The Last Word

Why we need to upskill educators in eSafety

eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, discusses how schools and educators can work with parents to deal with online challenges faced by young people.

Guiding young people to positively shape their digital practices has never been more important. Whether it’s for school, socialising or entertainment, almost everything they do is enabled through an internet-connected device. And it’s happening from a younger age – our survey of 3520 Australian parents revealed 81 per cent have allowed their pre-schooler access to the internet.

While this exposure to digital technology can create diverse and rich experiences, our research shows that young people also encounter a range of negative experiences online, such as being contacted by strangers, being left out by others or having mean things posted about them. Of these young people, only 8 per cent spoke to a teacher or Deputy Principal and just 8 per cent spoke to a school counsellor about their online issue. However, a larger number reported speaking to their peers (28 per cent) or their parents (55 per cent).

At eSafety we are dedicated to helping Australians have safer online experiences, especially young people. We operate the world’s first (and still only) legislated cyberbullying complaints scheme, where young people under 18 can report serious cyberbullying and then we work with social media providers to get the harmful content removed. We also run a legislative-backed reporting tool for victims of image-based abuse – or the sharing of intimate images/videos without consent.

From the complaints we receive, we know many of these online issues are closely linked to social conflict occurring at school. But the problem of bullying – online and offline – extends far beyond the school gates. It is embedded in the values and norms of wider society. So to effectively address this behaviour, we need to take a holistic approach, including a whole-ofschool and whole-of-community approach.

To assist educators with this, eSafety has developed an accredited Teacher Professional Learning Program, empowering teachers with the confidence and competence to guide their students through a range of online challenges they may encounter.

The live-webinar sessions help teachers understand the current trends in technology, the latest cyber-related laws and the education resources and strategies that can empower students to deal with online challenges. They also cover the common online safety concerns of families, and the resources and strategies available to help families address these concerns, including ideas for how to engage the whole school community in online safety awareness.

Educators play an increasingly important role in helping shape positive online experiences for young people. Not only can teachers initiate important discussions about online safety issues in the classroom and help students deal with these issues by using eSafety resources like the The YeS Project, they can also help bring parents along on the journey.

Understandably, parents are grappling with a generation who do not know a world without the internet and connected-devices. Issues like screen-time, gaming and access to online pornography are primary parenting concerns – and represent a set of challenges our own parents did not have to deal with.

While three in four parents from our nationwide survey say they took some form of action to try and keep their child safe online, there is a significant knowledge gap, as timepoor parents struggle to keep up with the ever

changing online trends of young people.

Less than half of parents feel confident dealing with cyberbullying, or managing online threats, like contact with strangers – which we know one in four Australian teens have experienced. A whopping 96 per cent of parents told us they need additional online safety information to help them manage the online risks children are exposed to.

Schools are a key gateway to getting essential online safety information to parents and carers. But they are also time-poor, so a variety of channels to reach busy parents can be looked at – whether it’s having them acknowledge technology and cyberbullying policies, holding parent-information seminars, or including regular articles about online safety in the school newsletter or app.

As digital technologies continue to infiltrate our lives, for the good and the bad, we all need to take responsibility for keeping children safe online. I encourage teachers to step up to the challenge – register for eSafety’s Professional Learning Program, explore the resources, support and reporting available, and pass on our advice and information for parents and carers.

Teachers who are competent and confident in dealing with online safety issues not only help more students effectively deal with online issues; the whole community benefits by being engaged and informed about how to help young people stay safe online. EM

Hackers, hustlers and hipsters

Sarah Moran, Co-Founder of the Geek Girl Academy, explains why algorithmic systems and design thinking is part of a future wave of technology education.

I started coding in 1990 when I was five years old. No, I wasn’t some super genius. I had a very thoughtful teacher, Mr Cam, who secured a classroom full of Australian-made Microbee computers. As he learned how to use them, he encouraged us to learn alongside him.

Picture a classroom full of primary school kids swapping code across computers, playing each other’s games with pride and laughing when the code wouldn’t do what we thought we’d told it to. Learning technology was a very collaborative activity and this social butterfly fell in love with building the internet.

Today, many teachers inspire the next generation to fall in love with the T in STEM. It might have taken nearly 20 years, but almost every school classroom across Australia now looks and feels like mine did growing up.

But there’s still a long way to go.

When kids illustrate what they want to be what they want to be when they grow up, they can usually draw a scientist, an engineer and a mathematician.

But what does a technologist look like? Technologists build the future so unless you’re drawing a crystal ball that can be hard to visualise. Technology is a relatively new profession, and the other professions have been socialised far more effectively. With more time to make these roles visible in society, they are now richly developed in our stories and culture.

If I want to dress up as a famous technologist do i go as Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk? For a start they’re all men who live in San Francisco, so not exactly relatable. The idea of going as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak standing next to the Apple II doesn’t really connect mentally with learning drag-and-drop block coding on your iPad.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at BUILD 2019 that “right now as we speak there are more software developers being hired outside of what is considered the ‘tech’ industry and it’s only going to grow”. So now every traditional career has technologists too!

I run school holiday programs teaching women and young girls together in the one classroom. The first activity is for everyone to close their eyes and imagine what it looks like to build the internet.

On my screen I show a stock image of a “hacker” - a dude in a hoodie sitting alone in the dark. “Put your hand up if this is what you think of when you think of hacking?” Up goes every adult’s hand, met with looks of confusion from young girls.

