With partners:
Teacher Snapshot 1
TEACHER: I’ve had kids say to me “I’m not going to go to TAFE … that’s for dummies.” And I say “no it’s not. If you don’t want to go to university but you want to get further education that’s where you go. It’s got so much to offer.” “No … that’s for dummies.
Teacher Snapshot 2
TEACHER: VCAL is seen as a lesser pathway, yet for many literacy students it may be the only option. It’s very hard to get enough language up in three years to be able to cope with VCE. For some kids it’s just the best option, particularly the refugee kids as a lot of them have interrupted schooling. Even taking the language factor aside they don’t have a lot of the skills and conceptual understanding to be able to cope even in subjects where English doesn’t matter that much.
Teacher Snapshot 3
TEACHER: Now when you’ve got kids who have been here two and a half years… some of them will have little or no language skills and they’ll plonk into Year 10, do Year 11, and do Year 12. Now they have aspirations, their parents have aspirations... They want their kids to succeed, because they have, if anything, left at Year 9 level of schooling. Many of the people who come from Iraq have had no schooling… So what I’m seeing is kids, and they can get through the curriculum because allowances can be made and it’s not dumbing down, but it’s trying to target it a little more, but when they get to Year 11 and 12 it’s really interesting… We had Year 12 students this year that walked into the exam, wrote their number on the paper and that was it. And the reason was that they didn’t understand the language of the paper.
Teacher Snapshot 4
TEACHER: We’ve found parents with interrupted schooling have a much less realistic view of the pathways. Parents with good education will identify there’s a problem… The ones without education say, “Oh we’ve made it to Australia. Now we do what normal people do [i.e. VCE].”
Teacher Snapshot 5
TEACHER: I was involved in a program a couple of years ago on transitions, kids going from language centres to high schools, and one of the big things was that parents have only ever heard of the VCE, only heard of high school. In their country it’s high school, then university, so they’re looking for that structure here… so any other pathway they don’t see. So some kids who might be suited to doing TAFE courses, they see it as punishment, or a poor choice, or not valid, because the parent hasn’t heard of it, or they only get told of those choices when it’s time to NOT get into Year 11 or 12… It’s too late then because it’s seen as punishment.
Teacher Snapshot 6
TEACHER: If you get them one-to-one with their parents and physically take them out to TAFE and do a tour and show them what the options are they come back and they say, “yes this is the right option for me”… It’s very time consuming but we’re all happy with the outcome.
TEACHER: We need to get the parents in well before their child is ready to exit and sit them down and say, “This is your child’s situation. This is where they’ve been, this is where they are, and this is what’s open to them.” And often it works on a one-to-one. They want to speak to someone personally about their own child’s situation and where they fit into the system.
Teacher Snapshot 7
Teachers with substantial experience in dealing with students from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds stress the need for early intervention pathway planning for these students otherwise they become disillusioned and lost in the education system.
TEACHER: I would like to see new arrivals going into the mainstream school being picked up a lot earlier and doing very formalised pathway planning, very specific planning, so that they remain focussed and they know where they’re heading, even though they’re having problems at the moment. That’s why this year, Year 9 boys were posing huge risks of being disengaged, and did become disengaged from mainstream classes. Although they were attending they weren’t engaged at all…You need to show them where their path is, to start to engage them in thinking about what things they are likely to be able to achieve realistically.