Foci Education

There’s a tension that doesn’t get talked about enough in communities like ours. To be a good Christian, you have to confess your failures. To maintain ‘mianzi’, you have to conceal them. These two things cannot coexist — and for many young Chinese Australians navigating both identities simultaneously, the result is performance rather than faith. W.G. is in Year 12. She wrote about this tension with the kind of clarity that most adults won’t allow themselves. She ranked first in her year.
That’s the education we’re trying to build — literary command to say what kids already know.

A study published this year by the European Journal of Education examined the effects of private tutoring here in Sydney, Australia. Unsurprisingly, the findings were uncomfortable.

Researchers found that most tutoring— the ones that are household names— prioritise getting to an answer over developing the critical thinking behind it. Students walk away knowing formulas, patterns, and acronyms without fully understanding why. Students read text not for meaning but for answers to questions they have to attempt. One teacher in the research described this kind of tutoring as the kind that crushes curiosity. Another said she could instantly tell from reading a student’s work whether they had been coached or not.

However, the research did also show something which the critics of tutoring don’t often acknowledge — that families (especially those new to Australia) turned to tutoring not out of anxiety alone but because schools aren’t competitive enough. There’s not enough challenge, there’s not enough feedback. There’s not enough preparation. There’s not enough monitoring of progress for when it matters.

We originally started Foci Education 6 and a half years ago because we believed that both things could be true at once — that the landscape of tutoring has a real problem, and that the answer isn’t less support (as some teachers would like to believe), but better support.

We don’t drill, hand out templates or teach students to perform understanding they don’t have. We teach them to actually think, and it’s bloody hard. The results just happened to follow.

Ho, C.2026. “Undermining Classroom Teaching? Teachers’ Perspectives on the Impact of Private Tutoring on School Education in Sydney, Australia.” European Journal of Education61, no. 2: e70597. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.70597.

all enquiries addressed to David at [email protected]

Strict Curve Grading (also known as norm-referenced grading) evaluates students against each other, rather than against an absolute standard of quality. Under this system, a student’s grade is entirely determined by their ranking within the class.

$18.2 million. That’s what the 2026 federal budget committed to maintaining and expanding Australia’s national literacy assessment platform.

It’s an easy number to scroll past, especially with other headline numbers. But the signal underneath it is worth naming: at a federal level, the ability to read and write precisely is still treated as the foundation for everything else.

NAPLAN is not the point. The instinct behind it is — our kids need to be literate and this represents a step in the right direction towards that goal.

New enquiries to [email protected]

A. Leung is in Year 10 at St Aloysius College. For his English assessment this term, he wrote a zine — three original poems, visual elements, and a written reflection — about mankind’s relationship with the natural world.

His first 20 out of 20. Top band across every criterion — Composition, Visual Elements, Reflection.

The work was his. We just refused to let him settle for less than what it could be. Read the full zine at the link in our bio.

A Leung hiện đang học lớp 10 tại Trường St Aloysius. Trong bài kiểm tra Tiếng Anh học kỳ này, em đã sáng tác một tập thơ — gồm ba bài thơ gốc, hình ảnh minh hoạ, và bài phân tích cảm nhận — về mối quan hệ giữa con người và thiên nhiên.

Đây là lần đầu tiên em đạt điểm tuyệt đối. 20 trên 20 — xếp loại A toàn diện ở mọi tiêu chí đánh giá.

Đó là thành quả của em. Chúng tôi chỉ không để em dừng lại ở mức chưa tốt nhất. Đọc toàn bộ tạp chí tại liên kết trong tiểu sử của chúng tôi.

Term 2 starts Monday. Link in bio. All enquiries to our brand-new website.

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