Entries Tagged: Public schools

An archive of entries with keywords: "Public schools"

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New South Wales Teachers Federation: Part 1, The first 50 years

New South Wales, 1918-1968

By Dorothy Kass, Ph.D., Macquarie University. Posted .

The New South Wales Teachers Federation has, over its one-hundred-year history, operated in two major roles, industrial and professional. As an industrial trade union it has concerned itself with teachers’ salaries, working conditions, and staffing of public education institutions. As a professional body it has endorsed and campaigned for a wide range of matters related to teaching and learning.… Continue Reading »

Residualised public schooling: The case of Mount Druitt High School

Sydney, New South Wales, 1995-2010

By Craig Campbell, PhD DipEd, University of Sydney. Posted .

From the 1970s in Australia there were rapid changes in the nature and patterns of employment. They especially affected sectors of the population that had been reliant on work in the manufacturing industry. As a result of these and other changes in each of the larger cities of Australia, suburban regions emerged that were marked by high levels of unemployment and increasing poverty.… Continue Reading »

Knibbs and Turner Commission and Reports

New South Wales, 1900-1914

By Dorothy Kass, Ph.D., Macquarie University. Posted .

The Commission on Primary, Secondary, Technical, and Other Branches of Education was appointed in New South Wales in early 1902. Commissioners George Handley Knibbs, University lecturer, and John William Turner, Headmaster of Fort Street Model School, travelled widely in Europe and America enquiring into education for the purpose of reforming education in New South Wales.… Continue Reading »

Junior teachers (2)

South Australia, 1936-1945

By Anthony McGuire, PhD. Posted .

Teacher preparation in Australia has a complex history. The balance between school-based and college or university-based preparation tends to be rethought in every generation. It took until well into the twentieth century for ill-managed, often exploitative, pupil-teacher and junior teacher preparation schemes to be replaced by arguably superior forms of teacher training and teacher education.… Continue Reading »

Comprehensive government high school

Australia, 1950-2010

By Craig Campbell, PhD DipEd, University of Sydney. Posted .

The idea that a secondary school could include all youth in a community or neighbourhood, regardless of their social circumstances, belongs to the twentieth century. By the 1970s such comprehensive schools educated a majority of Australian 12-17 year-old youth, but the size of the majority has been in a steady, though slow decline, from the 1980s.… Continue Reading »

Public and private in Australian schooling

Australia, 1788-2010

By Craig Campbell, PhD DipEd, University of Sydney. Posted .

The words public and private have been used in attempts to describe the ownership, governance and purposes of Australian schools and education from close to the beginnings of British colonisation in 1788. They are concepts that had little meaning for Indigenous society before, and for some time after initial colonisation.

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The meanings of these words shift over time.… Continue Reading »

Pupil Teachers to Junior Teachers

South Australia, 1873-1913

By Anthony McGuire, PhD. Posted .

Pupil teachers were introduced into South Australia to remedy a growing shortage of teachers for government subsidised schools as the colony expanded during a period of increasing prosperity in the early 1870s. It also needed to introduce its own teacher training system to ensure both future and immediate supply of teachers to meet the demand.… Continue Reading »

Public high schools: the foundations

Australia, 1870-1920

By Craig Campbell, PhD DipEd, University of Sydney. Posted .

This form of post-elementary schooling was introduced from the nineteenth century in the Australian colonies and then states. Cities and towns in the United States and Scotland began introducing public high schools from earlier in the nineteenth century, but the Australian colonies held to the English tradition that church and private grammar schools and academies (see glossary) would be the main providers of post-elementary education through most of the nineteenth century.

… Continue Reading »