High quality and relevant secondary education : perspectives and challenges

Margaret Forster, ACER

Abstract

This article is based on an address delivered at the ANTRIEP conference in Jakarta, Indonesia, in November, 2007. It explores three different perspectives and related challenges in providing high quality and relevant secondary education: i) the perspective of students who come to secondary school with wide variability in their knowledge and readiness for the secondary curriculum; ii) the perspective of the school which imposes, through its structure, particular demands on teachers and students; and iii) the perspective of the community which understands that certain values and pathways will be recognised particularly in the senior secondary years. These perspectives and related challenges are to be seen in the context of a baffling paradox that: 'In a good number of countries, large increases in the average real expenditure per student and other measures of school resources in primary and secondary schools over the last four or five decades have not remotely been matched by a comparable increase in average test scores'.