Ian Chia 's List: Australian education big picture

CUTS to the Victorian Education Department's budget have blown out to almost half a billion dollars over the next four years, with the government blaming a reduction in GST.Education Minister Martin Dixon revealed the department would have to find $481.1 million in savings - $143 million more than previously thought.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/education-cuts-blow-out-to-481m-20110511-1eiyd.html#ixzz1M8lUImQe

A $57 MILLION program that funds hundreds of maths and science coaches to help teachers at struggling schools will be axed at the end of the year as part of hidden cuts in last week's Victorian budget.

While China now devours 25.5 per cent of Australian exports, the US takes just 4 per cent. The direct impact of a US recession on the Australian real economy would be something of a sideshow. Even the indirect impact, felt through softening Chinese exports and declining confidence, may not be decisive either.
The Chinese economy is still being driven by the momentum that comes when 1.4 billion people strive to attain lifestyles that they see in the developed world around them.
''By 2020 China will have 93 cities that are bigger than Sydney,'' Emerson told BusinessDay yesterday. ''Looking at the cranes on the skyline of these massive provincial cities was a daily reminder of the difference between the financial economy and the real economy.''
Emerson, who served as economic adviser to prime minister Bob Hawke in the 1980s, makes another point that is easy to overlook. As China gets richer its consumption patterns will change. Already it is the biggest buyer of Australian export services, including education and tourism.''China's second great transformation will be away from a growth model that is heavily dependent on exports towards domestic consumption and an associated lift in the importance of services,'' says Emerson. ''Australia is in a very strong position compared with just about any country on Earth.''

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/business/this-dragon-has-plenty-of-fire-left-20110812-1iqzi.html#ixzz1UzRvZ2Wt

Second: Pearson, owner of Penguin, became a book and ebook retailer by the purchase of the relevant assets from the bankrupt REDGroup. It appears they will run the business, web sites under the Borders and Angus & Robertson brands, with a minimal staff.
Pearson is a big company whose interests go far beyond Penguin, but it is the trade implications of this that catch my trade-centric eye. Big trade publishers are caught between a rock and a hard place on direct selling and customer ownership. Whatever the future may hold or require, trade publishers today are highly dependent on their intermediaries’ good will. It would likely cause untold grief with Amazon and Barnes & Noble if a major US trade house set up a direct selling operation, despite the fact that niche publishers often have them as adjuncts to community or professional publishing efforts (Wiley, O’Reilly, McGraw-Hill, F+W Media, Interweave. In fact, Pearson owns half of Safari, a direct-to-reader subscription service pioneered and co-owned by O’Reilly. They also own part of CourseSmart, but they’re now selling books and ebooks direct to consumers, not just content-by-subscription to geeks and textbooks to students.)
It might be well down the list of reasons why Pearson Australia is now running online trade selling operations, but it will be interesting to see how Penguin Australia benefits from the association.

Pearson Buys Borders Australia and Angus & Robertson Web Businesses
by MICHAEL CADER on JULY 4, 2011 in BOOKSTORES, EBOOKSTORES, ENEWS, INTERNATIONAL NEWS
In a different type of strategic acquisition, Pearson Australia has acquired the online bookselling and ebook businesses of the bankrupt REDGroup retail, which includes the online stores for Borders Australia and Angus & Robertson. (The sites are http://www.borders.com.au/ and http://www.angusrobertson.com.au/.) They intend to retain 16 staff members associated with the businesses,…

In Australia ... it would take eight years, after a change of policy and a change of government, to balance the budget again. But that did not get our credit rating back. We did not recover our AAA rating until 2003 - 17 years after that first downgrade. And that was after seven years - from 1996 - when we did not borrow a cent. In fact we repaid nearly all our government debt. And when we had proved that we didn't need it, the ratings agencies reclassified us as a "class A" borrower! It's a banker's joke - the only person qualified to borrow is the one that doesn't need to do so.

But it was worth getting our credit rating restored. When the current government began to borrow again in the midst of the financial crisis of 2008, we were able to do so and at the most favourable rates.

Australian population over the age of 14 play mobile games (i.e. around 3.7 million people). Of these, 57 percent are aged 25-49 years, and are likely to be young parents.

Next year, Australian universities will be free to enrol as many students as they can as the sector rises to the challenge set by the federal government to lift the percentage of young adults with a degree from 29 per cent to 40 per cent by 2020.Advertisement: Story continues belowSuch growth is not possible without expanding online offerings, Ross Chambers, vice-chancellor, academic, at Charles Sturt University, says. Two-thirds of CSU students study by distance, with the figure growing by 14 per cent a year.The challenge to lift university qualifications among socially disadvantaged groups, indigenous Australians, and those living in rural and remote areas is even more dependent on better broadband services and online offerings.In the US, online tertiary study is growing at an even faster rate, hitting 25 per cent a year. Schools, too, are being transformed with more than half of the US states now having virtual schools, according to a report released this month by the Boston Consulting Group.

The Gonski review panel released four research reports for public comment ahead of its final report into new schooling funding arrangements due by the end of the year.

#gonski fact sheets for school funding http://t.co/6tc4G0t

Eugenics' influence on education policy in Victoria vs New South Wales in Australia in the first half of 20thC.