs impacts the legitimacy of enabling education as a particular field of education, taught by those with distinct and recognisable expertise. If we accept that enabling programs represent a particular branch of knowledge with expertise required to teach it, it deserves a consistent name that represents it as a field of education. It is questionable whether ‘enabling education’ is adequate for this purpose.

What we call these courses matters

The conflation of terms like FEE-FREE Uni Ready (a name reserved for particular programs) with a field of education or discipline being taught does not help with efforts to form a meaningful and invariable name. It also inhibits our ability to understand what it is about enabling education as a field that is distinct, and what exists in parallel with other transition pedagogies, or preparatory practices. If these courses are simply about ‘enabling’ students to enter undergraduate study, what exactly do they even need to cover to prepare students and who determines this? 

What we call these courses matters. In practical terms the diverse naming conventions of enabling programs presents a barrier to finding and accessing these programs. These programs are particularly aimed at students often marginalised from higher education – so this naming problem may exacerbate this marginalisation. Naming conventions matter too. They tell students how they are viewed by the university. They also tell students how they should think about themselves. In a NSW context, for example, ‘pathway’ is often used to refer to enabling programs. However, it is often preceded by the word ‘alternative’ – an alternate pathway to the completion of the Higher School Certificate. It implies that enabling education is secondary.

And is enabling the right word? It has the loaded and problematic inference that students are not already ‘able’. Our terminology matters in framing enabling education, particularly for students who have experienced educational disadvantage.  

We still don’t know what’s going to happen

The FEE-FREE Uni Ready proposal was slated for implementation from 2025. But at the time of writing (February 2025) no further substantive clarification has been provided by government. That leaves much of the government-led work in formalising sector-wide benchmarks and shared (read: portable) understandings, curricula, and expectations unfinished.

This variability limits the portability of certificates for students. It also limits of awareness of these programs, even within a program’s own institution. That, in turn, impacts the critical and evaluative interest of educational researchers both within and, importantly, outside of enabling education.

Enabling education represents a real space for changing individual fortunes and helping students to develop fulfilling careers. But it is also as an opportunity for powerful knowledge and recognition of why access to education matters. It should also provide a space for deeper and critical understandings of higher education and its distributive role in society.

A public good

Enabling education is a public good, a true legacy of Whitlam-era policies that assert that higher education is for everyone. How we refer to this field of study matters. It dictates what enabling education does, how and when across a student’s journey.

Naming matters in how we continue to “professionalise” this form of education as a set of practices and pedagogies, and operationalise it for educators and researchers who work within it and the students who seek to benefit from it. It matters to the public, who fund it.

Emma Hamilton is a senior lecturer of history and convenor of the Open Foundation (Online) Program at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her work relates to history on film, and to widening participation in higher education. Matthew Bunn is a seniorl lecturer in academic pathways at James Cook University. His research is grounded in the sociology of equity and widening participation in higher education. Kieran Balloo is joining Curtin University and is a visiting senior research fellow in the Surrey Institute of Education at the University of Surrey, UK. His research has a focus on student transitions, equity, and wellbeing, and it emphasises the importance of innovative and inclusive educational practices to support diverse student populations. Sally Baker is an associate professor of Migration and Education in POLIS at ANU. Her work centres on policy and practice related to equity in higher education, particularly with students with forced migration backgrounds.

Can we preserve human agency in a world of AI?

January 24, 2025artificial intelligence, Artificial Intelligence in schoolsAARE blog, AI, AI technology and teaching, Erica Southgate, University of Newcastle

That’s a question we can all ask ourselves as we interrogate the UN International Day of Education. This year’s theme is AI and education. What does the teaching profession gain and lose with Gen AI?

Two hundred million people use ChatGPT each month, with growth doubling in one year. A recent article from Harvard Business Review correctly identifies that generative AI (Gen AI) is a prediction machine that can summarise, synthesise, code, and draw based on its training with the corpus of knowledge from the internet and custom data sets. The article points out that: “The efficacy of predictions is contingent on the underlying data. The quality and quantity of data significantly impact the accuracy of AI predictions…. (T)he successful implementation of AI requires good judgment… It involves knowing which predictions to make, the costs associated with different types of mistakes, and what to do with the AI’s outcome… Judgment over what matters in a particular situation is fundamental to the successful use of generative AI.”

Time to ask those questions about AI again

Anecdote and research suggest that students in schools and universities increasingly use Gen AI tools in various ways to undertake learning and assessment. There has been a flurry of activity by government, state departments and regulators in providing policy, guidelines and resources for educators and students on the technology. Discourse has seemed to turn a corner from using Gen AI as “cheating” to either adjusting assessment by having students apply or adapt AI text to the real world or embracing AI outputs by critiquing or improving on them.

Two years after the widespread uptake of ChatGPT, the most popular Gen AI tool, I think it is time to pause and re-ask ourselves as educators what exactly do my students need to know and be able to do to demonstrate competency in learning. This question is the true core of curriculum. And it goes directly to thinking creatively or innovatively in education.

There is a lot of talk about Gen AI augmenting human intelligence with its efficient summary outputs. As the Harvard Business review article points out, such outputs require “good judgment” in order to assess the quality for a “particular situation”.

Still a place for old-fashioned exams

Educators can certainly set tasks where students generate such outputs and develop skills to assess output quality. Of course this means explicitly teaching those quality assessment skills (research, information literacy, critical thinking) and then having some way of knowing if students are using/developing the skills without using Gen AI to produce a fake trail of skill development. This might involve seeing drafts of work with commentary on how the skills were used with real time presentations on this coupled with teacher and peer questions. There is still a place for old fashioned exams too as one way to assess knowledge acquisition and transfer, as unpopular as this may be in some AI evangelical circles.

If we want students to be more than adept prompt jockeys, then we have to really think about how we want them to demonstrate learning.

