OECD education chief Andreas Schleicher blasts Australia's education system

We see the fallout from the inability to cope with the problem of indiscipline in public schools. Former experienced teachers gradually emerged and were replaced by new, poorly qualified graduates. Smarter graduates have many options and trying to teach unruly students is just not attractive to them. Above all, you must be very desperate to attend a school in a government school. More brilliant graduates with a vocation of teaching soon end up teaching in the many Australian private schools, much more orderly. A return of corporal punishment is necessary to restore order in public schools. In some of these schools, teachers spend most of the time ensuring that students are silent and sit down - during which they learn nothing

 

One of the most influential education experts in the world, Andreas Schleicher, has criticized the Australian education system for lagging behind global standards.

 

Mr. Schleicher, Director of Education of the Organization for Economic Development, said that Australia had a very significant decline in student achievement at the top of the PISA test ranking in the past year.

 

"Australia has lost a lot of students with very good results, it's very important this round and I think it's something to really think about," he said.

 

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international survey organized every three years that puts education systems around the world against each other by testing the performance of 15-year-olds.

 

Australia's results have steadily declined over the last decade. Last year, Australia ranked 14th behind Poland, Germany and Vietnam, with up to 20 percent of students unable to demonstrate their core competencies.

 

Speaking at the World Forum on Education and Skills in Dubai, Schleicher said that Australia's emphasis on the fact that teachers in front of a class on their own professional development was an area that required treatment.

 

"[Australia] defines teachers more or less according to the number of hours they teach before students," he said. "That's part of the problem." "We treat teachers as interchangeable widgets in the front line - they are just there to implement prefabricated knowledge."

 

He said that many countries were struggling to keep the best teachers of the profession because of curricula that limit creativity. "There really is a total lack of intellectual attractiveness for the teaching profession once you have this very industrial organization behind you," he said.

 

The past decade of Schleicher's data-driven research, which has been exploited by the United States and Britain's secretaries of education, has revealed that several changes have helped to Most successful in the world.

 

According to Schleicher, high-performing education systems such as Finland have set up selective teacher training with high academic standards, have prioritized the development of teachers and principals as above targets, reducing class sizes And allowing teachers to be creative in their implementation of the program.

 

These systems have also directed more resources to schools with a high number of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

 

NSW Minister of Education Adrian Piccoli frequently cites Finland, where teachers must have a master's degree, as an ideal model for NSW. In September, Mr. Piccoli announced new entry standards for teachers, with higher minimum marks now required to enroll in an undergraduate degree.

 

Schleicher added that Gonski's reforms based on Australia's needs, with increased investments in teacher training, were a positive step but needed more commitment. "This is one of the challenges in Australia - to ensure that funding continues to be channeled to schools with more needs," he said.

 

The federal government has not committed the last two years of Gonski's funding. According to school finance expert Jim McMorrow, NSW schools would be cheaper by $ 1.27 billion without needs-based funding