No School, No Sport – The Labor Revenge for Cutting Class

This is a not-unexpected one: Gillard’s other method for controlling student absenteeism is to simply deny them the privilege of playing for clubs on Saturday mornings.  This doesn’t seem to affect the private schools, but one would hope that they have their own systems in place.

• Plan to keep kids in school, Australian Teachers Magazine

The biggest opponent seems to be the Greens, with Senator Hanson-Young attacking Gillard for being a spoilsport…of course, the policy is about spoiling sport, so this seems like an exceptionally obvious thing to say.

Of course, the Greens do make a point – why make school an intolerable experience?  And there’s a lot of variables at play, too, I’m sure – what happens if a student, forced to be at school, then brings illegal activities into the school as a result?

• Greens hit out at truancy policy, Australian Teachers Magazine

The Greens are in the fortunate position of not needing to formulate a policy that requires budgeting – the joys of primarily being a Senate party, I suppose.  Even so, their argument of ‘sport might be the only thing that these kids have’, which seems remarkably similar to the argument against Coach Carter, in my opinion.

They have pointed out that Labor’s education policy, so far as reducing absenteeism, has primarily been negative – that is, ‘don’t be absent’.  The policy, however, has lacked positive incentives to be at school.