Software that purports to provide AI generator matches are pretty hopeless and give warning about this, so teachers shouldn’t rely on these but on carefully developed dialogue and iterative processes with students. In other words, carefully crafted learning and assessment activities and knowing their students well. This is easier in schools than in universities where large cohorts, online learning, intensified academic workloads and a highly casualised workforce act as barriers to developing genuine, long term educator-student connections.

On standards

Now, let me unpack the issue from my context as a teacher educator. Australian teachers have a set of standards they need to meet at various career stages. The curriculum of teacher education needs to directly respond to these standards and teacher education is commonly structured according to : (1) content (discipline) knowledge, (2) method which is curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, (3) understanding learning and the learning context of students (educational psychology and sociology), and (4) how 1-3 translate into practice through professional experience known as practicums and internships. Summarising and synthesising from the corpus of the internet, Gen AI can easily produce outputs for assessment related to areas 1- 3.

Teachers are great sharers. It is a human-centred, collaborative profession after all. For a long time teachers everywhere have shared curriculum scope and sequence documents, unit and lesson plans, assessments, teaching resources, and student work samples online. Student teachers, usually referred to as pre-service teachers, have a vast repository of exemplars and resources to draw on, modify and use for assessment at university and at practicum. Plagiarism checkers could and can still identify if a student has directly copied something from the internet and not cited the source or tried to pass it off as their own.

Questioning the quality of the AI output

Gen AI, drawing on all the teaching curriculum resources available online, can almost instantly produce scope and sequence, units of work, lesson plans and resources such as work sheets, by predicting what the user wants according to the prompt and synthesising or summarising what is available online. It is then up to the pre-service teacher or teacher to make judgements about the quality of the AI output in relation to the task or the appropriateness for the learning context.

Teachers who have gone through traditional method courses at university – learning to first read a syllabus for structure and meaning, and then translating this into a lesson plan, a unit of work and a scope and sequence through a carefully scaffolded developmental arrangement of courses across a degree – are mostly well equipped to make professional judgements about automated outputs from gen AI. However, we are entering a new era where it may be possible to produce work for discipline, method and learning courses without having to think critically or authentically about what is submitted for assessment.

There will be a sizeable proportion of students graduating from universities who would have relied on Gen AI outputs in an expedient or shallow way to get through their degree having been exposed to limited opportunities that “test” depth of understanding, application and transfer and creative or innovative thinking. Universities won’t want to talk about this for a long time – just as they were slow to address the impact of essay mills. But it will be a phenomenon which will shape trust in higher education institutions and ultimately professions.

In teacher education this could mean a heavier burden for teachers supervising students on practicum. In the world of Gen AI these supervising teachers are well placed to evaluate whether a student has developed competency through their application of discipline, curriculum and pedagogy, and learner knowledge.

There are many, many teachers using Gen AI to generate curriculum material, school reports, newsletters and other artefacts considered ripe for an efficiency overall in their time-poor day. If Gen AI were to cease tomorrow, I would hazard a guess that the vast majority could still create these texts as they have gone through the sequenced training prior to and in-service, and have experience to draw on, including the experiences of other teachers.

However, we may be entering an era where there will be the first cohorts of teachers who have come to rely on Gen AI to a point that they did not develop these skills or the necessary judgement vital in designing curriculum to suit context. Gen AI raises a lot of questions related to professional knowledge and standards.

Will pre-service and practising teachers develop AI dependency? Will this erode the unique combination of professional skills teachers have? Does this matter? Should we augment our competencies and intelligence and redefine the fundamentals of professional knowledge?

AI: it’s about what exists, not what’s possible

Finally, what will happen to innovation in curriculum design if pre-service and in-service teachers slowly stop drawing on their vast cognitive resources to create and share new unit plans or teaching resources, instead relying on the quick Gen AI fix? We need to remember that Gen AI is a summarising and synthesising tool, predicting a response from a prompt to communicate what already exists not what is possible.

Let’s start having a more serious and sustained conversation in teacher education and the teaching profession about what we gain as educators in using Gen AI and what we potentially erode, lose or irrevocably change, and will it matter for our students?

To return to my original question but orienting it towards the training of pre-service teachers – what exactly do pre-service teachers need to know and be able to do to demonstrate competency with and without Gen AI? This question surely goes to the heart of teaching standards.

Erica Southgate is an associate professor in the School of Education, University of Newcastle. She makes computer games for literacy and is an education technology ethicist and an immersive learning researcher.

Australian university staff now in chaos: No idea what will happen after December 31

November 26, 2024higher education, higher education policycasualisation, higher education, Jess Harris, NTEU, University of Newcastle

Imagine not knowing whether your job will exist after the holidays. The anxiety of wondering whether you should be budgeting for a well-deserved break with family or for the impending bills that might not be accounted for by your current salary in the new year. This is a reality for so many people working in Australian universities right now.

“I only have a contract until December 31. I have no idea what will happen after that.”

Released in February, the final report of the Universities Accord highlighted multiple crisis points for the Australian tertiary education sector. That includes inadequate funding, poor governance, wage thefts and a massive over reliance on casual staff. For people within the sector, this report provided some confirmation of their experience. The recommendations provided a small sliver of hope that we might see some change.

The Ending Bad Governance for Good report released by the NTEU last week paints an even more dire picture, while thousands of academics are facing uncertainty about whether they will have work in 2025.

Confusion over casualisation

The final report of the Universities Accord indicated that high rates of precarious employment in the sector negatively impacts the quality of teaching and research within universities, limiting the overall workforce capacity. The report cites data showing that over the past 30 years, rates of casual employment have consistently sat between 15.8% and 22.8% of all university staff.

