The Problem
As an engineer by training and formal digital technology consultant in pursuit of a career in education, I was appalled by the lack of STEM education in secondary schools on my recent quest to find a suitable school for my newborn daughter.
STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. To be fair, many schools do have robust teaching in the more traditional disciplines of STEM, namely mathematics and the natural sciences. What is shocking is the absence of technology and engineering teaching in Australian schools, both private and public.
Here is what I saw on school tours and open mornings. Some schools have robotics and coding clubs and programming electives in junior years, and students enter external hackathons. So what’s the problem? The problem starts to reveal itself when you look at the subjects offered in senior years (typically years 11 and 12). Of the more than 10 schools I have looked into located in Southeast of metropolitan Melbourne, all but one offered a technology subject in senior years. I myself was a victim of this neglect, having been denied access to an Information Technology class in year 12 because there were not enough students enrolled to justify the cost to the school (including teacher salary). I ended up teaching myself programming, but if students are expected to self-teach solely, what’s the purpose of schools?
Why STEM
One school I visited claimed they produce people that the world needs. A question immediately rose in my head: but do you know what the world needs? The principal was not able to answer this question, but I believe STEM is what Australia needs. In the Australia’s STEM Workforce report, the Office of the Chief Scientist points out that STEM fields impact over 26% of Australian economic activity, or about $330 billion per year. Employers share this sentiment, with the Australian Industry Group recognising STEM skills as essential for the national economy and industry success. In fact, one ABC article reports that some technology companies are having to hire half the amount of people they need because they struggle to find STEM talent in Australia. People trained in STEM bring to the workplace innovative solutions, systematic and analytical thinking, and the ability to adapt to changes, all of which are immensely valuable to industries.
The Cause
The nation needs STEM skills from school leavers, but why are schools not producing them? After speaking to staff at the schools I visited, as much as they avoided admitting it, the balance between the number of students enrolled and the cost of running a subject was always the reason for not offering technology and engineering subjects. This is not unreasonable. After all, a school is a business that needs to be sustained, and the only way to sustain a business is to run it profitably, and to achieve a profit one must control cost. Nonetheless, there must be a way to address the lack of STEM capabilities in schools.
What Schools Should Do
I was somewhat encouraged by what schools are doing in the junior years; with the technology programs they already have in place, hopefully interests can be inspired and more students will go on to demand technology subjects. Schools need to double-down on this approach. If Science and Maths are compulsory in junior years, so too should Technology. The society is changing rapidly, and it is time for schools to catch up.
What Governments Should Do
However, instilling interests in students takes time, but our society needs STEM talent now. This is where governments come in, to both set direction and push people onto that direction. First, the departments of education, both at federal and state levels, should make it clear to schools the values that STEM brings to the nation, and the importance of schools in making those values a reality. To turbo-charge this development, governments need to help schools solve the cost problem with too few enrolled students. They can do this with brute force: providing funding to technology and engineering classes with not enough students. For instance, if only two students elect to do Information Technology at a school, the governments can give money to the school to make the revenue for that class equivalent to the revenue at which the school is willing to run the class. This way, until schools succeed in convincing more students to enrol, the society can capture whatever number of students are interested in technology and engineering.
What Not to Do
When I was confronted with this problem during my school years, I was offered the chance to do the IT subject through distant education. This is a combination of online recorded videos and live video conference with a teacher. I rejected this proposal. With the ubiquity of online tutorials and conferencing software, students still choose to go to in-person tutoring. If done online, students have flexibility over when to do it, they save time in commute, and it is cheaper. So why does everybody still go to a real tutor? Because face-to-face teaching is simply better. The teaching is more effective and the interactions are of higher quality. The debate here is worth an article on its own, but to a young teenager at school, distant education is unlikely to work as well as face-to-face delivery at school.
Conclusion
Given the immeasurable value of STEM, governments have the responsibility and duty to set a long-term vision and provide concrete support to Australian schools, in the form of monetary funding to make running technology classes financially sensible. Even though the students who elect to study technology and engineering may be a minority, the benefits they will bring to society are unproportionally large, and they will underpin Australia’s future prosperity.
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