That is not what I had in mind; the initial idea was to pull together some threads of thinking developed over a decade or so. Certainly I began with a set against what governments of all persuasions had been saying and doing about schools since the Howard years, an approach driven with utter conviction by the Rudd/Gillard governments in their “education revolution” (with the sole but compelling exception of Gonski). But as I dug out and for the first time really focused on a mass of evidence about how things had been going, I got more than I’d bargained for.

I was not shocked, exactly, but taken aback by the consistency of the picture over a wide field and across many years: Australian schooling has been on the slide for two decades, is still on the slide and is showing no signs of turning around.

That conclusion was reinforced and expanded in scope late in the piece when I realised at last that much-publicised difficulties of a behavioural and emotional kind (“classroom disruption,” “school refusal,” early leaving, bullying, lack of “engagement,” problems of “wellbeing”) are even more marked, fundamental and significant than the cognitive shortcomings on which much of the evidence dwells. They suggest that schooling isn’t working, and that it isn’t working because what children and young people experience there is badly out of kilter with what they experience elsewhere.

There was more to come as I turned to the obvious question: why? Why didn’t an agenda prosecuted with exceptional vigour by exceptionally capable political leaders deliver what it promised, let alone do what really needed doing? There is nothing inherently wrong in the big arguments used to make schools sit up straight and do as they were told — choice, equality, “effective” teaching, and the duty owed by publicly funded schools to the wider society, including its economy. All can be constructive, inspiring even. But not the versions that came to dominate official minds.

Then came the third and final occasion for a sinking feeling: how and by whom could the slide be arrested and reversed? As the straightening agenda expanded and grew in confidence, the system of governance — already limited to doing what could be done in bits and pieces within three-year election cycles — became more complex and less capable. When the Productivity Commission looked at the problem it found that key elements of the national reform agenda had been “stalled” for thirteen years, and that the things talked about at national HQ could seem “remote” from the “lived experience” of teachers and school leaders. There is now no entity, national or other, no government, state/territory or federal, and no stakeholder or combination of stakeholders with a span of responsibility and authority and a relationship between brain and body close enough to conceive and drive change of the kind and scale required.

There is another side to this ledger, however. I was not the only or first to be dismayed at how things were playing out. Prominent veterans Brian Caldwell and Alan Reid (both former deans of education) conclude that “Australian schools have hit the wall” (Caldwell) and need “a major overhaul” (Reid). A former NSW education minister, Verity Firth, argues that the time has come for structural reform rather than more of the same. Her Western Australian counterpart (and former premier and Gonski panel member) Carmen Lawrence rages against the long tail, rising segregation, pathetically narrow performance measures, the failure of new school planning, “deeply disturbing” inequities, and “huge” differences in resourcing and opportunity. Barry McGaw, former chief executive of ACER, the Australian Council for Educational Research, and former head of education at the OECD, famously careful in his pronouncements, says bluntly that quality is declining, inequity is high, and the system is “resistant to reform”; his successor at the ACER, Geoff Masters, says “deep reforms” are “urgently required.”

All this comes amid a flurry of books about the “tyranny of merit” or “threats to egalitarian schooling,” books assaulting policy “that is taking us backwards” or calling for “reimagining” or “revolution” or “transformation” or a “ground-up rethink” of what “learning systems” are needed to equip students for “societal challenges we can’t yet imagine.”

And it’s not just policy wonks and the kinds of people who write books. Others trying to find a way through the maze include some actually giving life to the idea often given lip service by the powers-that-be: that all young people will become “confident and creative individuals, successful lifelong learners and active and informed members of community.” Now, for the first time, breakthroughs in the rigorous assessment of learning and growth are making it possible for schools to keep doing some of the important things they have long done and to do important new things as well, and, what’s more, to do it for everyone: to provide twelve safe, happy and worthwhile years across the board.

So the nub of the answer to the question posed in the book’s subtitle — can schooling be reformed? — is yes, but it’s a very big ask, and schools can’t do it by themselves. It requires a reorganisation or “restructuring” of the system of governance; of the sector system, government, independent and Catholic; and above all of the daily work of students and teachers.

That in turn requires a very different way of thinking about schools and reform: more incremental reform, yes, but within a big, long-term strategy for structural change; equality in schooling rather than through it; more fraternity as well as more equality and liberty; more choice, but made more equally available; sectors, yes, but not organised so that two feed off the third; realising that schools, like students and teachers, need space and support to find their own way within a negotiated framework; accepting that schools can contribute to prosperity, but not by aiming at it; and the really big one, focusing not on teaching, effective or otherwise, but on the organisation of the production of learning and growth by its core workforce, the students.

Thinking needs to be more politically capable and inspiring as well as enlarging in spirit, able to stimulate and guide the kind of top-down-bottom-up popular movement briefly seen in the “I Give a Gonski” campaign (and on a very much larger scale in the distant but formative tumults of the 1960s and early 1970s).

The case for such a big and risky rests on necessity (current and piecemeal reforms can’t do what needs to be done) and the fact that it really matters, not in a life-and-death way but in a hard-to-pin-down, universal, lasting way. •

Unbeaching the Whale is published by Inside Story in association with the Centre for Strategic Education and the Melbourne Graduate School of Education.

The post Unbeaching the whale: the book appeared first on Inside Story.

For Newman, this cultivation was not about social mobility, though it might well encourage it, but about the life-altering nature of contact with “universal knowledge.” But his impassioned advocacy for the university was undergirded by a subtle sense of threat, a fear that the university had lost much of its authority to the fast-paced and glittering world of journalism.

A century later, and concern had grown, in some eyes, to a “crisis.” In The Crisis in the University, published in 1949, another theologian, former Manchester University vice-chancellor Walter Moberly, lamented the moral decline of universities as institutions for producing cultivated men and women. He noted that the university had ceased to fully believe in its own sacred task and was uncertain what it stood for. Later, in 1996, Bill Readings, in one of the most incisive of the critiques that were to become a staple of late-twentieth-century scholarly analysis of the university, declared the university to be “in ruins.”

Michael Wesley does not, as far as I can recall, use the word “crisis” in his latest book, Mind of the Nation: Universities in Australian Life. In fact, he opens his readable and insightful account with the claim that universities entered the third decade of this century “secure and confident.” Having worked as an academic in Australian universities for more than three decades from the early nineties, I baulked at this. Many — if not most — of the securely employed academics I know are ground down, quietly despairing, and looking for a Plan B.

But I soon realised that in Wesley’s book, as in higher education policy and politics more broadly, “universities” does not mean “academics.” This ought not to have surprised me. After all, Étienne Pasquier’s venerable idea of the university as “built of men” has been extinguished, having taken its last breaths over recent decades as the highest levels of university governance were slowly but surely removed from the hands of “ordinary” academics and a managerial pathway established for those with that type of ambition. So while Wesley’s story of the sudden unexpected plummet in universities’ fortunes with the onset of Covid-19 speaks accurately to the shock experienced across the sector, including by students, many academics would, I am sure, have given this story a longer prequel — that of a slow decline before the calamitous fall over the precipice.

Wesley brings both institutional experience and academic expertise to his analysis. As a deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne, he opens a window into the high-stakes world of higher education policymaking; as an international relations scholar and former director of several research institutes on Asia-Pacific relations, he brings a world, literally, of understanding about the internationalisation of universities.

His book contains masterfully condensed explications of government policy, university funding, marketisation and internationalisation, and is all the more remarkable for having been produced during Melbourne’s long Covid lockdown. It is structured around six single-word “lenses”: money, value, loyalty, integrity, ambition and privilege. I played along at home, experimenting with my own six words. There was only one overlap — privilege — though plenty of points of agreement with his observations and analysis.

Wesley argues that Australian universities occupy a paradoxical space in Australian life. Among the many contradictions he observes are that while higher education is not an electorally significant policy issue a university education has a major impact on how Australians vote; that Australia is now a majority university-educated society but this has made us less egalitarian; and that the more that universities report back to governments, the less they are trusted.

While the “sublime ideal of the university endures in the Australian subconscious,” Australians are, he says, ambivalent about their universities — eager to malign them and oddly angry when they succeed financially — yet we attend them in ever-growing numbers and remain in support of funding them publicly. We regard our universities with an odd mixture of “agnosticism, aspiration and antagonism.” In sum, Australia’s universities, once (he argues) barely noticed by most people, are at the centre of a maelstrom of conflicting ideas about what we value, what knowledge is for, and who should pay for it.

Wesley paints a picture of a sector shaped largely by the interventions of governments yet locked into relations of “mutual incomprehension” with them, especially where funding is concerned. He argues that government policy has, for decades, been driven by three overarching agendas: expanding the number of tertiary-educated Australians while maintaining the quality of a higher education; containing the costs of this expansion and keeping universities accountable for public funding; and promoting universities’ role as significant contributors to technological and scientific innovation and to the economy. These are entirely reasonable goals, but the conflicts and tensions embedded within and between them have never been reconciled.

Instead, as Wesley notes, and as critical academics have strenuously argued for decades, governments have had only one solution — the imposition of a quasi-market model for the university sector. University managers have then mirrored this model of competition within their own institutions, imposing principles and practices that individualise academics and put them in competition with each other and reward those who play the game in its currently mandated form.

Wesley singles out global ranking schemes as particularly potent agents in turning a university education into a prestige good, thereby exacerbating the competition between universities and, he argues, paradoxically undermining the distinctiveness and diversity of particular university offerings. As he notes, “corporatisation was a fractal process.”

Wherever this neoliberal proxy-market model has been imposed, it has resulted in exhaustion, despair and moral injury. Yet this quintessential quality of contemporary academic life remains unexplored in Wesley’s account, in which the working life of academics plays little part. In fact, even though Wesley notes that the current confused state of universities is pre-eminently a result of government policy interventions, he nonetheless goes on to quote, and seemingly endorse, an accusation made in 2000 by emeritus history professor John Molony, who held academics responsible for our own unhappy state. We didn’t fight hard enough, he argued.

There is no doubt some truth in this. Some academics did ride the changes to their own advantage, or focused on personal survival, or put their head in the sand, or quietly waited for retirement. And inevitably, some individuals and some disciplines fared better than others under the new ideological regime and thus had less stake in contesting it. But this picture of a quiescent or complacent response to the marketisation of the sector bears no relation to what I witnessed as a humanities academic over those transformative decades. Frankly, the quotation from Molony about academics’ “supine compliance in the face of manifest tyranny” is inaccurate and insulting.

For the marketisation of universities was met by an explosion of critical scholarship especially, but not only, from the humanities and social sciences, and fierce opposition from both academic and student unions. It also created a new praxis, turning the daily life of an academic into a struggle to maintain value in the face of corrosive top-down pressures.

This struggle comes in many shapes and forms: academic scholarship and debate, canny strategising, occasional acts of point-blank refusal, and bouts of industrial action, including strikes. It also consists of countless daily collegial acts of care, strategy, support and cunning aimed at collective survival and the preservation of valued ideas, practices and people. The managerial ranks also include many people of good faith, who experience the squeeze of trying to be good managers, implementing policies set from the top while also defending and representing their colleagues.

This is exhausting work, and some are much better at it than others. Meanwhile, many teaching and research academics are demoralised and bone-weary. Quite a few dream of leaving. What a bitter irony: while young and eager scholars strain to find a secure toehold within the universities, many of the occupants of those coveted positions look for safe ways to exit.

In fact, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that most of the humanities academics I know dream, not just idly, of finding a suitable exit strategy. I know this from many whispered conversations but also from a research project I conducted on academics leaving the profession “early” (a hitherto unknown phenomenon), which gave me a distressing close-up insight into the human, intellectual, cultural and economic tragedy of training people (often at public expense) to reach an intellectual and professional peak, and then dismissing their concerns as the perennial whinges of an out-of-touch elite unable to come to terms with a changed global reality.

This brings me back to privilege — a complex matter, which is why it figured as one of my own imaginary analytical lenses and why Wesley often returns to the question of the individual and social benefits of a university education. He reminds us that Robert Menzies made the case for the shared value of university education to the whole of society. For decades, though, governments have insisted that a university education is an individual benefit and have admitted only a narrowly framed conception of universities’ contribution to Australian society, expressed largely through economistic rubrics of productivity and “innovation.”

Like many commentators, Wesley notes that belief in the university as an institution for the social good has been eroded by the competitive and individualist discourses of neoliberalism and consumerism. These forces have threatened to undermine universities’ social licence, including the case for public funding and some measure of autonomy in governance.

Wesley claims that a holistic public discussion about the purpose and value of universities has been missing; universities are central to Australian life, but “rarely discussed, debated, examined.” The closest we come, he says, are the reviews periodically instigated by governments and read “only by a select coterie of higher education specialists and bureaucrats.” His proposed remedy — the book’s call to action — is a “national conversation.”

I’m afraid this call to action did not rouse me. For one thing, it’s a very academic “solution,” a contemporary iteration of a philosophical tradition that goes back centuries, one in which, as Erin Elizabeth Greer argues in a forthcoming book about the ideal of conversation in modern thought, “‘conversation’ has been made to index lofty aspirations for both public and intimate life.” Conversation is, in her words, “a hazy but stirring metaphor” for a public sphere understood as constituted through lively but civil conversations between citizens. Calling for a national conversation is a familiar, and ironically very academic, rhetorical move.

Type “national conversation” into Google Scholar and you instantly get a sense of the reach of this taken-for-granted metaphor. Paper after paper calls for, or weighs into, a “national conversation” on anything from early learning to flexible workplaces, American pluralism, female academic emergency physicians, carbon capture and storage, engaged fatherhood, disaster resilience or the use of low-titre group O whole blood in blood transfusions.

The repetition of this metaphor in academic scholarship might seem an unimportant point. But, as Stanford cognitive psychologists Paul H. Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky have shown, metaphors shape and constrain the terms in which we can think about a social issue: “Far from being mere rhetorical flourishes, metaphors have profound influences on how we conceptualise and act with respect to important societal issues.” Metaphors — “even fleeting and seemingly unnoticed metaphors in natural language” — influence reasoning, surprisingly substantially. So if metaphor tips into cliché, it might actually hinder our efforts to find new intellectual and practical resources.

A telling hint at this comes, aptly enough, from the same edited collection from which the John Molony quotation that irritated me was drawn, titled Why Universities Matter. Published in the year 2000, its diagnosis of the malaise afflicting the university sector matches that outlined by Wesley, with public ambivalence, political disdain, values conflict, and funding dilemmas being among the issues noted. The book’s subtitle? “A Conversation about Values, Means and Directions.” Twenty-three years later and we still have the same problems and the same metaphorical solution.

Of course, all writers of critique face this problem: we are duty-bound, both ethically and aesthetically, to propose a pathway forward, especially in our concluding chapters. And the idea of a public sphere constituted via robust but civil debate and disagreement is a noble tradition, one that remains central to contemporary universities’ understanding of what it is they teach and practise. No longer the custodians of “universal knowledge,” universities instead seek to be exemplars of the art of “disagreeing well.”

Alas, they are not joined in this endeavour by many of the political and financial elites who hide themselves behind populist causes. So a rational national conversation is an optimistic call in the nasty post-truth political world in which we find ourselves. The proof — if proof were needed — is the supposed national conversation that Australians have just undergone: a referendum campaign in which mis- and disinformation ran amok, scaremongering was an effective political tool, and civility was often trumped by ugliness and vitriol.

Newman worried that the slow work of deliberation and debate could not compete with the seductions of faster-paced journalism. Today, we worry that journalism cannot compete with the reach and lightning speed of digital communications, in which text messages can be sent by political operators to carefully selected subsections of the voting public on election day or in the lead-up to a referendum.

With the press of a button, thousands of Chinese Australians can be told via WeChat that they risk being expelled from Australia if the referendum succeeds, or Muslim Australians told that if the Voice succeeded, their relatives would no longer be able to come to Australia, as political journalist Niki Savva recently reported happening.

But like Wesley, I am duty-bound, by both ethics and the requirements of the essay genre, to gesture towards a pathway forward. While I saw Wesley’s call for a conversation as a writerly deus ex machina, I nonetheless believe the ideal of informed civil debate to be worth fighting for, but in specific forms rather than as a vague aspiration. So I am cheered by the emergence of forums (like Inside Story and the aptly named The Conversation) that bridge the worlds of academia and journalism, prizing and promoting expertise, transparency, trust and access.

I also take heart from the rise of conversations, in the plural. The teal wave of community independents that was a novel feature of the last federal election was underpinned by sincere and committed community engagement, including in the form of “kitchen table conversations.” A technique invented and mobilised by Black feminist anthropologists, these conversations are moderated, guided conversations, held in a domestic setting, where no one tries to persuade the others of their views and differences are listened to respectfully. This slow and painstaking feminist work stands in marked contrast to the belligerent theatre of televised “debates” or the vitriol of anonymous trolls. In its reach and temporality it is, of course, no match for the rapidity and reach of digital scare campaigns, but that doesn’t make it worthless.