These types of proportional data, however, report on Full Time Equivalent (FTE) positions. That obscure the actual number of people who are precariously employed. Estimates of the number of casually employed individuals vary wildly. There are suggestions that one FTE could really represent between 7 and 16 employees.

The recent NTEU report uses a conservative estimate of 6 people for every FTE role. That raises the overall proportion of individuals who are casually employed to an average of 49% across Australian universities. That’s nearly half of all employees

Moves to reduce the reliance on casual work are welcome – but they have also left institutions in a state of confusion. Universities are currently scrambling to respond to changes in the classification of casual work. The Fair Work Commission’s “Closing the Loopholes” Act involves a range of changes to strengthen the protection of employees. That includes changing the definition of casual employment and the process of conversion to permanent employment.

Approaches vary

Approaches have varied across the sector. But people who have worked at institutions for years or decades are now facing uncertainty about what their roles might look like in the new year or whether their much-needed positions will continue to exist.

My research over the past eight years with colleagues focuses on the experiences of academics in insecure employment. We see an emerging sense of precarity throughout the sector that extends beyond those who are employed casually. Impacts of the COVID pandemic, reports of hundreds of millions of dollars in staff underpayment and other forms of wage theft, and multiple rounds of restructuring and redundancies contributes to a sense of unease across university campuses.

A crisis of governance

Adding to this unease, the new NTEU report paints a damning picture of university governance.

Neoliberal policies and reduced government funding ensure universities are now seen as businesses.

But the NTEU report includes shocking examples of management practices that would not be accepted in the business world.

The report describes inflated executive salaries. Over 300 university executives nationally being paid more than the premiers of their respective states. More than $730M was paid to external consultants and contractors in 2023 alone.

This figure seems incomprehensible within a sector that promotes itself as having the ‘best and brightest’ within their own walls. While I note that the amount reported can include other professional services, it does not paint a substantially different picture from the Sydney Morning Herald’s report in 2023.

The NTEU report shows, on average, the 37 Australian public universities examined have paid external consultants almost $20M in one year ($19,836,011). Simultaneously, they are undergoing restructures and cutting programs. They are also cutting staff, who are dedicated to the core business of teaching and research, in precarious positions.

Changing landscapes of academic employment

Between 2020 and 2023, the number of job losses and newly added positions has bounced around dramatically, bolstering the NTEU report’s finding of poor workforce planning.

Over the period of peak COVID-19 pandemic, 4,760 people were made redundant within Australian universities. While 75% of these positions have been readvertised since 2021, universities across the country have announced impending redundancies and some have recently cut entire programs.

At the same time, universities are declaring their commitment to de-casualising their workforce. Our current research examines policies which relate to the shift away from casual employment to permanency

within Enterprise Bargaining Agreements from 35 Australian Universities. We found 27 universities have committed to creating new positions targeting the conversion of a minimum of 2,554 FTE casual positions to permanent roles. A fraction of the public funding spent on consultancy alone would be sufficient to fund these positions.

Universities are complex. Workforce planning is particularly complex in a sector that is governed by student numbers. One issue within the sector, however, is clear.

A sense of precarity

All academics, regardless of their employment contracts, are feeling a sense of precarity. They are uncertain about their roles, their workload, and the future of the sector.

People who are currently wondering about their employment beyond next month are receiving reports that huge amounts of public funding has been spent on executive salaries and external consultants.

My hope is that public funding for higher education is committed to supporting those who teach our future doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, and nurses. My hope is that funding is dedicated to supporting researchers who engage in cutting edge research and providing training and employment for future researchers to do the same.

Jess Harris is an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle. Her research is focused on the leadership and development of teachers and teaching within schools and through initial teacher education. She draws on a range of qualitative research methods, including conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis.

Dramatic setback: Why the newly drafted senior drama syllabus falls short of a quality creative arts education

November 7, 2024Arts education, dramaAARE blog, arts education, David Roy, drama, Matthew Harper, University of Newcastle

The NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) just released new draft senior Creative Arts syllabuses for Year 11 and Year 12 students, including the drama syllabus. The announcement comes as part of raft of changes following the NSW Curriculum Review, ambitiously titled Nurturing Wonder and Igniting Passion.

Among the new draft syllabuses, the subject of senior drama received its first major revamp since 2009. This means that the current opportunity for enhancing drama curriculum is momentous.

This curriculum review represented a potential step towards elevating the status of drama in schools and society. Drama is, after all, is one of the most important subjects in preparing students for the world of work. The draft review fails drama and drama students.

Your chance to evaluate

Teachers, academics and other stakeholders now have the chance to evaluate the proposed drama syllabus in a formal consultation period that ends on 20 December 2024.

However, the interim reaction among stakeholders is mostly negative. Educators are dissatisfied and disappointed. The refined content reduces rather than strengthens the learning opportunities necessary for delivering a quality drama (and creative arts) education. This issue starts at a policy level and extends well beyond the decision-making practices of any school leaders and teachers.

A dramatic cut

The elimination of the HSC Group Performance examination is the most significant notable change. What’s in its place? An internally assessed rather than externally examined ensemble piece. This shift devalues the Group Performance as a major work that requires students to collaborate to devise an original piece of theatre.

For many teachers and students, this component of HSC drama is the preeminent experience because of the intellectual demand and corroboration of knowledge and skills in making, performing and appreciating drama. It is also a vital means to valuing actor-audience relationships and honouring communication and storytelling through the relay of meaning in real time.

The devaluing of this core component of the existing drama syllabus is a threat to the craft of drama. It produces an overreliance on prescribed content and leaves fewer legitimate opportunities to showcase the dramatic arts as intended through style or form, role and character, and structure and action.

It also signals cost-cutting measures. Facilitating external examinations across the state of NSW is not inexpensive. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.

