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Needs to be emailed to vit@hlbvic.com.au prior to 5pm on Tuesday, 18 September 2007.

Feedback and Recommendations

I. the appropriate objectives for the Institute in the light of government polices and changes in all educational sectors since its establishment;

Create new structures:

• VERB – Victorian educational Regulatory Board: Registration of Teachers, Approves and accredits pre-service teacher education courses, Misconduct Investigations. Run by government. Paid from general revenue.
• VEI- Victorian Educational Institute: Promotion of the profession, Works with teachers. Paid from voluntary membership. Run by members elected by membership.

II. the effectiveness of the Institute in achieving its original objectives;

• VIT has destroyed the little goodwill it has at its inception through its unwillingness to represent “the profession” in any real sense:
• VIT made no protest re. the imposition of registration fees and criminal record checks on teachers, revealing itself to be a government cipher
• the manner and timing of its demands for money have alienated teachers
• the wasteful style of practice most prominently in relation to its expensive and self promoting “communication” expenditure further alienated teachers
• VIT made insignificant contributions to public debates re. educational issues where “promotion of the teaching profession” is needed. e.g. VELs reporting and assessment systems, new curriculum structure, teacher stress, assaults on teachers etc
  It thus reveals itself o be another arm of government rather than a body representing the profession – an arm of government that teachers substantively pay for !

VIT has irreversibly lost support from teachers and nothing short of a major re-organisation in terms of structure, purpose and personnel could begin its recovery

VIT Purposes:

• Registration of all teachers: Achieved but only at the cost of near universal alienation of teachers due to:
  • the timing and manner that registration was organised,
  • the high level of charges,
  • the use of fees collected for purposes considered by teachers to be wasteful and unnecessary (e.g. glossy publications, ineffective “promotion of he profession etc etc) and
  • the absence of any attempt by the VIT to pressure the government to pay for functions that are clearly the employers responsibility (e.g. registration, police checks, pre-service course evaluation etc etc)
• Promotion of the profession: Pitiful performance on most issues reinforcing the strongly held conviction that the institute only parrots the policy of the employers and the government.
  Virtually no worthwhile contribution to important community debates on such issues as assessment and reporting, teacher stress and safety from assault, curriculum changes under VELs etc etc
• Works with teachers: Documents produce supposedly to “work” with teachers were verbose and full of jargon (“edu-speak”) and looked and smelt like a fait accompli.
  Importantly, VIT made NO attempt to provide any shared communication with the profession.
  One would think, after spending unknown sums on a website that there would be a discussion forum (as seen on so many news and community sites !!) where teachers could share responses and communicate to VIT and with each other.
  NO ! As befits an organisation that gives consultation only “lip service”, responses to feedback go into a magical black hole which generates an invented consensus view.
  People attending public hearings have no idea what becomes of their contributions. The website contains no record of what was said.
• Supports teachers in their first year of teaching with a structured induction program: Done. BUT the people who actually make it work are in schools. The contribution of the bureaucratic and verbose “support” materials to the success of the program is very small. Why not provide funding direct to schools to support induction activities !!
• Approves and accredits pre-service teacher education courses that prepare teachers: No idea what has been achieved. Annual report mentions the organisation of a conference and cyclical review of 6 courses which were all approved.
  The process described seems to be just another paper shuffle (2007 Annual Report p.20). If the VIT was really serious about this role, it would have implemented or required some real review procedures such as direct feedback from teachers trained by the institutions and/or from the schools where they work. Accreditation of new courses should presumably be built on objective data about the performance of existing courses so that improvements can be targeted at existing and emerging needs rather than “ivory tower” fads unrelated to the real world of classroom practice.
  Experienced teachers who have worked with beginning teachers have a distinct impression that the skills provided in pre-service training are not well matched to the demands of actual classroom teaching. Reports on individual teachers do not elicit this as they are heavily weighted towards supportive suggestions about the individual teachers practice rather then the pre-service course itself.
  The VIT should provide (or insist on) opportunities for all beginning teachers to evaluate on the adequacy of their pre-service courses at 6 months, and 18 months after commencement of teaching. This could easily be conducted at zero (YES zero !) cost through online an questionnaire and open forum for teachers to share impressions and experiences.
• Investigate and make findings on serious misconduct, incompetence or lack of fitness to teach: No idea of how well the VIT is performing this task.

III. the most appropriate structures for achieving the objectives identified under point I;

• Regulatory functions such as registration of teachers and investigation of misconduct as well pre-service course review should be conducted by a government department at no cost to teachers.
• Promotion of the profession and development of recommendations regarding professional practice should be undertaken by an organisation with voluntary membership.
  Most teachers already have the option of membership of such an organisations in the form of their union and voluntarily pay considerable membership fees.

