5.1 In commissioning the Quality of Education Review, the Government indicated that it wished:
to develop clear, more efficient strategies to direct the increased funds in ways that ensure:
• the attainment of a satisfactory standard by the great majority of students at successive stages of a general curriculum, with particular reference to communi- cations. literacy and numeracy;
• an improved relationship between secondary education and employment and tertiary education opportunities and requirements;
• improvement in these outcomes of education by funding at a level consistent with other priority claims on the Commonwealth, including those of the TAFE and higher education sectors. (I)
5.2 Narrowly interpreted. this may seem to represent an excessively utilitarian view of education. The Committee does not believe that the sole purpose of education is to fashion the young to the needs of the labour market; nor does it believe that this is the Government's intention. Nonetheless, employment. immediately after schooling or after further study, is an expectation for the great majority of people. Furthermore, the ability to gather, interpret, transmit and receive information, using symbols of many kinds, is important not only for employment but over a broad spectrum of human activity.
PURPOSES OF SCHOOLING
5.3 Expectations of schooling are many and there is unlikely to be consensus at any but the highest level of generality about the goals, aims or purposes which should be pursued by schools. Statements of goals are plentiful. Most of these layout the general principles that schools are concerned with knowledge and skills (learning) and values and attitudes (personal development); some go as far as specifying desired sets of these. The Commonwealth Schools Commission, for example, in its Commonwealth Standards for Australian Schools described the specific responsibility of schools as being to assist students to acquire some 11 groups of attributes (2). Four years earlier, the Curriculum Development Centre listed, in its Core Curriculum for Australian Schools, ten basic learning tools and resources with which students should be equipped (3). A typical example of a statement of aims was that recommended by the Select Committee on Education in Queensland in 1980:
The principal aim of education in Queensland Primary and Secondary Schools is to help and guide children to progress towards the full attainment of their potentialities as individuals and as adult members of our society.
In particular, it is the duty and responsibility of our teachers and educational administrators -
(i) to help children develop lively, enquiring minds, gIVIng them the ability to question and to argue rationally, and to apply themselves to tasks;
(ii) to help children to the maximum development of their physical qualities, giving them an understanding of the means of achieving and the benefits of physical fitness, health and hygiene;
(iii) to help children to use language effectively and imaginatively in reading, writing and speaking;
(iv) to provide a basis of mathematical, scientific and technical knowledge, enabling boys and girls to learn the essential skills needed in a fast-changing world of work;
(v) to instil respectfor moral values, for other people andfor oneself, and tolerance of other races, religions, and ways of life;
(vi) to help' children understand how our country is governed and to instil an awareness of the social, civic and political responsibilities and rights of adult citizenship;
(vii) to teach children about human achievement and aspirations, and in particular to make them aware of the traditions and culture of Queensland and of Australia and of the heritage of our past;
(viii) to help children understand the world in which we live, and the interdependence of nations;
(ix) to help children to appreciate how the nation earns and maintains its standard of living and properly to esteem the essential role of agriculture, industry and commerce in this process;
(x) to encourage andfoster the development of the children whose social, physical or environmental disadvantages cripple their capacity to learn,
if
necessary by making additional resources available to them;(xi) to help children develop an understanding of and sensitivity to the arts, and to become aware of the value of the arts in their own lives and in the lives of others. (4)
504 Few would disagree with such a statement. However, difficulties begin to appear in defining objectives against which outcomes can be measured. There are no ready agreements on the content of the curriculum, the manner in which schools should go about their tasks and the ways in which their success should be measured. Further, statements of goals tend to be all inclusive, with little sense of priority or differentiation among items in terms of the relative weight which should be attached to them at the different levels of schooling or as end products of the schooling process. Realistically, schools cannot be expected to pursue successfully a broad range of sometimes internally inconsistent .. objectives. Neither can they be expected to achieve satisfactorily an increasing range of
objectives nor to encompass a steadily expanding curriculum.
