As Australia’s four million school students return to the classroom for another year of study, experts are sounding the alarm about the number of pupils failing to master basic skills. Their message to parents is to emulate the success of students from language backgrounds other than English, who are outperforming their peers. National Education and Parenting Reporter Conor Duffy has more.
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00:00Back at Meriwether High, I always loved the hope at the start of a new school term, but
00:06parents really shouldn't be in the dark about the scale of the challenges that are facing
00:10our school systems. Fully one third of students now are struggling to master the basics of
00:15literacy and numeracy right across Australia, and almost half a million are in the very
00:19bottom performing group that are performing well below those expectations. Now these are
00:24results that can really impact the trajectory of a young person's life, even if someone
00:29doesn't want to go on to do further study after school. These are really just the basics
00:33that everyone needs to navigate adulthood, and the evidence is in that without them,
00:38life can be a real struggle.
00:40Conor, tell us about the performance of children from language backgrounds other than English
00:44and the lessons that we can learn from them and their parents.
00:47Yeah, so this trend is really well established now in NAPLAN data which tests every student
00:52in Australia for the basics of literacy and numeracy in years 3, 5, 7 and 9, and these
00:57students are outperforming their peers even in English language convention subjects very
01:01early on in primary school, and by the time they get to year 9 numeracy, they're one and
01:05a half years ahead of their peers. Now this really makes Australia a bit of a global outlier,
01:10this isn't the case everywhere in the West, and we know in other places these students
01:14can often struggle to succeed. This is a really big group of students we're talking about,
01:19about one third of the entire student body in New South Wales and Victoria, the biggest
01:23school system, so while there's a bit of a hint of generalisation in drawing lessons
01:28from the performance of such a large group, experts are saying that one consistent trend
01:32is that these families really value education and they're throwing down the challenge for
01:36everyone else to do the same as the new school year gets underway.