So too, the revival of civic forums like town halls, panels and forums can also produce conversation as a structured social medium underpinned by some measure of patience, good faith and openness. In the aftermath of the referendum, leading Indigenous Yes campaigner Thomas Mayo wrote with extraordinary optimism and grace of the solidarity generated when goodwilled communities show up to listen to each other.

These curated contexts for face-to-face group engagement are not spontaneous expressions of authentic relations but structured forms that aspire to both aspects of what Greer identifies as the “elusive ideal” of conversation: authentic intimate interpersonal exchanges and the civil debate that underpins a democracy. For the ideal of public and private conversations to be protected, reinvigorated and shared — and for it to grow into new shapes — we clearly need investment not just in public conversations themselves but, more fundamentally, in the whole subterranean architecture of customs, laws, values and networks that underpin and enable them. For this, we need a raft of committed actors, including a vibrant university sector staffed by academics with the energy and optimism to be part of that fight. •

Mind of the Nation: Universities in Australian Life
By Michael Wesley | Black Inc. | $34.99 | 256 pages

The post University challenge appeared first on Inside Story.

Years ago, David Gonski and his panel also visited schools as part of their deliberations. But something got lost when their recommendations were translated into spending by state and federal governments. Will it be different this time around for the schools visited by the latest panel, and the 24,000 people who recently completed the review’s survey? Will the review, as its title suggests, create a better and fairer future?

Looking at the schools Gonski visited in 2011 might help answer those questions. Are they any better off, or do they still exhibit the contrasts and inequalities that have dogged schools for so long?

The Gonski panellists certainly witnessed contrasts. Gonski himself saw them firsthand in two little schools, one public and the other private, in western Sydney. The principal of the public school spoke to him about the struggle to get all the kids to school. His counterpart in the Catholic school had a solution: “If we have truancy, I tell the parents to take their kids away.” He had witnessed Australia’s unlevel school playing field in action.

Between them, members of Gonski’s panel visited thirty-nine public and private schools in urban, regional and remote settings. While those schools may not have been representative in any statistical sense, they certainly influenced the deliberations of panel members.

Ample information is available on thirty-two of those “Gonski schools,” information that suggests where they ended up a decade later. To enable a closer look, the schools can be grouped according to the socioeconomic (or in the case of schools, socio-educational) slice of Australia they served, then and now.

A school’s place in the sun can hinge on many things: location, leadership, the quality of teaching, the diversity and appeal of its programs. Changes in policy and practices are important, as are changes in the neighbourhood population, school openings, closures and amalgamations, and increases or decreases in resources.

My School data, especially covering who goes to which school, provide consistent clues to the profile, image and progress of schools. My School tells us that the top half of all schools, according to the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage, were 10 per cent bigger on average in 2018 than in 2012, and the bottom half almost 6 per cent smaller. Government schools, especially, enrolled an increasing proportion of the most disadvantaged students.

What about funding? Total funding (from government and fees) generally went up during this time, but not in ways that reflected differences in student need. On average, annual funding per student increased about 28 per cent — but less for government schools (25 per cent) and more for independent (32 per cent) and Catholic (38 per cent) schools. Capital funding per student favoured independent, Catholic and government schools in that order.

Income from fees lies at the core of Australia’s divided system of schooling, and largely explains what it does, and doesn’t, deliver. Many Australians value our apparent diversity of schools and school choice, but that choice usually comes with a price tag. Fees shape the whole system.

They also shape our impressions of school quality. Surprisingly, when schools with similar student demographics — public and private — are compared, school achievement doesn’t vary greatly. But different students increasingly go to different schools, and the differences in their achievement have increasingly been associated with the socioeconomic status of their peers and their school. Who goes to which schools matters: students themselves are a key and very unequal resource for the schools they attend.

What happened to the Gonski schools, and do they reflect these trends?

First, those on top stayed on top. When the Gonski schools are grouped by the socioeconomic status of their enrolments, a group of nine at the top stands out from the rest. My School shows that they increasingly serve the most advantaged students and families. They also started — and finished — the post-Gonski era with the highest levels of funding from fees and government, now averaging more than $27,000 per student.

Importantly, while most of this group are large and wealthy independent schools, their public funding increased as much as it did for the schools down the school ladder. Most importantly, the average fee — the price tag for entry into these nine schools — is now around $18,000.

These Gonski schools include Geelong Grammar School in Victoria and four in Sydney: Moriah College, Santa Sabina College, SCEGGS Darlinghurst and St Andrews Cathedral School. Girton Grammar School in Bendigo joined this group, shedding some of its disadvantaged students and gaining more of the most advantaged. The two public schools in this group, Narrabundah College in Canberra and Adelaide High School, formed a second tier in terms of the socioeconomic status of their enrolments. Interestingly, the NAPLAN scores of most of these schools remained largely unchanged over the post-Gonski years.

In the middle and more diverse group of Gonski schools ranked by socioeconomic advantage are eleven mainly private schools. Contrasting with the first group, these schools grew, and their total income per student, averaging around $17,000, was much lower. Their NAPLAN scores also varied, with a tendency to dip.

Some of these schools ended up with a more disadvantaged overall enrolment: for instance, Ashdale Primary School and Living Waters Lutheran College in Western Australia, Al Amanah College in Sydney and Bendigo South East Secondary College in Victoria. School enrolments shifted towards the advantaged end, meanwhile, in Holy Cross College in suburban Perth, and Caroline Chisholm Catholic College and Ilim College, both in suburban Melbourne.

A closer look at one locality reveals some of the dynamics at play. Since 2012, enrolments at the independent Ilim College have grown dramatically, but disadvantaged students make up a falling share. As is commonly the case, many of the latter students ended up at the nearby Hume Central Secondary College — as have certain students from other nearby government schools. Hume Central has also grown, but with a significantly less advantaged enrolment (though its NAPLAN scores compare favourably with those of nearby schools). This story plays out in many communities: no school is an island.

The average price tag for entry into this middle group of schools is just over $3000 per student, not as much as for the first group but enough to admit some students and screen others.

While the experience of schools in the “middle” varied, the dozen lowest-socioeconomic status schools — five Catholic and seven public — reveal a more consistent story. At both the beginning and the end of the post-Gonski decade, most of these schools enrolled among the most disadvantaged students in Australia.

Most had also stopped growing or had lost enrolments. Half, both public and Catholic, increased their enrolment of the strugglers. Among them, in the main, the schools with improving NAPLAN results were those that managed to hold their portion of advantaged students. There were exceptions. One school, Roseworth Primary School in Girrawheen, Western Australia, lost some advantaged students but still managed an improvement in NAPLAN. Results at Bradshaw Primary School in Alice Springs also improved, as did those at St James Catholic College in Tasmania.

Did funding make enough difference? On average, the increasingly disadvantaged schools were funded at around $22,000 per student — mostly public funding, regardless of sector. The remainder averaged close to $18,000, again mostly public funding. It is easy to argue that the difference is nowhere near enough to lift the former. What also stands out is that the changing composition of school enrolments, as much as the dollars going into the schools, appears to have most affected student prospects and school achievement.

These schools serve families and communities at the struggling end, which is well illustrated by their average price tag of just $890 a year, and often much less.

Gonski warned that the increasing concentration of disadvantaged students had a significant impact on educational outcomes. The message still resonates, arguably more so.

A majority of the most disadvantaged Gonski schools enrol an increasing concentration of low socioeconomic status students. Many advantaged students in those schools seem to have fled and taken their higher scores with them. The schools they have left behind have stopped growing — and, in relative terms, many of them have also stopped achieving. The contrasts between the Gonski schools at the top and those at the bottom have become even more evident. The families in the “top” schools can pay the entry fee, the ones at the bottom cannot.

Some commentators seem to believe the blame lies inside the school gate and behind the classroom door, as if the lower-achieving of the Gonski schools have collectively decided to underperform. Hence, we need more data, more targets and school reforms, fewer teachers leaving the system, and schools and systems made more accountable.

Those kinds of reform are always needed, but they don’t deal with the fundamental problem. As Gonski found, public funding arrangements need to reflect the nature of the educational challenges faced by a system or school. That is now widely accepted, but it is only after a decade that all sectors and governments agree.

Money does matter, but the trajectory of the Gonski schools suggests that certain students can be just as important a resource for schools — that the collective impact of peers on learning can make or break a school’s reputation. Small wonder that the schools towards the top of the pile compete to get the “best” students while those towards the bottom struggle to lift those left behind.

This is what the system does, and indeed seems designed to do. The consultation paper issued by the current review has bravely warned that the education system needs to be careful not to introduce additional forms of disadvantage through the design of the schooling system itself. That warning needs to morph into long-overdue structural reform of our framework of schools.

Gonski’s review was A Review of Funding for Schooling. A decade later, the current review is A Review to Inform a Better and Fairer Education System. We can’t wait for another decade for A Review to Rebuild Australia’s Framework of Schools, yet it is clear this must be done as part of a process of school reform.

We need to start by confronting the regressive impact of current policies and practices. The challenge is to strip the education system of the discriminators, including price, that have become firmly entrenched, endemic and destructive.

No one should be surprised by proposals that include abolishing fees and fully funding all schools, regardless of sector, that commit to inclusivity and a public purpose. We need big solutions and considerable structural change, starting now.

The story of the Gonski schools is evidence enough that a class system of schools does nothing for fairness and comes at a considerable cost in money, opportunities and school achievement.

The talented team supporting the current review has a chance to embrace a more global view of school reform. It can identify the drivers of segregation in our school framework, explain the links between this and our mediocre national achievement, and recommend that work start now to reverse the current trends. Without this, what happened to the Gonski schools will increasingly become Australia’s future. •

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The crowd was there to bid farewell to more than 500 excited and slightly trepidatious passengers — 306 young men, fifty-seven young women, and 133 adults who were combining travel with education — and the sixty-three lecturers and staff who had signed up to join the Floating University: an around-the-world educational experiment in which travel abroad would count towards a university degree at home.

Over the next eight months they would meet some of the twentieth century’s major figures, including Benito Mussolini, King Rama VII of Thailand, Mahatma Gandhi and Pope Pius XI, and visit countries in the midst of change: Japan in the process of industrialisation, China on the cusp of revolution, the Philippines agitating against US rule, and Portugal in the aftermath of a coup.

In an era of internationalism and expanding American power, the leaders of this Floating University believed travel and study at sea would deliver an education in international affairs not available in the land-based classroom. It was through direct experience in and of the world rather than passive, indirect engagement via textbooks and lectures that they thought students could learn to be “world-minded.” The trip was promoted as an “experiment in democratic theories of education,” and New York University lent the venture its official sponsorship.

In championing the merits of direct, personal experience as a way to know the world, the Floating University was joining a set of public as well as scholarly debates taking place in 1920s United States about the relationship between professional expertise and democratic citizenship in increasingly complex industrial capitalist societies.

On the one hand, protagonists including secretary of state and future president Herbert Hoover and journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann argued for the principles of scientific management and technocratic governance, and emphasised the importance of well-informed and expert elites. It was specialised knowledge, they believed, that was needed to address the challenges presented by rapidly changing economies and societies.

On the other hand, popular technologies such as photography, film, radio, inexpensive novels and newspapers, as well as cheaper transatlantic travel, jazz and the latest improvised forms of dance, seemed to offer direct, embodied and experiential ways of knowing that were at once deeply personal and widely accessible. Questioning the concentration of power in the hands of experts, labour, social and civil rights activists as well as populist and agrarian groups advocated for more participatory forms of democracy.

Although their differences are often exaggerated, the debates in the 1920s and 1930s between Lippmann and the educational reformer and philosopher John Dewey are often taken to be emblematic of this apparent opposition between technocratic expertise and democratic knowledge and deliberation.

Dewey’s thinking had a huge influence on the founder of the Floating University cruise, New York University’s professor of psychology, James E. Lough. Fascinated by education and the learning process, Dewey argued that knowledge does not flow from experience, but rather is made through experience; it was by doing things in and with the world that students would best learn. As a psychology student at Harvard in the 1890s, Lough was attracted to these ideas and, following his appointment as director of the Extramural Division at New York University, had a chance to put them into action.

Education at university — as at the primary levels of schooling — should be connected to the environment, experiences, and interests of students, Lough argued. From 1913 onwards his Extramural Division began offering credit-bearing courses at a variety of locations across New York City: onsite commercial, investment and finance courses on Wall Street, courses in government in the Municipal Building, art appreciation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and engineering courses at Grand Central Station.

Extending this logic, NYU also began offering summer travel courses to Europe to study economic conditions and industrial organisation in Britain and municipal planning in Germany. These courses resumed after the first world war and then — towards the end of 1923 — Lough took his ideas one step further. If summer travel courses could work, why not a whole year at sea? As he told the audience assembled at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel the night before the Floating University’s departure, those aboard the ship would experience “a method of study which actually brings the student into living contact with the world’s problems about to be realised.” The difference between it and what was ordinarily served up to students was, as he put it, the difference “between reading a menu and eating the full course meal.”

Putting this educational vision into practice, however, was harder than Professor Lough had anticipated. Despite some hiccups, the formal part of the undertaking was relatively successful. Students took formal classes while the ship was at sea. When it was stopped in port they participated in a variety of activities that included officially arranged shore excursions, visits to host universities and free time.

Although some professors were more diligent than others, the best among them linked their curriculum on the ship to the experiences students were having onshore. Undoubtedly a good number of students didn’t attend to their studies, but the official Report of Scholastic Work on the University Cruise around the World stated that during the cruise, 400 college-level students had attended classes (79 per cent of whom sought university credit). Their aggregated marks were mapped onto a bell curve: 16 per cent of grades were As; 38 per cent Bs; 28 per cent Cs; 9 per cent Ds; 3 per cent incomplete; and 3 per cent fails. Those who were “negligent in their work on board” were, concluded the Floating University’s academic dean, George Howes, no doubt also negligent in their college studies onshore.

It was the behaviour of the students in port that proved the biggest problem. Reports of sex, alcohol and jazz made their way back to an American press hungry for scandal, and the Floating University became a byword for what could go wrong with educational travel. “Sea Collegians Startle Japan with Rum Orgy” read one newspaper headline. “More than a hundred students, among whom six girls were to be noticed, were doing intensive laboratory work this evening, in the bar of the Imperial Hotel” continued the article.

And there were plenty of unfavourable stories to follow: more trouble with alcohol, rumours of romantic relationships and sexual relations between the students, accounts of a split between the cruise leaders, and even reports of an outbreak of bubonic plague. These accounts proved such catnip to American editors that it is hard to read the newspapers of 1926 and 1927 and not come across the story.

It didn’t matter to the newspapers that unruly student behaviour was a common aspect of life on college campuses across the United States in the 1920s. “There was a certain amount of necking on board,” was how one of the students, George T. McClure, put it, “but not more than I saw at the University of Colorado last year.” Playing on the popular image of the frolicsome college student — the smoking by women, the drinking by men, and the sexual promiscuity of both — was a guaranteed way to sell papers. But not far beneath such discussions of the misconduct of American youth lurked a fear that ungoverned youthful bodies might threaten the foundations of civility at home, while also betraying a lack of national readiness for the new global role the United States was rapidly assuming abroad.

By the end of the 1920s, huge numbers of Americans were travelling abroad. Many of them were students taking advantage of new and cheap “tourist class” transatlantic fares. And while they were away, many enrolled in one of the “educational courses” frequently offered by the shipping companies. During their voyages these travellers were undoubtedly learning something about international affairs and spending huge amounts of money in the process.

In fact, a report of the time suggests that in 1930 more than 127,800 Americans travelled “tourist class” to Europe: that is 5000 more people than were awarded a BA degree in the United States that same year. This was big business. With the Floating University and his other summer travel courses, Professor Lough had recognised the potential of this market for what was already beginning to be called “international education.”

But on the whole American universities wanted to have nothing to do with it. Although the trend had begun earlier, the 1920s was the decade in which they really marked out the boundaries of their empire of expertise. With newly established schools in a whole range of fields — from business administration and retailing to journalism and education — they asserted their claim to authority over both how knowledge could be acquired and whose knowledge claims should be trusted.

Rather than crediting educational travel programs, universities set about establishing what the League of Nations’ International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation called the “scientific study of international relations.” While for graduates and academic scholars who were undertaking research this might necessarily have entailed travel, for the much larger American undergraduate population it meant enrolling in credit-bearing courses and degree programs taught on home campuses, with syllabi, reading lists and assessments.

