Search Toggle

Teachers can’t teach Rudd’s curriculum

By NIKKI BRICKNELL
TEACHERS don’t know enough to deliver the Rudd government’s National Curriculum, according to education expert Curtis Watson.

“Looking at the English curriculum in the National Curriculum, there are aspects of it that cannot easily be delivered by teachers, given their current state of training,” he said. “There’d be many English teachers… particularly if they’re under 40, I wouldn’t expect them to have a strong knowledge of things like adverbial clauses or nouns being used in apposition, for example.”

Mr Watson, who is writing his doctoral thesis in education, said that while the transition will prove stressful to teachers, he expects most academic programs will just need tweaking to comply with the new curriculum.

After the Government’s National Partnership for Literacy and Numeracy, coordinators and field officers have been appointed to support teacher development in public schools, but these new positions have created new problems.

The head of mathematics at Belconnen High, Valerie Barker, said there were not enough new teachers to replace those being promoted into management.

The presence of the coordinators and field officers has changed the staffing point structure that allocates teaching staff to schools, meaning that fewer teachers are teaching bigger classes.

“What’s been happening with all of these appointments is that our limited pool of staff are being moved upwards and promoted out of the classroom,” she said. “I worry enormously that we’re actually losing our classroom capacity.”

Recent government funding saw $17 million going into ACT schools, many of them primary and independent schools.

“As a committed public school teacher, it does worry me when I see huge amounts of money . . . going to the primary school departments of large selective independent schools,” Mrs Barker said. “That’s hard work, when you know you’re going to school and you’re going to have students who don’t want to be there, struggling with resources . . . when you don’t have that infrastructure, it sometimes is a bit hard to accept that other schools are getting a lot of money that we’re not getting, and I think that’s in every way, that’s not just physical resources.”

More teachers will be required as the government rolls out its national curriculum, but Mr Watson believes that won’t be the only hurdle they come across.

“We’re going to need a lot of money spent on professional development for teachers,” he said. “Then it becomes a matter of time, do we have enough time to skill those teachers in time for a 2012 delivery?”

English isn’t the only subject that teachers need retraining in, according to a study by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. In 2009, more than half of the science teachers had not done any professional development courses and only three quarters of Year Eight science teachers felt well prepared to teach. In comparison, most math teachers had done math-related professional development and felt very well prepared to teach their students.

Recent Comments

0

Be the first to comment!

Post Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *