From ABC news article – click here to read.
Class divide no surprise to experienced teacher
After more than three decades teaching at a range of schools, Roger Amey said he was not surprised by what the PISA results showed when it came to economic background.
“Education is a right and not a privilege and yet in most of our public schools, many, many kids miss out,” he said.
From living in unsafe homes, to simply not being granted access to resources given to their privately-educated peers, Mr Amey said students were left to deal with the result of an unequal education system.
“The quality of the work being done by teachers in both systems is the same — the difference is the amount of money that’s being spent on kids in the different systems in the independent sector,” the science and maths teacher said.
A member of the Australian Education Union, Mr Amey said contending with bigger class sizes and a pile of admin work inflamed the problem.
“Teachers want to focus on the kids in their classes,” he said.
“But we have so many requirements about data keeping and compliance and so on that we don’t get to do the most important stuff in the classrooms.”