Hands-on parenting helping kids, not money or location

KIDS with hands-on parents are more likely to succeed regardless of how much money they have or where they are brought up.
                                     

Reaching out to children, talking to them and helping them with their homework matters more than income or background, analysis from the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth shows.

Students with engaged parents are more likely to do well academically, graduate from school and go on to higher education, an ARACY report by Dr Stacey Fox and Dr Anna Olsen from Australian National University has found.

The aspects which appear to matter most include high expectations and aspirations for children, shared reading between children and parents and family conversation.

In the report Drs Fox and Olsen say parent/child talking time is a simple but crucial form of parent engagement.

Children also benefit when their parents provide a positive environment for homework and play a role in school activities.

“A sense of belonging to the school community and participation in school activities can indirectly impact children’s academic outcomes by conveying to children the extent to which parents’ value and support their education,” Drs Fox and Olsen say.

Anton Leschen, Victorian general manager at The Smith Family, said such research illustrates that “a child’s education is about more than what happens in the classroom”.

The Smith Family, which is co-hosting the Australian Parent Engagement conference in June, is looking for more sponsors to expand their Learning for Life program which helps disadvantaged parents support their children’s schooling.

Richmond parents Leanne and Jason Mansfield are very engaged in the school and sporting activities of their daughters Lucy, 10, Chloe, 13 and Charlotte, 15.

Today’s education debate ignores a child’s starting line: Voices

The first few weeks of new parenthood are a blur. When my three children were born, I was laser-focused on keeping them alive and healthy. I counted wet diapers, performed late-night checks to make sure they were breathing, put them “back to sleep,” and worried about whether they were eating enough.
                                             

Like most parents, I was taught, and maybe even evolutionarily conditioned, to worry about the health of their little bodies. Less obvious, though, was that I also needed to worry about the health of their little brains, which were beginning the most rapid period of growth during their lives.

Too few parents get this message; too few understand the window of rapid brain development that occurs between birth and age 3. And that’s a problem leading to a public health crisis. As many as 85% of American parents are failing to give their children a basic building block that is as key to early brain development as tummy time is to physical development, and which has been recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics since 2014: Reading aloud daily right from birth.

By their very design, books make enhancing brain development easy. When you read to a child, you’re bundling together a set of brain-boosting activities: hearing a wide range of vocabulary and complex syntax, bonding and interacting with a parent, hearing stories, having a routine, developing empathy. And while you might be able to let a child chew on, tug, or shake some baby toys on his own, you can’t hand a newborn or older infant a book to read by himself. You, the parent or caring grown-up, must read, interact and snuggle. Books unlock parenting strategies, language that families don’t use every day and, for older babies, pre-literacy skills, such as turning pages and learning to enjoy reading.

Many urgent health and social consequences have been linked to a child's literacy level and correlated with inadequate early exposure to books. From obesity and poor school performance to drug abuse, teen pregnancy and juvenile delinquency, literacy has a significant impact. In this age of many needs but diminishing funds to meet those needs, reading to a child is one of the most cost-effective ways to build a foundation that would give a child a head start in school and life.

Children's commissioner urges halt to education bill

A major overhaul of the education system must be put hold until children are consulted, the Children's Commissioner Judge Andrew Becroft says.
               

Judge Becroft told Parliament's Education and Science Select Committee to stop work on the Education Amendment Bill until children have been asked what they want.

If passed unchanged, the bill would give the government the power to set high-level objectives for education and national priorities that schools must follow.

It would create online schools known as COOLs, and make it easier for schools to require five-year-olds to start school at set times during the year.

The select committee was hearing public submissions on the bill, but Judge Becroft said there had been no real consultation with children about its content.

Judge Becroft said New Zealand had signed a UN convention that said children had the right to express their views, especially on matters that affected them.

Other organisations appearing before the committee agreed.

Sarah Te One from lobby group Action for Children and Youth Aotearoa said it was strange the bill made no provision for consulting children over things like the national priorities.

The Education Minister, Hekia Parata, said she was confident learners had had a chance to comment on the proposed changes.

Other submitters to the Education and Science Select Committtee including the Post Primary Teachers Association, the Educational Institute and the Principals Federation opposed plans to allow online schools.

They expressed concern about giving the government the power to set national education priorities.

The Educational Institute's president, Lynda Stuart, said the priorities were likely to become targets that would narrow the education offered by schools.

The president of the Principals Federation, Whetu Cormick, said the priorities needed to be guided by an over-arching vision for education that everybody agreed on.

The president of the Post Primary Teachers Association, Jack Boyle, said the Education Minister must consult with educators and children about the priorities.

He said aspects of the bill, such as the creation of online schools, would undermine quality education.

Children 'at risk' in Christian fundamentalist schools in the UK, warns government watchdog

A number of Christian fundamentalist schools have been downgraded by government inspectors following an investigation by The Independent which revealed children at some schools that follow the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) curriculum are taught that LGBT people are inferior and girls must submit to men.
       

The investigation also uncovered historic allegations of corporal punishment, exorcisms being performed on children and schoolgirls being “groomed” for marriage to much older men.

