UK retains ancestral visas for Australians

Australians with a UK-born grandparent will retain the right to live and work in Britain but visa conditions may be changed. The British High Commission says the UK government has decided not to scrap ancestry visas as proposed earlier in the year. Under the existing rules, Commonwealth citizens aged 17 and over can be granted residency if they can prove that one of their grandparents was born in Britain. Those awarded visas are allowed to work and then apply for citizenship after five years of residence.

The British government in February called for a debate over whether the UK ancestry route should be abolished. British high commissioner to Australia Helen Liddell today said the visas would be retained as a route to UK citizenship. "Ancestry visas are a tangible sign of our close, shared history. They give Australians a glimpse of their heritage and a gateway to one of the world's most innovative economies," Ms Liddell said in a statement. "Full details on how ancestry visas will work in the future are yet to be announced. For the time being, the current rules apply."

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Schools in Australia and the USA compared

Australia and the United States have much in common--language, political institutions, the influence of British settlement, and, more recently, fighting together on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. They also have a lot in common in the field of education.

Books like Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, and Diane Ravitch's The Language Police make clear how effective America's Left has been in its long march to take control of education, especially the curriculum, in an attempt to transform society. The Left has targeted education in Australia, too. Over the last 30 years or so, professional associations, teachers' unions, and academics in teacher-training institutions have consistently attacked more traditional, competitive curricula as elitist, socially unjust, and guilty of enforcing a Eurocentric, patriarchal, and privileged view of the world.

In 1983, Joan Kirner, who eventually became the state of Victoria's education minister and then its premier, argued that education had to be reshaped as "part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation and social change, rather than an instrument for the capitalist system." More recently, the editor o! f the journal for the Australian Association for the Teaching of English argued that the John Howard-led conservative government's victory in 2004 was a result of the nation's English teachers' failure to teach young people the proper (i.e., left-wing) way to vote.

Currently, eight Australian states and territories have the power to manage what is taught in their schools, but the recently elected, left-of-center national government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is trying to develop a national curriculum. Such is the Left's control of education that the effort is cause for concern: any federally imposed curriculum will likely be ideologically driven and politically correct. During the early and mid-nineties, for example, the Commonwealth of Australia's left-leaning government developed a national curriculum so politically correct and dumbed-down that, after public outcry led by conservatives and the media, it was eventually rejected at a meeting of state, territory, and commonwealth education ministers.

Like America, Australia has both public and private schools. (As the German researcher Ludger Woessmann notes, one characteristic of stronger-performing education systems, as measured by international tests, is a muscular private-school sector.) On the whole, Australian private schools are more academically minded than their public counterparts, especially at the high school level. Private schools also have a better chance of escaping destructive curriculum initiatives like the "whole language" approach to reading instruction, as well as feel-good assessment systems that refuse to tell students that they have failed.

One striking difference between the United States and Australia, however, is that the Land Down Under doesn't need a formal school-voucher system like those in some American localities. In Australia, students attending private schools automatically receive funding from state governments and the commonwealth, with the amount of taxpayers' money received per student varying according to each school community's socioeconomic profile. While the figure never fully covers the cost of educating students (the average cost of educating a state-school student is $10,000, while the average government subsidy to private-school students is $5,000), private schools have become increasingly popular. In 1997, approximately 30 percent of students attended private schools; by 2007, the figure had grown to approximately 34 percent. Surveys suggest that parents choose private schools because they have a strong academic focus, better reflect parental values, and promote excellence.

While private schools must register with the government and conform to regulations in areas like health and safety, teacher certification, and financial probity, they enjoy flexibility when it comes to curriculum and staffing. They have been particularly effective in more affluent, middle-class areas, where they have forced government schools to promote a more disciplined and academic environment.

The curriculum debate now revolves around questions of increased testing and accountability, teacher performance, and developing a national curriculum in order to become more internationally competitive. However, since we have left-of-center governments at all levels--state, territory, and commonwealth--I fear that future education policies will be premised on statism, instead of opening schools to the type of accountability, choice, and competition represented by the market. Further, the commonwealth's minister for education, Julia Gillard, defines the purpose of education in terms of its utilitarian value, by linking it to increasing productivity. No one disputes the importance of economic growth, of course. But it's vital that we don't lose sight of the broader cultural, spiritual, and ethical value of education as well.

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Teacher quality getting some attention

They'll be pissing into the wind until they do something effective about the discipline problem, though

TOP university graduates would be aggressively recruited and given financial incentives to work in some of the nation's toughest classrooms, under Federal Government plans to boost teaching quality and revive interest in the profession. Education Minister Julia Gillard is also examining ways to track students and give parents unprecedented information on school performances in what she described as a "new era of transparency" for the public and private education systems.

