00:00Parents really shouldn't be in the dark about just some of the problems facing our school
00:05systems. Right now, one third of students are failing to master basic skills in literacy
00:11and numeracy, and about half a million are so far behind they're in the bottom rung for
00:15performance. Now, this affects all of these students, not just the ones that have ambitions
00:20to go on to do further study. These are really basic skills, the kind of things that you
00:25need to navigate through adulthood, and the evidence is really in that if you don't master
00:29them, your life outcomes are going to suffer. We have really excellent data now that students
00:34from language backgrounds other than English are outperforming their peers. This is a consistent
00:39trend in NAPLAN and just about every other measure of performance we have, and it's a
00:43really interesting statistic because it's not the case most places in the West. In many
00:47other countries that we would compare ourselves to, students from these backgrounds often
00:52struggle to keep up, but in Australia they're outperforming their peers, even in English
00:57language assessments, and by year nine, they're one and a half years ahead in numeracy. There's
01:02a lot we can learn there. This is a big group of students. We're talking about one third
01:06of the student body in New South Wales and Victoria, the two biggest school systems,
01:11so while there's a bit of a case that drawing too many lessons from it is a generalisation,
01:17experts say that one thing many of these families have in common is that they place a huge premium
01:22on education, they value it at home, and they're highly engaged in their children's schooling,
01:27and they're urging other families to do the same as the new school year kicks off.
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