Jennifer’s main area of work is school education, and she has published papers on issues including school funding, boys’ education, teacher training and employment, class size, school performance reporting, and educational disadvantage. She is the author of the policy monographs Boy Troubles (2000), Families, Freedom and Education (2001), Schools in the Spotlight (2003), and Schools of Thought: A Collection of Articles on Education (2009).
Her other publications have been on child care, female labour force participation, and NSW trains. She also edited the Centre’s State of the Nation series from 1999 to 2004.
Jennifer has been at the forefront of debate on education matters, with more than a hundred articles in major newspapers and regular radio appearances. Jennifer was schools editor at The Australian newspaper from May 2004 to June 2005.
Author Archive
Posted: 8:00 am on 22nd February 2012
Julia Gillard and Peter Garrett’s refusal to countenance a $5 billion increase in annual expenditure on schools was the right response to the most unrealistic recommendation in the Gonski report released yesterday. For one thing, the figure of $5 billion seems to have been plucked out of thin air by the review committee. It is supposedly the extra money required to meet a new Schools Resource Standard and provide resource…
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Posted: 8:00 am on 14th February 2012
On Monday, the report of the federal government’s Review of Funding for Schooling, commonly known as the ‘Gonski review’ will be released, along with the government’s initial response. So far, federal education minister Peter Garrett has been tight-lipped. Supporters of school choice and non-government schools have good reason to be uneasy. Most worrying is that the review committee seems to be drawing its information and expert analysis from sources that…
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Posted: 1:19 pm on 12th December 2011
Something pretty exciting happened in New Zealand last week. Yes, really! The National and ACT parties agreed to implement a trial of charter schools in South Auckland and Christchurch. Apparently, it’s that simple — you decide to do it, and then you do it. Teachers unions? What teachers unions? Charter schools (known as Free Schools in the UK) are fully publicly funded schools which are owned and operated by private…
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Posted: 8:00 am on 29th November 2011
Federal education minister Peter Garrett’s re-announcement last week of a Gillard government policy to increase school autonomy is great news for public schools. Independent schools already enjoy a high level of decision-making power at the individual school level. Catholic schools, which operate as state-based systems, are more centralised than independent schools but have already begun the march to individual school autonomy, particularly in staff appointments. Under a Council of Australian…
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Posted: 4:50 pm on 31st October 2011
Once again, child-rearing is under the spotlight. At the moment, helicopter parents are out, free range kids are in. The overall impression is that Australian children are a bunch of molly-coddled wimps. Some of my favourite writers have weighed in on the subject, identifying an irrational fear of injury, lamenting paranoid parenting, and advocating a more relaxed approach to raising kids . I do sympathise with these sentiments and I…
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