Asia leads the way in schooling: report

Australia is slipping behind East Asian school systems, with students in Shanghai sometimes outperforming our pupils by up to three years, a new report says.

The report to be released on Friday by the Grattan Institute, reveals that although substantial increases in school funding has occurred in OECD countries between 2000 and 2008, we were slipping behind East Asian systems in school performance.

“In Shanghai, the average 15-year-old mathematics student is performing at a level two to three years above his or her counterpart in Australia, the USA and Europe,” Grattan Institute school education program director Ben Jensen said in a statement on Friday.

“That has profound consequences. As economic power is shifting from West to East, high performance in education is too.”

Based on a series of tests, the report named four of the top five highest-performing school systems as Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Shanghai.

Meanwhile, it found that Australian students were one to two years behind children in Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea, Fairfax reported.

However, Australian students are still ahead of pupils in the United States, Britain and EU countries in science, maths and reading.

The report found that one of thee main ingredients to improving students’ results was boosting support and training of teachers.

“The rise of these four systems is not culturally determined by Confucianism, rote learning, excessive focus on exams or Tiger Mothers,” he said.

Instead the elements worth replicating here, he said was a relentless, practical focus on effective learning and the creation of a strong culture of teacher education, collaboration, mentoring, feedback and sustained professional development.

“We’re spending money in the wrong places,” Mr Jensen told The Australian.

“The lesson from Asia is that the only way to improve students’ learning is by improving teaching.

“Reforming teaching is about behavioural and cultural change, which means changing what teachers do, day in, day out, in every school.”

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