Education

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Coronavirus: Schools told to keep staff and students recently in China away from classroom

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Oceania/ New Zealand/ 28.01.2020/ Source: www.stuff.co.nz.

 

School principals are being urged to delay the start of the school year for staff or students who have recently been to China over fears of coronavirus.

Education Secretary for the Ministry of Education, Iona Holsted said the ministry had warned school principals to «err on the side of caution» with the .

On Monday Ministry of Health officials said there was a «high likelihood» of coronavirus reaching New Zealand, with a moderate chance that it would spread when it arrives.

The new virus originated in the Chinese province of Wuhan in December and has rapidly spread to other countries, including Australia.

Cabinet is expected to make the virus a notifiable disease on Tuesday, giving public health officials the power to quarantine people suspected of infection.

Children and young people were currently returning to classrooms and the health of students and staff was a priority, Holsted said.

Official advice for principals included a list of steps to take that advised keeping students away from school if they had been in China.

«For any staff member or student who may be at high risk of exposure because they have recently been to China or have been in close contact with someone confirmed with the virus, I encourage you to ask that the staff member or parent/caregiver of the student delay the start of their school year for 14 days and voluntarily stay away.»

The advice states that anyone who was unwell should not be at school or at their early learning service and provided a number for Healthline.

If a student still attends school while showing symptoms, the principal of a state school could preclude them if they believed on reasonable grounds they may have a communicable disease, her advice said.

«The student has to stay away for the infectious period of the specific disease.»

This did not apply for private schools but principals could request that a student with an infectious disease or is suspected of having an infectious disease, did not attend.

Principals can also request that a staff member with an infectious disease or was suspected of having an infectious disease, did not attend.

Meanwhile, National Party education spokeswoman Nikki Kaye has written to the Education Minister asking about what support was in place for schools, early learning centres and tertiary institutions.

She sought the sought urgent advice on Sunday but was yet to get a response.

«Tens of thousands of international students will be arriving in New Zealand to study over the coming weeks, some of them from places which have been affected by the outbreak.

«There needs to be clear advice for host families, parents, schools and teachers about what they should do if an outbreak were to occur.»

Some schools started back on Monday and more will be starting on Tuesday and later this week.

The University of Canterbury (UC) expected «several hundred» new Chinese students to enrol in person from February 11 to 13. It was exploring late enrolments for students whose travel from China was disrupted.

The university had urged staff and students to reassess whether planned trips to China were essential and had «contingency plans» in case the situation changed, a spokeswoman said.

Kaye said: «It’s time the Government gave clear advice about will happen if this virus reaches New Zealand.»

«The Government is missing in action while the rest of the world is taking this seriously. It’s time for action.»

Source of the notice: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/119085941/coronavirus-schools-told-to-keep-staff-and-students-recently-in-china-away-from-classroom

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Finland: Education Minister warns of school consequences of population decline

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Europa/ Finland/ 27.01.2020/ Source: newsnowfinland.fi.

Minister of Education Li Andersson (Left) is warning that declining population in some parts of the country might mean there’s not enough children for each municipality to have its own schools in the future.

She made the comments to Iltalehti newspaper, and attributes the problem to Finland’s falling birth rate. One answer the minister suggests is to share resources. “Sharing an elementary school among several municipalities is something that I consider a possible outcome in some parts of Finland” she says.

Finland has one of the lowest birth rates in the western world, although the overall population of the country is increasing thanks to inward migration.

The number of children born in 2019 for example (45,597) is the lowest recorded annual figure since the famine years of the 19th century.

According to the latest figures from Statistics Finland 45,597 children were born during 2019 which is 1,980 fewer births than the year before.

Li Andersson says this will have an impact on education as well.

“Obviously, if these population projections come true, it will be visible on the school and education side. The first, of course, is immediately apparent in early childhood education. Therefore, we intend to bring this big issue to the forefront of education policy” she says.

Source of the notice: https://newsnowfinland.fi/domestic/education-minister-warns-of-school-consequences-of-population-decline

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Education innovations in Asia: 5 takeaways from Taiwan’s NXTEducator Summit

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Asia/ Taiwan/ 21.o1.2020/ Source: www.brookings.edu.

here’s no question that children in school today will encounter an entirely different workplace than the one we’re in now. The impact of new technologies and a changing climate will influence the kinds of jobs available and the skills needed to be successful in them. While it’s impossible to know what exactly the future will hold, education scholars are emphasizing the need for young people to acquire skills such as collaboration, critical thinking, and problem-solving. These so-called “21st century” skills will help young people thrive in an uncertain future. Around the world, innovators are finding new and creative ways to deliver such skills.

