Abstract
A very warm welcome to this first issue of the Australian Journal of Education in 2018. As usual, we are pleased to offer our readers a thought-provoking mix of articles, with topics focussing on students, their support and assessment, as well as articles focussing on teachers, their challenges and demographics.
The first two articles focus on how students’ particular circumstances require different support in schools. In the first article, Gail Macdonald and Helen Boon report on a service to support children of Australian Defence Force families. As one of the service’s main elements, Defence School Transition Aides (DSTAs) provide support in schools for students to manage the transitions associated with school mobility and parental absence for service reasons. Findings of semi-structured interviews with parents, teachers and DSTAs indicate that the service assists in increasing teachers’ understanding of these children’s specific needs, raising the involvement of ADF personnel (i.e. the serving family member) in the schools’ learning program and increased levels of support by various members of the school community to the families during deployment. A specific person, namely the Education Family Worker (EFW) is also the main element of a school-based family referral service (FRS) in New South Wales whose evaluation is reported in the article by Martin Hall and Gerald Wurf. Overall, the evaluation finds that the FRS improves linking families with appropriate services and reduces the time principals and teachers spend on managing complex student issues. However, the evaluation also uncovers reservations regarding the FRS in terms of lack of structure and lines of responsibility.
In the next contribution, Felicity Harris, Maxwell Smith, Kristin Laurens, Melissa Green, Stacy Tzoumakis, Maina Kariuki and Vaughan Carr examine the structure of the Best Start Kindergarten Assessment (Best Start), aimed at five-year-old children. Their analysis confirms the hypothesized structure of two main factors with the first factor consisting of seven literacy aspects and the second factor comprising four numeracy aspects. As a consequence, the assessment can be used in the longitudinal modelling of student performance with Best Start as a measure of early childhood literacy and numeracy performance and a predictor of later school performance as assessed by the National Assessment Programme Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9.
The next two articles focus on teachers. Vaughan Cruickshank, Scott Pedersen, Paul Cooley and Allen Hill report on the development of a scale to quantify the gender related challenges faced by male primary teachers. Results of the Rasch analysis show good construct validity of the developed scale with male teachers more easily agreeing that issues around social isolation, physical contact and workload are challenges whereas family and friends are less of a challenge. No differences in perceived challenges emerge depending on age, teaching experience, whether teachers were parents themselves or whether teaching is their first career. However, male teachers in schools with a female principal feel more isolated and challenged by social media and media perceptions than other teachers. Likewise, male teachers with fewer male colleagues feel that being a positive role model is more of a challenge than teachers with a greater number of male colleagues. In the last article in this issue, Paul Weldon critically examines widespread claims regarding the large proportion of early career teachers leaving the profession. To this end, he traces the sources and basis of figures on teacher attrition which have been cited over the last 17 years, both in the Australian and the international literature. This analysis shows that figures are based on different measures of teacher attrition sometimes considering, for example, a teacher taking extended leave for family reasons or leaving a school sector to teach in another sector as having left the teaching profession rather than having a break from teaching or accepting a new teaching appointment. It also reveals that figures frequently lack specificity, for example whether they refer to primary and/or secondary teachers, different locations (i.e. metro, rural and remote) or employment status (i.e. relief/casual, contract, permanent). These findings lead the author to call for an agreed definition and measurement of teacher attrition to increase comparability and enable monitoring over time.
The final contribution in this issue is a comment by Rob van den Honert on a previous article in this journal (issue 61(2)) on predicting results for the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) to examine the effectiveness of government schools with a response by the authors of the original article, Diane Dancer & Vincent Blackburn and me.
So, dear readers, wherever you may be: Happy reading!