Elimination of choice

Additionally, the proposed drama syllabus eliminates choices for the Individual Project. This component of the drama course requires students to communicate a directorial vison for a key text through deep exploration and application of specialised knowledge and skills. Current project options are Director’s Folio, Portfolio of Theatre Criticism, Costume Design, Lighting Design, Promotion and Program Design, Set Design, Scriptwriting, Video Drama, and Performance.

However, the draft syllabus cuts Director’s Folio, Lighting Design and Video Drama. These projects are three critically important parts for sustaining any theatrical tradition and the entertainment industry more broadly.

A reduction of choice might seem small. But we cannot underestimate the value of enabling students to choose which content to pursue to nurture their creative abilities. Giving students choice in drama specifically provides a scope and flexibility that is rare among most subjects. It provides learning benefits such as skills in time-management, self-regulation, creative autonomy, and risk-taking. In a society that looks to encourage higher order thinking and creative skills, such a move is retrograde at best.

Missing the texture

The draft syllabus now states that “All Individual projects, excluding performance, will be submitted electronically to reflect industry practice and support best practice in marking processes” (see p. 9). Now, projects are packaged and posted, then sent through the mail for external examination. This process is necessary because the projects are tactile in nature; for example, costume design projects tend to use carefully chosen and delicate fabric swatches.

Limiting the Individual Project to digital submissions impedes creative and aesthetic possibilities available to students and is a disservice to the art form. The justification that this change aligns with “industry practice” relies on using software programs that many schools simply cannot afford to purchase. And the point about “best practice in marking processes” is debatable.

Eroding the arts by curriculum design

Unfortunately, arts subjects are usually first on the chopping block in schools (and universities).

Recent research also reveals a worrying decline in the proportion of NSW public secondary students participating in creative arts courses in Years 10, 11 and 12. This includes dance, drama, music, visual arts, visual design, and photographic and digital media.

But any view that arts subjects appear less popular or that students are abandoning arts subjects overlooks that they are ranked lowly in the status spectrum of school subjects. They are deliberately positioned as optional extras – ‘peripheral’ as opposed to so-called ‘core’ learning areas. This subject hierarchy means that students are rarely equipped to make informed choices about studying arts subjects (or not) due to a lack of quality learning experiences within arts subjects.

Indeed, this curriculum context remains devastatingly unjust given a vast majority of Australian school students still have little or no access to quality arts education. It also neglects the inherent value and human need for the arts and goes against a growing body of research about the benefits of arts education. If we learnt one thing from the recent Pandemic, it was the need for all of us to engage and consume arts content in a time of isolation.

‘Revival’ of the arts in Australia?

Ironically, the federal Labor Government (2022) initiated changes on a policy front that position the arts as an important agenda. Specifically, the national policy, Revive, outlines five pillars designed to enhance the cultural ambitions of Australia over the next five years and beyond. They are:

First Nations First;
A Place for Every Story;
Centrality of the Artist;
Strong Cultural Infrastructure; and
Engaging the Audience.

These pillars provide a timely policy framework for rethinking the role of the arts in society and education, particularly for nurturing the lives, livelihoods, and wellbeing of people across the country.

A degree of scepticism

However, this policy warrants a degree of scepticism. The focus on ‘revival’ conveys a need to restore resources and strategies that are deficient given deliberate attempts to erode them.

The gap between national policy aspirations and the proposed curriculum changes to creative arts subjects such as drama has severe potential consequences for what students have the opportunity to learn in school, and the future possibilities available to them outside of school, in terms of employment or otherwise.

The hearings of 2024 NSW Inquiry into Arts Education continually demonstrated the ongoing diminishment, paucity and degradation of the Creative Arts in schools; despite the wealth of talent in both staff, pupils, and the wider community. As educators we can choose to either focus on basic skills creating industrial automatons, or recognise the Arts as a key skill to empower articulate, inventive, and engaged future citizens. When students study the Creative Arts they succeed across all aspects of their education, and beyond.

Matthew Harper is an early career researcher in the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre at the University of Newcastle. Matt has collaborated with colleagues on a range of research exploring student aspirations, quality teaching in schools and higher education contexts, and curriculum and pedagogy theory and development. His doctoral research compared secondary mathematics and drama in the Australian schooling context.

David Roy is a lecturer and researcher in Education and Creative Arts at the University of Newcastle (AUS); and was formerly a teacher for 17 years. He uses his research to inform inclusion and equity practices across Australia, with a particular focus on children with a disability, policy, and engagement with the Arts.

The truth about the pay rise for the oppressed

October 17, 2024Early Childhood, Early childhood education and careAARE blog, Early childhood, Melissa Duffy-Fagan, University of Newcastle

The Federal Government’s “good social and educational policy, and even better political move” of a fully funded pay rise (worker retention payment) for the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector becomes the latest example of the continued oppressive workload and undervaluing of the ECEC sector in Australia.

The worker retention payment

In August this year the Albanese government announced it would be providing a fully funded 15% increase for the ECEC workforce implemented over two years – and that will function as a grant. Early conditions shared by the government included a fee growth cap of 4.4% to ensure that families did not incur further fee increases to support wage increases.

Other details would come much later.

Guidelines and applications opened last week for a grant payment through the Department of Education (DoE) and Grant Connect.

Here’s what we understand about the grant so far:

The first pay increase of 10% must be passed on to eligible employees. The 10% cannot be manipulated for any employee who is already paid above award.
Eligible employees are those paid under two approved awards – the Children’s Services Award 2010 and the Teachers Award 2020. Trainees paid under other awards are not eligible for this pay increase.
The amount of grant monies each service receives is based on gross labour costs detailed in grant applications. These are then applied to each service’s weekly child care subsidy submission hours. The government are yet to release a fully explained formula for payments.
Each employer must provide a Fair Work approved workplace instrument with their grant application; for example, an Individual Flexibility Arrangement.

