Education

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New NZ digital curriculum set for 2020, are schools ready?

Noticias

Oceania/ New Zealand/ 06.07.2019/ Source: www.rnz.co.nz.

The Education Review Office last year slammed the way schools and the Education Ministry were preparing for the introduction of the new digital technologies curriculum in 2020, a just-published report shows.

It shows the office warned the ministry in December that many schools would fail to meet their obligation to start teaching the curriculum in January next year when it becomes mandatory for children in Years 1-10.

The Education Ministry told RNZ things had improved since the review office surveyed schools last year and all schools would be ready to start teaching the subject.

But the Principals’ Federation and the Auckland Primary Principals’ Association said many schools were poorly prepared.

The new curriculum includes teaching children as young as five the basic principles of computer coding.

The review office report said schools had made slower-than-expected progress toward introducing the curriculum and school leaders had indicated they needed more time and resources.

It said some schools and principals were not taking seriously their obligation to introduce the curriculum and indicated boards of trustees needed to get tough on their principals.

«The lack of commitment by some school leaders to this compulsory curriculum content is of concern. Boards of trustees should consider including a component in their principal’s appraisal focusing on meeting the obligation to implement the DT [digital technologies] curriculum content from January 2020,» the report said

It said delays in setting up a coherent support programme were to blame for much of the problem.

«Too many schools did not know about the DT curriculum content, where to find the best information, or what PLD [professional learning and development] options were available to them. Too many schools have not started to look at the DT curriculum content, and, of those that have, too few have sufficient understanding, knowledge and skills to start to implement the Digital Technology curriculum content,» the report said.

The report said only 35 percent of schools reported that both senior leaders and teachers knew about the new curriculum and their obligation to start teaching it from January 2020.

«More schools must start to engage seriously with what is required of them if they are to meet their curriculum obligations,» the report said.

The curriculum was introduced by the previous government which committed $40 million to resources and training to support it.

The ministry’s deputy secretary for early learning and student achievement, Ellen MacGregor-Reid, said the ministry improved its support for schools in light of the report and over the past 12 months momentum had grown.

«We think that all schools will be ready to start teaching the digital curriculum and that that teaching will develop over time,» Ms MacGregor-Reid said.

She said teachers were motivated to start teaching the curriculum.

«We know there’s been a growing momentum in them engaging in the supports we’re offering, 12-and-a-half-thousand teachers alone have engaged with the digital readiness programme which is just one of the supports and it’s on that basis that we’re confident that schools will be teaching the digital curriculum from next year.»

The president of the Principals’ Federation, Whetu Cormick, said some schools were not ready to start teaching aspects of the curriculum such as the skills behind computer programming.

«In some schools that won’t be happening because we won’t be ready for it. Schools will do their very, very best to put this in place and I’m sure they will be planning for that next year but we have to question will teachers actually have the skills to do it themselves in every single classroom throughout every single school,» he said.

Mr Cormick said he had doubts about the number of schools that had received training in the new curriculum.

«I know my own school hasn’t and I’ve spoken to lots of school leaders who haven’t participated in any professional development. We’ve even heard reports that they found the application process difficult and they were declined.»

Auckland Primary Principals’ Association president Heath McNeil said he was not aware of any schools that would not introduce the curriculum next year as required.

However, he said schools would have varying degrees of familiarity with the curriculum, which he said should be included in daily teaching rather than taught once-a-week as a discrete subject.

Mr McNeil said the teacher shortage and high degree of churn among staff in Auckland schools had hampered their preparations for the curriculum.

In addition, training for teachers had been under-resourced.

«A compounding factor was that the professional learning and development were contestable rather than if-you-want-it-you-get-it. So if we want two-and-a-half thousand schools to implement something, we need to resource two-and-a-half thousand schools,» he said.

Mr McNeil said the current industrial action being taken by primary and intermediate school principals who belonged to the Educational Institute (NZEI) was also affecting schools’ preparations. The principals were refusing to participate in any ministry initiatives, including training for the digital technologies curriculum.

Souce of the notice: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/395986/new-nz-digital-curriculum-set-for-2020-are-schools-ready

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Japan to toughen eligibility standards for Japanese-language schools

Noticias

Asia/ Japan/ 06.07.2019/ Source: www.japantimes.co.jp.