With a third of serving teachers aged over 50 and university entry scores for teaching courses as low as 60, Ms Gillard last night called for the "urgent" creation of a national scheme to recruit talented graduates - from any field of study - to work in the most challenging schools. "We need to re-establish in Australia something that the labour movement has long recognised: that there is no higher vocational calling than teaching," said Ms Gillard, speaking at a John Button lecture in Melbourne last night.

She said she wanted to examine two contentious but successful international programs: the Teach First initiative in Britain, and the Teach for America scheme in the US. Under these programs, graduates are aggressively recruited and offered financial incentives to teach in struggling schools. They get access to accelerated teacher training and intensive mentoring from business and community leaders, and sign on to work in the system for about two years.

State Education Minister Bronwyn Pike endorsed the idea last night, having signalled in December that she was considering the Teach First program for Victoria.

But teachers called for better wages to back the rhetoric. "We need to see the necessary respect and valuing of the profession . which doesn't happen with words alone," said Australian Education Union federal president Angelo Gavrielatos.

In a wide-ranging speech, Ms Gillard said she wanted more detailed school-by-school data showing the socio-economic make-up and numbers of disadvantaged children. The minister also:

* Said perceptions of teaching would improve if top teachers were rewarded, in comments interpreted by some as another example of the Government's shift towards performance pay in schools.

* Rejected suggestions that differences in student results could be explained solely by socio-economic status.

* Said it was wrong to believe the education system could be divided into two groups: disadvantaged public schools and highly resourced non-government schools. "There are schools that struggle with limited resources, trying to serve disadvantaged communities, in both groups," she said. "I specifically reject the proposition that the only way to debate differential need in our school system is through the prism of the public-private divide."

Australian Secondary Principals Association president Andrew Blair said he was "absolutely all for" collecting data on individual students to identify learning difficulties, but raised concerns about comparing schools. "We all know that you can't compare a Balwyn high school and a Broadmeadows high school because you have a completely different clientele," he said.

Shadow education minister Tony Smith said the Coalition's attempts, when in government, to reform the profession had been "consistently blocked by teachers' unions and state governments".

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Corruption in Australia's immigration representatives overseas

Employing local Muslim Arabs to represent Australia in the Middle East was certainly a "courageous" decision (Courageous in a "Yes Minister" sense). Australia's current Leftist administration doesn't care, though

Former immigration minister Kevin Andrews instructed his department to lift the intake of Christian refugees from the Middle East. Mr Andrew's instruction was in response to what he saw as a pro-Muslim bias created by corrupt local case officers.

The Weekend Australian says Mr Andrews was so concerned about the extent of corruption in Middle Eastern posts - despite the allegations being investigated and dismissed by his own department - that he wrote to then Prime Minister John Howard advocating a $200 million plan to replace local employees with Australian staff in 10 "sensitive" countries, including Jordan, Iran and Egypt. Opposition immigration spokesman Chris Ellison said yesterday this remains Coalition policy. "We do not want discrimination or bias occurring ... and that's why I believe it is appropriate that our sensitive overseas posts, such as those in the Middle East, are staffed by Australians," Senator Ellison said.

A Department of Immigration spokesman said there were no substantiated cases of anti-Christian discrimination in Australian embassies and no plans to replace "Islamic locally engaged staff" with Australian officials.

An investigation by The Weekend Australian has discovered Mr Andrews was petitioned by the Australian Christian Lobby to address alleged religious discrimination against Iraqis. Before losing office in the November 2007 election, he ordered the number of Christian Iraqi refugees to be increased by 1,400 for 2007-08, almost doubling the previous year's Iraqi total of 1,639. "Put it this way, it was made very clear to the immigration department that more Christian refugees were wanted," a Howard government source said.

In his letter to Mr Howard in August last year, Mr Andrews, a devout Catholic, proposed significant changes to the refugee selection process. In the letter, seen by The Weekend Australian, Mr Andrews accused the case workers in Australian embassies of fraud and bribery when processing migration applications. Such posts are predominantly staffed by local workers. He said this raised "considerable security risks".

Mr Andrews named 10 countries - Pakistan, India, United Arab Emirates, China, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Kenya, Russia and Egypt - in which the posts should be staffed exclusively with Australian departmental officers. The non-Muslim countries named by Mr Andrews are understood to be less riddled by religious discrimination and more so by corruption, a source told The Weekend Australian.

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