BROADCASTS.com

b'

Off the back of the PISA results last week into maths, science, and reading, comes the OECD\'s disciplinary climate index.\\xa0

It won\'t surprise you to learn we aren\'t doing very well in that either.\\xa0

There are just four countries in the OECD where students do not report a favourable disciplinary climate. They are Finland, Canada, Australia, and \\u2014you guessed it\\u2014 us. What an indictment.\\xa0

The Australian Government acted immediately and threw $3.5 million at schools to boost resources. Erica Stanford on the programme last week talked of the cellphone problem and the distractions raised in the PISA report.\\xa0

Isn\'t it funny to think that when the National Party announced a phone ban during the election campaign a lot of people scoffed. Labour claimed there already was one, in the sense schools could do it if they wanted. A lot of people asked how that works. What if there is an emergency? What if I need to ring Mum?\\xa0

Yet, a few short months later here we are, an embarrassment on an international scale, at the bottom of an increasing number of metrics.\\xa0

Distraction and discipline, or lack of it, are clearly major issues and yet we have allowed the problem to not just present itself, but to fester.\\xa0

I am reminded of Jan Tinetti earlier this year madly defending absentee numbers by suggesting school post-Covid was hard, and teachers had it tough, and numbers were slowly getting better, so there wasn\\u2019t anything to worry about.\\xa0

What the reports show us was that although everyone went through Covid, some actually got on with it and some didn\'t.\\xa0

In some respects, the lack of discipline in school is a reflection of the top-down lack of discipline we have seen these past six years from a Labour Government who had no relationship at all with discipline, either fiscally or morally.\\xa0

They were a Government for the lowest common denominator, where average was more than adequate and there wasn\\u2019t a crime that couldn\'t be excused in some way, shape, or form.\\xa0

You have to feel sorry for the teachers. It must be a war zone at times, between the distractions, the lack of discipline and, as a result, the lack of results.\\xa0

What a mountain it is to climb.\\xa0

First job though is to accept the state we are in, because surely these reports that encompass the entire OECD spell it out pretty clearly.\\xa0

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.