‘F’ for Failing to Train Our Future Teachers Properly

Commentary The Australian education system is in crisis. It is failing at a most basic level, which is to teach young Australians how to read and write. All you have to do is look at this year’s NAPLAN results to see how bad things really are in Australian schools. One-in-three Australian students are not meeting the basic standards of numeracy and literacy. In contrast, just 15 percent of students are exceeding expectations. The majority of Australia’s Year 9 students use punctuation at a Year 3 level. To put that into perspective, 15-year-old teenagers have the writing ability of 8-year-olds. And the majority of those teenagers are struggling to be able to put a sentence together, let alone insert a comma or an apostrophe correctly....