Full details of the Worker Retention Payment can be found on the Department of Education website.

Complications of gendered undervaluation

The Fair Work Commission is currently undertaking a gender undervaluation review case with results due mid-2025. Following on from the decision from the review of the Aged Care Award 2010 etc, the Children’s Services Award is currently being considered in this case. The decision from the previous review noted:

The basis upon which the ERO (equal remuneration order) rates were determined closely parallel the work value reasons upon which we are proceeding in this matter: the high female composition of the industry in question, the significance of the work being ‘caring’ work, the disguising of the level of skill and experience required to perform the work, the gender-based undervaluation of the work, and the need to remedy the extent to which assumptions on the basis of gender had inhibited wages growth.

A substantial increase is well overdue

This decision justifies the benchmark rate fixing process for the Aged Care Award and is highly reflective of the gendered composition and undervaluing experienced in the ECEC sector. A substantial increase in wages is well overdue and the latent expertise of the skills and value of the sector need to be heard. However, there are serious financial implications for services that opt in to this grant before the gender undervaluation decision has been made.

If a service has opted in to the grant and the outcome of the gender undervaluation case results in a well-deserved increase in the Children’s Services award – services will not be able to increase fees to cover the wage increase beyond the 4.4% cap.This will place many services, particularly small ones, under great financial strain.

The disconnect

The disconnect between what is being decided should happen for the ECEC sector and the means to which it is being implemented is alarming. Complex industrial relations and financial decisions need to be made by providers. Furthermore, Approved Providers and/or Directors will be responsible for administering grant monies, reporting usage and researching, paying for or writing workplace instruments to meet the conditions of the grant.

State and Federal governments are fully aware of the complex and diverse nature of the ECEC sector. The vast differences in ECEC service budgets, licensed numbers, business structures and contexts within more than 17,000 services in Australia is widely understood. Yet little consideration appears to be given to the continued impact of how partial remedies to gender pay inequity are being implemented.

It is clear that small centres of either private or not for profit nature, will experience heavy burdens associated with the administration, financial, mental, ethical and emotional load of the grant’s implementation.

Posing questions about problems

Can we afford this grant? What other costs will require fees to rise more than the capped fee growth of 4.4% allowed under the grant terms? Will the grant continue beyond the projected two-year timeframe? What will happen if we become ineligible for further payments but have binding workplace instruments to continue paying above award rates? Will we lose our team if we don’t opt in to this grant to offer them higher wages? Will we lose families if we increase fees to cover a self-funded 10% pay rise? How much wage related on costs such as superannuation, workers compensation, leave entitlements, payroll tax will be covered by the grant? How will our budget afford 10-15% above award costs when we are closed for public holidays, two weeks at Christmas and New Year when we cannot submit CCS hours?

Pay rise of the oppressed

These practical and rational questions about a political action ostensibly designed to lift the value and living conditions of the ECEC workforce, asserts further notions of oppression by systems of power over our sector.

As the decision in the Aged Care Award suggests, the skills and experience of care work is disguised based on gender. So too is the overly complicated nature of the grant. It disguises continued mistrust and undervaluing of the ECEC sector by the government. This mistrust and undervaluation reinforces that ours is a sector bereft of true professional autonomy and agency.

Freire’s notion of a critical pedagogy encouraged the oppressed to problem pose about their experiences to transform themselves from oppression. The fact is our sector is truly oppressed by neoliberal ideologies that value education as financial, human capital-based outcomes rather than democratic and ethical ones. As Freire maintains, it is necessary to admit that oppression exists and locate what that oppression is, for liberation to be possible.

Crumbs of progress

The reality of the ECEC sector is that we are so oppressed by these systems that even when the oppressive discourses transform into promises of better conditions with great uncertainty, the oppressive powers condition us to accept, navigate and move on. We lower our expectations and continue to accept higher workloads and bad deals for ourselves. The cycle of oppression goes around and around as we accept crumbs of progress from disingenuous and politically motivated offers. How do we heal from internalised and externalised oppression? How do we do this whilst holding on to our ethical and democratic beliefs that our workforce deserves more than the uncertainty of a temporary fiscal stop gap to hold the crucial ECEC system in place?

Melissa Duffy-Fagan is the owner and approved provider of a ECEC centre in Lambton, Newcastle. She is a sessional academic at the University of Newcastle. Her doctoral studies, completed in 2023, explored the themes of leadership, professional identity and quality policy. Find her on LinkedIn.

NAPLAN: There is no need to panic

August 15, 2024NAPLANJennifer Gore, Jim Tognolini, NAPLAN, University of Newcastle, University of Sydney

Jim Tognolini: What do the results really mean
JT: Only so much “growth”
JT: A sound springboard
Jennifer Gore: We know what to do. Let’s do it
JG: You too can be like Cessnock

Jim Tognolini: What do the results really mean

Every year when results for large scale tests such as NAPLAN are released, there is a need to remind parents – and people in general – about the need to reflect judiciously on what they really mean.

It is also very important to address the misconceptions that are promulgated by journalists who start off with a preconceived notion of what they want the results to say (for one reason or another) and then proceed to misinterpret and draw unsubstantiated conclusions that they argue support their notions.

This year’s NAPLAN is just another case in point.

Overall, the results are best summarised by the CEO of ACARA, Stephen Gniel when he says, “The data shows that while there were small increases and decreases across domains and year levels, overall the results were broadly stable.”

There are some good reasons for drawing this conclusion. The results, apart from some minor perturbations up-and-down in different domains, are indeed relatively stable.

JT: Only so much “growth”

To be honest, this should be expected because there is only so much “growth” that can occur across one or two years of learning and the only other data we can compare to is the NAPLAN 2023 data because the scale that is being used for comparison was only calibrated in 2023.