IV. whether the Institute or a successor body has a role to play in this future environment; changes that may be required to its functions, structure and legislative mandate; and

• VIT, in its present form and with its present management, should be scrapped because it has no credibility with teachers in relation to its independence, its management of registration and police checks, or its promotion of the profession

V. the appropriateness of the fee structures and operating costs of the Institute.

• As the dominant purpose of the institute is to regulate teachers rather than to assist them, the costs of the institute should be born by the employers and the state.
• IF the government insists on passing on the cost of regulation to teachers, then the organisation should be run as an efficient administrative structure devoid of the fat of self promotion and the pretence that it is serving any other purposes
• The VIT Budget Report for 2005-6 (http://www.vit.vic.edu.au/retrievemedia.asp?Media_ID=1061) indicates that the organisation can’t even remain within it’s income of about $8 mill and overspent by $253000
• the organisation makes no attempt to separate expenditure relating to its separate functions – registration, promotion, standards development, induction, teachers course approval, misconduct investigations.
  It is highly likely that this conceals the fact that the organisation spends the vast bulk of its funds merely administering itself as a sinecure for fat cats. This is certainly the near universal belief of teachers in schools.
• The expenditure on communications is identified 1.5 mill but not explained in terms of publication types purpose, web site etc.
  Virtually all teachers would assume that the lions share of this expenditure falls under the umbrella of self-promotion rather than fulfilling any of the VIT aims
  On receiving expensively produced VIT communications in schools, teachers universally sigh with exasperation in the realisation that the pamphlet has been produced mainly at their own expense – and then consign it to the bin.
• If the government decides NOT to listen to teachers and to scrap the VIT in its present form, it could AT LEAST cut the organisation back to its bones so that the registration cost is minimised and “optional” activities such as promotion and communication are eliminated.

It would be far better to remove the confusion of purposes, the secret cross subsidy of activities, and the huge legacy of antipathy developed by the current VIT, and create new structures:

• VERB – Victorian educational Regulatory Board: Registration of Teachers, Approves and accredits pre-service teacher education courses, Misconduct Investigations. Run by government. Paid from general revenue.
• VEI- Victorian Educational Institute: Promotion of the profession, Works with teachers. Paid from voluntary membership. Run by members elected by membership.

The Australian Government seems to be hell-bent on wasting money on an ineffective home and ISP filter systems which are very likely to be bypassed easily by simple strategies including the huge and growing number of “anonymous proxy” sites.

These sites provide a window within a window. The school, home or government computer registers that the user has gone to the proxy site….. and stayed there. The inner window then allows the user to go anywhere, look at anything without any trace…..

As in so many areas of law enforcement (in or outside school), the only real deterrent is a “climate of fear” regarding severe and public punishment for offenders caught by traditional methods - surveillance, informers, mistakes by the perp (e.g. storing images on local machines for later viewing).

Porn filters no barrier for net users (Herald Sun)

We are all superheroes ! We just need “training”  

The modern employers panacea for any dysfunction in the workplace is to propose some “training”. The unchallenged and unstated assumption is that there is no limit to any one persons performance. Job expectations can be expanded without limit as long as “training” is provided. The mantra is most commonly espoused by governments that cannot seem to give up on trying to be “all things to all people”. Yesterday the idiocy was repeated by a very frequent offender, the Victorian Education Department. “A Government spokeswoman rejected the need for new laws to protect teachers. She said the Government was taking action to reduce parent-rage incidents by providing training for teachers on how to defuse possibly violent situations.” (Parent Rage pushing teachers to the edge 10/6). Teachers are being “trained” not to cope better before the police arrive, but to avoid the need to ring the police. The inference for teachers is that intimidating and violent behaviour is part of life and we must learn to handle it - not stop it. Similarly, despite the recent blustering about mandatory reporting of drug use in schools. The government’s policy of “harm minimisation” is designed to “train” teachers to cope with and support drug using students in their classrooms. After all, drug use is part of life and we must learn to handle it - not stop it. But there’s more… The government continues to push students with severe disabilities into “normal” classrooms maintaining that the teachers can be “trained up” to meet any parent’s expectation about their child’s special needs. There are many more examples of this dangerous fallacy in the way employers respond to when their policies create impossible situations in nursing, the police force, social welfare etc.
Training is seen as the cheap alternative to workable policy.

Parent Rage pushing teachers to the edge - The Age 10/6

Teachers at Rowville did nothing wrong based on your article “Teachers frisk pupil for drugs - Jane Metlikovec June 02, 2007″. The Victorian Government School Reference Guide instructs teachers with a “cause for concern” to instruct students to “empty their pockets or open their bags for inspection and a failure to comply with such an instruction is a discipline offence.” It is only if the teacher thinks the student will not “imminently use” that they should put off the search. You can imagine the hysteria (probably from the same parents) if a teacher assumed the use was not “about to happen, or threatening to happen” and it did happen ! If hysterically defensive parents make schools operate like CSI, then there will be even less staff time and energy left for actually teaching !
See: Original Story: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,21832926-661,00.html
Victorian Government Schools Reference Guide

The display of simple-minded and divisive posters saying “Jesus Loves Osama” outside the Glen Iris Uniting Church has caused some passerby to take direct action and remove them.

Rev Peter Whitaker is shown on the front page of the Progress Leader with his “script”.  Thinking for himself ? I don’t think so. The script sheet he was presumably sent by the “Outreach” group shows some more lame attempts to get publicity for a church with rapidly diminishing relevance in the community.

Instead of using a real pariah, the church decides to use name that IS loved by some Muslim extremists in our community.  The poster then encourages the community to believe the The Uniting Church sympathises with this extreme view.  The choice of Osama is also likely to mislead because of the Church’s widely known opposition to the war in Iraq. Saying “Jesus loves Osama” in the context of this policy also invites belief that the church is on the side of the Terrorists.

A sincere sign of compassion would have been to extend jesus’ love to one of the very few truly universal pariahs. Let’s see if the church has th guts to replace the poster with the much clearer message:  “Jesus loves Child Molesters”.

Story URL: http://www.progressleader.com.au/article/2007/02/13/10336_ppv_news.html

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