Paul Gardner is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at Curtin University and is Vice-President of the Western Australian Institute for Educational Research.
There is an obscure but very real connection between a Queenslander being ferried by a neighbour in a tinny from their inundated home in the recent floods, and a small gathering of economists and others in a Swiss Village in 1947.
The scale of the gap is evident in the capacities of different schools to resource educational provision, with a school on one side of the divide building a second theatre and a school on the other side wondering if it can afford to replace a worn carpet.
Teachers across multiple settings are reporting much the same thing: that young children are now starting school lacking the level of oral language of their counterparts a decade ago.
Whole sections of departments in our universities are now staffed by temporary workers. The casualisation of the workforce by university managers means that the lives of these women and men are held in suspension…