Inspectors say they fear “children are at risk” at some schools after finding in some ACE institutions safeguarding plans to be flawed or non-existent and that staff who come into contact with children sometimes have not undergone background checks to see if they are safe to work with children.

The Independent previously revealed allegations by former pupils that children were subject to serious mistreatment at some of the schools, which are operated by fundamentalist Christian communities and teach more than a thousand pupils at 26 different ACE schools in the UK.

Following The Independent’s investigation, 10 ACE schools were visited by Ofsted inspectors in October and nine of the schools have now been downgraded from “good” or “outstanding” to “inadequate” or “requires improvement”. In inspection reports seen by The Independent, the watchdog raises serious concerns about child protection failures, warning they are failing to meet official safeguarding regulations to protect children. A damning report of one of the schools concludes that “children are at risk”.

However, former pupils have told The Independent that the reports do not go far enough and say the Government must be held to account for allowing the schools to operate for so long. They have called for a government inquiry into how “generations of children were failed”.

Melbourne Museum opens $5.8 million Pauline Gandel Children’s Gallery

MELBOURNE Museum’s new children’s gallery opens for business today and its developers and testers were as young as just a few months old.
         
               

The new $5.8 million Pauline Gandel Children’s Gallery is designed for children from birth to age five and more than 500 tiny tots helped developers fine tune the final inclusions.

Melbourne Museum education and community programs manager Georgie Meyer said children from local childcare centres, kinders and other groups took part in workshops, design, development and testing of the new 2000sq.m space.

“This new space is very much dedicated to the learning needs and play space for the very young child, from babies to five-year-olds,” Ms Meyer said.

“The original children’s gallery was built when the Museum was built in 2000 so it was 16 years old and time for a refresh.

“That space was aimed at three to eight year olds but so much more is now understood about how learning occurs from birth and how a child’s brain develops from birth and the importance of coming to cultural institutions and making them welcoming for babies and toddlers.”

The new outdoor area includes a dinosaur skeleton stretching across two fully-accessible sandpits, seating and picnic areas, a rock garden featuring geologically important rock types from across Victoria, a crystal cave, growing cubby houses fashioned from apple trees, and other hiding spaces.

Philanthropists Pauline and John Gandel donated $1 million toward the project, with Mrs Gandel describing the new space as “a true game changer in the field of early childhood development and education.”

“Children are our future and we must do everything we can to give them the best possible start in life,” Mrs Gandel said. “Enabling them to have fun while they learn is at the core of the new Children’s Gallery and they are in for a real treat.”

Nursery teacher shortage 'risks children's learning'

A chronic shortage of fully qualified teachers in England's private and voluntary nurseries is risking young children's education, warns a charity.
Last year more than a quarter of a million under-fives attended non-state nurseries without a qualified teacher, says a report by Save the Children.
Applications for early years teacher training have plummeted, leaving nurseries struggling, say the authors.
                 

The government said staff quality was already good and continued to improve.
Contact with highly qualified staff is crucial to young children's development, says the report.

The researchers focused on privately run, voluntary and other independent childcare settings as opposed to state-run nurseries, which tend to be attached to primary schools and are more likely to employ qualified teachers.
They looked at three- and four-year-olds, 95% of whom attend some form of childcare each week.

The report, based on new analysis of official figures, also found that in the academic year to July 2016, half of all three- and four-year-olds or more than 280,000 children, had attended a private, voluntary or independent setting without a teacher who held a degree-level early years qualification working directly with them.

Overall, just half of independent nurseries in England employed a qualified teacher last year, says the report.
But this masked wide variations between local authorities: 86% of young children in Sunderland were in childcare settings with qualified teachers, but only 16% in the London borough of Newham.

And the report quotes National College of Teaching and Leadership figures showing a fall in early years teacher trainee numbers.

Family day care rorts cost our children’s educational future dearly

Many Australian parents choose family daycare for its flexible hours of operation and homelike environment, and so they can keep siblings together. Which is why the rorting of this system by some operators is so concerning: to the Turnbull government, the states and territories, to honest, high-quality family daycare educators and to taxpayers.

We all have a role to play in ensuring the important work family daycare provides is of a high quality, that it supports children and uses taxpayer funding for the right reasons.

During the past three years the Coalition has acted. Some have criticised this action but there is no question it has strengthened the sector and empowered those genuine, high-quality services. But there is clearly more to do.

The facts and figures from public reports through the years have been repeated in the media again this week and call attention to the loopholes and flaws that have existed and that the Coalition has been closing since 2013.

We’ve been closing those loopholes as quickly as we find them but we are partners in this process and it is up to the states and territories to fulfil their responsibilities as the level of government primarily responsible for regulating childcare providers to ensure quality and compliance.

Each dollar that is rorted from the system is a dollar of waste that our budget simply can’t sustain when we are already stretching to find every dollar possible to ensure that children are well prepared for the start of their educational journey.

And it is not acceptable for an operator to withhold key information about significant incidents among educators that may make them unsuitable to look after children.

While all of these things have been expected all along, sadly it now needs to be spelled out in black and white so that an element of our society no longer flouts expectations.