SHIFTING the focus away from academic achievement and encouraging more children to aspire to careers in trades would go some way to achieving better educational outcomes for rural and remote students, Professor John Halsey said.
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Professor Halsey was in Dubbo on Wednesday to chair a forum as part of his independent review of regional, rural and remote education.
Present at the forum were parents, teachers and other stakeholders from across the central and far west.
One issue raised was that some families and children didn’t see the benefits of education, as the children in question weren’t aspiring to go to university, or dreaming of a professional career.
But a system designed to get children into university meant many children who might aspire to do a trade felt hopeless, one forum attendee said.
Professor Halsey said there was no quick fix and that society actually needed to re-evaluate how it measured success.
“In a nutshell, we’ve got to consistently demonstrate that we value, both individually and as a society, certainly as a community, people that are outstanding, skilled tradespeople,” he said.
“It speaks to the headset we have of that academic pathway as the top quality one and everything else is lesser and what we need to do is to continue to develop a discourse … around, we need a broad mix of skills, knowledge, attributes, dispositions in society and it's not so much that one is better than another, it’s that we need to look at the complementarity of things.
“Unfortunately in the world we live in at the moment, the highly interconnected world where some things are highly valued over others and there's always an implied, if not explicit, hierarchy, we’re going to live with these sorts of things and we’re going to just have to relentlessly press back.
“I don’t have too many imaginative ways out of that.”
Professor Halsey’s report on regional, rural and remote education is due to be delivered to the federal government by the end of the year.