I recently took part in the NXTEducator Summit in Taipei on 21st century skills in Asia, which shed light on the many innovations in the Chinese-speaking world. Co-hosted by the Finnish nonprofit HundrED and the Sayling Wen Cultural and Educational Foundation in Taiwan, the summit brought together more than 100 teachers, administrators, and innovators across China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia to learn from seven featured innovators and exchange ideas for delivering a quality, future-ready education for all of today’s young people.

At the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at Brookings, we research education innovations, and the summit provided a window into current trends in the region as well as similarities we see across the globe that can help inform our future work. Below are five takeaways from the summit:

1. Leapfrogging is happening in the here and now. The summit’s featured innovators confirm that rapid, nonlinear progress in education, or what CUE calls “leapfrogging,” is alive and well in communities across the Chinese-speaking world. CUE’s leapfrog pathway highlights how innovation can move education from the status quo to a place where all young people develop the breadth of skills needed to be successful in the future. For example, the Co-Publishing Project in Taiwan works with economically disadvantaged students and students from immigrant families, putting them at the center of learning through hands-on photography projects. Student-centered learning is a core element of leapfrogging, as highlighted in CUE’s leapfrog pathway. The project fosters students’ curiosity about their own cultures and the world around them and allows for their self-expression through the art of photography. Another featured innovation, Teach for Taiwan, recruits university graduates and professionals to teach in economically disadvantaged primary schools through its two-year fellowship program, helping to address educational inequity among rural and urban communities. The innovation represents an example of widening the pool of teachers, another aspect of the leapfrog pathway.

2. Advanced technology is being harnessed for learning. While many well-resourced classrooms have tablets and computers, the use of drones in school is less common. The Drone-based Interdisciplinary Learning and Entrepreneurship Education program in Hong Kong has seized on the greater commercial availability of drones to further student learning. Secondary school students first learn about drones in the classroom, applying math, science, and coding skills to program drones and track their trajectories. They also meet entrepreneurs and professionals who use drones in their day to day careers. Students apply their learnings to the real-life measurement of water quality, first by engineering drones to collect water samples through a testing process in the classroom and then collecting samples from local bodies of water. Back in the classroom, students analyze the collected samples to identify levels of water pollution and pollution sources. The program enables students to solve a local problem through technology, while robustly building their 21st century skills.

3. Familiar models are being used in new ways. Innovation isn’t always the brand new, never-before-seen thing. Indeed, in “Leapfrogging Inequality,” Brookings scholar Rebecca Winthrop defines innovations in education as a break from current practice, whether new to the world or new to a context. Two featured innovations, BEEP Lab and FunMeiker, represent examples of an old idea being adopted to serve a new purpose. Both innovations use concepts from the field of architecture to teach K-12 students. The programs work with local architects as mentors who guide students through the processes of inquiry-thinking, design-thinking, and problem-solving. While architecture’s use in K-12 education is not brand new, these innovations are providing thoughtful, new ways to deliver context-specific concepts and ideas to children in Singapore and Taiwan, such as a focus on the natural and cultural environments in addition to the built environment.

4. Innovation is promoting empathy and cross-cultural exchange. Featured innovation MTA World (Mondragon Team Academy) is a university in which students spend each year in a different country. Students can choose to study in Asia in China and Korea, as well as in Spain, Mexico, and the United States. Instead of classrooms, learning takes place through innovation labs where students work in teams of entrepreneurs. MTA recognizes that when young people have the opportunity to interact with others from different backgrounds, they develop new perspectives and ways of working that will serve them throughout their lives. Another innovation that promotes cross-cultural learning at the tertiary level is City Wanderer, in which teams of university students take on challenges in their city that benefit underserved groups—for example by cooking meals for the homeless or spending time with elderly neighbors. By interacting with others from different backgrounds, students develop empathy and a commitment to improve their world.