5.5 Apart from resource limits, there are both human and physical limits to the amount of time the students themselves are able to devote to schooling and to learning processes. Even increases in the lengths of the school day and year and the average duration of schooling may not provide sufficient student time to permit schools to cover the extensive range of knowledge, skills, values and attitudes which are from time to time 69
proposed as school responsibilities. When these limits are coupled with those of resource availability and human frailty, schools and school authorities must of necessity select the objectives they pursue and the vigour with which they pursue them.
COMPETENCE
5.6 The Committee has approached the definition of desirable outcomes through the concept of competence, that is, the ability to use knowledge and skills effectively to achieve a purpose. This allows the emphasis to be placed on the results of learning, which should be purposeful and have demonstrable effects. It encourages a practical examination of desirable outcomes because it can be used to concentrate attention both on the purposes to be achieved and on the necessary knowledge and the abilities required to apply that knowledge. In the Committee's view, the five general competences set out in the section below are desirable learning outcomes for all students.
5.7 The setting down of competences provides a way of stating objectives to be pursued by schools and standards against which knowledge and skill acquisition can be judged. For instance, one test of whether communication skills are being developed is to ask whether, as a result of their school studies, students are able to convey information and to answer questions about it with ease and fluency. This is a key competence, involving knowledge of what is being described and communications skills. It might be expected of all students at all levels of schooling. What will change over a student's time at school are the range of content which can be described, the breaulh vf iauguage useu and the depths of insights perceived.
General Competences
5.8 Acquiring Information The acquisition of information is an essential part of daily living. Information is acquired in many ways: directly from other people or from print and non-print materials and increasingly through electronic media. The skills are those of reading, listening, recording and analysing.
5.9 To extract meaning from information, individuals need to be able to identify the main ideas that are being presented, to paraphrase them as a way of clarifying them and to record them for future use. They need a facility with words, including the ability to use contextual clues, dictionaries, glossaries and other reference material to give meaning to unfamiliar words. They should be able to use source materials effectively, taking advantage of tables of contents, indexes and bibliographies in the case of books. They should also be able to recognize the various purposes of writers and speakers, to sort out opinion from fact and to ensure that they do not allow their own personal opinions or assumptions to prevent them from comprehending information being presented.
5. IO These skills, and others like them, are not the preserve of any particular subject discipline; their acquisition should be possible through many different subject areas, both academic and practical. Nor is the need for these skills confined to a particular group of students. They are required at higher levels for successful study at universities and 70
colleges of advanced education, but they are equally necessary for functioning in employment and in society generally,
5.11 Conveying Information The demonstration of 'competence in conveying infonmation, orally or in writing, also involves the use of a range of skills and knowledge.
Conveying infonmation requires the ability to conceive and develop ideas about a subject, to organize information in ways that it will be easily understood and to ask and answer questions concisely and coherently. To interact effectively with listeners and readers, individuals should also be able to exchange ideas and engage in critical debate with others. They need to be able to follow widely held convelltions about sentence structure and punctuation and to vary their writing and speaking styles for different purposes and different audiences.
5.12 The above does not encompass all the skills and knowledge involved in conveying infonnation nor the differing degrees of complexity in expressing ideas and giving shades of meaning. Neither is it a prescription for the teaching of English. During their studies, all students should acquire skills like these and use them in their daily lives.
They should be able to select the most appropriate skills for the particular purpose at hand.
The outcome that is required from schooling is that students are able to convey information to other people and to answer questions about it with ease and fluency.
5.13 Applying Logical Processes All students need to be able to reason effectively, using a range of analytical skills. These include defining tenns, identifying assumptions, framing relevant questions, recognising ambiguities and using logical processes. The ability to arrange thoughts in a careful and orderly way is a necessary step in extracting meaning from daily experience, and in choosing ways of responding to it.
5.14 Number systems and mathematical concepts are essential elements in reasoning processes. Students should be able to perform tasks which involve computation and measurement and to forecast the results with a reasonable degree of accuracy. The emphasis should be on the development by students of the ability to use mathematical knowledge and skills in practical situations rather than on the acquisition of mathematical knowledge for its own sake.
