By
Craig Campbell, Ph.D., Dip.Ed., University of Sydney. Posted .
Selective high schools in New South Wales are those public secondary schools that enrol students who have achieved highly in annually-held, competitive and state-wide entrance tests. There are academically selective schools in the non-government sector also, but it is those in the public sector that are commonly known as ‘selective schools’.… Continue Reading »
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Craig Campbell, PhD, DipEd, University of Sydney. Posted .
For most of Australia’s European settlement history opportunities for parents and others to choose schools for the children in their families and care were absent or highly constrained. The major effort over the long term was to provide schools for increasing proportions of the population, and by the end of the nineteenth century, to compel families with limited interest in schooling children, to force their attendance.… Continue Reading »
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Craig Campbell, Ph.D., Dip.Ed., University of Sydney. Posted .
Jean Muir was born on 14 July 1919, to a family that was rising from the working class. After overcoming the difficulty of a father who opposed any more than elementary education for girls, Jean Muir was able to progress beyond Lloyd Street Higher Elementary School in Melbourne. She spent four years at the academically selective University High School (1933-1936).… Continue Reading »
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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 »
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Roger Openshaw, PhD DipTching, Massey University. Posted .
A prescription for radical change
The Picot Report, 1988
In April 1988 Administering for Excellence, the report of a taskforce headed by Brian Picot, identified ‘serious weaknesses’ in New Zealand’s three-tiered 110 year-old education system that in its view justified replacement by an entirely new two-tiered structure. The Taskforce envisaged the replacement of the Department of Education by a Ministry of Education and the abolition of regional education boards.… Continue Reading »