A trend requires more than two points to be able to be reliably interpreted. It is a relatively naïve view that would expect strategies that have been introduced to address issues identified in the 2023 results would generate significant changes across a system in one year.

It is also important when reflecting on these results to stress several points. Firstly, there is some emotive language used to summarise performance which should not be allowed to go unchallenged.

Students who have performed in the bottom two proficiency levels have been summarised as having “failed”. However, when interpreting results like NAPLAN it is important to go beyond the “label” and look at what skills these students have displayed. The proficiency levels describe what students in these levels know and can do and an analysis of these skill sets suggests that they have a wide range of skills that will serve them well in later studies.

JT: A sound springboard

The students in the bottom two levels have not “failed”. Knowledge and skills that students have displayed in the developing proficiency level are a sound springboard for learning within disciplines and through life.

Let’s focus on what it is that students know and can do rather than jumping to labels that detract from the real meaning of the results.

While the NAPLAN is a battery of psychometrically sound tests, they are only tests of literacy and numeracy (there is a lot more to schooling than a test result on literacy and numeracy only).

In addition, the results represent the outcomes on a particular day and a particular time. The key point here is that these results are only indicative. It is the trend data that are important at a system level. At an individual student level it is the cumulation of a range of data which provides the best evidence as to the overall performance of the student. The NAPLAN test scores must be interpreted by teachers using a wide range of data collected under different circumstances in the classroom.

Parents who are concerned because the results are not consistent with what they expect from their child/children should seek clarification from the teachers.

Jennifer Gore: We know what to do. Let’s do it

These NAPLAN results are not new and not surprising. They reflect the results we saw last year with the new NAPLAN testing and reporting process and results we’ve seen for years. The fact that a third of students are not meeting proficiency standards is of great concern and the fact they disproportionately come from disadvantaged and other equity backgrounds reflects our nation’s failure to reduce educational inequality.

Education Minister Jason Clare is correct that we need reforms. The important thing is we get the reforms right.

First, we need to fully fund our public schools and end the political football over funding. Second, we need to support teachers to deliver excellent teaching. The current push for explicit teaching and synthetic phonics can only be part of the solution. Students are more than their brains. They learn in social and emotional conditions that also need to be addressed. For example, after a decade of explicit teaching and synthetic phonics, students in England are at an all-time low for enjoyment of reading, languishing toward the bottom of all OCED countries on this measure.

JG: You too can be like Cessnock

A decade of research at the University of Newcastle, including five randomised controlled trials, offers an alternative approach to school reform. Results from Cessnock High School, one of the most disadvantaged schools in NSW, shows how our evidence-based approach to improving teaching quality, regardless of the instructional strategies used, can change lives. Cessnock High achieved the most improved NAPLAN growth from Year 7 to 9 in the Hunter region and 11th overall in the state by engaging in whole school Quality Teaching Rounds. Simultaneously, teachers reported greater morale and improved school culture, which are critical factors in addressing the current teacher shortage crisis.

Thanks to funding from the Australian Government, thousands of teachers from across the country can now access this evidence-backed professional development for free.

From left to right: Jim Tognolini is Professor and Director of the Centre for Educational Measurement and Assessment (CEMA) at the University of Sydney. Jennifer Gore is the Laureate Professor and director of the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre at the University of Newcastle. She developed the Quality Teaching Rounds.

Want quality teaching? Here’s the model

April 15, 2024quality teachers, quality teaching, Quality Teaching RoundsAARE blog, Drew Miller, Quality Teaching Rounds, University of Newcastle

When Cessnock High School approached us in 2020 about a long-term partnership focused on developing a clear, coherent culture of teaching and learning, we were two years into an ambitious five year program of research on the impact of Quality Teaching Rounds on student and teacher outcomes.

We had evidence from the first in a series of randomised controlled trials that teacher participation in QTR could improve students achievement, teaching quality and teacher morale.

The challenge was to translate this large-scale research involving hundreds of teachers across hundreds of schools into a partnership model that deeply embedded a culture of quality teaching in one highly disadvantaged school.

Our role at Cessnock High was supporting their teachers to do the challenging work of reflecting on and developing their practice. We did this by centring the partnership on the Quality Teaching Model and engaging all teachers in Quality Teaching Rounds.

How Cessnock High achieved its goals

As reported last night on the ABC, Cessnock High School ranked first in the Hunter region and 11th overall in the state for their growth in NAPLAN results from Year 7 to 9 in 2023. Cessnock students’ HSC results also improved by more than 50 per cent in 2022, a result that was sustained in 2023.

Student attendance and engagement grew by seven per cent – triple the average across the state. Positive behaviour referrals were up 130 per cent in 2023 while negative behaviours significantly decreased.

Importantly, teacher morale improved, their efficacy went up, as did collegiality, confidence, and the quality of their teaching.

This highly successful partnership model is at the heart of a new project, announced today, to support 25 disadvantaged NSW government schools to enhance teaching quality, support teacher wellbeing, build positive school cultures, and improve student achievement and equity.

The partnership

We started from a position of respecting teachers and their professionalism as they were the key to changing outcomes for students. Teachers understand that depending on their context, the specific lesson, and their students, different teaching approaches can produce powerful learning. The Quality Teaching Model and QTR provide a mechanism to ensure the underlying pedagogy, regardless of the teaching strategy, is high quality and produces powerful learning experiences.

The QT Model, grounded in Newmann’s Authentic Pedagogy work and supported by a broad history of education research is centred on three key ideas:

Intellectual Quality: Focusing on deep understanding of important knowledge.
Quality Learning Environment: Ensuring positive classrooms that boost student learning.
Significance: Connecting learning to students’ lives and the wider world.

In opposition to a focus on the technical and telling teachers how to teach, the Model gives a conceptual lens through which a broad range of teaching strategies can be reflected upon to increase understanding of pedagogy.