And for universities, it meant an entirely new discipline of teaching and study. It meant journals, conferences, summer institutes, government consultancies, and new paying audiences for university-sanctioned expertise.

None of this was compatible with educational travel of the kind Professor Lough envisaged. It was the university and its qualified faculty members that stood as the source of authoritative knowledge about the world, not the experiences of sundry travellers. In 1926 NYU pulled out of its sponsorship of the Floating University and over the course of the next few years abolished all its other study abroad programs. Although in 1930 the university did offer a course called Literary Tour of Great Britain, it took place entirely in a classroom in Washington Square, with readings supplied. In this 1920s contest between different ways of knowing the world, it was academically authorised expertise that triumphed, and it has undergirded the claims of universities — in Australia as in the United States — ever since.

Why does this matter?

For the last century or more, universities have derived their social standing (not to mention their income) from their claim to have authority over knowledge. They are the institutions that undertake the research, distil the learning, and provide the training so crucial to our economies and societies — or so the generally accepted story runs. Within their walls students learn from experts about the world and each other, developing both general and specialised disciplinary knowledge that prepares them not only for careers but also to be active and informed members of society.

But as anyone paying even a little bit of attention to politics and current affairs over the last decade will be aware, the university’s authority over knowledge is by no means uncontested. On the one hand, a new politics has emerged that challenges experts and their long-privileged authority, and instead prioritises personal, embodied and experiential ways of knowing. On the other hand, the proliferation of highly granulated, linked and disembodied big data, and the artificial intelligence algorithms that process it threaten to make obsolete many of the tasks that experts and knowledge workers have traditionally undertaken. Who gets to know in this new world?

There are many ways of warranting or justifying knowledge claims. In 1926 Professor Lough argued for the legitimacy of personal experience, but doing so brought him into conflict with the universities’ assertion of the authority of academic experts and “book knowledge.” But there are also other warrants for knowledge — authority, testimony, culture, tradition, or even divine revelation; all these can be invoked to support a claim to truth, and frequently they come into conflict with each other. Thinking about these conflicts can tell us a lot about how power and knowledge work in a society, especially in moments of change.

In their book Leviathan and the Air-pump, science historians Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer examine one such moment of conflict: the historical controversy surrounding the experimental demonstrations of the vacuum pump conducted by Robert Boyle and his assistant Robert Hooke in the seventeenth century. Boyle’s approach, which emphasised systematic observation, measurement and repeatability, represented a new way of producing knowledge that conflicted with Thomas Hobbes’s emphasis on deductive reasoning and mathematical principles. But crucially, as Shapin and Schaffer show, Boyle’s effort to establish the credibility of this new, scientific form of knowledge relied heavily on the social status and reputation of those men who were performing experiments and observing them.

We might think today that scientific experiment and academic expertise are self-evident means of arriving at the truth. But as various people (from feminist, Black and anti-colonial thinkers to Trump supporters) have pointed out, they are underwritten by social conventions and forms of power. Or, to put it another way, the social recognition Robert Boyle was able to mobilise was something Professor Lough failed to muster.

Too often, expertise is cast as a neutral or natural phenomenon, but expertise also has a history, one that is intimately connected to shifts in the nature and mode of power and rule. Thinking about why the Floating University was deemed a failure in the 1920s matters because it highlights the failure in our own times to ground knowledge claims in ways that are recognisable to those outside the community of academically authorised experts.

Experience and academic learning may now not seem so far apart. Internships, service learning, study abroad programs, field studies, work-integrated and simulation-based learning, collaborative research, and capstone projects are all part of the way most universities today deliver their degrees. In the United States, the Semester at Sea program, which claims the 1926 voyage as its progenitor, even allows students to credit time at sea towards their college degree.

But these initiatives don’t really settle the questions the story of the Floating University’s 1926 world cruise ultimately provoke: Who gets to know in our society? What forms of status determine what knowledge counts as legitimate?

These are pressing questions for democracies seeking to navigate change, and they are as relevant for twenty-first-century Australia as they were for Lough and Dewey and Lippmann in the 1920s and 30s United States. •

The post What is a university? appeared first on Inside Story.

Then, unlike many schools confronted by a similar fate, Albert Park College was given a second chance. A well-connected community campaign created the opportunity for a completely fresh start, with new buildings, new staff and new students. And that’s where Cook entered the story, hired as employee #1 to direct the design and construction of an entirely new school and serve as its inaugural principal.

Today Albert Park College is tightly zoned with more than 1500 students, more than 200 staff and a series of campuses with names like “Studio 120” and “APC Lakeside” peppered throughout the suburb. Students produce their own plays, organise literary festivals with big-name writers, speak at major climate rallies and conferences, and light up school functions with dance performances (before going on to secure jobs at places like the Moulin Rouge, Cook tells us). In 2021 Albert Park College was voted Australian School of the Year.

In his new book, From the Ground Up, Cook sets out not only to document this remarkable story of rebirth but also to provide fellow principals and budding school leaders with a how-to manual, a manifesto designed to spark a revolution from below. “The educational theorists and policymakers have had their chance,” Cook claims. “Now it’s time for schools to lead the way, with actions, rather than words.”

Cook believes that attempts to change the system from the top down are futile, counterproductive even. But he has a recipe for success that principals across the country can use to improve their schools, thus transforming Australia’s education system from the ground up. “Where must this change come from? Schools, not bureaucracies,” Cook proclaims. “How can it be done? This book provides the answers.”

On the face of it, this is an improbable claim, one that requires the reader to believe that what works in a place like Albert Park can work all across Australia. When Cook fleetingly attends to this objection he protests that his community has “lots of public and social housing mixed in with renovated terraces” and “many people who rely on social security benefits and lower-wage jobs.” But only 6 per cent of students at the school come from the most disadvantaged quarter of the Australian population. This is more than at the nearby public selective school (3 per cent) or independent school (1 per cent), and it’s a wonderful thing that around a hundred students from very disadvantaged backgrounds are able to attend a flourishing school like Albert Park College. But it’s another thing entirely to imagine that the strategies that work in this context can be readily applied by principals of schools where 26 per cent or 46 per cent or 66 per cent of students are highly disadvantaged.

Cook’s own account makes it clear why this is so. He describes, for instance, the vital difference the significant voluntary levy makes in funding the “annual literary festival, music festival, cabaret, musical, plays, dance performances, science competitions, debating program, senior school formal and graduation evenings, as well as underpinning our top-class ICT.” Then he points to the importance of elaborate fundraising. Cook recalls that when an extra million dollars was needed to build a “Liberal Arts Hub” with cafe, library and open fireplace, he launched a “1000 Club” — “a thousand people willing to give up a $1000 to make it happen. We thought it was crazily ambitious but we raised $670,000 this way.”

And then there is the parent body in an affluent inner-city community like this: “natural change agents — strong-willed, politically connected, media savvy, used to getting things done,” people willing to volunteer “professional expertise in the most valuable skills you can imagine — business, architecture, property management, politics, communications and other fields.”

It’s fine to reflect, as Cook does, that “for a local principal, it doesn’t really get any better.” But it’s a bit rich to turn around to other principals, many of whom face a whole different set of problems (which doesn’t include making the 1000 Club work), and proclaim that “this is the story of how we did it — and how you can do it too.”

And then there is a deeper problem still with Cook’s theory of change, one that goes to fundamental questions about how schools and school systems improve. When we think about any stirring story of school transformation, it’s natural to imagine a sequence in which quality is enhanced — great teachers are hired, innovative learning strategies employed, a strong culture created — and then enrolments expand in response. With this picture in our minds, we wonder how the first part was achieved, and take the second part as its validation and vindication.

But as Cook himself makes clear, things aren’t so simple. Increased enrolments are the cause as much as the consequence of improvements in quality: economies of scale help fund better buildings and a richer, more diverse curriculum; a preponderance of able and motivated students aids immensely in promoting student engagement and a positive learning culture. And, as we have already seen, the depth of the parent community’s pockets, not to mention their reserves of social and cultural capital, is vitally important.

Complicating matters further, Cook describes how in choosing a school parents often employ shortcuts to evaluate their quality, like the look and tone of the uniform, buildings and grounds, or the choices made by their friends and neighbours. All of this means that you can build a great school and they will come; but it’s also possible that if you divine the secret of building enrolments you might end up with a great school.

As it turns out, Cook is frustratingly elusive when it comes to the story of what happens behind the school gates and inside classrooms, and it is only when he shifts his attention to the interface between school and community that he moves into gear, laying bare the realities of how schools compete for the “right” students. But the thing about this aspect of his strategy, in which enrolment growth drives improved quality, is that it’s inherently a zero-sum game. The schools that can attract more, and more able and affluent, students inevitably do so at the expense of other schools whose ever-shrinking student populations are increasingly made up of students from disadvantaged families. This is not a recipe for a revolution; it’s the sorry recent history of Australian schooling in a nutshell. So the candid story Cook tells ultimately undercuts his larger argument that Albert Park College provides a formula for revolutionising Australian schooling.

As far as teaching and learning go, Cook mentions many seemingly impressive initiatives and activities, but the discussion is rarely more than newsletter-deep. Instead of sharing a rich account of how these programs work in practice, Cook presents his accumulated wisdom largely unmoored from the particulars. Uprooted from their specific context and denuded of detail, sentiments offered as insights often arrive as platitudes. “Everything we do is pointless if the students aren’t listening. We must find ways of making school appealing, stimulating and even fun,” Cook avers, surely surprising no one. “In the world outside the school, technology is everywhere,” he explains for the benefit of readers who may have gone out on Millennium Eve and only just woken up. “Students communicate endlessly using social media and watch television almost totally on digital devices.”

Teachers playing professional development bingo will surely need a drink when they hear this one: “Given that we live in a world of constant innovation, students will need to learn to think creatively to invent new technologies and products and to solve problems.” Or: “Not having academic attainment as your goal is like a political party not aiming to win elections to implement its program; a football team not aiming to win the grand final; a racing team not striving to win the grand prix; an army not trying to win the war.” Indeed.

Largely absent is a detailed account of how the school got from A to B, leaving school leaders hoping to learn from the experience empty-handed. For instance, Cook breezily recalls that “when we discovered disappointing Maths results in 2019, we threw significant resources at the problem and managed to improve results dramatically.” That’s it. No elaboration on the exact nature of the problem; the lessons learned; how the resources were used; or why the reform apparently worked so well. All the reader gets is the part they probably already knew, that additional resources may help.

While Cook briefly alludes to his school’s NAPLAN scores in maths, he skips over the fact that in recent years its year 9 NAPLAN scores in writing and spelling have also sometimes been below average compared with students of similar backgrounds. There is a case to be made that these indicators are relatively unimportant. Or that there is a trade-off between the basics, measured by NAPLAN, and creativity — and ultimately the latter is more important. But surely, in a book that proclaims to offer a prototype for the transformation of Australian schooling, the issue had to be acknowledged and the argument made.

So much of the complexity of managing schools lies in the challenge of balancing conflicting interests and imperatives. As an educator with many decades’ experience, Cook undoubtedly knows this very well. At one point in From the Ground Up he declares: “Your true aim is to get students performing strongly because they have a love of learning for learning’s sake.” Noble enough, if hardly revelatory. But elsewhere he insists on the necessity of fostering competition between students: “When competitive requirements are removed, effort tends to cease and not much work is done.” With fifty pages separating these two proclamations, Cook doesn’t explain how intrinsic motivation and external reward might be reconciled or balanced, or even acknowledge the potential tension between the two. And yet it is in that space, in between, that the most interesting and important dilemmas reside.

Likewise, it’s one thing to criticise schools, as Cook does, for “policing student technology use… when in the workforce they will be challenged endlessly to become more proficient and creative in their technology use.” But doing so is dangerously simplistic if you don’t acknowledge the evidence of an association between technology use and declines in reading ability and learning in general, or the negative impact of screen time on mental health, or the association with disorders like ADHD, or just the perpetual cycle of edtech hype and disappointment. Cook doesn’t even explain how his school’s Bring Your Own Mac policy works in cases where families struggle with affordability, or disengaged students don’t bother to bring their device to class.

This is not to claim that some very worthwhile things aren’t going on at APC (it seems like they are), but only that Cook’s account appears not to do them justice. A book that also included contributions from students, teachers and parents might have shed more light on what the school has achieved. As it is, for much of From the Ground Up the reader is left guessing what really explains the school’s dramatic transformation between 2006 and 2023.

Eventually, finally, a partial answer does begin to suggest itself when Cook turns to the story of how an increase in enrolments can itself help create a successful school (as much as vice versa). The old Albert Park College’s fundamental problem, according to Cook, was that its few remaining students were mostly from the area’s more disadvantaged families. That only compounded the challenge of turning the school around and arresting further enrolment decline. “To put it bluntly,” says Cook, describing the equation that greeted him when he arrived on the scene, “only by attracting middle-class families that place a high premium on education could we get ourselves in a position to lift up those from poorer backgrounds whose need for a good education was even greater.”

Looking backwards, Cook could see the wreckage of the old Albert Park school deserted by its own community, abandoned by parents “voting with their SUVs.” Looking forwards, the new iteration of the school still faced the same cutthroat competition from its well-resourced near neighbours. Cook had to persuade the good burghers of Albert Park to park their SUVs at the local public school, and there was no guarantee he would succeed. “Our early intakes were on average from relatively low socio-economic backgrounds and we had to work hard to convince the whole community that APC was for them,” he explains.

At this point marketing really mattered, and on this topic Cook leans in and whispers plenty of frank advice to peers and protégés alike. “The importance of good communications is something that cannot be underestimated,” Cook explains. “Schools should spend money on education, not communications, some might say. But good communications are essential.” If you don’t believe him, check out APC’s website. As soon as the video starts rolling, with its images of solar panels, school ties and student-led learning, the message is crystal clear. Progressive, environmentally conscious, but affluent and oh so successful, if a teal independent were a school this would be it. APC promises to be just like a private school but without the stuffy traditions — the perfect pitch for an area that is thoroughly gentrified but retains its artsy inner-city aura.

Then there is what the marketing gurus call “physical evidence,” the tangible signs of a product’s quality. “One of the best features of APC is the building design,” Cook explains. “This is because we put lots of thinking time and resources into the way our school looks.” The emphasis here is not so much on how the buildings can enhance teaching and learning — no discussion of the problematic acoustics of open-plan learning environments, for instance, or the challenges of managing the distractions from students passing by. It’s all about how physical infrastructure works as a marketing tool. “This shouldn’t be considered a luxury,” Cook insists. “It is essential to your school’s future success, in part because the schools that are competing for enrolments, especially non-government schools, take the look of their campuses very seriously indeed.”

In a similar vein, uniform-clad students constitute a critical marketing channel, effectively acting as brand ambassadors and social influencers in their local community. Cook describes how he engaged design and branding experts to create a “colour palette that provides a consistent and professional aesthetic” for the campuses, uniform and “other touchpoints.” The school’s high-end (and expensive) uniforms, featuring a big A on the pocket, make it clear that Albert Park College is conceding nothing to the prestigious private schools it is competing with.

The idea of school principal as marketing manager may seem unsavoury, but Cook is unapologetic. “While many education policymakers think parents choose schools for their children based on the school’s standing in academic league tables, in reality it isn’t so straightforward,” he confides. “Experienced educators know that parents tend to form judgements according to common sense, often on first impressions.” If first impressions can be decisive, then the website, the uniform, the polish of a school’s reception, the view from the road, or the look and feel of facilities on open night can determine whether a child is enrolled at your school or the one down the road.

Of course, spin alone is not enough. Good marketers have to get the product and the delivery right as well. And we know that peers, parents and scale help mightily in creating a good product. So if the enrolment battle can be won, a virtuous cycle will likely ensue. Cook’s marketing savvy has evidently enabled Albert Park College to achieve just this kind of momentum, with entirely happy consequences.

Cook might claim that he has shown how the Davids can take on the Goliaths and win. And it is a striking fact that Albert Park College has achieved its dramatic reversal of fortune with only half the funding per student of the high-profile private schools it has to compete with. Doesn’t this show that it’s possible to defy the odds, to kick goals even when the playing field is tilted against you? It’s impressive, for sure. But, no, it doesn’t alter the basic structural equation. For every school that increases its intake of the advantaged and the able, another has to take on greater responsibility for educating the marginalised and disengaged.

Highly sought-after and successful public schools are widespread in the affluent suburbs of Australia’s capital cities. Their locations provide them with a decisive advantage in terms of motivated and privileged student populations, accompanied by educated and affluent parent communities (as Cook’s narrative richly illustrates). These human resources — peers and parents — and the social and cultural capital they bring can be as important as a school’s income. But not only does this fact fail to make life easier for schools in less well-heeled areas, it actually makes their task harder.