The Immigration Services Agency said Thursday it will toughen eligibility standards for Japanese-language schools that can accept foreign students, effective Sept. 1.

The stricter standards will require 70 percent or more of the students who complete the courses to proceed to universities, get jobs in Japan or certify through outside testing that their Japanese ability is above daily conversation levels.

Schools that fail to meet the requirement for three straight years will not be allowed to accept new foreign students.

The tougher standards are aimed at preventing foreign people from coming into the country with a study visa for the purpose of making money, as well as to improve the quality of Japanese-language education in the country.

The move comes as the number of foreign workers in the country is expected to continue increasing following the introduction of a new visa program in April.

Under the new standards, the minimum requirement for the average student’s attendance rate will be revised from 50 percent or more in a month to 70 percent or more over a six-month period. Schools failing to meet this threshold will not be able to accept new students.

Foreign students will be asked to inform schools about their part-time jobs, and information about students who miss more than half of classes in a month must be reported to the agency.

Japanese-language schools used to have to undergo eligibility checks only when they are established. But under the new standards, they will be checked every year.

The number of Japanese-language schools in the country recognized by the government rose 1.6 times over the past five years to 747 as of Thursday.

Source of the notice: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/08/01/national/japan-tighten-japanese-language-school-standards/#.XUi17OgzbIU

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We ignore our children’s future

Mail & Guardian

By: Mail & Guardian.

Beyond all the noise — the politics and the Twitter spats between politicians — are South Africans who are grappling with serious difficulties and few people are paying attention to their plight.

This week, the Mail & Guardian visited the area near Weenen in KwaZulu-Natal. This is where Sahlumbe village is situated. It’s a village that has been grappling with the violent behaviour of schoolboys who fight dangerously among each other on school grounds and turn these battles into impi yezigodi (faction fights).
The parents were forced to take the hard decision of shutting down Sahlumbe High School for three months. This gave them time to put their heads together to find solutions for the fighting culture among learners that is slowly eating away the good record of the school — the matric pass rate has dropped from 96.30% in 2002 to 32.6% last year.

The school was closed because of children fighting. Let that sink in. In those three months young people, whose only ticket out of that village is education, were starved of it. They loitered on the streets of their village with no sense of purpose. This is three months they will never get back.

The KwaZulu-Natal department of education has essentially washed its hands of this, saying that there is little they can do to intervene in that situation. The school was finally reopened last month, at the start of the third term. But parents, schoolchildren and teachers are on edge; they don’t know when the war will start again.

Have we become a society that is so hardened that we no longer care about the future of our children? Do we no longer care about the marginalised and disadvantaged? Are we willing to watch children kill each other over nonsensical things and we don’t even make noise about it?

Government officials always say that education is a societal issue and that when there is violence at schools those involved need to come together to find lasting solutions. But the people of Sahlumbe are alone in this fight. They have come together as parents and relied on their inkosi for guidance to try to bring stability to the school. The provincial department could bring in social workers to try to understand what issues these learners are dealing with. The department of community safety could also intervene.

Instead, the provincial education department held one imbizo with parents and then drove away, leaving no lasting solutions behind.

Adults also need to do better. It’s true that the violence that plays out at Sahlumbe High and other schools mirrors what is happening in society. When parents use violence to address problems, children do the same in the schoolyard.

When we do react to this kind of thing, it is after the fact. This year it was to a learner who was killed by another child at a Johannesburg school. But learners have been killing each other at least as far back as 2011 in KwaZulu-Natal villages in alleged faction fights.

Why have we not been outraged by that? And why have we not found ways to interrogate this phenomenon in the province and nip it in the bud?

History will judge us harshly for being preoccupied with the battles between elites when our children — the future of this country — perish in front of our eyes.

Source of the article: https://mg.co.za/article/2019-08-02-00-editorial-we-ignore-our-childrens-future%5B3/8

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Labour must be bold, and finally abolish private schools

Steven Longden

By:

 

These schools are core to Britain’s inequality problem. Labour should emulate Finland and integrate them into state education

As a teacher of ethics, philosophy and religion at a Manchester comprehensive school, students often ask me why politicians allow 7% of children in this country to access exclusive schools that enable them to dominate the top professions – schools whose main entrance criteria is the size of parents’ bank accounts. These days, I usually answer, “because the politicians are wrong”.

