Motivation key to success in school
I REMEMBER my school speech night from the increasingly distant year of 1985 when the awards were being doled out to those students who had achieved the highest marks in their subjects.
A bunch of kids I had never seen before came forward from the back of the old Cosgrove Hall at Marion High School to accept their medals. Their defining feature was that none of them were called Bruce, Shazza or Wazza, but had names such as Minh, Zhang and Tran.
I guess the reason I had never met these students is that they didn’t spend their lunch hours playing handball, kicking the footy, smoking on the oval, flirting with girls and listening to the latest Rodney Rude album.
They didn’t regard school as an irritating encroachment on the more important business of seeing bands, playing sport and trying to buy West Coast Cooler with a fake ID at the local drive-through.
They regarded school as nothing other than a place to learn. As a result, they learnt better than any of us.
Fast forward to 2020 and the latest NAPLAN results have confirmed something quite extraordinary.
Not only are the children of migrants performing better than Australian-born kids in most subjects in almost every grade, they have an even better grasp of the English language than Australian-born kids for whom English is their native tongue.
When it comes to writing, spelling and grammar and punctuation, migrant students are performing better than their Aussie-born classmates across the board
The only area where they lag, and only very marginally, is reading. But in the writing section of the test, 94.9 per cent of Year 5 migrant students reached the minimum standard, compared to 93.2 per cent of children from Englishspeaking backgrounds.
The biggest difference for spelling was among Year 3 students where 96.3 per cent of migrant children reached the minimum standard, compared to 94.4 per cent of children whose family speak English.
It has often been said that migrant children do better because migrant families know what it’s like to live in countries that are devoid of opportunity.
If your parents have fled here on a boat from the killing fields of Cambodia, with half your family back home wiped out by the Khmer Rouge, you’ve got a pretty powerful demonstration of how bleak things can be, and how important it is to grab life with both hands.
It’s an effect that has been nicely described by the South Australian Governor Hieu Van Le, one of the so-called boat people who arrived from Vietnam in the 1970s, who says he came to Australia “with nothing but a suitcase filled with dreams”.
There are no such ravages in Australian suburbia, meaning parents are less likely to be as