In recording how he won at the game of school choice, Cook provides a revealing glimpse of the incentives and imperatives school principals face as they compete for enrolments, and the methods with which they inevitably respond. His candour on the subject makes for a valuable account. But his claim that struggling schools can pull themselves up by the bootstraps by applying the solutions he has discovered in Albert Park (and that all bureaucrats need do is “stop meddling”) is not only flawed but dangerous. Such a conclusion discounts entirely the structural obstacle: the zero-sum competition for student enrolments that is at the heart of Australia’s educational woes — and which much of Cook’s story incidentally lays bare. •

From the Ground Up: How a Community with a Vision and a Principal with a Purpose Created a Thriving State School
By Steven Cook | Black Inc. | $29.99 | 256 pages

The post Good story, bad theory appeared first on Inside Story.

And yet, when you toggle to the “students with similar backgrounds” rating, things change dramatically. The aquas and greens start being replaced by a series of pink and red cells. Compared with schools that enrol a similarly privileged clientele, Girton’s scores are often below, or even well below, average. As far as NAPLAN results can be relied on, the most that can truthfully be said is that students who are already on the road to success tend to start Year 7 at Girton Grammar. The school’s claims about its role in their progress seem to reverse cause and effect.

It’s not just Girton. Any school that recruits lots of already high-achieving students will almost inevitably star in NAPLAN league tables and end-of-school awards lists. And those top-line results will help greatly in generating more demand for enrolment places. This gives schools a systematic incentive to focus on marketing their flashy buildings and state-of-the-art facilities rather than the harder, more complicated and more important work of taking students from whatever point they start at and helping them realise their full potential.

Girton Grammar is the kind of school that Melbourne University’s John Hattie, the apostle of educational effectiveness, has termed a “cruiser school.” It clearly succeeds at enrolling already high-achieving and socially advantaged students (56 per cent of them from the top quarter of the Australian population) and excluding children from disadvantaged backgrounds (just 4 per cent from the bottom quarter). But in terms of adding value, and materially enhancing the trajectory its students are already on, the available evidence shows few signs of success.

Cruiser schools, says Hattie, are “a major contributor to Australia’s declining educational performance,” a view endorsed by the second Gonski report on achieving educational excellence. In particular, cruiser schools are responsible for significant declines in achievement among Australia’s most advantaged and high-performing students. In the OECD’s PISA tests, for example, maths literacy among high-achieving students declined by around thirty-five points between 2003 and 2018, equivalent to a year and a quarter of learning. That was an even sharper decline than among low-achieving students. A successful strategy of attracting high-SES students at the individual school level, applied over and over again throughout the country, has been a recipe for national failure.

Cruiser schools are mostly, though by no means only, private schools, simply because we have decided that these schools should be exempt from the obligations imposed on most public schools. The elaborate enrolment application process for Girton Grammar, for instance, makes it clear that admission, as well as expulsion, is entirely at the discretion of the head. Then there are the tuition fees, which range between $12,000 and $15,000 a year, and that’s before you add in the non-refundable application fee, the capital fee and the curriculum levy.

Girton Grammar principal Emma O’Rielly insists that “Girton enrols students from a wide range of backgrounds, from families where parents have made substantial sacrifices from their after-tax income to educate their children in a school that matches their needs.” The school, she told me, “offers a range of means-tested scholarships for students whose parents would not ordinarily be able to access a Girton education due to their financial circumstances.”

And yet the impact of the various barriers to entry is palpable. Ten minutes away at the government secondary school, Weeroona College, 55 per cent of students come from the most disadvantaged quarter of Australian families, a strikingly higher figure than Girton’s 4 per cent.

Across Australia private schools use their resource advantage to attract students from better-off families yet fail to add significantly to their students’ overall educational achievements. Study after study after study has concluded that even though non-government schools have more income per student than public schools, their contribution to student achievement (adjusted for the socioeconomic profiles of students) is no higher. Despite much greater financial resources, non-government schools only manage to produce the same results as less well-resourced public schools.

Jenny Chesters, a researcher at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, has gone further. Using data from the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth project, she found that there is “no statistically significant association between type of school attended and employment status, occupation or earnings at age twenty-four.”

Why do non-government schools need more resources — building, grounds, staff and marketing budgets — to produce the same output, in academic terms at least, as their public counterparts? And why, more generally, is Australia bedevilled by the problem of cruiser schools?

In a perceptive paper on designing successful school systems, the OECD singled out the harmful effects of allowing schools to pursue success, or the appearance of it, by cherrypicking already high-achieving students. “The international evidence suggests that schools that are selective in their admissions tend to attract students with greater ability and higher socioeconomic status, regardless of the quality of the education they provide,” say the paper’s authors. They continue:

Given that high-ability students can be less costly to educate and their presence can make a school more attractive to parents, schools that can control their intake wind up with a competitive advantage. Allowing private schools to select their students thus gives these schools an incentive to compete on the basis of exclusiveness rather than on their intrinsic quality. That, in turn, can undermine the positive effects of competition.

That sounds embarrassingly like what we do in Australia. While all schools receive taxpayer funding, some are allowed to pick and choose the students they enrol (and keep) and charge admission fees as they please. Taxpayer funding, meanwhile, gives the exclusive schools the significant resource advantage that helps them attract those who can afford the ever-increasing fees. Australia’s “cruiser schools” don’t exist in spite of public policy but because of it.

Critical to this dynamic is the fact that ever-increasing public subsidies have abjectly failed to improve the affordability and accessibility of private schools. The most recent research pointing to this reality came from the Blueprint Institute, a pro-market think tank with former Liberal ministers Bruce Baird and Robert Hill on its board. The institute’s Ensuring Choice report revealed that “the average independent school has raised its fees by 50 per cent over the last decade ending in 2020 — far outstripping wage growth (29 per cent) and inflation (22 per cent) over the same period.”

The result: “middle-income families are priced out of contention for enrolment spots.” The institute could have added that the pattern of the last decade was a perfect replica of the ten years before that, or that Catholic leaders long ago publicly acknowledged that their schools now largely exclude the poor.

Australia has one of the most socially segregated school systems in the OECD. Students from underprivileged families face the “double disadvantage” of their socioeconomic background combined with attendance at schools where they are surrounded by similarly disadvantaged peers. An abundance of evidence indicates that concentrating disadvantaged children in the same schools only further stacks the odds against them.

Students from more privileged families, conversely, might be expected to benefit from the “double advantage” of high family socioeconomic status and a cohort of similarly privileged peers. But, as we have seen, this is not how it plays out in practice. Instead, these students are falling further and further behind their international counterparts, floundering in schools more focused on intake than output. Allowing and even encouraging some schools to cherrypick their students has succeeded only in undermining both equity and overall achievement.

All of the above might plausibly have provoked a series of questions among Productivity Commission staff as they wrote their recent report on the National School Reform Agreement, the four-year funding deal that defines how Australian schools are resourced, on what terms and to which ends. Why, for instance, does intense competition between Australian schools fail to generate the productivity gains economists might expect? Why has a huge increase in government funding to private schools yielded no discernible return in terms of either affordability or student achievement?

And then there is an even more fundamental question that goes beyond outcomes, effectiveness and productivity to the role of schools in the cultural formation of citizens. This question returns us to those two schools in Bendigo, ten minutes apart, that serve young people from completely different social worlds — a dynamic that repeats itself in towns and suburbs across the country in a pattern of segregation that inevitably includes a racial as well as a class dimension. What is the hidden curriculum embedded in these arrangements? What are the lessons contained in this organisation of learning and learners?

To the Productivity Commission’s credit, its report acknowledged some dimensions of the problem. It reported evidence that “students from priority equity cohorts demonstrated, on average, less learning growth… if they attended a school with higher concentrations of students experiencing disadvantage.” It also recognised that these schools “tend to have less experienced teachers on average and are more likely to struggle with staff shortages and classroom management.”

But the commission didn’t examine how concentrations of disadvantage and privilege have resulted from the way we resource and regulate our schools. Notwithstanding its broader preoccupation with competition, there was little attention to how it works in Australia’s school sector.

In ignoring these matters, the Productivity Commission’s work reflects a myopia that dates back at least as far as the governments of John Howard and Julia Gillard, whose respective policies are primarily responsible for the shape of our school system today. This narrow orthodoxy either takes Australian-style school competition for granted, as though there is no alternative, or assumes that all competition is good without contemplating the unlevel playing field on which it occurs. A similar silence descends when it comes to the failure of ever-increasing public spending to achieve its ostensible purpose of expanding school choice.

Outside this Australian orthodoxy, alternatives exist. Numerous comparable countries, including Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Scotland, have arrangements in which all schools, government and non-government alike, are fully publicly funded on a common basis and universally prohibited from charging admission fees or applying selective enrolment policies, other than those strictly defined to support their special ethos.

As Chris Bonnor and I argue in our new report, Choice and Fairness: A Common Framework for All Australian Schools, it would now be surprisingly affordable to adopt similar arrangements in Australia — largely because so many private schools in this country already receive at least as much taxpayer funding as comparable public schools.

A framework in which all schools are eligible for full public funding, and are free to the user, would tackle the problem the Productivity Commission — along with many others — has not. It would minimise social segregation, reduce the outsized impact of negative peer effects on student achievement, and ensure that schools compete not on their ability to attract additional resources and the “right” students but on their capacity to help each child achieve a full year of learning, every year, and to realise their full potential.

All schools receiving public funding would be open to children of all abilities and prohibited from excluding children on the basis of entrance tests and other similar discriminators. Non-government schools could continue to apply enrolment and other policies necessary to promote their specific religious or educational ethos, but if they are unwilling to accept funding obligations, they would forfeit their public funding.

The obvious objection is that a proposal like this is politically unthinkable. But there is a circularity in such an objection. The question is: why is it unthinkable to challenge the basic assumptions underlying Australia’s unique — and uniquely bad — dual system of taxpayer-funded schools?

This complex question has many answers, but here is one. Advocates for public education typically frame their argument in exclusively egalitarian terms, either ignoring the case for choice and competition or regarding it with active hostility. This approach accepts that there is an inescapable trade-off between choice and equity, and then vigorously argues that the latter should trump the former.

In political terms, this is a losing strategy, as a half-century of failed attempts to implement needs-based funding attests. There is just too large a constituency who like choice, either because they prefer something other than a secular, government-owned and -operated school, or because they place a premium on the capacity to opt out.

In embracing the choice-versus-equity dichotomy, champions of public education have failed to point out that we currently enjoy neither. Instead of offering meaningful choice, existing policies have created non-government schools that openly acknowledge they price out the poor. Instead of putting downward pressure on fees, public subsidies have enhanced the market power of exclusive schools. Instead of creating the competition that engenders diversity, dynamism and innovation, public policy has succeeded only in producing cruiser schools.

Rather than continuing the false debate between choice and equity, it is time to affirm the value of both and explore how each could be realised more effectively than at present. The first step is for critics of the status quo to engage in the task of reimagining how choice and competition could be shaped to advance the common good. If we think the choice for Australian schooling is between the unthinkable and the indefensible, it is time we thought harder. •

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Nothing illustrates this better than our addiction to selective schools. It’s mainly a NSW phenomenon — with almost fifty of them, the state is on a frolic of its own. (Victoria, by contrast, has four.) For years, the claimed benefits of selective schools have been convincingly contested. Yet successive NSW governments and the education bureaucracy have ploughed on regardless. Many of these schools now resemble monocultural refuges for students from well-off families.

The choice of location for new fully and partially selective schools is also a puzzle. They do tend to appear in places where high schools have lost enrolments, but the announcement in 2018 of a new selective school at Leppington appears simply to have been a “captain’s call” by the then premier, Gladys Berejiklian.

The decision to create a new mega-selective school at Westmead, west of Parramatta, illustrates the lack of any real rationale. If the hype is to be believed, it will be a beacon of opportunity for high-achieving students in Sydney’s west. In reality, unless it is radically different from other selective schools, it will have to look elsewhere for students. The pool of high achievers in the comprehensive schools in Sydney’s west and southwest — raided for decades by their neighbouring selective, part-selective and private schools — has all but dried up.

What happens when a new selective school or a selective stream is established? Data from the My School website and the NSW Education Standards Authority make it possible to track the progress of newly formed selective schools and the fate of their neighbours — particularly in the case of part-selective schools, which are more likely to draw students locally or regionally.

In southwest Sydney, where six part-selective schools have been created over the past thirty years, the new schools, together with local private schools, have stripped most of the neighbouring schools of their high-achieving students, increasing the achievement gaps between local schools. The number of what are called “distinguished achievers” in the NSW Higher Education Certificate results has all but collapsed in many of the neighbouring comprehensive schools, and the achievement profile of the selective schools and most private schools has risen.

On the surface, and in the inevitable league tables, the quality of some schools appears to have grown while the quality of others has declined. But it’s not about the quality of the schools — there’s no shortage of stories about school innovation and achievement in Sydney’s west. All we have seen is a shift of academic higher-achievers to schools more able to choose whom they enrol, creating two classes of schools and two classes of kids. In school education, this local story is also the NSW story — and the Australian story. A lot of movement, but no overall improvement.

A closer look at three local areas — Liverpool, Fairfield and Camden — highlights the increasing gap between local secondary schools. In 2006, eighteen government schools accounted for 54 per cent of local distinguished achievers, and seven non-government schools accounted for 41 per cent. By 2021 just four of the government schools, now well-established as partial-selective schools, accounted for 20 per cent of the local distinguished achievers, and the fifteen remaining government schools accounted for just 25 per cent. More than half (53 per cent) of the local distinguished achievers attended a larger number of private schools.

Over the same period, the number of the most advantaged students declined in more than half of the areas’ comprehensive public schools, especially in Liverpool, and those schools have ended up with a much higher proportion of the least advantaged students.

Robert Mulas, a previous principal at Fairfield High School, tells me how, as the number of students declined, “so did the ability to provide a wider range of subjects to those students.” Roger Berry, another principal, relates how his school, Camden High School, struggled to maintain its strong results — “the data showed that our disadvantaged student enrolment was growing” — and how some of the teaching staff “found it difficult to accept demography had changed and as such we as teachers needed to make adjustments.”

Despite the best efforts of principals and teachers, academic results fell in both those schools.

Another school, St Johns Park High, experienced one of the sharpest falls in headline student achievement. Yet the school’s results had been improving outstandingly as recently as 2015, according to the Department of Education’s Centre for Statistics and Evaluation. In that year, more than 90 per cent of St Johns Park students came from a non-English-speaking background, and more than one hundred were refugees. In 2014, according to the then principal Sue French, the school “had five students with ATARs over 99, fifteen over 90, and 146 out of 170 students received a university offer.”

Who goes to which school, and whom they go with, really matters. One of the significant findings of the 2012 Gonski review was that concentrating students from certain socioeconomic groups within different schools has a noticeable impact on the educational outcomes achieved by all students at the school.

This is sometimes called the compositional or peer effect, and at one level it is hardly new: it has long been articulated by teachers who know that the learning culture and academic focus of students can vary from one cohort to another.

A student’s peer group has two impacts on learning. The first is relatively direct and generated by current peer behaviour or outcomes. Teachers know how student engagement and behaviour (and misbehaviour) affects classroom management, time-on-task and the attention that can be given to individual students.

The second impact comes from the wider context. A child’s peer group affects their identity, their post-school aspirations and their motivation to learn. It can also have a powerful effect on the curriculum, in terms of both subjects offered by a school and how lessons are pitched. This effect can make it harder to engender a shared sense of the value of education, and is intensified when resources, including teachers, are in short supply.

Australia is increasingly aggregating strugglers in disadvantaged schools, making it harder for formerly high-profile schools like Roger Berry’s Camden High to maintain their academic success. The prospects of such schools completely restoring their previous academic reputations have simply walked out the door.

Yet the impact of peers on student learning hasn’t filtered through to the policymakers. The final report of the recent Productivity Commission review of the National School Reform Agreement made several references to the peer effects and the impact of concentrated disadvantage on student achievement. But the closest its findings came to discussing this impact was the lame statement that “students from priority equity cohorts can lack access to an inclusive learning setting that supports their learning needs and wellbeing.” In systems distorted by selective schools, students increasingly lack that access.

There is another reason for us to be concerned about the impact of selective schools. In response to the NSW government’s Westmead announcement, the Sydney Morning Herald’s education editor reminded readers of a 2019 government plan to identify genuinely gifted students and extend them outside the selective school system — and “to widen the definition of gifted from purely academic, and acknowledge all sorts of talents.”