I sometimes inform my students of the latest Sutton Trust reports which highlight that 65% of senior judges, 49% of armed forces officers, 44% of newspaper columnists and 29% of MPs are all privately educated. Being a good teacher, I integrate maths into my subject and get them to work out the extent to which private school students are disproportionately represented in these professions. You should see the disheartened looks on their faces.

I tell them not to lose hope and that there is something called “social mobility”, which means that if they work really hard, get to university and then work hard in their careers they might be lucky enough to get one of those remaining top jobs that haven’t gone to the privately educated. They don’t look convinced. The Social Mobility Commission wasn’t convinced back in 2017 either, which is why its commissioners resigned en masse a year and a half ago.

I’d hoped under Jeremy Corbyn that my party would have been up for finishing off what Clement Attlee failed to do after the second world war: phase out private schools. There was a welcome commitment in Labour’s last manifesto to add VAT to private school fees, but the impact of this will be minimal and certainly won’t hasten the demise of private schools.

Labour’s pledge to create a National Education Service is exciting. The party has published a National Education Service charter that commits it to “tackling structural, cultural and individual barriers which cause and perpetuate inequality”. Earlier this year, Corbyn quite rightly pledged to focus on promoting social justice rather than social mobility, but I was bemused by the silence on private schools. How, precisely, does one tackle structural inequalities in England without phasing out private schools? Are we serious about these inequalities or just tinkering?

In the past Labour has missed opportunities to integrate private schools into the state sector – we can’t let that happen again. That’s why we have launched the Labour Against Private Schools campaign. Our first goal is to make the full integration of private schools into the state education system official party policy, by getting a motion passed in support of this at Labour’s annual conference this September.

There are models of excellent education systems that exist without private schools. Finland is often held up as a system that consistently achieves some of the best educational outcomes across Europe and the OECD countries. In Finland, private schools were effectively brought into the comprehensive education system over the course of a decade. It is time England started to seriously plan a school system without private schools, so that in the future teachers like me can look their students in the eye and tell them that this country has removed one of the biggest barriers that the richest people erected to unfairly advantage their progeny.

So I am proud to tell my students that I am a founding member of the Labour Against Private Schools campaign, and that I will do everything I can to encourage the Labour leadership to commit to dismantling the private schools sector that continues to uphold gross levels of inequality in this country.

Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/09/labour-phase-out-private-schools-britain-inequality-finland

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16 Million Children Out Of School In Nigeria -Adamu, Former Education Minister

Noticias

Africa/ Nigeria/ 02.08.2019/ Source: saharareporters.com.

 

Adamu Adamu, a former education minister, has said the number of out-of-school children in the country now stands at over 16 million.

Adamu, who is also one of the 43 ministerial nominees submitted to the senate for screening and confirmation stated this while fielding questions from senatirs on Wednesday.

The Nation reports that the new figure of 16 million, however, contradicts the 13 million out-of-school children being bandied around.

The ministerial nominee told the senate that the 16 million figure was based on a February 2019 census.

Adamu noted that out-of-primary-school children stood at 10 million, while children out-of-secondary-school are six million.

He blamed the high number on poor funding of education in the country by states and the federal government.

Adamu also said it appeared that more Nigerians are now corrupt despite President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-corruption campaign.

Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, said the legislature and the executive arm of government should work together to get the children back to the classrooms.

Lawan said: “It is our responsibility to get these children out of (the streets). The senate and the executive need to work together to get these children back to the classroom.

“We can’t continue to have them on our streets. It poses a serious security problem and we need to stop it. Maybe that will be through more budgetary allocations.”

Source of the notice: http://saharareporters.com/2019/07/25/16-million-children-out-school-nigeria-adamu-former-education-minister

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China: Education and testing may rein in HIV rates

Noticias

Asia/ China/ 02.08.2019/ Source: www.china.org.cn.

 

China reported some 145,000 new cases of HIV/AIDS last year, with about 2 percent among those aged 15 to 24, a health official said.

«There has been a slight uptick in HIV/AIDS among male youths in recent years, but the total number of newly diagnosed teenagers and young adults hovers around 3,000 each year and makes up only a small proportion of all cases,» Liu Zhongfu, an official with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news conference in Beijing on Wednesday.

