Is it just me or has everyone done a
backflip this week?
When I first heard Kevin Rudd was considering withholding benefits from
parents who fail to get their children to school, I was all for it. Not
because I like to kick people when they’re down, but because I believe
education is the greatest gift you can give someone, even if they don’t
really want it, and sometimes money is the only effective stick the
government has to wave.
My family is littered with school teachers and I’ve heard far too many
stories of parents who wilfully neglect their children’s education.
My sister-in-law is a primary teacher in a largely disadvantaged area.
On any given day, more than 100 children are missing from the classrooms
at her school.
Some parents are so slack, the education department has resorted to
supplying taxis to ferry their kids to and from school.
And while most persistent truants have learning and behavioural
problems, my sister-in-law says it’s virtually impossible to engage
their parents in any program available to help. She claims
parent-teacher nights are a complete waste of time because almost no one
turns up.
I imagine these are exactly the parents the government is trying to
“financially” motivate.
My initial enthusiasm for the scheme though, has waned.
Almost universally, truants come from low-income households, with
parents who didn’t finish high school. They are often victims of abuse
or neglect, or hail from families tackling mental-health issues,
histories of criminality or drug abuse.
I also think that once a kid gets into high school, whether or not they
wag is largely out of the parents’ hands – short of handcuffing them to
the principal.
So what to do? Every kid deserves a fighting chance and that demands an
education.
I know I’m not qualified in any way and that people in government are
not fools, but for the purposes of the debate I thought I’d offer a few
ideas of my own.
I think the first thing that has to go is the “suspension”. Excluding
kids from school as a punishment is just about the most
counterproductive activity I can think of.
Kids who wag or disrupt lessons probably do so in part because they are
struggling to cope with the classroom environment. Locking them out can
only exacerbate that disassociation and I don’t think you have to be
Einstein to work out where that’s heading.
Numerous studies have shown that persistent non-attendance (either
through truancy or exclusion) contributes to early school leaving,
juvenile crime, youth unemployment and homelessness.
The bottom line is that unstructured time gives young people more
opportunity to get into trouble.
If the government wants to wave a big stick, I suggest they make it a
positive one.
The parents of persistent truants, particularly of primary age, should
be sentenced to community service inside the school their child attends.
Classroom help, tuckshop duty, yard work, whatever the parents think
will help them engage in their kid’s education.
I think that children removed to foster care should be treated with
extra caution. A troubled home life is enough for a kid to cope with;
disrupting their education has got to be a recipe for disaster. Most of
all, I think we need to be more flexible inside the classroom, and that
means more staff.
Like it or not, kids these days are not as compliant as they used to be.
They can be violent, won’t hesitate to express an opinion and are
frequently more interested in their rights than their responsibilities.
If that means we need to offer more bells and whistles, more
spoon-feeding and more “shop” style subjects to keep them engaged, then
so be it. But it means more staff. Not just more staff for schools, but
for welfare agencies, counselling and mentoring programs.
Just one final thought, I read a statistic this week claiming inmates in
Australian jails have the average reading age of an 11-year-old.
Whatever the cost of keeping kids at school, it’s got to be cheaper than
building new jails.
