esperanza

Personally, I wouldn't be tooooo worried about what mathematical & grammatical work a young child (eg under 8 or 9) is doing. There is strong evidence to show that children who do not start formal education until 7 have caught up with those who started at 4 after just a few years.
Children can fairly easily be taught to read at home, with shared stories & lots of encouragement, and can learn a lot through play & enjoyment and just 'soaking it up'. In the UK (from experience) I think teaching has gone way too far in the 'teach to test' direction, obsession with league tables, etc; it is refreshing to think that Australia does not suffer the same problem - although this is just what I have heard, not from personal experience. If you want to compare the countries' respective systems, compare the 18 year old product, not the 7 or 8 year olds - and consider social skills, personal happiness, as well as academic achievements.

(One last point - there are awful teachers in the UK too, where there is a fairly rigid curriculum to follow - curriculum does not = good teachers.)

Whingin Pom

Can I just ask a question, have any of you thought about when your kids are in their teens.

I have a 20 year old daughter who apparantly doesn't know there is a letter 'T' in the alphabet. Not that my daughter is thick or anything, but she has grown up around children who don't care about the way they act or behave, she has not, and this is my opinion, had a very good education although she went to a school with very good achievement levels. We had a conversation today about Robin Hood and she didn't know who the sheriff of Nottingham was.

My son is almost a teenager and his education is terrible, its not his fault as he is very bright and when he takes an interest in things, knows everthing about it in no time at all. He sits in class bored, he has the failing of being distracted very easily because he finds lessons too easy, his school will not do anything about it and have put him into groups they know he will acheive in rather than push him to acheive more.

Now when I was in Australia I bacame aware of how different people are, as most people would, but being with younger men who have just left school and starting apprenticships, which you wont find in the UK anymore, I became aware of how much nicer people they were. They had manners, they were polite and respectful and hard working, and by no means thick or uneducated like alot of kids in the UK.

I would rather my children grow up in an enviroment where children are taught to be respectful and hard working than force fed an education that focuses on acheiving test results for leauge tables.

It is great that you care for your childs education but they are in a different country and are at the same mercy as every other child, so in reality they are not loosing out, I would say they are gaining because they are taught more life skills.

Sorry for the long post but had to say it all.

daunted

whilst on this subject can i ask if 'more academic' children are encouraged to stretch themselfs? my son is on gifted and talented for maths and science and currently works at a level much higher than his age. Will this be encouraged out in Oz
thanks
mandy

Mutley

I found this site

http://home.alphalink.com.au/~dredno...oolsinaus.html

It lists G&T provision on a school by school basis - It must have taken ages to put together!

northernbird

They do have programmes here in WA.

daunted

thanks northernbird

steandleigh

State education departments give each teachers a rating:
"S1" being the most compentent, S2 and S3 below that but all suitable to teach. The 4th rating means only suitable to teach relief, to be reviewed after a year. I think this is done to take pressure off the principles, in terms of choosing staff - teachers are rated and therefore according to their rating should be competent to a specific level.

With the issues of what level a child should be at with literacy, numeracy etc, an awful lot of the onus can be taken up by parents at home if they wish. My son is eight and he has the reading age of a fourteen year old. This is no accident - reading is a social practice in our home, we've encouraged our kids to enjoy books, to read for themselves and to enjoy being read to. I've always felt it is really important to give your kids at least the basics at home, that way you are setting them up for success rather than failure. If kids are literate and numerate from an early age, it makes the whole school learning process much easier for them.

Accountability shouldn't be laid firmly at the feet of teachers alone, parents need to be accountable for their childrens successes too.

NKSK version 2

Just to alleviate your concerns re: motivation of bright kids.

I have a pretty smart 4 year old (don't we all think that?!) and she absolutely loves school.

(Learns nothing but enjoys learning nothing)

(Just being facetious, I'm sure she's learning how to be a good Australian)

NKSK version 2

But we get to know which schools have poor teachers from inspections.

Often you don't know here until it is too late.

northernbird

My 4 year old is enjoying kindy and they seem to be teaching quite a bit. My 4 year old also very bright and has been identified as such by the teaching staff in her kindy class. They are adjusting her work and play accordingly so she doesn't get bored and frustrated. Nothing but good experience for me so far.

NKSK version 2

This is an interesting post.

Certainly, one of the push factors for us away from the UK was the dreadful behaviour of the teenagers which I seemed to come across. I taught in an "excellent" school and its student behaviour was dreadful. So you could say that in that respect, it is better here and Australia is getting it right.

HOWEVER, we live in a nice area here and we don't come into contact with any deadbeats - I'm not so sure that people in other parts of Perth would be of the same opinion.

Anecdotally, I have been truly amazed by the number of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors I see in formal writing here in Australia - adverts, bus stops, journalistic writing, TV captions.
Bearing in mind that my own kids will probably travel the world in their careers, it isn't really good enough to only compare with other Australians and thereby accept mediocrity. This just perpetuates the perception of Australia being a paraochial and isolated country.