Because they are too young to consume some of the media that glorifies this kind of hacker, those girls haven’t been hit with the stereotypes.

But a new risk is on the horizon. Technology moving faster than the curriculum, and coding as we know it is becoming “daggy”. As a woman who thought she’d found a bargain when she scored her Frozen pyjamas for half price, I can assure you - youth culture moves fast.

If we think teaching young people the same block coding lessons in Scratch and Code Studio will still be cool in 2020, think again. This is already happening in high schools, where kids in Year 7 are being “taught” things they’ve already learned in Year 3. It’s frustrating young people and turning them away from technology altogether.

At Girl Geek Academy we ensure we go beyond coding to explain the broader roles and skills in a technology team: hackers, hustlers and hipsters.

A hacker is a builder or coder and uses algorithmic thinking, a hipster is a designer who makes things look good using design thinking, and a hustler uses systems thinking to make sure people actually use the technology once it’s built. These skills are the core ingredients you need to build tech products, and a good technologist is able to dabble in all three.

We are also using the influence of pop culture to inspire young people to think more broadly about careers in technology. Our “Girl Geeks” book series for young girls ages 9-12 features four friends who discover their talents as hackers, hustlers and hipsters in their classes at school.

There is a real risk the digital wave currently driving inspiration in young people will age quickly and no longer be considered cool, so we need to think about what’s next in terms of inspiring merging future technologists.

According to the Australian Government’s Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, 75 per cent of jobs will require STEM skills by 2026. We need all hands on deck to ensure young people not only learn the basics but commit to technology careers and be supported to study the right things at the right time. EM

Mental health and wellbeing matters

Peter Goss, School Education Program Director at the Grattan Institute, sheds light on how poor mental health and low wellbeing harms student learning outcomes.

If you ask a policy wonk how well a primary school is doing, you’ll probably be subjected to statistics about NAPLAN.

If you ask a parent, you’re more likely to hear how their child feels about school. Of course, both things matter. But the dynamic interplay between wellbeing and mental health, social and emotional skills, and academic learning is starting to get a higher profile in policy circles. It’s about time.

Social and emotional skills include managing emotions, setting positive goals, building relationships and being aware of others. They are vital for success in life – but of course they aren’t isolated from academic learning. Students with strong social and emotional skills tend to improve more quickly in those domains – a non-cognitive version of the Matthew Effect – but also progress more rapidly on academic skills.

At the other extreme, poor mental health and low wellbeing harm learning. But two major Australian studies are shedding more light on how common these issues are: how young they start and how much of an impact they have on learning.

Young Minds Matter: the second Australian Child and Adolescent Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing is run by the University of Western Australia. It shows that roughly one in seven students has a mental disorder in a given year, with ADHD the most common disorder for boys and anxiety for girls. The prevalence of mental disorders is broadly consistent across Years 3, 5, 7 and 9.

The impact on learning is already apparent by midway through primary school. Year 3 students with any mental disorder are six to nine months behind in NAPLAN compared to their mentally healthy peers. This gap grows to between 1.5 and 2.8 years by Year 9, depending on the NAPLAN domain. Some of this slower rate of learning progress is probably due to lower attendance rates, although absenteeism for students with mental disorders is much lower in primary school than secondary school.

These are huge learning gaps. The Year 9 learning gap is about the same as the learning gap for students whose parents didn’t finish high school or are unemployed, two common markers of social disadvantage.

To make matters worse, family background and mental health challenges interact. Students from low-income households have twice the rates of mental disorders as those from high-income households, students from unemployed sole parent households have three times the prevalence of mental disorders as students who have two employed parents or carers.

In effect, worse mental health may account for somewhere between one tenth and one quarter of the overall gap between socially advantaged and disadvantaged students.

The second major study is the Childhood to Adolescence Transition Study (CATS), run by the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne. It shows that students lose about eight months’ worth of learning from Year 3 to Year 7 if they have low wellbeing, and nearly ten months of learning if they are bullied for two or three years.

Because it tracks students as they move through school, the CATS study can tease out the links between these interacting factors. And there are strong links: students with low wellbeing in primary school tend to have poor engagement and learning in secondary school.

Primary school principals have always focused on the wellbeing of their students and the data increasingly shows just how vital this is. Prevention is better than cure, but schools also need the

capabilities to identify and support mental illness.

But what should principals do? After all, there are dozens (if not hundreds) of programs on offer that claim to improve wellbeing/reduce bullying/ support mental health.

There is one new initiative that can help principals cut through the noise. ‘Be You’ was launched late last year as the national mental health initiative in education, with a vision to create a mentally healthy generation of young Australians.

It gives educators knowledge, resources and strategies to help children and young people achieve their best possible mental health.

Be You is led by beyondblue with delivery partners Early Childhood Australia and HeadSpace. It integrates several successful initiatives into a single framework and also provides details about the implementation and evidence base of a wide range of external programs. And Be You is free, courtesy of generous funding from the Federal Department of Health. It’s great that policy makers are getting on board with mental health in schools. But in the end, each school has to choose how it will approach student wellbeing and mental health.

The hard yards get done each day, with each child, in the classroom, in the playground, and at home. Be You is there to help you find the right approach for your school.

Peter Goss is an unpaid member of beyondblue’s National Education Program Council for Be You. EM