This isn’t a new idea. Twenty years ago, Tony Vinson’s inquiry into NSW secondary schooling questioned the definition of giftedness, arguing that selective schools were simply enrolling well-off children of above-average ability. A more recent paper showed that the schools overwhelmingly enrol students from very advantaged backgrounds.

The government and its education bureaucracy need to review the role, scope and impact of selective schools and how they might better reflect what we know now, rather than what we assumed a generation ago. This means going back to the drawing board, to the basics of how to best support all students with particular gifts and talents — and the role of selective schools in any new structures.

In New South Wales, the government shouldn’t wait for the outcome of any such review. It should immediately turn the Westmead proposal into a pilot project, using an entirely different approach to serving gifted and high-potential students — one that will reach out to suitable students, and not just high test-scorers, across west and southwest Sydney. Such a project can draw on existing best practices in innovative schools, including features of the learning design already implemented in Big Picture public schools in New South Wales and other states.

Rather than gather selected students into exclusive settings, the Westmead school could offer special classes for students, mainly in year 11 and 12, who would come from participating public high schools for a designated time each week. (Obviously this requires coordination, but there are already schools that run a four-day week for senior students, creating a full day for them to complete courses in other places.)

Participating students would be chosen by their home school on the basis of their curriculum, their related interests, and their capacity to pursue these in a supportive and partially structured program. Westmead would be a coordinating and administration, as well as teaching, centre. Its staff would include specialist teachers. Together with other professionals and chosen Westmead precinct employees, they would develop mentoring relationships to support participating students. As an additional professional learning bonus, some teachers in the home school could accompany their students and work alongside the Westmead specialists.

Most students would complete the same subject requirements as if they were in their home school, but would also have online time with their Westmead teachers and mentors. Most would choose to meet requirements for the HSC and ATAR, but they would also gain greater access to early and/or portfolio entry to tertiary education, again an increasingly common pattern today.

Schools in western and southwestern Sydney are hardly beginners in establishing links with other providers, including universities. Many have been innovators in this field for decades and have long had links with local businesses. Students in schools like Liverpool Boys High undertake internships in the community. Student research and mentoring form part of the reason for their success.

For decades the discourse about catering for high-potential and gifted students has been about either doing so within every school or shifting selected students to separate schools. This is a false binary, and better pathways can be created with a mix of both.

The mixed model would also create wider access to highly skilled teachers. For understandable reasons, comprehensive schools have a broad curriculum, and many have lost subject specialisations. They won’t easily get them back, and teachers are in short supply. A reshaped Westmead school could potentially revitalise comprehensive schools.

It could also take the heat out of the debate about selective schools. For years, discussion has been closed down out of a fear of what would happen if the schools were, in fact, closed down. Public education would lose its high-profile battleships, students would shift to private schools, disruption would reign. A successful Westmead pilot would open minds to different ways to reach a much larger range and number of high-potential and gifted students. •

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First, how are the schools going? In reading, writing and numeracy, as tested for Years 3, 5, 7 and 9, NAPLAN reveals some ups and some downs since 2008, but no significant improvement. In science and maths, tested internationally by PISA and TIMSS, Australia is a bit above the middle of the OECD pack, which doesn’t sound too bad until we learn that this represents one in five fifteen-year-olds failing to reach “proficiency” in science, and one in four in maths.

Overall, a quarter of kids leave school without certification of any kind, and the much-discussed “long tail” of attainment persists. Many students don’t reach the minimum standard, and often fail to do so year after year. Kids who start behind typically get further behind. For Indigenous students it’s worse (although things are at least getting better from a very low base). Other sources of “disadvantage” — “geolocational,” disability, language background, and living in out-of-home care — are also of concern.

If school “performance” is a worry, so too is how students feel at and about school. A 2018 survey found that nearly one in three fifteen-year-old students didn’t feel they belonged at school, and more than one in four reported feeling like an outsider. When data of this kind are fed into a Sense of Belonging Index, Australia scores below the 2018 OECD average, and we’ve been sliding since 2003. On the related issue of wellbeing, the commission reports a 2014 survey (the most recent available) as finding that one in five students between the ages of eleven and seventeen had experienced high levels of psychological distress, and one in seven had had an episode of mental illness during the year. The clear implication is that schools aren’t doing enough to help.

Teachers aren’t happy either. They’re shouldering the load, the commission says, and too much of the load isn’t actual teaching. Teachers considering leaving often cite the workload and/or a wish to achieve “a better work–life balance” as reasons. Also cited: “challenges with student behaviour” (26 per cent) and “not enjoying the work” (21 per cent). A mere 2 per cent thought they weren’t suited to teaching.

The second story concerns the National School Reform Agreement, or NSRA. What even is it, as First Dog might say? It is, the commission says, an agreement by nine governments that the pursuit of a “high-quality and equitable education for all students” can be delivered by “three reform directions” and three target outcomes to be “progressed” through “national and state-specific initiatives,” assessed against “seven performance indicators,” and reported to the community in the interests of “transparency” and “confidence.”

So many moving parts! So many devices! So many players! In case the description alone doesn’t make the point, the commission hammers it home: “policy discussions” convened under the NSRA can be “remote” from “the lived experience of teachers and school leaders” (i.e. it’s a talkfest); some initiatives under the agreement have been delivered but others are “stalled”; two of the three “stalled” initiatives — both focused on tracking student progress and tailoring teaching accordingly — “are already thirteen years in the making”; and most of the delivered initiatives are “enablers” rather than rubber on the road.

All in all, the NSRA’s various initiatives are likely to have had “little impact” on student achievement. The next intergovernmental agreement should “focus on a small number of reforms” (i.e. the “reforms” have been all over the shop); initiatives should be limited to those that might benefit from “coordination” and avoid “a one size fits all” approach (i.e. agreements thus far have hindered more than helped); milestones should be clear (i.e. no one knows where we’re up to); and “thorny issues” will need to be “resolved” (i.e. they’ve been ducked).

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the NSRA has not just failed to work but, for fundamental, structural reasons, can’t work, and never will.

The problem began with the Commonwealth’s move into schooling in the “state aid” election of 1963. It was compounded by Whitlam and his Karmel Report and then by the Rudd and Gillard governments when they dollied up Canberra’s imperialism as a “national approach” complete with a National School Reform Agreement.

For the whole of this sixty-year period, the funding, regulation and governance of the Australian school system has fallen between two stools, neither national nor local. It can’t move forward and turn into a genuinely national system because neither the Constitution nor the states/territories will let it.

The two levels of government, the state/territory and the federal, work less with each other than against each other. The NSRA is really neither national nor an agreement; it is a federal coercion arising from federal dollars. As Julia Gillard made clear in 2008 when she filled out some of the detail of the beefed-up Commonwealth role, “reporting on performance will be a requirement of any new school funding agreement.” What the Productivity Commission sees as failures of program design and simple fecklessness are better understood as artful foot-dragging by press-ganged sailors on a rudderless ship.

If schooling can never move on to become coherently national then where can it go? There is really only one alternative: back to the future. Schooling will have to be returned whence it came, to the states and territories. If some or all of them want to get together for whatever purpose from time to time, then that would be up to them, not to the only Australian government that doesn’t actually run schools.

Is that the commission’s conclusion, that the feds should get out of schooling? Its way of saying the unsayable? Perhaps, but probably not. For one thing, the commission is itself a part of the Canberra machine. For another, its idea of “reform” is indistinguishable from that pursued by the Commonwealth.

The Productivity Commission says it is taking an interest in schools because it wants them to be more productive. They will then help, in turn, to make the economy more productive.

How to do that? Well, the commission is staffed by economists, so their first recourse is to human capital theory. Developed at the University of Chicago in the late 1950s, human capital theory addressed a puzzle: why was the US economy so much more productive than most? The first answer: because its relatively huge education system generated a copious supply of educated labour, otherwise known as “human capital.” How does education do that? What is the missing link? The answer was found in the labour market, where employers pay more for educated labour because it is more productive.

Human capital theory went global in the early 1960s after it was picked up and promulgated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (emphasis added). It arrived in Australia in 1964 via the Martin report on tertiary education — the first few pages of which, by the way, offer a compelling insight into the theory and its impact.

In the almost seventy years since then, human capital theory has been rejected outright by some and revised and refined by many others, none of which seems to have reached the commission. Education, it declares, is the source of no less than a fifth of labour productivity growth in recent years “and will become increasingly important in maintaining future growth.” Moreover, education “benefits both individuals and society” — by boosting earnings, increasing fulfilment, improving health outcomes, reducing crime, and lifting social and economic mobility.

All that talk about “benefits,” as if schooling didn’t do a fair bit of damage to a significant number of kids (and to the social fabric). It’s still correlation assumed to be causation (including the preposterous claim that “one standard deviation increase in the effectiveness of the average teacher would raise average lifetime earnings of the classroom by several hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.”) Education is still a driver of economic growth, not a mere supplier, let alone product. But the main problem is that the theory provides no guidance at all about how education itself can be made more productive, apart from the idea that if education is good then more education is even better. That was plausible in the United States in the 1950s and Australia in the early 1960s, but now?

That leaves the commission looking for help in working out what to say about more productive schools. Unsurprisingly, it turns to “effectiveness” theory, currently the orthodoxy in Australian schooling and, despite its origins in the discipline of psychology, very like economics in its assumptions and methods.

The core finding of the “effectiveness” approach is that there are big differences in the effectiveness of individual teachers and teaching strategies. It follows that the way to boost schooling’s productivity (or “performance”) is to boost the “quality” of teaching by getting “better quality” recruits into the profession, disseminating “best practice,” and driving schools to drive teachers to “perform” via standardised tests and published results.

The commission takes to this idea like a duck to water. Suddenly finding itself with the key to schooling productivity, it comes up with lots of bright ideas — twenty-seven of them by my count.

Consolidated, the list looks like this: schools should identify students who are falling behind and respond with “targeted interventions”; learning for all students should be “personalised” via “untimed syllabuses”; equity groups need an “inclusive” approach; student wellbeing must be brought into focus; “systematic” mechanisms must be used to diffuse “evidence-based practices”; Master Teachers are needed, which means boosting the HALT (Highly Accomplished or Lead Teacher) program; on-the-job-learning through “professional development” is a priority; best practice must become common practice; ongoing professional feedback needs to be systematised, perhaps via Quality Teaching Rounds, as used in Singapore and elsewhere; digital technologies can support teachers, reduce teacher admin loads and enhance learning; support staff should be better deployed; schools should focus on “innovation” and “development”; different “models” of schooling should be trialled and evaluated; we should perhaps follow the examples of the US charter schools and England’s academies (which have “transformed” that country’s school system); school hours might be more flexible and extended.

Just how this miscellany squares with the commission’s insistence on focus and parsimony in the NSRA is not explained. More, as anyone who has been around schooling for a while will attest, the commission’s list is reminiscent of countless whiteboards from conferences, workshops, professional development days and the like. Most items arise from a particular cast of mind but otherwise lack any sense of priority or sequence. Those who run schools and systems would be entitled to be offended by this offer to teach them to suck eggs, and by the simple ignorance of those who would teach them.

For example, “innovation” has been a mantra since the 1960s and official since the Karmel Report and its Innovations Program. So also for “inclusive” approaches to “equity groups” and another Karmel initiative, the Disadvantaged Schools Program and its many derivatives and like programs. Master Teachers perhaps? The commission appears unaware of the Advanced Skills Teacher initiative of the early 1990s and its ignominious end as just another salary increment. As for charter schools and academies, words fail. The commission seems unaware of Western Australia’s independent public schools program or of a national de facto charter school system, the heavily subsidised, fast-growing independent schools.

If we really did contemplate ramping this up somehow, the American charters and the British academies would serve as warnings. Both programs have been surrounded by controversy and conflict since their introduction in the 1990s and the early 2000s respectively. Evidence on the “performance” of the charters and academies is fiercely contested. But the real issue is to do with their impact on school systems and their performance. Far from “transforming” England’s schooling, the academies are better seen as the most recent episode in a long and often bitter class-based struggle between the “comprehensives” and the grammar schools, while in the United States the charter schools and their bête noire, the public systems, are sites of cultural warfare backed by the two main political parties.

How about the commission’s idea of trialling different “models” of schooling? Is it aware of (for example) the Big Picture schools (which really are transformative)? Or Victoria’s publicly funded “community schools”? Or the chequered histories of Preshil (Victoria), Marbury (South Australia), the School Without Walls (ACT), the Nimbin Community School (New South Wales), the Bowden Brompton Community School (South Australia), among many others? The difficulty isn’t in cooking up “alternative models” or even in getting an alternative model off the ground. The problem is in getting the elephant to learn from the ant. Changing heavily defended structures is a very different thing from finding interstices between them.

Beneath the commission’s simple ignorance is incomprehension. Consider the injunction that best-practice teaching should be common practice. There is, of course, plenty of scope for improvement in how teachers do their work. More than three-quarters of classroom talk is typically teacher talk, and when the teacher does ask questions almost all the answers require only “surface” learning (recall of facts and the like). About half the typical class will already know about half the content of the typical lesson. Students spend most of their time listening, or pretending to. They get little feedback on how they are going; most of what they do get comes from other students, and most of that is wrong. Teachers routinely mistake busyness for engagement, activity for learning. Students — the experts on the quality of teaching — mostly report having had only a handful of teachers who made a lasting and positive impact.

Some teachers do manage consistently to transform the recalcitrant class into a harmonious choir, and many don’t, or do so only sometimes, and the extent to which teachers do or don’t does indeed make a big difference to the quality and pace of students’ learning. But “highly effective” teachers are, almost by definition, the exception. How to get, let’s say, 200,000 of those who don’t teach consistently at that level to catch up with the 100,000 who do? And why, after decades of effort in teacher training, in-service education, thousands of studies and years of hot gospelling about “teacher quality,” is it still not happening?

Is the problem in the teacher and the teaching? Or is it in the organisational form, in the inherently low-productivity set-up of class, classroom, timetable, subject, lesson, test, success, failure? Apart from passing references to “experimenting” with different “forms” and to “untimed syllabus,” the commission neither asks nor canvasses this question. Nor does the commission wonder in which schools those 100,000 (or whatever) very effective teachers, and the 200,000 others, might be concentrated. Any teacher knows the answer to that question; many vote with their feet.

The Productivity Commission is of course correct in another of its suggestions, that “equity groups” would benefit from a more “inclusive” approach. But is it aware that Australian schools now have the highest concentrations of “disadvantaged” (and “advantaged”) students of any comparable OECD country? Plus high levels of segregation by religion and ethnicity? That has to do with the housing market, of course, but it also has to do with something the commission ignores: the organisation of schooling at the macro level rather than its conduct at the micro, and in particular its division into sectors, one government, two non-government, one secular, two “faith-based,” all three funded, governed and regulated in their own way, the game as a whole set up in a way that encourages two sectors to suck the most sought-after families (and teachers) out of some schools and into others. Has the commission read the Gonski report, and the excellent analysis that informed it? Is it aware of the dynamics of the sector system and the growth of “diversity” between schools rather than within each, and that this is what presents schools, from top to bottom, with the “inclusiveness” challenge?

Human capital theory in its unreconstructed form owes its longevity more to the enthusiastic support it attracts from a very large and influential education industry (no less than four of the sources on human capital thinking are education lobby groups) than to its explanatory power or usefulness in guiding reform. We can make much more sense of schooling if we see it as a product as well as (or more than) a supplier/driver of prosperity by providing the educational credentials that fuel the ever-increasing competition between individuals and occupational groups for “positional goods.”

That certainly explains a lot more about schooling than does human capital theory, including the explosive growth in education numbers, often far outstripping economic growth; the displacement of much learning and “skill development” from workplaces to front-end, credential-yielding formal education; the increasing organisation of schooling to generate a giant ranking of students, made explicit in Australia by the ATAR; and the secular demographic shift in the school system noted a moment ago. That in turn goes a long way towards explaining why schools and school systems have struggled with so little success to reduce inequality and the “long tail” of attainment, or to help kids who start behind to catch up.

The commission first collapses this heresy into the confines of economics in the form of “signalling theory” (“does a qualification make you smarter or just signal that you are smarter?”) and then briskly dismisses it as not standing up to empirical scrutiny. That understanding “credentialism” might require some sociology, history and political science as well as economics seems not to have occurred.

The commission is on a similarly sticky wicket when it turns to the effectiveness approach to explain schooling. Developed mainly in the United States in the 1970s as a response to the radical and disruptive ideas about schooling widespread in the previous decade, it is deeply conservative in adhering to the received “grammar” of schooling: the class, classroom, timetable, subject, lesson, test, success, failure. Like human capital theory, the effectiveness idea was quickly adopted by the OECD and disseminated around the world by its program of standardised testing. Like economics, it ends up thinking that change is something achieved by technical management, and that is perhaps what appealed to the Rudd and Gillard governments and their goal of “Top Five [in OECD league tables] by ’25.”