5. There is tremendous opportunity for governments to help innovation scale. Six of the seven featured innovations are led by nongovernmental organizations (the seventh is a social enterprise). Many collaborate with formal education systems by partnering with schools to lead after-school and weekend programs. This trend mirrors CUE’s research. In its global catalog of nearly 3,000 education innovations, CUE found that two-thirds of innovations originated from the nonprofit sector, whereas only 12 percent of innovations originated from governments. While innovation tends to occur outside of formal systems for a number of reasons, there is great value in more fully bringing innovation into the mainstream, where it can reach millions more students. CUE has called for a mindset shift among leaders as a starting point to encourage greater uptake of education innovation by local and national governments.

While we can’t say for certain what the world of work will look like 10 or 15 years from now, the conversations at the NXTEducator Summit show us that the education innovations community is putting into practice a range of creative ideas inside and outside of the classroom.

Source of the notice: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/education-plus-development/2020/01/09/education-innovations-in-asia-5-takeaways-from-taiwans-nxteducator-summit/
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Australian bushfires drive education group to hatch climate action plan

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Oceania/ Australia/ 21.01.2020/ Source: www.studyinternational.com.

The International Education Association of Australia (IEAA) is developing a carbon-neutral policy in response to the nation’s most dire bushfire disaster to date.

As experts across various industries met in Canberra last Wednesday to discuss the issue, the IEAA had already begun developing a joint statement and action plan. This effort involved international education representatives from all eight states and territories, as well as education and trade departments.

Speaking ahead of the crisis conference he chaired, Education Minister Dan Tehan said, “The federal government will work to fast track the support we can provide to the sector as a result of today’s meeting.”

“We will work with the sector to harness the many good ideas that will make a difference to the education and mental well-being of children in bushfire affected areas,” he assured.

In the past, the IEAA was responsible for creating the Council for International Education’s Collaborative Marketing Framework. The framework provides a guide to critical incident response and ensures the equal distribution of resources in times such as this.

IEAA chief executive Phil Honeywood, who led the creation of the Collaborative Marketing Framework, believes the bushfires call for greater attention and action on mitigating carbon footprint within the education sector.

Among his suggestions are encouraging webinars and teleconferences instead of travelling across borders for work. If a flight is necessary, the least that can be done is donating towards tree replanting efforts.

Honeywood also indicated that the policy developed in this regard is expected to be approved by the end of February 2020.

Academic institutions step up

International education representatives expressed views and ideas on the most pressing matters in light of this national crisis, including health, safety, and stability of school communities as well as the impact on academic research.

Caroline Perkins, executive director of the Regional Universities Network, said research on ecosystems located within the area affected by the bushfire would inevitably be harmed. She called for special considerations for affected researchers, in hopes to mitigate the ruinous impact on their studies.

This series of Australian bushfires has been raging across 10 million hectares since June 2019 and only began to alleviate this week with the help of downpour in affected areas. For comparison, England’s entire land area is 13 million hectares.

The fires are predicted to continue blazing until March.

Throughout this climate disaster, several Australian universities have stepped up to provide crisis accommodation for firefighters and evacuees while serving as fundraising centres for relief efforts. This includes the University of Wollongong (Batemans Bay and Bega campuses) and Charles Sturt University.

 

Source of the notice: https://www.studyinternational.com/news/australian-bushfires-climate-action-plan/

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Behaviour battleground: isolation booths divide opinion among teachers

Richard Adams

By: Richard Adams.

From a ‘lose the booths’ conference to ‘warm-strict’ policies, teachers are divided on how to tackle unruly pupils

The use of isolation booths in state schools has become one of the most contentious issues among teachers in England, even if public concern over pupil behaviour has faded from the headlines since the 1990s.

Social media has become an almost nightly battleground between teachers with conflicting views on behaviour management and the use of internal exclusion or removal rooms within schools, where disruptive pupils are taken out of class and sent to study elsewhere under supervision.

What the debate reveals is that the more than 20,000 state schools in England have wide variations in discipline and behaviour policies.

In some cases pupils are sat at booths, similar to cubicles used in call centres, with a desk and three high sides. It is the use of this furniture that has become controversial within the profession, to the extent that a “lose the booths” conference for teachers is being held this weekend in Leeds.

“Learn how to remove the booths from your school and still have great outcomes,” says the publicity for Lose The Booths Live!, which promises a conference with “children’s rights at heart”.

