00:00Back at Meriwether High, I always loved the hope at the start of a new school term, but
00:06parents really shouldn't be in the dark about the scale of the challenges that are facing
00:10our school systems. Fully one third of students now are struggling to master the basics of
00:15literacy and numeracy right across Australia, and almost half a million are in the very
00:19bottom performing group that are performing well below those expectations. Now these are
00:24results that can really impact the trajectory of a young person's life, even if someone
00:29doesn't want to go on to do further study after school. These are really just the basics
00:33that everyone needs to navigate adulthood, and the evidence is in that without them,
00:38life can be a real struggle.
00:40Conor, tell us about the performance of children from language backgrounds other than English
00:44and the lessons that we can learn from them and their parents.
00:47Yeah, so this trend is really well established now in NAPLAN data which tests every student
00:52in Australia for the basics of literacy and numeracy in years 3, 5, 7 and 9, and these
00:57students are outperforming their peers even in English language convention subjects very
01:01early on in primary school, and by the time they get to year 9 numeracy, they're one and
01:05a half years ahead of their peers. Now this really makes Australia a bit of a global outlier,
01:10this isn't the case everywhere in the West, and we know in other places these students
01:14can often struggle to succeed. This is a really big group of students we're talking about,
01:19about one third of the entire student body in New South Wales and Victoria, the biggest
01:23school system, so while there's a bit of a hint of generalisation in drawing lessons
01:28from the performance of such a large group, experts are saying that one consistent trend
01:32is that these families really value education and they're throwing down the challenge for
01:36everyone else to do the same as the new school year gets underway.
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