Hi @minismallholding, thanks so much for your response. I do find that the way our education system is currently established to be quite restricting, both for teachers and students. There is a lot of research going on at the moment in regard to this very outdated model, and how it can be made more relevant. The problem is, it will take time (and probably quite a bit of time), however, done right could be very rewarding.

I think one of the problems stems from the fact that teachers are bound by the government to teach what the they deem to be the most appropriate content at the time they write the documentation. Each subject has certain standards that students are 'judged' against, and it is very difficult to deviate from this curriculum.

We also, and this is the English teacher in me speaking, have situations such as the one that follows, where we no longer have every opportunity to assess basic skills such as grammar, spelling and punctuation, especially at Year 11 and 12 levels (while I still correct this, I cannot actually grade a student down for poor spelling). Students are, for the most part, purely assessed on the content of their assessment task, and these basic life skills take the back burner. This has been the case for a number of years, so we now have a situation, where students who graduated Year 12 five years ago and commenced a teaching degree are now in classrooms teaching what they learned those few years prior. Unfortunately, unless they know better, they probably weren't corrected in regard to basic English skills, so they are now teaching this incorrectly to a whole new generation. It's slowly becoming a vicious circle (I hope that makes sense!).