5.15 Practical Tasks Individuals should to be able to plan, and then execute, practical tasks by marshalling ideas, materials and tools. In doing so, they will usually need to acquire infonnation and often to use mathematical reasoning. In addition, competence here requires the ability to analyse problems, work independently, monitor one's own performance, and exercise judgment about whether the final result is adequate. It is developed through the actual perfonnance of practical tasks. The current debate about the relevance of what is taught in schools may have more to do with the ways in which learning is expected to take place and the ways in which the results of learning are assessed than with the subject matter itself. Schools may be undervaluing this type of competence.
5.16 Group Tasks Few endeavours are divorced from contact with other members of a group. Students should be able to interact effectively with other people to achieve chosen or directed purposes. Collaboration with others is often the only way of achieving a particular purpose. Competence may involve showing tact, sensitivity, tolerance, strength of purpose and a sense of time. These require knowledge of people and how they interact 71
and the acceptance of both superior and subordinate roles. The school environment provides many opportunities for group tasks beyond the classroom: participation in sporting teams, hobby clubs, drama and music societies and bushwalking are examples.
OTHER OUTCOMES
5.17 The five general competences are required by all individuals, but their development, however important, is not the sole task of schools. Schools have other obligations, because additional competences are needed by individuals as they undertake their various roles as members of society. These roles can be broadly categorised as:
• the work place role, requiring entry to the economic system, either as an employee or in a self employed capacity, and effective performance in that system;
• the ongoing education role, requiring the continued acquisition of knowledge and skills either formally or informally;
• the community role, requiring participation in the cultural life of the community, the exercise of rights as a citizen, the discharge of obligations and the use of interpersonal skills to meet the needs of other members of society; and
• the personal role, requiring the development and maintenance of personal physical and mental health, the use of interpersonal skills in the maintenance of family relationships, and the satisfying use of leisure time.
Work Place Role
5.18 In spite of current employment difficulties, it remains a reasonable expectation that young people will at some time enter the production process either as an employee or in a self employed capacity. Those who become employees, that is the vast majority, will be required to demonstrate the ability to achieve purposes which are set by others. To do so, they will apply skills which they have acquired through education and training, and experience in other employment. What these skills are is not always clear because patterns of production are subject to change over the lifetime of each student. Nevertheless, the trends evident in the labour market, the forecast developments in the Australian economy and other evidence about present difficulties in the transition from education to employment provide pointers to the special requirements for competence in the work force.
5.19 One set of skills required in this role is that which involves selecting behaviour which is appropriate in the work place. When and how to accept authority, how to comply with directions and how to learn what is expected in different situations tend to be learned by experience and demonstrated in every day life. There is no formal test for them. Work experience programs and increasing employment of secondary students as part-time workers (see paragraphs 4.13 and 4.14) offer the prospect of spreading understanding of labour market expectations among young people well before they seek to become full- time members of it.
72
5.20 Vocational Skills The perfonnance of work requires vocational skills and knowledge. The concept of vocational education serves, in many ways, to cloud the issue of desirable outcomes from schooling because it is subject to a wide range of interpretations. Traditionally, vocational education has referred to the acquisition of skills associated with specific occupations, especially the <trades'. It is sometimes used in even narrower terms to refer to the skills required for highly specialised tasks. More broadly, the term is used to denote the teaching of work place skills generally and preparation for employment. The term tends to be used to denote forms of skilling and education which are seen as qualitatively different from the academic tradition.