Substantial and consequential differences in the “effectiveness” of teachers and teaching strategies undoubtedly exist. Nor can it be doubted that the effectiveness movement has brought some empirical discipline to the waffle endemic in and about schooling. The account of the realities of the classroom given above, for example, is gleaned from a guide to “effectiveness,” the International Guide to Student Achievement. Effectiveness thinking and evidence has been helpful to teachers and schools in providing answers to the crucial question: what works? That question was indeed the title of a foundational text.

Things begin to go wrong when general findings and guidance are turned into the very precise “effect sizes” popularised by John Hattie. Holding students back? –0.32. Diversity courses: +0.09. Mainstreaming/inclusion? +0.27. Reading Recovery: +0.53. And top of all pops, “conceptual change programs”: +0.99. To speak so clearly and confidently in answering the “what works” question, to do all those intricate calculations of “effect,” the effectiveness approach needs to see schools as the box between “inputs” and “outputs” and then take a drastically simplified view of both.

On the “inputs” side it considers only the most proximate causes of differences: teachers and teaching strategies and “interventions.” That screens out all the things that shape and organise the daily work and workplaces of teachers and students, and the working careers of the latter — the organisation of Australian schools into sectors; the big structures of funding, regulation and governance; and the heavily entrenched “grammar” of schooling.

It is equally reductionist on the “outputs” side. Its fundamental, and sometimes exclusive concern is with “outcomes,” and particularly “outcomes” in science, numeracy and literacy, as revealed by standardised testing. The problem is that that is very much narrower than the span of schooling itself — just a fraction of the cognitive fraction of the formal curriculum, which in turn is the source of only one part of “what is learned in school.”

Schooling, moreover, is not only an individual business, and it isn’t just about outcomes. As can be seen in the social, religious and ethnic segregation noted above, schooling shapes the social order. And its twelve years represent something like a fifth of most working lives. So blinkered in this is the Productivity Commission that when it inspects the indicators used by the NSRA it dwells on their technical quality and says nothing about their scope. What schooling needs is not more highly polished indicators but indicators that represent what it is that schools actually do, and should do.

The effectiveness approach has another thing in common with economics: it is so dominant in its field that it has become a true believer in its own “science.” It regards that “science” as the only source of real “evidence” about schooling, and has even achieved a new national institution, the Australian Education Research Organisation, dedicated to that proposition. It cannot see itself any more than it can see much about schools and schooling because it has no philosophy or history and very little of the social sciences and their many derivatives to see with.

In thinking that schooling is all about teaching, effectiveness research sees students as consumers, and then wonders why so many of them become “disengaged” and why “student agency” is so difficult to provide. In its origins and its contemporary functioning the effectiveness movement is not reformist or even conservative. It is reactionary, shoring up a low-productivity and obsolete mode of schooling, and drawing attention away from the big structures that hold it in place. Often singing the praises of teachers and schools, it is in effect if not intention engaged in a form of victim blaming.

It does all this by starting from the wrong point altogether. Schools are less sites of the delivery of the service of teaching than sites of production where the core workforce, those it calls “students,” labour away as best they can within the frame given by history to produce not just learning but themselves and each other. If the Productivity Commission really wants to make schools more productive, then that is where it should start.

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To Sims, and many others around Australia, that’s how crucial the new tax debate is. It’s no longer just about whether Labor waves through Scott Morrison’s stage three tax cuts, amends them or abandons them. There is a much wider question, with much greater consequences for our country.

Governments can never satisfy us all. But from hospitals to defence, from childcare to aged care, from schools to fixing potholes, government services are falling way short of what Australians need and expect from their country. That shortfall helped Labor get into government. Now Labor’s there, what is it going to do about it?

Labor came to office as the flagbearer of many Australians’ hopes for a government that would end the chronic underfunding of education, health and welfare, not to mention the miserly $47.74 a day we give the unemployed to live on.

Some of those areas have now reached the point where things fall apart. GPs, tired of being cast as the poor cousins to specialists, are deserting country towns and suburban practices, and young doctors are not replacing them. Aged care homes and childcare centres are perpetually short-staffed because low pay and high workloads create constant turnover. Across the board, Australia is short of skilled workers because apprentice wages are so low that only half of them stay on to complete their training.

We could all add more examples. To me the most important is that Australia now finds itself in the most dangerous environment since the second world war, yet the Coalition kept defence spending to just 2 per cent of GDP (lower than in the 1960s when we faced no real threat) and settled on submarines that will be delivered between 2038 and 2050.

Faced with all these needs, Labor nonetheless went to the election with a platform of relatively modest, tightly targeted new spending, promising no new taxes and a big tax cut primarily for those in least need.

You can understand why. It wanted to be elected, so it played safe. And in 2025 it wants to be re-elected, so it doesn’t want to risk breaking any promises now. At least, not yet.

You see what Rod Sims meant? All those spending goals require more money, much more money. In the short term, the only way governments can get more money is by raising taxes, to reallocate spending from private purposes to public ones. What do we want Australia to be?

The looming budget is the government’s first test — and the timing is not good.

The fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (amid other factors) has lifted global food prices almost 50 per cent above pre-Covid levels, blown global energy prices to several times pre-Covid levels, provided cover for businesses everywhere to sneak their prices up — and could throw some big economies into recession.

The International Monetary Fund this week estimated that after decades of low price growth, global inflation has jumped to 8.75 per cent. Even with central banks slamming the brakes on hard (which the IMF applauds), it predicts global prices will rise 6.5 per cent next year before returning to something like normal in 2024.

Contrary to some commentary, the IMF is not forecasting a global recession; its half-yearly World Economic Outlook is towards the optimistic end of the spectrum. It predicts the global economy to grow by a relatively low 2.7 per cent next year, dragged down by global supply disruptions, a permanent slowing of China’s growth rate (to 4.4 per cent) and the fallout from the war in Ukraine.

It expects the United States to keep growing, albeit slowly (1 per cent); other forecasters expect much worse. The IMF envisages some big developing economies like India (6.1 per cent) and Indonesia (5.0) more or less hurdling the upheaval, while Brazil, Russia and Turkey now seem to be doing better (or in Russia’s case, less badly) than was forecast six months ago.

If there is a recession, it would be in the advanced economies — whose growth collectively is expected to slump to 1.1 per cent — and centred in Europe. Germany, Italy and Sweden are forecast to experience mild recessions: no upsurge in unemployment, just a year without growth.

On the IMF’s forecast, Australia will also be hit. It expects our growth to fall to 1.9 per cent next year and 1.8 per cent in 2024, and to stay low thereafter. Unemployment would gradually edge back towards 5 per cent, per capita growth would total just 4 per cent over five years. Governing Australia would not be fun.

These are only forecasts. But clearly the budget outlook is far worse than the one Josh Frydenberg unveiled in his budget in March. And even that projected a string of hefty deficits as far as the eye can see. At a time of record mineral prices and low unemployment, there is no good reason why Australia should have run up new debt of $32 billion in 2021–22.

A cardinal rule of budgeting is that, by and large, you pay for what you spend. If you don’t, you are leaving the bill for the new generation to pay. There are exceptions: you run deficits in bad times and cover them by running surpluses in good times. Infrastructure spending largely benefits the next generation, so it is fair to borrow to build. But at federal and state level — especially in Victoria and the ACT — governments have simply lacked the courage to make us pay for what they spend.

This combination of a grim global outlook, a grim state of the budget and a government still new to the job does make it likely Labor’s first budget will be, as treasurer Jim Chalmers keeps saying, responsible.

I assume he means that Labor will give priority to reducing the budget deficit. And that in working out the numbers, Treasury will err on the side of caution in guessing future energy prices, and hence company tax revenue. And that any new taxes and spending will implement the commitments Labor made in the campaign, and little else. And, of course, that Labor will go after the Coalition programs it has identified as rorts.

All that buys time. But circumstances are conspiring to force Labor to confront Rod Sims’s question: what does it want Australia to be? To deliver First World services, you need a First World revenue base. And for Australia, that means higher taxes.

Let’s take the long-term issue first. Australia is a low-tax country. At the government’s recent jobs summit, economist Ross Garnaut cited OECD figures showing that total federal, state and local government tax revenue as a share of GDP was 5.7 percentage points lower than the developed country average. That’s a shortfall of almost $140 billion a year.

The IMF’s data for total revenue reports a similar gap: governments in Australia raise 5 percentage points of GDP less revenue than the median advanced economy. In 2019 federal, state and local governments raised 34.6 per cent of GDP, well below 40.7 per cent in Canada (the country we most resemble), 46.5 per cent in Germany, and an average of 50.6 per cent in Scandinavia.

In part, that’s because retirement income in Australia is semi-privatised through superannuation, whereas retirees in almost all other Western countries, even the United States, rely on government-run retirement benefits funded by a separate social security tax on income. (The reason Australia appears to rely so much on income tax is that we have only one income tax. Most other Western countries have two, under separate names.)

But the OECD’s data show Australia also has the highest private spending on education of any OECD country, and the third-highest “voluntary” private spending on healthcare. Unemployment benefits are among the very lowest in the Western world.

Once, Labor ministers might have rebelled against this two-stream system in which the best services are reserved for those who can pay the fees demanded in the private sector. Now, as we saw when the Gillard government squibbed on the Gonski report’s school funding reforms, preference to private schools is one British tradition Labor still loyally supports.

In theory, Labor could use more desirable ways to meet the cost of bringing Australia’s services to the standards we expect. It could reduce spending on lesser priorities and reallocate the savings. Or it could take on the politically difficult economic reforms needed to speed up Australia’s sluggish rate of productivity growth.

In reality, speakers at the revenue summit agreed, the gap between today’s service levels and those we expect in aged care, the health system and so on is too vast to be filled by cutting services in other areas. Sims called it “self-evident” that savings from those cuts, while they could and should be made, are not on the scale needed to get us where we want to be.

For ten years until recently, Sims chaired the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. The experience has made him sceptical of the potential for dramatically improving our productivity and hence growing a bigger economy. Rapid productivity growth, he said, requires increased competition — and the reality is that business is reducing competition, not increasing it.

“Our political debate always favours low taxation,” he said. “We have to point out that what comes with that is low expenditure. And we have to keep asking the question: is that what we want? If you want to spend extra money, you have to raise extra revenue. There’s just no avoiding that.”

He went on: “If you are against higher taxation, then you are against higher government expenditure… Many do not realise that in opposing taxation they are opposing extra spending on health, education and much else. I think we need higher taxation. I think it’s unavoidable.”

Why? Sims and other speakers at the summit gave several reasons:

1. Australians need better services

Annie Butler of the Nurses Federation cited the findings of the aged care royal commission: neglect and substandard care are widespread and systemic in aged care because the industry is underfunded by $10 billion a year. “Ridiculously low” wages lead to high staff turnover and hence shortages.

ACTU secretary Sally McManus argued that a lot of the crises Australia is experiencing in health and other services result from years of “chronic underfunding.” Economists predict that 30 per cent of all jobs created in the next decade will be in caring for others, but unless those jobs are better paid, workers will not stay in them. Our priorities have to change.

2. The transition to a low-carbon economy

The big economic reform facing Labor is going to be an expensive one: valuable in the long term but costly upfront. Business and government will need to invest tens of billions of dollars in building the solar and wind farms that will generate the power, the batteries that will store that power, and the transmission lines that will bring it from the inland to the cities. And if our coal stations are to close down by 2035, this money needs to be spent in the next decade or so to guarantee that we will still be able to turn on the lights.

The task is made even bigger and more crucial by the need to transition cars from oil to electricity and households and businesses from gas to electricity. Tim Washington, chair of the Electric Vehicle Council, told the summit that electric vehicles comprise, at best, 3 per cent of Australian car sales, compared with 15 per cent in other Western countries. With a global shortage of EVs likely to persist, he urged business and government to manufacture them here, using Australian designs, software, metals and lithium to create an entire value chain. He’s not likely to get that.

Fortunately, there is an ideal solution. Unfortunately, only the Greens, teal independents and economists support it. It is a carbon tax.

Sims confessed he found it baffling that so many Australians want action on climate change but instantly condemn the idea of a tax on carbon. Governments are going deeper into deficit to subsidise solar panels and electric vehicles, whereas the carbon tax would give the whole economy an incentive to decarbonise while raising taxes to fund the investments required.

“No such transition can be painless,” he said. “We need to decide whether we are serious about climate change. If we are, then it can be funded by a tax that will have the benefit of directly changing behaviour while insulating low income earners [through compensation].”

3. Get out of deficit and start paying down debt

Australia has less government debt than most Western countries, but only because the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments made fiscal responsibility a priority from 1985 until 2005. In both 2009 and 2021, as a resilient Australia emerged from the global financial crisis and Covid lockdowns respectively, our governments kept piling on stimulus as if money were no object. And the pollies’ fear of tax rises — much of it due to the vicious hostility of the Murdoch press towards anyone, especially anyone from Labor, brave enough to impose them — has kept us in deficit ever since.

Federal government revenue in this century peaked at 25.6 per cent in 2005–06, when it was 24.1 per cent of GDP. Since then spending has swollen to 26.8 per cent of GDP. Yet, far from keeping pace, revenue has fallen — because governments are frightened of raising taxes.

As ANU economist Ben Phillips put it, “We have plans for increased expenditure, but not for increased revenue. All we’ve got to increase revenue is bracket creep: it’s sneaky, but it works.”

(Bracket creep is the additional tax you pay when inflation pushes more of your nominal income into a higher tax bracket. The stage 3 tax cuts are often defended as simply handing back that extra tax. But only the high income earners will get their bracket creep back, and they get back more than they lost.)

Phillips estimates that Australia faces a revenue gap of $25 billion to $50 billion a year for the next decade. The summit heard lots of suggestions on how to close that gap: one that Labor has flagged for this budget, and others that we should be debating and putting to a new tax review.

Sims alone proposed five:

• Crack down on multinationals avoiding tax by non-commercial transfer pricing, including paying ridiculously high interest rates or “marketing fees” to a head office in a tax haven.

• Ensure Australians benefit when our mineral and energy resources are extracted. Norway takes almost 80 per cent of the revenue from its oil and gas fields, yet Australia allows companies to take those resources for virtually nothing. The petroleum resource rent tax, which is meant to do the job, desperately needs big repairs — and an extension to cover coal and iron ore.

• Introduce an excess profits tax, as the European Union has done recently. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that in the Coalition’s nine years in office, mining output rose by $195 billion but wages in the industry by just $5 billion. Net profits by the mining industry grew by $190 billion, yet taxes on mining shrank by $0.1 billion. If there is ever a time for a tax on excess profits, it is in Australia now.

• A carbon tax. (See above.)

• At state level: a comprehensive land tax covering all private property except farmland, to replace stamp duty on conveyancing. Economists generally see land tax as a most efficient tax. Sims called it a progressive tax, “based on assets that cannot be moved,” that produces a steady revenue flow.

• Road-user charges will be inevitable as electric vehicles replace petrol-driven cars. Their advantage is that they can be fine-tuned for vehicle type (trucks pay for the damage they do to roads) and time of day (peak-hour pricing).

Other speakers added at least another five:

• Prune tax breaks for superannuation.

• Prune or phase out negative gearing of property investments.

• Scrap fossil fuel subsidies, including the mining industry’s exemption from fuel excise.

• End concessional tax rates for family trusts.

• Increase the Medicare levy to pay for extra spending on aged care.

Sims emphasised that the reforms would need to be sold as a package, with compensation where appropriate, as the Hawke government did when it reformed tax in 1985. That package was preceded by a tax review by Treasury and a tax summit where a wide range of groups put their case.

Albanese has pledged no new taxes in this term apart from the ones Labor took to the election (primarily a crackdown on tax avoidance by multinationals — no votes lost by tackling that). But independent MPs Allegra Spender (Wentworth, NSW) and Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Victoria) both urged a new tax review “with everything on the table” — with Spender adding “including the GST” and a hopeful plea: “We need to have grown-up conversations about tax.”

Well, good luck with that. I suspect most tax economists would agree that the GST rate should be raised, or its field widened, or both. New Zealand lifted its GST rate to 15 per cent back in 2010 without suffering any visible social collapse, and its GST is far more comprehensive than ours. That’s the main reason its government can spend more than ours.

The left needs to stop demonising the GST and think of tax reform as a package. You can introduce or increase or widen a GST fairly so long as you design the right package — as we saw in 1999 after the Australian Democrats stopped the Liberals using the GST to shift more of the tax burden onto lower and middle income earners.

