source : the age
I was one of the thousands of parents and children caught up in the issues that plagued the selective schools’ tests on Friday, when riot police were called in to manage chaotic crowds and one test was cancelled after the Department of Education made students sit the assessment in testing mega-centres across Sydney.
Riot police were called to the selective schools test at Canterbury on Friday.
It was easy to be frustrated and just a bit anxious waiting in the rain. One parent told me their child had been going to tutoring since the beginning of the year and now, at the critical moment, these problems with the test were just too much. Almost all their friends’ children had been attending tutoring for longer, sometimes since the start of year 5, to prepare for this day.
While waiting in that line, the massive role the tutoring industry was playing in the educational outcomes of large numbers of Australian children couldn’t be clearer.
Dr Bronwyn Reid O’Connor and I from the University of Sydney, along with Dr Katherin Cartwright from the University of Wollongong are all former mathematics teachers. We have been researching the billion-dollar tutoring industry, finding that it is the wild west of education. With only loose guidelines provided and next to no regulation, it truly is a system where nearly “anything goes”. Given the impact it is having on education in our state, we argue that regulatory frameworks are sorely needed for our children to receive quality, equitable education.
Concerningly, there is no official data collected by the Australian government on the exact size of the tutoring industry, although some estimate that one in seven students receive some form of academic coaching outside of school. For the NSW selective schools’ test, some families were investing more than $10,000 in tutoring services to help their child secure a place.
However, as there are almost no formal requirements to become a tutor, there is little assurance that there is any quality in the tutoring service provided; those thousands of dollars spent by thousands of families may be going to waste.
Contrast this with qualified school teachers who must complete tertiary training in education, where they acquire a range of strategies designed to help students learn and gain expertise in the content of their subject area. Importantly, pre-service teachers must complete at least 60 days of school-based placements, where they teach under the watchful eye of a professional mentor and are assessed against strict national teacher standards.
Tutors can apply today and be teaching tomorrow without any training. Regulation could ensure that tutors possess fundamental teaching skills, giving parents confidence that when they engage tutoring services, the tutors are adequately qualified.
Due to the lack of regulation, the wellbeing of young children may be at risk as some complete more than 15 hours of tuition and related homework a week in addition to 30 hours at school. For some this means that they are studying for over 45 hours a week, more than a full-time job for an adult.
Too much tutoring can prevent children getting adequate rest. Credit: iStockphoto
This has been a pronounced problem in countries like China and South Korea, which have enacted policies to reduce the number of hours children can spend in tutoring. For many children the added burden of tutoring means that their lives revolve solely around academic success, which is often narrowly defined around exam performance. Such extensive time engaged in tutoring outside of school prevents these students from getting adequate rest and engaging in other important extracurricular activities such as sport, art, music, and other hobbies that help them develop holistically.
A final area of concern is that the rapid growth and subsequent impact of private tutoring is entrenching inequality in the education of our children. This issue is particularly pronounced in NSW where there are numerous selective schools, not a feature in other states.
For example, the selective James Ruse Agricultural High School has a higher Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) than Barker College, where school fees are more than $40,000 per annum for high school students. In 2018, a massive 73 per cent of selective school students came from the highest quarter of socioeconomic advantage – that is unlikely to have changed. This suggests that selective schools are mostly made up of students who are already advantaged, demonstrating that selective schools may not be catering to the academically gifted, but to those who have access to the best tutors.
Moreover, the influence of tutoring is not contained to just the selective school examinations, its effect can be felt throughout the whole education system as the number of tutored students continues to rise. The inequity fed by the unregulated tutoring system is one we should urgently consider, and the scenes on Friday affirm this.
Without government-led regulation of out-of-school academic tutoring, we run the risk of compromising the quality of our education system and jeopardising the wellbeing of children in our state. Targeted regulation is needed to help level the playing field for students, so all have access to high-quality education.
Drs Katherin Cartwright, Bronwyn Reid O’Connor and Ben Zunica are education academics.
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