Bringing teachers together

QTR brings teachers together to learn from each other and improve their practice. It is an approach to teacher professional development that involves teachers working in groups of four to observe and critically analyse each other’s teaching using the Quality Teaching Model. Importantly, it offers teachers deep engagement in their craft, intellectual challenge that is significant to their work, and the processes of QTR ensure teachers are in a safe, supportive learning environment with their colleagues.

Framing this work using the concept of school capacity to improve student outcomes (see Newmann, King and Youngs) the partnership functioned to produce program coherence among staff by centering pedagogical understanding around the Quality Teaching Model, and improved teachers knowledge, skill and dispositions, and professional community through engagement in collective, collegial professional development through QTR. In turn, leadership supported the work by providing the time for staff to engage in developing their practice.

While quality teaching was the central pillar in this process at Cessnock High School, change of this nature does not occur without cultural change. Instructional leadership at the school was supported by academics and our non-profit social enterprise the QT Academy via the partnership. This left space for executive leadership to focus on practice and policy to promote a consistent, calm and safe teaching and learning environment that recognises that all students are capable of engaging and learning. This also meant working on better connecting the school to its community and promoting high expectations and positive aspirations for students and the community.

Thriving schools

Now, at the end of our major five year program of research on QTR, we have high quality evidence from three randomised controlled trials that participation in the program improves student achievement in mathematics and reading, it improves teaching quality, and teacher morale and efficacy.

The Cessnock partnership provided evidence that a whole-school approach to QTR enables schools to keep a clear focus on teaching and learning despite the other matters that demand their attention. Across the four year partnership, we found focusing on the core business of teaching and supporting teachers to do this work produced strong positive effects on teachers and their teaching. This, in-turn, improved student attendance and engagement and reduced behaviour issues, with a profound impact on student achievement.

It’s a testament to the teachers and to the leadership of Cessnock High School in sticking with the partnership approach through all the ups and downs over the past few years.

What’s really exciting is we now have the opportunity to take this approach and test it in 25 other NSW government schools, with similar low socio-educational complexities over the next three years thanks to funding from the Paul Ramsay Foundation and support from the NSW Department of Education.

Core to all this work is a commitment to both equity and excellence in Australian education.

Drew Miller is a senior lecturer in the School of Education, University of Newcastle and the deputy director of the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre.

Excellent: why do we need that rating for early childhood care?

February 15, 2024Early Childhood, Early childhood education and careAARE blog, Early childhood, Mel Duffy-Fagan, University of Newcastle

Professional identity in the Australian early childhood education and care sector (ECEC) is strongly linked to quality assurance policy and the need to prove ‘quality’ and professionalisation through external ratings, say researchers. In Australia, that means gaining high ratings within the National Quality Standard (NQS) assessment and rating process.

There are unclear messages of who the ECEC professional is and where they fit in the overall education profession due to a combination of social, political and economic factors.The idea of ‘quality’ in ECEC is used as a political and economic tool to justify government spending and to measure output. The historical beginnings of the ECEC sector are grounded in welfare and mothering-type child care roles. That’s further compounded by societal beliefs that early childhood educators don’t require credentials or even deserve the title of educator.

These issues of professional recognition in the ECEC sector are being addressed through quality-driven compliance processes and increasing surveillance disguised as rewards, such as higher ratings within NQS processes. These factors are challenging the opportunities for a true reflection of professional recognition for our ECEC workforce.

There’s an upturn in applications for ‘excellent’

As a researcher of professional identity in the Australian ECEC sector, I pay attention to patterns of engagement in professional recognition undertakings. There appears to be an upturn in ECEC services applying for the ‘excellent’ rating.

I wondered why that was. Why the need for an excellent rating? And why spend precious resources applying for this rating?

Let me explain the process of assessment and rating within the Australian ECEC sector.

The operation of an approved ECEC service including long day care and preschools in Australia is regulated through a national independent authority the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA). This body oversees the implementation of the National Quality Framework (NQF) under which a National Quality Standard (NQS) system exists.

Since 2011, ACECQA has assisted state and territory governments in implementing the NQF for children’s education and care. Its role is to provide support for the ECEC sector and to monitor the application of the National Law and Regulations system. The standards are implemented through assessment of an ECEC centre’s performance against seven quality areas.

Seven quality areas

The seven quality areas are educational program and practice, children’s health and safety, physical environment, staffing arrangements, relationships with children, collaborative partnerships with families and communities and finally, governance and leadership.

For an ECEC service to achieve a rating of ‘Meeting’ the NQS an authorised officer from a state or territory regulatory body needs to assess the centre’s performance against seven quality areas as listed above and have met them all. That rating shows the service meets the NQS providing quality education and care across all seven quality areas Guide to the National Quality Framework (NQF) – September 2020

What does ‘exceeding’ mean?

To achieve a rating of ‘Exceeding’ the National Quality Standard, the centre needs to be rated Exceeding in at least four or more of the quality areas with at least two of the areas being either educational program, relationships with children, collaborative partnerships with families and governance and leadership. Under the standards, a centre rated as Exceeding demonstrates that the centre goes beyond standard requirements. To achieve the rating of Excellent the centre needs to have been rated as Exceeding the standards in all seven quality areas.

The NQS considers that a centre rated as Excellent promotes exceptional education and care, demonstrates sector leadership, and is committed to continually improving Guide to the National Quality Framework (NQF) – September 2020. To be awarded an Excellent rating a centre must make an application to the authority and demonstrate it meets three of the authority’s criteria.The first criteria is related to exemplary and exceptional education and care covering partnerships with professionals, community and or research organisations; show a commitment to children in relation to diversity, culture and inclusive partnerships; demonstrate positive workplace culture and values and environments that enhance children’s learning.