But in practice the use of “consequence rooms” or removal spaces, is just one potential tool in a school’s armoury. While some regularly use internal exclusion as a formal policy for misbehaviour, others reject it – highlighting the autonomy enjoyed by headteachers.

At one end of the scale are schools practising “warm-strict” behaviour management, which their critics deride as “zero tolerance”, with clear rules and sanctions. Those rules can be at a level of detail some parents may find disturbing: not only the lengths of skirts or type of shoes but also maintaining complete silence when moving between classes, and sanctions for what some regard as petty issues such as failure to bring a pen to class, or not keeping eye contact with the teacher during lessons.

But the defenders of this approach, including schools such as the Magna Academy in Dorset or King Solomon Academy in Paddington, say that a well-structured behaviour policy is liberating for teachers. By cutting out the background buzz of what the former Ofsted chief inspector Michael Wilshaw called “low-level, persistent disruptive behaviour”, the whole class can then concentrate on learning.

One maths teacher who moved to a recently opened “warm-strict” free school said he was astonished by the difference a successful behaviour policy can make.

“I’d worked at four schools before, but this is the first time I’ve been actually able to teach for the whole lesson. At the other schools pupils would arrive making noise and jostling, and take five or 10 minutes just to settle down. Here there’s none of that,” he said.

But on social media teachers regularly spar over the need for such detailed rules and sanctions for what in other, more relaxed schools would be minor infringements.

There’s little in the way of research to say which approach is more effective in terms of pupil behaviour or academic attainment – although supporters point to the strong GCSE results produced by the Michaela Free School in Brent, one of the flagships of the stricter approach.

While it is impossible to say if pupil behaviour has improved in recent years, statistics show that the rates of expulsions from state schools are well below their peaks of the 1990s. In the 1993-94 school year, more than 12,000 pupils were permanently excluded. By 2017-18, the latest year for which we have figures, just 7,900 were permanently excluded, although the proportion of pupils being excluded has been rising slowly over the previous five years.

But many teachers remain unconvinced by the stricter approach. The most recent annual conference of the National Education Union held a hostile debate over zero tolerance policies, with one delegate labelling the use of booths as “inhuman”, while others blamed budget cuts for the loss of school support staff.

But union surveys have also found that many teachers feel unsupported by their school’s management over tackling bad behaviour, with behaviour frequently cited as a key reason for leaving the profession.

The Conservatives went into the most recent general election vowing to improve school behaviour, seeing it as a vote winner. Its policies included giving school inspectors extra time to examine bullying and behaviour, while documents obtained by the Guardian before the election showed the government preparing to “back heads to use powers to promote good behaviour including sanctions and rewards” including the use of “reasonable force”.

Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jan/17/behaviour-battleground-isolation-booths-divide-opinion-among-teachers

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Australian education bodies take action as bushfires still rage

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Oceania/ Australia/ 14.01.2020/ Source: www.timeshighereducation.com.

Australia’s international education representative body is vowing to curb its carbon emissions, as the bushfire emergency elevates climate consciousness across the scorched country.

The International Education Association of Australia is developing a carbon neutral policy to mitigate the climate impacts of globetrotting education leaders. Meanwhile the leading university body is joining education minister Dan Tehan’s crisis meeting on the bushfires.

Mr Tehan said Prime Minister Scott Morrison had asked him to call the meeting of the sector’s representatives “to hear first-hand how the bushfires have impacted education, and how our government can help”.

The summit, scheduled for 15 January, echoes similar forums of key players in other sectors. It will focus primarily on schools and childcare centres, where the summer break ends much earlier than at universities.

But Universities Australia chief executive Catriona Jackson said the meeting offered an opportunity to thrash out how her members could continue supporting affected communities.

“University expertise is being deployed to help the community make sense of the crisis, across almost every aspect,” she said.

Ms Jackson highlighted the need for clear communication with international students during the crisis. She said students heading for Australia should contact their prospective universities if they had queries or concerns, while those already in the country should “reach out to university support services if they feel distressed or anxious”.

The support has not all been one-way, with international students among those contributing to the relief effort. International media has carried a story about Mark Yeong, a Singaporean student at the University of Sydney who joined a volunteer firefighting brigade.

International education representatives from Australia’s eight states and territories are also putting together a joint statement on the bushfire emergency, in collaboration with the education and trade departments and IEAA.

