David Bartlett’s Tasmania Tomorrow is falling apart

THE FIRST DAY back at school is always a complex and anxious time for students of any age. Students entering the new Tasmania Tomorrow institutions were always going to be doubly apprehensive because they know there is a dark shadow hanging over the new Tasmania Tomorrow institutions that they are entering.

Cut down to its bare bones the first day in a college is quite simple. Students go to an assembly where they are made feel warm and welcome. They meet their teacher support leaders are move off to a room so the day’s real business can begin. The timetable has a list of subjects students have enrolled in, their teachers’ names, the time to attend each subject and the room, kitchen or workshop it is to be taught in.

Teachers and students need this day to begin in a cool, calm and orderly way.

Hundreds of polytechnic students enrolled at the Hobart Polytech campus at Mount Nelson, did not get their timetable, or received incorrect information, and others received the timetable with no information at all. Meanwhile the Academy students collected their timetables and headed off to begin their “college” education.

Some students had their suspicions about the Polytech confirmed. Some breathed a sigh of relief. Some felt sorry for their forlorn friends.

Teachers did their best to ensure that students had a room to go to and a teacher to listen to their concerns.

Some teachers told the AEU that they had been let down by the system yet again and felt like getting into their cars and driving home.

And that is how it started on Thursday. And it was repeated and exacerbated with the return of year 12 students on Friday.

At times student support services were overflowing. The focus of both days moved from dealing with late enrolments and course changes to trying to stop students from feeling devalued and alienated. Staff working without current computer information, were busy handwriting information to get students into afternoon sessions.

Shared Services and the polytech administration simply did not meet the needs of the students. It is bad enough that these students have lost hours of class time. Our biggest concern is for the welfare of the children and what they now think about being in the Polytechnic. These first days set the tone for the whole year. This type of thing undermines the sense of community that the staff of the Hobart polytech are trying to keep alive. These students have come from schools where they have had a real sense of belonging. What have they come to in the Polytech?

I was told of one teacher who had 48 students yet he had to battle along all day trying to solve timetable problems without any support being made available to him.

Senior polytech management was in damage control at the campus on Friday afternoon, telling teachers that extra personnel will be brought to the campus on Monday to work with students who do not have timetables. It is feared that the process could take several weeks.

Gross inefficiencies in the handling of data, the computer system crashing, archived data being lost and the continual delays associated with getting information from team leaders located in distant polytech campuses are considered to be major contributing factors.

Because the Hobart Academy is using the same tried and true methods developed in the former college, and its leadership is all on campus, when a problem arises it can be responded to immediately. When problems appear in the Polytech it is a different matter. The people who have to fix things are scattered all around the state, so information comes in more slowly and problems take a long time to get sorted out.”

David Bartlett’s Tasmania Tomorrow is falling apart. From the start, secondary college teachers have been telling him that it is not an education system that is suitable for children of this age. He has not listened. Nowhere else in the world are students at the end of Year 10 expected to make a choice like this that will affect their whole lives.

If David Bartlett came out tomorrow and said that he was ending the Tasmania Tomorrow experiment because it has been such a terrible flop, I am sure that the Tasmanian community would not punish him for it at the next state election.

The worst thing about the debacle at Hobart Polytechnic is that the students know that they have been put into a system that does not work properly and that it brands them as different.

What David Bartlett told Tim Cox, ABC Radio, Feb 11:
abc-bartlett-11feb.mp3