Talking a good game about ending inequity

THERE are few more revealing insights into a community than the behaviour, negative or positive, seen in a national school classroom. 

Children, in their innocence and naivety, sometimes through their cold calculation or detached violence, are a pretty good reflection of the world they come from. Sometimes they can beguile and charm, other times they can frighten classmates and be a cause of great concern for their teachers. They are nearly always a perfect expression of the environment they come from.

That concern is often exacerbated when the support services designed to help a troubled child are not readily available or available at all. Teachers and the whole school community — and especially the unsettled child’s family — can only look on in something approaching despair as a child that desperately needs help to secure the most basic education becomes marginalised and ultimately leaves school a confused, sometimes angry young person, ill-equipped to meet life’s many and unforgiving challenges.