Its primary focus is ensuring the safety of current and incoming foreign students, in line with provisions outlined in a “collaborative marketing framework” developed a year ago by the Council for International Education, which is convened by IEAA chief executive Phil Honeywood.

The provisions are designed to coordinate the sector’s responses to critical incidents, and to ensure that jurisdictions do not profit from each other’s misfortunes in situations like the bushfire crisis.

Mr Honeywood said the disaster had also presented an “appropriate time to have a comprehensive look at the carbon footprint situation and to lead by example”. He said that given their considerable domestic and overseas travel, international education representatives needed to find ways to alleviate the climate impact.

This included encouraging webinars and teleconferences as an alternative to international travel. When flying became unavoidable, education representatives should support measures offered by airlines to mitigate the carbon footprint, such as paying for trees to be planted.

He said the industry should also look at ways of reducing the far greater carbon footprint generated by the international travel of students themselves. An obvious measure was to put more resources into branch campuses rather than focusing on onshore recruitment.

“Australia has not been very good on transnational education,” he said. “Surely it’s part of our mission as a sector to be more accessible to the largest number of students possible…to provide world class education in countries where it’s not readily available.”

He said the policy was expected to be approved by the end of February.

Source of the notice: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/australian-education-bodies-take-action-bushfires-still-rage

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Affordable education still out of reach for Indians

Ishan Anand

By: Ishan Anand.

Before last Sunday’s attack in Jawaharlal Nehru University, the students’ union was protesting a fee hike in the university for months. An analysis of National Statistical Organisation (NSO) data shows that affordable education is a larger problem that needs to be seriously discussed.

The NSO recently released a report based on an all-India survey conducted in 2017-18. The survey shows that only 10.6% of the Indian population aged above 15 years has successfully completed a graduate degree. This proportion is only 5.7% in rural India and is 8.3% among women. The proportion of graduates in the same age group was 8.2% as per the 2011 Census.

Since micro data for the 2017-18 survey on education is not yet available, it is not possible to go into the socio-economic background of those who received higher education. Another NSO survey, the 2017-18 Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS),can be used for this, though.

The PLFS data confirms the intuitive belief that social and economic disadvantages perpetuate educational inequalities. The proportion of the population (15 years and above) with a graduate or a higher degree is much lower for the socially backward sections than others. Muslims fare worse than even the Scheduled Caste (SC) Hindus. To be sure, the social gap has been reducing over the years, but it still remains significant. There is also a gender gap when it comes to access to education. (See table 1)

A similar pattern can be seen by economic status as well. Disaggregation by deciles of monthly per capita consumer expenditure shows a strong correlation between economic status (spending) and educational attainment. Data clearly shows the social gap in educational attainment as well as the gap by economic status across and within socio-religious groups. (See table 2)

The NSO report on education also tells us about the average cost of education in the country.

The average annual expense on a graduate course was Rs 10,501 in a government institution, and almost double in an unaided private institution (Rs 19,972). The expenditure for a graduate degree in technical courses in a government college was Rs 36,180 as compared to Rs 72,712 in private unaided institutions.

This must be seen along with the income data available from PLFS (2017-18): 45% of the regular workers, 60% of the self-employed and almost all casual workers earned less than Rs 10,000 a month.

Overall, about 67% of Indian workers earned less than Rs 1,20,000 in a year.

India remains a country with an overwhelming number of poor people who cannot afford expensive education.

The NSS report on education spending also reveals that in the age group of 3 to 35 years, 15% of men and 14% of women never enrolled in an educational institution because of financial constraints; 5% of women never enrolled as there was ‘no tradition in community’.

Among those who were enrolled at some point in time but were not attending at the time of the survey, 24% of men and 18% of women cited financial constraints as the reason for dropping out; 13% of women cited marriage as the reason for dropping out.

What is the importance of a graduate degree in India? If we look at the distribution of graduates in the workforce, 62% were in regular jobs in 2017-18. The wage for a worker with a graduate (or higher) degree in salaried jobs was 1.6 times the overall average wage of a regular worker.

Here, it must be noted that the unemployment rate is much higher among the educated.

Quality education leads to better job prospects and higher wages for all, but also provides a path for social mobility. Students’ demand for better and just prospects for all is completely justified.

Source of the article: https://www.hindustantimes.com/opinion/affordable-education-still-out-of-reach-for-indians/story-Ud6MFDKYfUrnTKMnqX4Y8J.html

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