Liu denied recent news that there had been a spike in the number of HIV infections among Chinese teenagers.

He said China has recorded over 100,000 new cases of HIV/AIDS a year for five consecutive years.

«Proper sex education and readily accessible testing services are two pillars to slow the spread of the disease,» he said.

«The health and education authorities have jointly staged trial education campaigns on campuses and established a reporting system to tackle the issue,» Liu said.

There are about 1.25 million people living with HIV in China, with the infection rate lower than 0.1 percent at the end of last year, according to the National Health Commission.

A health promotion plan released by the State Council in July said the number of people infected with HIV is likely to keep rising, but the prevalence will remain low.

The country aims to contain the infection rate to under 0.15 percent by 2022 and 0.2 percent by 2030, according to the plan.

Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiological expert at the CDC, said during a news conference in November that the increasing number of cases are largely due to more tests being conducted each year, revealing previously unknown cases.

Lei Zhenglong, deputy director of the National Health Commission’s disease control and prevention department, said that in addition to awareness campaigns, efforts will also be devoted to maintaining full coverage of HIV testing for blood donations and implementing measures to prevent transmission of the virus between mothers and babies.

At the same news conference, Xiao Ning, an official with the China CDC, also drew attention to parasitic diseases, another major category of infectious conditions that impact the health of Chinese.

«There have been about 3,000 cases of imported malaria in recent years, and different types of snail fever that are indigenous to Africa or South America have entered the country,» Xiao said.

China is working toward eliminating malaria by 2022 and effectively containing snail fever infections in the same time frame, with the goal of wiping out the disease by 2030, according to the nationwide plan.

Xiao said the goals are attainable thanks to the upgrading of the country’s disease monitoring and reporting system.

Source of the notice: http://www.china.org.cn/china/2019-08/02/content_75058969.htm
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Poe wants social media awareness included in primary, secondary education in PH

Noticias

Asia/ Phillipine/ 30.07.2019/ Source: news.mb.com.ph.

Poe on Tuesday, July 2, filed Senate Bill No. 129, which seeks the inclusion of social media and its importance in the curriculum of primary and secondary levels of education in the country.

This was one of the first 10 measures she filed to begin her second term in Senate.

“Social media is upon us and should be put to good use by teaching the youth the value of responsible, fair and truthful usage,” Poe said in a statement.

“Magandang lugar ang mga paaralan para maimulat ang mga kabataan sa responsable, mapanuri at produktibong paggamit ng social media. Kailangang mabigyan din sila ng sapat na impormasyon kung ano ang maaaring i-post, ano ang mga dapat iwasang paniwalaan agad, at kung paano mag-beripika ng mga datos. Para na rin ito sa kanilang kaligtasan,” she added.

(Schools are an ideal place to teach the youth on the responsible, critical and productive use of social media. They should also be given enough information about what they can or cannot post, what should not be believed easily, and how to verify data. This is also for their safety.)

In her bill, the Department of Education (DepEd), in consultation with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), will formulate the necessary steps and measures to achieve these objectives.

Aside from elementary and high school, Poe also sought to include social media education in the National Service Training Program (NSTP), particularly in the service components pertaining to the Literacy Training Service and the Civic Welfare Training Service.

The bill tasks the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA), in consultation with DICT, to lead its implementation.

The “Digital 2019, a report from Hootsuite and We are Social showing people’s online behavior around the world, found that Filipinos spend an average of 10 hours a day on the internet.

Digital 2019 also revealed that social media use in the Philippines was at 71 percent, above the worldwide average of 45 percent. It said Filipinos spent the most time on social media at four hours and 12 minutes on average per day.
It also showed that 79 million Filipinos aged 13 and older were on social media.

In her bill, Poe noted the role of social media in information dissemination and shaping of public discourse and opinion.

She said she hoped that the youth will learn the virtues of discernment and critical thinking amid the prevalence of so-called “fake news”.

“This bill seeks to insulate the citizenry from attempts to unscrupulously utilize Social Media for various kinds of black propaganda and misinformation which are detrimental to transparency, accountability and truthfulness which could frustrate a meaningful, fruitful and intelligent discourse towards nation-building,” Poe added.

Source of the notice: https://news.mb.com.ph/2019/07/03/poe-wants-social-media-awareness-included-in-primary-secondary-education-in-ph/

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