The second criteria needs to demonstrate leadership that enhances the development of the community or wider ECEC sector.

The third criteria needs to demonstrate a commitment to practices of excellence that are sustained and continuous.

Exceptional Practice Framework

There is provision of an Exceptional Practice Framework to assist applicants. Just 34 ECEC or OOSH settings hold the excellent rating in Australia, compared to 3,700 rated at exceeding and 15,700 rated as meeting.

During my doctoral studies with the University of Newcastle researching the relationship between leadership, quality discourse and professional identity, participants shared that gaining an excellent rating for their centre provided a perceived heightened sense of professional identity amongst colleagues and families.

This response reflects the struggles of professional identity development in the ECEC sector resulting from the historically benevolent and feminised formation of the ECEC sector and the neoliberal project of proving professionalism through quality policy metrics. Both of these factors act to marginalise the purpose and identity of the ECEC sector.

The latest National Quality Framework Report Summary for 2023 reveals the quality rating of a service continues to rank as the least important factor for families when choosing care for their child.

According to the report, what matters to families is skilled and experienced educators, cost and location.

If the imperatives of the early childhood sector are to ensure children and families are thriving in accessible and affordable ECEC settings, why do we need ratings beyond meeting a national standard?

Why does achieving a higher rating matter and why would educators be drawn to undertake the significant work involved in proving their practices are ‘excellent’?

Here’s why.

The excellent rating awarded by ACECQA seeks to highlight specialisation by providers and educators that showcase outstanding practice and programs.

I believe a tension exists around the measurement of ECEC programs based on the contextual nature of a settings’ specialisation through a neoliberal mechanism such as quality assurance.

This tension questions whether or not specialisation can remain a meaningful marker of excellence when held within frameworks of criteria, themes and external decision-making. There is a risk that this process reduces the excellent rating to a politically domesticated professionalisation award in place of truly valued and authentically understood pedagogy and professional identity for the ECEC sector.

The ‘truths’ of quality

The discourses of quality and accepted truth claims of centres holding high ratings equate to better quality outcomes, move through the ECEC social body. This normalises quality processes encouraging the sector to pursue professional status through higher ratings.

There is little evidence to support the claim that high ratings held under the NQF ensure quality outcomes for children.

The evidence demonstrates quality outcomes are dependent upon individual educators’ motivation to seek ongoing professional learning and higher qualification. That cannot be assured by the NQF.

The quality assurance process can alter – and shift – educators’ focus away from the heart of expert activity and opportunities for reflexive, democratic pedagogical curiosity.

Quality assurance mechanisms incite self-governance that fixate the ECEC sector to exceed external standards and re-design thinking about practices of care and education to evidence themes and ‘quality’ criteria.

Is this the criteria that educators, children and families would choose? Does this matter to them or are they simply governed to generate these values? What other values and ideas are overlooked when the sector is so entranced by quality highlights?

Complicating ‘excellence’

Those applying for an excellent rating are seeking validation for the considered pedagogical efforts of their setting that highlights the big and bold points of difference of their context.

But I argue that centres look beyond external ratings and instead re-focus on the everyday value rational practices of expertise in care and wellbeing.

The inequity of the excellent rating for those centres who do not have the resources to meet criteria could be balanced by ‘excellent’ educators sharing and connecting with other educators about daily practices of deeply practical pedagogical care that forms our decision making.

Focus could be directed to co-constructing new narratives of professional practice within our teams, to debate and discuss the purpose of our work and create better outcomes for more children.

All centres could be proud of this kind of work, resulting in significant, albeit difficult to measure, ongoing ethical improvement.

Educators and centres need a deeper understanding

The opportunity for professional identities existing within collective societies informed by democratic values is lost through these quality assurance processes. Educators and centres need a deeper understanding of how these mechanisms shape what the sector does – and a broad cohort of educators must become confident to let go of the truth claims of professional certainty gained from external gildings of excellence.

We can’t lift the ECEC profession through ideas of individualised excellence and themed specialisation and continuing to accept that quality ratings proves professionalism.

Could we move our thinking away from instrumentally rational approaches of ‘doing what works’ to achieve professional recognition, towards more value rational approaches of ‘doing what is right’ for children and a workforce in desperate need of sustainable reconceptualisation?

Elevating education and care through joining educator expertise with regulatory structures

It is time to talk about ways to recognise and join practitioner expertise with the quality policy structures of the ECEC system in a way that ethically and radically lifts and validates educators’ daily practices and expert activity beyond quality discourse.

Quality discourse in the form of criteria, themes, outcomes and frameworks wears a cloak of certainty that provides ‘truth’ about what can be highlighted as macro practices of specialised excellence.

The cloak of certainty hides complexity

But this cloak of certainty hides the complexity of the micro practices within the relationships and shared values of care, trust and wellbeing when working with children and families. To validate the work of the ECEC educators’ daily practices, the influences of formal and moral knowledge operational within educator expertise and regulatory structure should be revealed.

Educator agency and moral knowledge is gained through deeply reflexive praxis, experience and wisdom that considers the broader conditions that educators are working in. These conditions include economic and political influences, discourses of quality and self-governance that educators are complicit in when seeking an excellent rating. These conditions distract the focus of ECEC professionals to technocratic ways of highlighting success in their work. This distraction can hinder value rational acts that may better serve ECEC contexts. Our daily practices of criticality that truly represent the complex capacity of the ECEC educator are far more intricate than any reductive notions of ‘excellence’.

Mel Duffy-Fagan is a proud Early Childhood Teacher with over 30 years experience as an educator and director with 20 years also being an Approved Provider of a centre in Lambton, Newcastle. Mel works as an academic and researcher within the ECEC sector and completed her PhD in 2023 with the University of Newcastle. Her doctoral studies explored the themes of leadership, professional identity and quality policy. Find her on LinkedIn.