I usually sit down on a Thursday night and write my posts. This week though my Thursday night is taken up with Parent/Student/Teacher interviews, which means the chances of me making any coherent sense about anything when I get home is slim.

So for this week, I’ll keep it brief and direct you to something that aired on Australian TV last Tuesday night (March 12^th 2013). I’ll leave the commentary on it for next week.

First though, I should put this link into context for readers outside Australia. ‘Q and A’ is the ABC’s (Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s) weekly discussion panel style program on politics and social issues. It’s an impressive attempt at getting politicians to front the public and makes pretty effective use of social media. It also, as you will see if you watch it, has a confident and authoritative host that keeps things moving.

This week the show broke with it’s usual format slightly and only two guests were present, the Minister for School Education and, his counterpart, the Shadow Minister for Education. Australia is in an election year (September 14^th) and education issues seem to be a hotter topic than I can ever remember. This episode of ‘Q and A’ is a good example of just how much attention the Australian media is giving education.

I can think of a few good reasons for this but I’ll save that for next week. For now, I really just want to recommend checking out the programme’s web site. The episode has been divided into 3-4 minute sections to highlight the areas of discussion and there are transcripts and copies of live twitter feed reactions to what was discussed.

This is worth checking out because it’s more than just a programme about Australian education. This provides really interesting insight into how a modern western society thinks about education and how modern western policy makers think. The show could have been about education almost anywhere in the world.

I’ll discuss this more next week.

Here’s the link.

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3698638.htm