United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Promoting health and well-being through physical education partnerships

The United Nations recently approved the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which forms a guideline policy for all nations. While the UN have strongly advised that partnerships are essential for the implementation of these global goals, within local communities there is little evidence of how this is best done or what it looks like in practice. This paper shares a health and wellbeing community initiative that achieves goals three and four of the SDGs, and in doing so models how to implement physical education partnerships as advocated by the UN. The highly successful innovative initiative is “Best Start: A community collaborative approach to lifelong health and wellness” (2011–2014).This paper shares a health and wellbeing partnership, modelling implementation of physical education (PE) advocated by the United Nations (UN). The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) exemplifies global efforts towards equality, specifically Goal 3 and 4 address health and wellbeing. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into cross sector “partnerships”, identified as essential for the implementation of the SDGs. This is significant as the UN acknowledge a present gap of information on partnerships in action and a need for reporting from the ground level. The project “Best Start: A community collaborative approach to lifelong health and wellness”, began as a partnership between a university and nearby schools and quickly grew to involve Australian Registered Training Organisations, the local health industry, Education departments and sport governing bodies. The collaborations involved pre-service teachers teaching Health and PE lessons to children in a disadvantaged socio-economic area, creating valuable learning experiences for stakeholders. Local and global communities were involved in research and reform. The project creatively optimised resources available through state, Australian and international connections. International partnerships enabled identification of unique contextual opportunities. Programme planning was strengthened with data gathered from an England and Wales Ofsted awarded Primary Physical Education course. Various methods, including; semi-structured interviews, reflective journal, observations, document analysis, and Student Evaluation of Teaching Units (SETU) were adopted. SETU is valid and reliable data collected by the university for the purposes of research. The findings support that partnerships enable SDG implementation and the research paper offers direction for localisation

'Language Background Other Than English': a problem NAPLaN test category for Australian students of refugee background

Since 2008 Australia has held the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (known as NAPLAN) for all students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. Despite the multilingual character of the Australian population, these standardized literacy and numeracy tests are built on an assumption of English as a first language competency. The capacity for monitoring the performance of students who speak languages other than English is achieved through the disaggregation of test data using a category labelled Language Background Other than English (LBOTE). A student is classified as LBOTE if they or their parents speak a language other than English at home. The category definition is so broad that the disaggregated national data suggest that LBOTE students are outperforming English speaking students, on most test domains, though the LBOTE category shows greater variance of results. Drawing on Foucault’s theory of governmentality, this article explores the possible implications of LBOTE categorisation for English as a Second Language (ESL) students of refugee background. The article uses a quantitative research project, carried out in Queensland, Australia, to demonstrate the potential inequities resultant from such a poorly constructed data category

Do early life cognitive ability and self-regulation skills explain socio-economic inequalities in academic achievement? An effect decomposition analysis in UK and Australian cohorts

SSocio-economic inequalities in academic achievement emerge early in life and are observed across the globe. Cognitive ability and “non-cognitive” attributes (such as self-regulation) are the focus of many early years’ interventions. Despite this, little research has compared the contributions of early cognitive and self-regulation abilities as separate pathways to inequalities in academic achievement. We examined this in two nationally representative cohorts in the UK (Millennium Cohort Study, n = 11,168; 61% original cohort) and Australia (LSAC, n = 3028; 59% original cohort). An effect decomposition method was used to examine the pathways from socio-economic disadvantage (in infancy) to two academic outcomes: ‘low’ maths and literacy scores (based on bottom quintile) at age 7–9 years. Risk ratios (RRs, and bootstrap 95% confidence intervals) were estimated with binary regression for each pathway of interest: the ‘direct effect’ of socio-economic disadvantage on academic achievement (not acting through self-regulation and cognitive ability in early childhood), and the ‘indirect effects’ of socio-economic disadvantage acting via self-regulation and cognitive ability (separately). Analyses were adjusted for baseline and intermediate confounding. Children from less advantaged families were up to twice as likely to be in the lowest quintile of maths and literacy scores. Around two-thirds of this elevated risk was ‘direct’ and the majority of the remainder was mediated by early cognitive ability and not self-regulation. For example in LSAC: the RR for the direct pathway from socio-economic disadvantage to poor maths scores was 1.46 (95% CI: 1.17–1.79). The indirect effect of socio-economic disadvantage through cognitive ability (RR = 1.13 [1.06–1.22]) was larger than the indirect effect through self-regulation (1.05 [1.01–1.11]). Similar patterns were observed for both outcomes and in both cohorts. Policies to alleviate social inequality (e.g. child poverty reduction) remain important for closing the academic achievement gap. Early interventions to improve cognitive ability (rather than self-regulation) also hold potential for reducing inequalities in children's academic outcomes.Anna Pearce, Alyssa C.P. Sawyer, Catherine R. Chittleborough Murthy N. Mittinty Catherine Law, John W. Lync

Bons professores em um terreno perigoso: rumo a uma nova visão da qualidade e do profissionalismo

Ideas about what makes a good teacher are important in thinking about educational reform, and have come into focus recently. These ideas are contested and open to change. The first part of this paper traces models of the good teacher in Australia from the colonial-era good servant, through an ideal of the autonomous scholar-teacher, to contemporary lists of teacher competencies. The second part looks more closely at the incoherent but insistent way the good teacher is now defined under neoliberal governance by teacher registration authorities. The third part of the paper makes proposals for a new understanding of good teachers: based on understanding the labour process and occupational dynamics of teaching, the intellectual structure of Education studies, and the overall logic of education itself.Ideias sobre o que caracteriza um "bom professor" são importantes para se possa refletir a respeito da reforma educacional, e elas têm ganhado destaque recentemente. Essas ideias são controversas e estão abertas a mudanças. A primeira parte deste artigo examina modelos do que é considerado um "bom professor" na Austrália, desde os bons servidores da era colonial, passando pelo ideal do professor erudito autônomo, até as atuais listas de competências dos docentes. A segunda parte examina mais detalhadamente o modo pelo qual as autoridades responsáveis pelo registro e credenciamento de professores, em governos neoliberais, definem um "bom professor". A terceira parte oferece propostas para uma nova compreensão do conceito de "bom professor", baseadas no entendimento do processo de trabalho e da dinâmica ocupacional do ensino, na estrutura intelectual dos estudos sobre a Educação e na própria lógica da educação como um todo

Northern Territory Labor Market Profile Mach 1998

This article looks at the consumer price index for Housing, Food and Average retail prices