But so long as we are unable to see any bipartisanship on tax, the GST will remain a no-go area. And bipartisanship is probably off the agenda as long as Peter Dutton is Liberal leader.

Where does that leave the stage 3 tax cuts? It looks like this movie has ended now, with treasurer Jim Chalmers apparently losing the fight despite his skilful attempts to persuade colleagues to revise, reduce or even scrap the cuts — which would be in line with his theme of protecting the budget in increasingly dangerous times and giving support only to those who really need it.

But good movies these days have a sequel, and these tax cuts won’t take effect until mid 2024. Given his impressive debut in the role, Chalmers has time to perfect it when he plans his next budget. He knows the case for either abolishing the cuts or reducing and retargeting them is very strong.

Stage 3 contains three elements:

• abolish the 37 per cent marginal tax rate on income earned between $120,000 and $180,000

• raise the threshold for the 45 per cent top rate from $180,000 to $200,000

• reduce the standard 32.5 per cent rate to 30 per cent — which would then be a flat tax rate for all income from $45,000 to $200,000.

Modelling by the Parliamentary Budget Office and by Ben Phillips found the first and the third are the expensive items. And the consensus at the summit seemed to be that if there is compromise, we should keep the third while scrapping the first.

A few points are important to note.

First, these tax cuts were proposed by treasurer Scott Morrison way back in 2018, six years before they would take effect. Since then, we have had a global Covid pandemic and the global inflation breakout. Committing to tax cuts six years before they took effect had no economic rationale. What drove it was politics. Morrison assumed the budget in 2024 could afford it. He was wrong.

Second, the cuts follow stage 1 (in 2018), directed to lower-middle income earners, and stage 2 (in 2020), focused on upper-middle incomes. Stage 1 was small, and has since been abolished by the Coalition itself. Stage 2 was bigger: it cut taxes for people earning less than $90,000 by $10 a year, and taxes for people earning over $120,000 by $1890 a year. The idea that high earners have been kept waiting while others have had tax cuts is quite untrue.

Stage 3 is seriously big money. The Parliamentary Budget Office last year estimated their cost at $18 billion in year one (2024–25), then more than doubling to $37 billion by year nine (2032–33). Treasury is now revisiting those numbers — and the cost will almost certainly be even higher now.

But even on the PBO’s 2021 estimate, that would reduce total government revenue by 3.5 per cent initially, and by more than 4 per cent by the start of the 2030s. That is a huge cut in revenue at a time when the budget is unable to cope with Australia’s existing spending needs, let alone the new ones coming over the horizon from the ageing of our population, China’s attempt to assert hegemony over the region, the excesses of the NDIS, and so on. We need tax rises, not tax cuts.

Third, the PBO estimates that 78 per cent of those billions of dollars would go to the richest 20 per cent of Australians. That’s largely because they pay 68 per cent of all income tax — but that in turn is because they get such a high share of the nation’s income. They would rank low on a list of those in need.

That said, it seems fair to say that the threshold of $180,000 for Australia’s top tax is too low. If Chalmers and his colleagues want to compromise, one option they might consider is to reduce the 37 per cent rate to 35 per cent with the same thresholds as now — but add a new 40 per cent rate for income from $180,000 to $200,000, and a timetable to raise that threshold to $250,000. Over time, that would save the budget a lot of money, without taking everything from those who would gain from the plan Labor promised them. •

The post Time to talk about tax appeared first on Inside Story.

It was a success according to its intentions. But that won’t take us very far. Its directors managed to evade almost completely an issue that is crucial to how Australia is to tackle the many, deep social problems spelt out by speakers on the floor of the Great Hall of Parliament House. I’ll come to that shortly.

The summit was intended to show Australians that our political climate has changed with the new government — and it did. The participants, speakers and moderators were mostly female. There was an abundant sprinkling of young faces, of non-white faces, of foreign accents. It looked and sounded like Australia.

The vibe was overwhelmingly positive. Political differences were set aside (except by the absent Peter Dutton). Everyone was given a chance to speak at some point, and most were worth listening to. Their contributions were mainly constructive.

The PM was his avuncular self, the friendly, trustworthy Uncle Albo, heir to the good Labor leaders of long ago. He urged the summit: “We have not gathered here to dig deeper trenches on the same old battlefield… Australians have conflict fatigue. They want politics to operate differently.” The contrast between his positivity and Dutton’s sniping showed why Australians, according to Newspoll, prefer him by a 61–22 margin.

This summit was a stage production. The cast spoke when they were meant to, and not otherwise. I didn’t see any debate on day one, though ANU vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt started some when he took the chair on day two. Mostly, if anyone wanted to disagree with what was being said, tough luck: they had no opportunity to do so. The “consensus” Anthony Albanese praised was more staged than real.

The summit was intended to produce a set of policy outcomes — and in a sense, it did. Soon after it ended, the government published a fourteen-page document listing what Treasurer Jim Chalmers described as thirty-six “concrete steps [it] intends to take… as an outcome of this… summit” plus a similar number of priorities for future discussion. Everyone got something to take back to their constituencies.

Seeing the speed with which the document appeared at the end of the summit, a cynic might wonder if, rather than responding to what it heard on the floor, the government took these decisions well before the summit, but held back the announcements to make it look like they came from the floor.

The summit was intended to highlight the importance — economic, social and political — of getting more women into work, into decision-making and into higher-level roles in the economy. And it did. Its three main policy themes were: how to fix the skills shortages in Australia’s workforce; how to change wage-fixing rules so that workers get a bigger share of the cake; and how to lift participation in the workforce. In the presentations, women’s work was central to all three.

Grattan Institute chief executive Danielle Wood sounded the bell in her opening keynote speech. Australia has one of the most gender-segregated workforces in the OECD, she noted, and market realities are now in sync with fairness in dictating that we tackle the underpayment of female-dominated caring occupations.

She cited an example: childcare workers are paid as little as $22 an hour, less than they could earn washing dishes at McDonald’s. No wonder we are perpetually short of them. Every year, Australia needs more than 33,000 more aged care workers, but they are grossly underpaid and overworked, so a huge turnover means a constant search for workers.

We can’t put off this issue anymore, and Labor’s leaders clearly recognise that. Treasury’s paper for the summit estimated that a quarter of Australia’s gender pay gap comes from low pay in the female-dominated caring and education professions. The Fair Work Commission is now hearing a case in which unions are seeking a 25 per cent pay rise for aged care workers. The government has promised to pick up the tab. That is where the action is.

But the obvious stage management of the summit should not obscure its genuine achievement. For two days, leaders of business, unions, community groups and federal, state and territory governments focused on contributing their knowledge, identifying the problems, finding common ground and scoping out solutions. They didn’t solve Australia’s problems, but they made progress on some fronts, and established good working relationships for future dialogue.

Yet the progress they made was marginal to the key issues facing Australia. Getting consensus meant the organisers could not allow the conference to tackle issues where consensus was impossible. Danielle Wood and fellow economist Ross Garnaut, the dinner speaker, certainly touched on some of them, but they were not targeted in any session.

One of them is crucial to almost every issue the summit addressed. It is tax.

The federal government is running deficits of $75 billion or more a year. While claimants were putting urgent cases to the summit for more spending in this area and that, Labor still insists on delivering an already-legislated tax cut, mainly for the rich, that will reduce tax revenues by 3 to 4 per cent. Where is it going to find the money to solve the problems the summit presented to it?

Garnaut pointed to the elephant in the room. “We have to stop kidding ourselves about the budget,” he said. “We have large deficits when our high terms of trade should be driving surpluses. Interest rates are rising on the eye-watering Commonwealth debt.

“We talk about the most difficult geo-strategic environment since the 1940s requiring much higher defence expenditure, but not about higher taxes to pay for it. We say we are underproviding for care and underpaying nurses, and underproviding for education and failing to adequately reward our teachers…

“[Yet] in the face of these immense budget challenges, total federal and state taxation revenue as a share of GDP is 5.7 percentage points lower than the developed country average.”

To put it another way, our governments every year raise roughly $120 billion less than they would if our tax rates were at the Western average. With that money, we could tackle every issue raised at the summit. The government, if it chose, could finance 25 per cent pay rises for aged care and childcare workers, raise the dole to $70 a day, restore the funding the Liberals took from universities, invest in research and new technology, pay the states 50 per cent of hospital costs, give state schools their fair share of funding, etc., etc. — and close the deficit.

There are many good ways to raise revenue. Australia has an abundance of tax loopholes allowing companies and individuals to avoid tax: negative gearing is a classic example, but as the International Monetary Fund once suggested, Australia could apply the same principle to business, and stop firms deducting interest bills from their tax.

In the June quarter, the Australian Bureau of Statistics tells us, the total wage bill for Australia’s millions of corporate employees was $164 billion, while its mining companies made a gross operating profit of $81 billion. In just three months! If any country ever had cause to levy a tax on super profits it is Australia, now. Jim Chalmers needs to make this a centrepiece of his October budget.

But no one in the sessions I heard mentioned tax in their speeches. Like all those who argue for more spending on worthy causes, they urged more spending without a word on how the government should find the money to pay for it. Tax is the issue we don’t talk about. The summit would have had more cutting edge if some delegates had dared do so.

There’s been little argument over the summit “outcomes” because they are mostly agreements on principles, aspirations, processes or short-term supports to be applied while longer-term outcomes are negotiated.

They are modest: first steps, not solutions. Maybe they needed to be to get tripartite agreement between government, business and unions. And having tripartite agreement on sensible first steps in the right direction gives the government more freedom to plan bolder steps to solve the problems.

One of the summit’s big moves to tackle the skills shortage, for example, was to increase the permanent migration target for 2022–23 from 160,000 a year to 195,000. Almost all that increase will comprise skilled workers and their families, mostly sponsored by state governments (who are primarily chasing health workers) and employers in the regions.

No one objected to that. Nor should they, because if the target follows current patterns, it will make little difference. In recent years, two-thirds of permanent residence places were awarded to migrants already in Australia, working or studying on temporary visas.

And while the government would like to bring in new migrants to help reduce our skills shortage, particularly in hospitals and aged care, it has an even more urgent priority: tackling the scandalous backlog of unprocessed visa applications piled up by the Department of Home Affairs under the Morrison government.

Immigration minister Andrew Giles told the summit Labor inherited a backlog from the Coalition of almost a million unprocessed visa applications. It was an unbelievable number, including applications from all types of people: separated partners, skilled workers, overseas students, business. Brian Schmidt recalled the department taking twenty-one months to process the ANU’s applications to bring in some Indian academics — for three-year appointments.

Giles said the government has now swung an extra 180 staff onto clearing the visa backlog, and has so far reduced it by 100,000. One of the thirty-six “outcomes” was that it will now spend an extra $36 million to lift visa staff by 500 people for the rest of this financial year.

But the waiting list includes a staggering 330,000 people who are already in Australia on bridging visas until their applications are processed. It’s fair to assume that many, maybe most, of them are applying for permanent visas. Given the scale of this backlog, an increase of only 35,000 in the migration target seems extraordinarily timid. Labor will have to revisit that, and soon.

The big “outcome” for the young unemployed and school leavers was the agreement by the prime minister and premiers to pump $1 billion into TAFE in 2023 to provide 180,000 extra fee-free places while they negotiate a longer-term agreement to reform the sector. Again, you applaud the direction — and in this case, the boldness and the federal–state cooperation — but it’s only a short-term solution.

Another “outcome” was Albanese’s announcement that, as an inducement for older workers to keep working, or retirees to return to work, pensioners will be allowed to earn an extra $4000 — just for this financial year — without losing any of their pension.

Good, but I think the PM is safe from being knocked down by a stampede. For a few months, it might induce some pensioners to put in a few hours a week at some nearby workplace. But why make it so small? Why end it on 30 June? It’s almost as if it was designed to avoid having any substantial impact. It’s tokenism, when big gains are possible from a comprehensive policy to extend working lives for those who want to keep going.

Chalmers and finance minister Katy Gallagher routinely fob off questions about spending proposals such as raising the Jobseeker allowance by declaring sympathetically, “There are lots of good ideas out there, and I wish we could fund them all. But we have inherited a trillion dollars of Liberal debt…”

Someone must call that out. First, Table 9.2 of the 2022–23 budget papers implies that Labor inherited $979 billion of gross debt from the Liberals — but $303 billion of that was inherited in 2013 by the Liberals from Labor (who in turn inherited $64 billion in 2007 from the Liberals, and so on). It’s Liberal and Labor debt. It’s Australia’s debt.

Second, gross debt looks at just one side of the balance sheet — which is why we focus on net debt. Table 9.2 estimates Labor inherited $631.5 billion of net debt from the Liberals, who in turn inherited $161.6 billion of net debt from Labor back in 2013. It’s a cheap, false political point.

But on the first part of its routine line, Labor is right: there are a lot of good ideas out there, and the government can’t fund them all. Its job is to sift through them and set the priorities. And if it picks a bad priority, such as backing the Liberals’ stage three tax cuts, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

These cuts were Morrison at his worst. They do not take effect until mid 2024, yet became law in 2019 — with Labor’s support, because it was frightened of being depicted as a high-tax party. This is the legislation that will give tax cuts of almost $175 a week to someone earning $200,000 a year, and $2 a week to someone earning $50,000.

The Parliamentary Budget Office estimates the cuts will deprive the government of $243.5 billion of revenue — 3 to 4 per cent of budget revenue — over their first nine years alone. The PBO says 78 per cent of that will go to the richest 20 per cent of households: by definition, those who need it least. And that, at a time when the budget is perpetually in deficit, and the government assailed on all fronts for spending too little.

The summit’s speeches ranged far and wide. Many speakers gave interesting accounts of what they were doing, or their experiences dealing with the systems now in place. Highlights are on YouTube, and the entire summit can be seen on Parliament’s video stream.

Transcripts regrettably are not available, except on ministerial websites and those of some speakers. I recommend Danielle Wood’s challenging and probing overview of Australia’s economic potential, which castigated business leaders for their risk-averse “economic funk,” and called for Australia to adopt “full employment as our lodestar” and remember that, if we want to raise living standards, in the long run, “productivity is almost everything.”

Peter Davidson, principal advisor to the Australian Council of Social Service, also made a lot of challenging points in urging Labor to reform the employment services system. “The system [has] not been working for a long time,” he said. “Jobactive was more of an unemployment payment compliance system than an employment service. It sent people out into the labour market and when they didn’t find jobs, told them to search harder. People were literally told: ‘It’s not our role to find you a job.’”

Ross Garnaut’s dinner speech recounted the reasons for Australia’s success in the postwar era, and the challenges reformers faced then — and in the Hawke-Keating era — and now. “I grew up in a Menzies world of full employment,” he recalled. “Workers could leave jobs that didn’t suit them and quickly find others. Employers put large amounts of effort into training and retaining workers. Labour income was secure and could support a loan to buy a house. Steadily rising real wages encouraged economisation on labour, which lifted productivity.”

In the postwar era, and in the 1980s, Garnaut said, “success was based on using economic analysis and information to develop policies in the public interest; on seeing equitable distribution of the benefits of growth as a central objective; and on sharing knowledge through the community about economic policy choices. This built support for policies that challenged old prejudices and vested interests.

“Personal and corporate taxation rates were much higher than before the war. Full employment and a wider social safety net supported structural change and much larger and more diverse immigration… Menzies’s political success was built on full employment — helped by Menzies insulating policy from the influence of political donations to an extent that is shocking today.”

Garnaut ended by exhorting Albanese and Chalmers to follow the path of Hawke and Keating, strong politicians who took big risks to bring in reforms when they were clearly needed. “We have to raise much more revenue while increasing labour force participation and investment,” he said, urging two radical reforms he advocated last year in his book Reset: a guaranteed income scheme, and a shift to cash flow taxation of business.

But Albo is not Hawke and Chalmers is not Keating. Like the business leaders who have dragged down Australia’s business investment to the lowest share of GDP ever recorded, they are risk-averse. Their priority is to retain power, and they see the way to do that is by giving people what they want, not trying to persuade them that tackling tough reforms is in the national interest.

It is possible, though, even likely, that they will end up having no choice. The crisis in aged care, in hospitals, in GP practices, in childcare and in teaching will force an end to governments’ model of saving money by underpaying those who work for you (or whose wages you pay indirectly). Australia’s system of doing government on the cheap has been tried, and failed. We are going to have to learn from how the rest of the West does it, and that means raising taxes.

Many have noted that the Hawke government, like this one, began its term by staging an economic summit, which brought business and union leaders to Old Parliament House with the similar aim of “bringing Australia together” to tackle its economic problems. But we should also recall that its follow-up two years later was to invite a similar cast for a tax summit.

