Colleen Harkin Discussing IPA Education Research On The Rita Panahi Show Sky News Australia – 26 August

The Institute of Public Affairs’ Colleen Harkin was on The Rita Panahi Show to discuss the IPA’s research into student aptitude and general education effectiveness in correlation with PISA rankings data.

All media posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.

Below is a transcript of the interview.

Rita Panahi:

This year’s NAPLAN results revealed one in three Australian students are failing to meet basic proficiency benchmarks, with nearly half a million pupils requiring intervention to help them catch up.

Joining me now is the IPA’s National Manager of that Class Action programme, Colleen Harkin. Colleen, education unions and more than one state education minister says the answer to this is more funding. Is that how you see it?

Colleen Harkin:

No. Look, in the last 15 years the budget for education has more than doubled. So we’re at $79 billion a year now, and in that same period our results have gone backwards. So a teenager, a 15-year-old is now about 14 or 15 months behind where they were 15 or 16 years ago. So money is actually clearly not the issue. What really needs to happen is an address of how the teachers are taught. IPA’s research shows that about a year and a third of the university teacher training course is full of woke, decolonization, all of that sort of stuff. So the teachers are not being trained properly to do the job that they’re supposed to be able to do. And explicit teaching has not been a focus. So the effective money versus results is not there. What actually has to happen is an address of where the problem starts and that doesn’t cost money, that will actually save us money.

Rita Panahi:

But we’ve known this for so long. I think anyone who is not a leftist activist would acknowledge the curriculum is a problem. It has just been hijacked by social engineering and politics and isn’t really focused on academic excellence. But how do we do something about it? Because we had a supposedly conservative federal government in for a decade and didn’t really do much to fix the curriculum.

Colleen Harkin:

No, and the national curriculum actually specifically states that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander’s history and culture and sustainability are priorities. It doesn’t state that children learning to read and write and be competent and not have a third of the nation’s children failing. The message is not getting through.

Rita Panahi:

And the contentious, divisive activism that is pushed onto vulnerable children, impressionable children, often with their parents really ignorant. A lot of parents don’t know what’s happening in the classroom. Of course they speak to their kids, they might see the homework they’re doing. But the day-to-day content of the curriculum, I think a lot of people would be shocked by just how political it is. When you’d expect them just to be taught facts and how to think about things critically rather than what to think.

Colleen Harkin:

Yeah, absolutely. Most parents would be quite unaware of what their children are being taught and that’s because what they call the cross-curriculum priorities. That it is mandated that there’s no subject that’s called ideology or colonisation or climate emergency, but it’s embedded into every subject at every year level, at every opportunity. And no young child is going to come home and say, I learned how to count today through Aboriginal dance. But that’s actually what’s happening. And the parents who are alerted to this are actually finding out after the damage has already been done when young children as young as five and six are going home crying about the stolen generation, for example. And they’re being taught that within reading or within equity and inclusion and all these sorts of things. So it’s highly politicised.

Rita Panahi:

Or they’re needing psychological care because they have climate anxiety. I’ve spoken to child psychologists about this. They actually treat kids who should be… Well, they are the most privileged, luckiest kids in the world really to be living in Australia at a time of peace and prosperity. But their mental health is damaged because they’re basically told the world’s ending and them and everyone they love is going to die. It is just, I mean, it’s borderline child abuse if you ask me.

Now, I want to ask you about this University of Melbourne study that has found some classroom layouts, including the very fashionable open classroom model, while it’s apparently negatively affecting literacy. The lead researcher Professor Gary Rance, said he was shocked by the strength of the findings and the clear difference in academic achievement between the two settings. So 65% of the kids developed their literacy at a faster rate when they were in an enclosed classroom. So the results were really quite striking and surprising, he said.

This is pretty compelling data. What percentage of classrooms do we know are this open plan model? Because I know it is fashionable and popular.

Colleen Harkin:

Yeah. So it’s, I’ll call it, a fad that’s been around for decades. And it’s based on an allegiance to a flawed ideology that children are actually the masters of their own learning. So this inquiry learning sort of scenario where you sit around in groups and there might be multiple groups and multiple classes. Some of these classrooms have up to 100 children in them.

Rita Panahi:

Oh, great.

Colleen Harkin:

I mean, we’ve all been in busy restaurants and shopping centres that make it very difficult to hear and how exhausting that is and how exhausting it’s to concentrate. And what’s really interesting is most of these open plan classrooms are found with young children whose auditory skills are still developing and they don’t even yet have the language skills to fill the gaps if they didn’t hear. So that research, there’s been research previously, but that’s a Melbourne based one and, again, it reinforces the fact that these environments are not helpful to the children in those classrooms.

Rita Panahi:

Yeah. This whole student-led teaching is a recipe for failure. Now, a review into the future of Victoria’s interschool sporting programme is underway, aiming to shift the focus away from year-round team sports and competitions, things like football and rowing, and instead focus more on things like yoga and Pilates. The Associated Public Schools’ sporting programme is seeking to remove heightened senses of competition amongst private schools by embracing more recreational sports and activities.

Colleen, this one has got parents at private schools fired up like nothing else. What do you make of this review?

Colleen Harkin:

And understandably, because parents who choose to send their children to an independent school they know well ahead that Saturday morning sport is part of the deal,.and it’s been known for a long time that activity is good for mental health and physical health and that there’s a lot to be learnt from competitive sport, resilience, team, effort, failure, all of those sorts of good skill sets to learn-

Rita Panahi:

Discipline, turning up to training, being on time for your games.

Colleen Harkin:

Correct. Can’t be bothered getting out of bed, no, off you go. So they’re all terrific skills. But what this is really interesting is that it’s an example of another breakdown of social cohesion because what these schools do very well is build a sense of positive community spirit. Children who go to these schools love to represent their school, wear their school colours, they go and support each other. You see it all the time and people don’t like to refer to it, but the old boys, they love it. So they’re building a positive framework about their community. And this is just an example of breaking down that social cohesion.

Rita Panahi:

I just do not see the upside. I don’t know why they would even contemplate this. There’s plenty of downside. And at the end of the day, if there’s a particular kid who doesn’t want to participate, then that’s a choice the family can make. But like you said, you send your kids to these schools partly because of the sporting programmes and everything that brings to a child’s life. But Colleen Harkin, thank you so much for your time this week.

Colleen Harkin:

No problem.

Rita Panahi:

Still to come-

This transcript from The Rita Panahi Show on 26 August 2024 has been edited for clarity.