5.21 The effects of this confusion in terminology were highlighted for the Com- mittee during its consultations with labour market authorities and its examination of submissions made to it. Representations were made, for example by the Department of Employment and Industrial Relations, that interaction between schools and the labour market would be assisted by more 'vocational education'. When the characteristics of vocational education, as used in this context, were examined, they were substantially the same as those of general education and not substantially different in many (but not all) respects from what are espoused as the characteristics of academic education. For example, the Department argued that:
the essential ingredients in the vocational preparation of youth must include:
• basic knowledge, competencies and skills to provide a basis on which to build up-to-date aptitudes;
• a basic foundation in logic and analytical reasoning;
• expressive and communicative skills; and the ability to 'learn to learn', to be able to adapt to changing work places and production processes and to apply generic skills and general capacities acquired initially and over time to the changing work place environment. (5)
5.22 There are several reasons why schools are not likely to be successful as centres of occupational training. These relate to the selection of occupations andlor skills, the lead time in setting up new programs and achieving results from them, the flux in the labour market induced by changing knowledge, technology, markets and industry structures, and the skills and experience of school teachers. The dismal performance of labour market forecasting and the absence of comprehensive knowledge about the skill requirements of current and future jobs suggest that the selection of jobs or occupations for which to train will be haphazard. The lead time required to prepare curricula, adjust curriculum structures, train teachers and equip courses or programs in schools is substantial, as critics of institutionalised training recognise. Beyond this, more time must pass before the first qualified people appear and make their way through the labour market. These difficulties are exacerbated in a dynamic economic context where the range and volume of skill requirements are changing rapidly. As well, many specific skills are better learned on the job, where they have immediate relevance and where tools and production processes are likely to be most up to date. In the light of these considerations the Committee does not advocate a narrow vocational emphasis in post-compulsory schooling.
5.23 Other Requirements An important aspect of preparation for the work place role is that of understanding the nature of work. The need for such understanding is expressed 73
in many ways: criticism that young people show no appreciation of the responsibilities and duties involved in work, or that they do not comprehend the need for discipline, punctuality and cooperation, or that schools pay no regard to economic goals. Schools have an obligation to playa part in preparing students for entry to the work place. Without necessarily committing either themselves or their students to the values of the work place, teachers must accept the responsibility of bringing them forward as important aspects of life beyond school. They must assist students to gain experience in selecting behaviour which is appropriate in a work situation. Attention to developing competence in performing individual practical tasks, and in performing tasks with others, should go some way towards this.
5.24 These work oriented competences do not necessarily require an unquestioning acceptance of discipline or authority. Such an attitude may not lead to the most effective performance in the work place role. Creativity, ingenuity, entrepreneurial behaviour and innovation are being called for in the process of developing the Australian economy.
5.25 Schools have, in the recent past, made strenuous attempts to bring paid work closer to the school, through career counselling and work experience, although Blackburn, when discussing educational responses to unemployment, noted in 1980 that:
There is a remarkable absence in the whole school curriculum of the study of work as a major human activity. Students gain little assistance in understanding the effects of technological change, why different kinds of work command different rewards and are performed under different conditions, why some important work like child rearing is unpaid, what the role of trade unions is, how major investment decisions affecting the availability and nature of work are made. The individual emphasis of what is done
nY'Arol"Ao .. /'II'> III'>AAY' .. tnr",/j..,,.., th/'lt "MDW1n]ro"W10I'>t ;<' /'I <'ro/'i",ll" nY'roAu/'oA nho..,ro....,AMro.., r' ~~~~.~~~ ~,. ~.,~-~, ~·~'·-·'·o ~,.-. ~·'·~"·r~~-"'·~'·~ .u - u~~.-.~J r' ~~ .. ~~-J:"'.~'.~".~'.~'.
which cannot be tackled at an individual level. The likelihood of getting a job is presented as an individual competition. (6)
The Committee believes that the study of work as a major human activity deserves a place in the school curriculum. Such study might cover not only the elements Blackburn has mentioned but also the place of Australia in the world economy and the nature of the rights and privileges, duties and obligations which are associated with working life.
Ongoing Education Role
5.26 For most students schooling will be only one stage in their formal education:
under present conditions some 71 per cent of an age cohort enrol in the higher education or technical and further education sectors before they turn 40 years of age (7). The continuity of the learning process is an attribute of human life. Schools have a duty to enhance the process by extending the base on which further learning occurs and by helping students develop ways of learning. For many, ongoing education will mean enrolment in a course at a tertiary institution; for others it will mean informal learning, sometimes self directed and sometimes supervised. For some, entry to tertiary education will occur soon after leaving school; for others it will be postponed until much later in life. All will need to have developed the techniques of learning.
5.27 Higher education studies require, at a high level, the application of written and oral communication skills, logical thought processes, numeracy skills and skills in 74