If you really want your kids to have no limits to their aspirations then you need to compare their education with the best in the world - Singapore, South Korea, Finland and (dare I say it?) England.

NKSK version 2

Well it finally looks as though this is going to happen.

One of the saddest things that I've seen whilst here is state MPs and premiers (hardly persons of particularly outstanding IQ from what I've seen), arguing against a National Curriculum, doing untold damage to kids who move interstate purely for political reasons.

States were against it when the Federal government proposed it (not for any reason to do with education but because it was a "power grab" by Canberra) but now that the Labour opposition have suggested it they are all happy.

If ever a microcosm of the childish behaviour of state politicians were in evidence, this debacle surely has to be it.

Phoenix

I agree with these comments - my daughter started at 4 and 2 weeks august baby - she was involved and spent a year working towards sats at the age of 7 - ridiculous in my mind.
I do agree its the end result that counts, and given the uk's current literacy and numeracy levels along with never ending restrictions on what teachers can and cant do, the amount of time they spend doing their own paperwork for the government statistics dept rahter than teaching and the fact that once the child gets to high school most of the teachers are locums who couldn't give a rats arse about what they turn out at 16 then I for one am looking forward to my last child in education trying a different approach.

Dont for one minute think I think all uk schools or teachers are like this, but from my experience so far with my older 2 now left, thats what happened and we live in a good area ! ,my son even had his gcse graphics course work incinerated by that terms teacher, along with the whole class, it made up so much of the kids results with only 3 weeks to exams - needless to say the whole classes graphics results were dire and there was nothing that could be done.

My daughter had 5 different english teachers with 5 different styles in the last 2 years of education.

And my youngest who's dyslexic has spent the last 5 years learning very little academically but can speak to you like a grown up with very big words and with more understanding of the more important things in life than her peers , yet she's a write off as far as the statistics for the school and their 'figures'

Oooo i'm having a rant now - i better stop

thomas and sarahjayne

Its still a bit too early for me to judge as my girls started school here at new term end of feburary so still very new to it all. My 5 yr old, started school at 4 in uk and knew her phonics, simply maths and could read basic words and sentances together, since being here, what with xmas holiday period etc, i feel as if she has went back the way slightly, and at school it seems to be more fun and play and social skills as opposed to numeracy and literacy. I feel as if she is bored and its more like what her nursery was like back home. But having said that, partly our fault too as we had plenty of oppertunity over xmas 6 weeks etc to be doing some home teaching to keep her encouraged but simply let it slip as were settling into new life. We should be more envolved at home, but we took it for granted that in the U.K they had such an organised , strict learning regime in school that we did not have to do much at home as they were coming on greatly just based on classroom learning. I do think its far more laidback here, but we seem to be as well, so as parents we need to take some responsibility i think.

sj

Hutch

My son Josh is an August baby too (born 2001). He started school in September 2005 (7 days after his 4th birthday) and had just about done a full year at his (supposedly 7th best in the country) primary in the UK, when we emigrated here in July last year. He had good word knowledge and, despite being almost a full year younger than many of the children in his class, was keeping up on every level. When we moved here we managed to get him into the kindy class of the very highly regarded local public school, despite the serious misgivings of the headmaster. He was there for six weeks until we took him out of school and put him into pre-school.

Why did we remove him? It certainly wasn't because he wasn't managing academically, it was because socially he simply had trouble coping - many of the children in his class were six years old and he wasn't even five. He became withdrawn (very unlike him) and it became obvious he was out of his depth. Anyway - after initially resisting the idea, he quickly came to love his pre-school, socialising with kids of his age - and he made a set of eight solid friends who moved with him to the public school this January. We saw immediately how much better prepared he was this time round. He's been placed in a K/1 class and so is not being held back academically - in fact that school have single and split classes right the way up for this precise reason - if the child is able he/she can progress at his/her own level without moving up a class and being placed with much older children. Children who reach the end of secondary school education a year or two younger than their classmates then have the issue of waiting longer to drive, drink etc and undoubtedly end up doing things (having sex, experimenting with drugs etc) much younger than they would have if they'd progressed up the school in the normal way.

To address the concerns of the OP - I think we (my wife and I) are different to a lot of British parents. We honestly don't give a monkeys if they're seen to be 'behind' the equivalent national curriculum level in the UK. What evidence is there that the UK national curriculum is somehow 'right' or 'better'? We place a lot of value on the non-curricular skills they learn early here (possibly particular to our school/area - I don't know) - independence, responsibility, socialisation, politeness, team-work etc. There's no evidence to suggest that cramming kids from day one and testing them from the moment they walk through the door of primary school makes them any 'cleverer' or equips them any better, either socially or academically, for life beyond school. Indeed, didn't that recent Unicef report (hardly an easily dismissed or unreliable organisation) say that at age 15 Australian school-kids ranked third among students from OECD countries in reading, maths and science? The country was behind Finland (which starts childrens education at age 7) and Canada. I suppose the issue of the comparative levels of education between the UK and Australia only rears its head if you truly are an 'expat' and not an immigrant and therefore plan to return to the UK with your children whilst they're still of school age.