That is what Albanese and his team should start planning for. We cannot solve our problems without an honest national dialogue on the need for higher taxes, and where we should be looking for increased revenue. It could be combined with the announcement of a super profits tax on mining companies and the big banks. Reform needs to start now. •

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All this was supposed to be driven by an expanded “national” machinery of agreements, meetings and institutions centred on Canberra — the only administration not stuck with the tricky business of actually running schools — in which state/territory and federal governments of all persuasions were enlisted. Those responsible for making this Heath Robinson contraption work were left confused about “who is steering the ship” and exposed to incessant micromanagement by state/territory ministers who carry the can for troubled systems. And the system as a whole — already hamstrung by the proliferation of agencies, institutions and authorities — was left with no entity (state, federal or national) with a span of authority and responsibility sufficient to drive improvement.

The “revolution” and its various components were no sooner in place than a leading international authority on systemic change predicted in unambiguous terms that it wouldn’t work. Six years on, the head of Australia’s leading education research agency asked how well we’re doing in meeting a series of “challenges,” ranging from lifting the teaching profession to reducing the long tail of student underachievement. He found that things were going nowhere or backwards in all of them. Six years later he looked again: much the same story. The revolution’s own miserable measure of “outcomes” in the “fundamentals,” the PISA test, has recorded a slow but steady decline in Australia. The rallying cry of “top 5 by ’25,” embedded in the Australian Education Act of 2013, now looks risible.

This comprehensive failure has left an elephant-sized question in the room: now what? The revolution’s one real success was in directing the attention and shaping the language of “policymakers” and “thought leaders.” They now have no other way of thinking and talking about schooling. Hence ministers declaring that yet another bad PISA result to be yet another “wake-up call,” hence more announcements about lifting teachers’ pay or entry scores, hence new tests to make sure that teachers can spell, and hence more looking at other countries to see what they are doing right that might work here — all less from conviction than from not knowing what else to do. Seen from the outside it comes close to a famous definition of insanity.

But what is the alternative? Revive and reconfigure Gonski, the revolution’s one attempt at structural reform designed to “level the playing field,” as proposed in Waiting for Gonski by Tom Greenwell and Chris Bonnor? Put all schools, government and non-government alike, on a common basis of funding and regulation to stem the “residualisation” of the government sector and the damage being done to the learning and life chances of the most disadvantaged students?

Greenwell and Bonnor’s proposal, and the analysis underlying it have a lot going for them, on which more in a moment. But first the “but.” Could Gonski rise again? It enjoyed massive popular and professional support and still didn’t get up last time. What chance a revamped (but not necessarily less threatening) version promoted in the midst of the long post-Gonski hangover? When the non-government schools are already on such a good wicket?

And let’s imagine a school system on the other side of a substantial upheaval. We’d still have much or all of that counterproductive national machinery. We’d still have Canberra finding yet more ways to interfere in everything and federal education ministers wanting to be national education ministers. We’d still have an obsolete “grammar” of schooling centred on ranking rather than success for all. And we’d still have heads full of trivialising ideas about “outcomes,” “effectiveness,” “teacher quality” and “performance,” as well as the belief that salvation will be found in “practice” when the problems are essentially structural. If it is possible to say that the Greenwell and Bonnor proposal is too much, it is also possible to say that it is not enough.

Are we in a catch-22, where what needs doing can’t be done? Not quite. The one thing that can be done is the thinking that the revolution couldn’t do.

• Stop obsessing about a narrow range of “outcomes” and start thinking about all the things that schools do, are and should be. Schools are meant to — and often claim to — “develop the whole person” and not just the cerebral cortex. Very well: how do we know if they are? Getting a broader sense of cognitive “outcomes,” often urged, is just the start. Schooling is an experience as well as a producer of outcomes: around a fifth of most working lives is spent at school. Is it a safe, happy, rewarding experience? For whom? Schooling has outcomes for the social order as well as for individuals. Are they of the kind that a pluralist, democratic society needs?

The case has to be made for indicators that measure the quality of the experience, the diversity within each school rather than between schools, and the development (or otherwise) of “general competencies.”

• Stop devising bite-sized improvements and start trying to understand why incremental reform has such a disappointing record. Consider, for example, the current crop of solutions to teacher shortages, low morale and poor retention in the light of “reforms” stretching back to the 1960s. One by one, apparently sensible proposals led to new agencies and institutions for teacher training, registration, standards and discipline, and the setting of terms and conditions of employment — most within each of the eight states and territories and/or at the national level.

That tangle meant failure for the Rudd/Gillard proposals, and it means that the current crop will fail too. In much the same way, bite-sized improvements in teacher workload have driven one reduction after another in class sizes and one increase after another in numbers and categories of “support” staff. The result has been chronic cost escalation, an extended life for a fundamentally obsolete way of organising student and teacher work, and no improvement in teacher morale and workloads.

• Stop talking about the quality of teaching (or teachers) and start talking about the quality of work in schools. In fact, go a step further: stop focusing on teachers and teaching and begin at the beginning, with learning. For its fixation on teaching, the revolution can thank a vast body of research into “teacher effectiveness” premised on the assumption that it could replicate the success of the medical sciences by doing the same kind of science. The most fundamental mistake lies in imagining that schools are essentially deliverers of the service of teaching in much the same way that hospitals and clinics deliver health services. In reality, schools aren’t like that at all.

Schools are sites of the production of learning, not by teachers but by a four million–strong workforce otherwise known as students. The big determinant of their productivity is not the quality of supervision but the organisation of their work. An inherited “grammar” of schooling is organised around increasingly intense competition, from Year 1 all the way up to Year 12, for position in a ranked order. It guarantees failure for many. A more productive grammar would shift assessment from ranking to the growth and progress of each student and, around that, change the organisation of work and workplaces.

The implications stretch from infrastructure (dominated by the classroom) to industrial awards and teacher unionism to popular assumptions about what schooling looks like. That’s what needs thinking and talking about. It is terra incognita to effectiveness research, and to the revolution.

• As the grammar of schooling is to work and workplaces, so are the “sectors” to the industry as a whole. Don’t take them as a given for policy; do make them its objects. They are not, as is so often claimed, a means by which families can choose an “appropriate” or a “faith-based” schooling, or a way for governments to cut costs by permitting fees to be charged. They are the means by which some schools have sucked the most sought-after students and families out of other schools.

Social segregation in Australian schooling is now more pronounced than in any comparable OECD country. To social segregation is added religious division — government schools are secular, but almost all non-government schools are attached to one or other of around twenty religions and denominations. With that and other sorting devices comes the separation of language and cultural groups too. In this matter, we have a very good starting point for thinking and talking in Greenwell and Bonnor’s book. (And, we should add, a case of “outcomes” being given too much weight and social, religious and cultural division getting not nearly enough.)

• Don’t dwell on “transparency” (a Gillard favourite), or reporting and accountability (state ministers’ contribution to teacher workloads), or “school performance” (intimidatory ranking for schools as well as kids). Start talking about the structure of the system and its governance — the fragmentation of authority and responsibility within state and territories, between the sectors, and between these and Canberra and its purportedly “national” machinery.

How can these bizarre arrangements be reconstructed? Should we go back to the future? Return responsibility for schooling whence it came (and as the Constitution requires), to the states/territories? Install in each a cross-sectoral statutory authority with a remit to drive a long-term restructuring of the industry and its work and workplaces? If not that, then what?

There is no shortage of things that could be added to this list. The revolution’s questionable taken-for-granteds (“equality of opportunity,” “choice,” schooling’s economic contribution) badly need re-examining. So does the habit of looking for silver bullets in other countries rather than trying to understand how Australia’s system has developed and what it can and can’t become. So also the endless talk about what makes a good teacher or a good school to the exclusion of what makes a good system.

But the point is not in a to-do list. The point is that the revolution has failed and so has its way of thinking. The first step towards unbeaching the whale is to start thinking outside that suffocating box. •

Comment to: dean.ashenden@unimelb.edu.au

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A decade on, all this stands like Shelley’s Ozymandias, that colossal Wreck on which is inscribed: “Top 5 by ’25.” Even by its own miserable measure, the revolution failed, utterly. Australian schools have not raced up the OECD league table, as was promised. To the contrary, they are further away from the international Top Five than ever. Others have raced, we have languished. Where did it all go so badly, so hopelessly wrong?

Although Savage disclaims any concern with that question, he provides an important part of an answer in his penetrating analysis, the fruit of in-depth interviews with eighty-odd Australian and international “policy actors,” close scrutiny of the revolution’s myriad speeches, statements, reviews and polemics, and all the latest in “policy studies” theorising.

Savage finds three substantial defects in the apparatus of revolution. First, a “playbook” of reform, a manual of measures and strategies promulgated by the OECD and made just about compulsory by its standardised testing and international league tables. The playbook and its enforcement, eerily reminiscent of the textbook and the Friday test, turned platitudes about “evidence,” “outcomes,” “evidence-based policy” and “evidence-based practice” into a stifling orthodoxy; larger ways of thinking about schooling and its purposes were pushed to the margins or extinguished altogether.

Second, and particularly damaging in Australia, was a mania for “alignment.” “Alignment thinking” drove a massive effort to line up everything from new national institutions to the daily work of every teacher in every school behind the great task of lifting “outcomes” in the “fundamentals.”

Third, and underlying both the playbook and the alignment push, was a “techno-scientific” cast of mind that discounted practical know-how and local knowledge in favour of purportedly universal, evidence-based assertions about “what works.” Linear minds, Savage argues, set out to seduce the non-linear world of schooling “with the alluring promise of order, certainty and progress.” In practice, this overweening drive for order generated disorder of several kinds: pushback by the states and territories against Canberra and its obsessions; a complicated, confusing “policy environment” in which “policy actors” were never quite sure who was “steering the ship”; and a “disconnect” between what policy said and what was done in its name.

Savage’s analysis of the inner workings of the education revolution is quietly devastating, but he resists the temptation to dance upon its grave. What the revolution has wrought, he seems to suggest, is what we’ve now got, and we’ll have to make the best of it. Policy and policymakers need to be more respectful of difference in thinking and practice, and more tolerant of at least some disorder. Above all, they must end their “romance with rationalisation.”

I can second most of these motions without expecting them to be carried, for reasons more apparent to old-fashioned political history than to policy studies. The problem with the “education revolution” was not that it carried out the most wide-reaching and comprehensive reform of Australian schooling policy in the nation’s history, but that it didn’t. With the partial exception of the Gonski funding proposals, Rudd and Gillard left the unique, dysfunctional fundamentals of the Australian school system unnamed and untouched: three “sectors,” each with its own sources and levels of funding, regulation of student selection and choice, and form of government; each sector represented in each of the eight states and territories, making a total of twenty-four “jurisdictions”; and two levels of government, the state/territory and the federal, closely engaged in every jurisdiction.

Problems arising go well beyond a confusing “policy environment” in which “policy actors” are never quite sure who is “steering the ship.” No one steers the ship, or can. With the possible exception of a handful of powerful independent schools, no agency — not the jurisdictions, not the states/territories, not the Commonwealth and not the newly installed national machinery — has the scope of control and responsibility or the stability of direction needed to change anything of real educational significance.

This incompetent machinery is heavily defended. Around the sectors have formed ethnic, religious and class-based interest groups, all in for their chop, each intent upon defending its patch and willing to frustrate any larger scheme that might threaten it. Specifically, as was seen in the sad case of Gonski, the two non-government sectors will go to war over any change to funding or regulatory arrangements that might interfere with prosperity won at the expense of the government sector.

On this divisive and counterproductive organisation of schooling — the timid effort to change school funding excepted — the revolution had no policy. These matters therefore fall outside Savage’s analysis too. “Policy studies” study what “policy actors” do and say, not what they fail to do. A larger kind of “policy studies” would be less inclined to take its cue from “policy,” less interested in critique, less focused on the machinery of policy, and more interested in working out what needs to be done about the deformed structure of Australian schooling.

A first submission: get the feds out of schooling; in each state/territory, move towards a framework of funding and regulation common to all schools; and install within each state/territory a statutory body to keep schools at a safe distance from ever-changing ministers and governments. •

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As anyone with a HECS debt can tell you, education is no longer a process. It’s a commodity. At the non-compulsory ends of the education spectrum — early childhood at one end, university at the other — education is a business enterprise, even if the business is run on a not-for-profit basis. What if the right “policy lens” could help us understand the pressures and the competing interests better? Would that help us to better plan and deliver education and care to young children? After reading Neoliberalism and Early Childhood Education, my answer is a qualified “yes” — accompanied by nagging thoughts about where this book could have taken us.

Guy Roberts-Holmes and Peter Moss set out to do something potentially very powerful: to “emphasise the significance of the political and economic for early childhood education.” But their book is not a straight work of analysis: their purpose is forcefully subversive. They are here to explain not only how neoliberalism operates in early childhood education and care, but also how to resist it. They want to convince the rest of us that neoliberalism is “deeply problematic, eminently resistible and eventually replaceable.”

A historian by training, Peter Moss has devoted his academic career to interrogating the assumptions and ideologies that underpin early childhood policy and practice. His colleague at University College London, Guy Roberts-Holmes, is a former early childhood teacher who entered academia after several years working with children. They therefore bring experience to bear, along with a strong sense of mission.

The revolutionary framing might seem odd for a book about the early childhood education and care sector. At times, it feels that way — particularly when Roberts-Holmes and Moss draw their bows too long. Nonetheless, the pairing of these two subjects — neoliberalism and early childhood education — makes sense. As the authors note, neoliberal economics is the lingua franca of policymakers across the globe, and education systems have not escaped its reach. While there are piles of analysis on neoliberalism in the university sector and in schools, preschools, kindergartens and long daycare centres have received relatively little attention.

For those not familiar with how neoliberalism grew from a boutique economic theory to a manual for business and government, Roberts-Holmes and Moss only skim the surface. But they get away with it because they are writing not so much about neoliberalism as about resisting the dominant paradigm — which, at the moment, happens to be neoliberalism.

The authors define neoliberalism as a “meta-narrative” that “reduces everything to the economic.” The market mediates both economic and social relations, and citizens are replaced by customers. Their analysis has a strong sociological bent, and it takes a wide frame, describing “the conversion of non-economic domains, activities and subjects into economic ones.”

Roberts-Holmes and Moss survey the school education system to provide context for their study and get a head start on building their thesis. They are mightily displeased with what they see, mapping neoliberalism’s “infection” of education systems across the developed world, tracing it through the spread of policy ideas and assessment tools like the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, known as PISA.

The book focuses heavily on Britain, although the policy environment there is familiar enough to be accessible for Australian readers. Elements of the story will ring a bell (or, for some, welcome heralds of change) among Australian readers. These include national control of previously disparate and diverse school curricula; standardised national testing; and a relentless narrative of “parent choice” in school selection, even in the public sector.

For the authors, the “marketisation” of early learning and care is objectionable largely because it has fostered the emergence of private, for-profit providers, who compete with government and not-for-profit providers in a mixed market. In Britain, the number of private providers skyrocketed over the course of the 1990s, driven by demand from working families. By 2019, commercial providers accounted for 82 per cent, by value, of the long daycare sector.

The private sector has not come to such prominence everywhere. In Germany and Norway, for example, not-for-profit providers still dominate early learning and care. Roberts-Holmes and Moss demonstrate market similarities across the Anglosphere, from the United States to Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, but private capital has also found opportunities elsewhere across the globe, particularly in Asia. By 2013, two-thirds of the kindergartens in China were privately owned.

So how and why did the private sector come to play such a significant role in early learning in so many countries? As the authors show, where rapid expansion of the early learning sector was required it was private providers who were ready to move quickly enough to meet demand. The dynamic runs thus: the government neglects early childhood education and care; the government has an epiphany and realises it needs more of those services, in a hurry; private capital mobilises to meet demand.

While Roberts-Holmes and Moss are trenchant critics of neoliberalism, they also argue that, even if we accept the terms and tenets of orthodox economics, the operation of the open market in early childhood education and care is not “a roaring success.” The authors identify particular elements of market failure in the system, beginning with the fact that competition can’t drive down costs for parents because staffing is by far the largest expense for all providers, and pay and conditions for early childhood educators can’t be cut any further.

Using research from Europe, they also highlight the role of poorly informed consumers in driving the market. Parents are generally time-poor and find it difficult to compare the quality of competing early learning and care services. They are a long way from embodying Homo economicus, so they have little capacity to drive up quality by only purchasing services from the best providers.

Neoliberalism and Early Childhood Education includes a detailed account of the governance and assessment systems for early childhood and school education introduced in England over the past twenty-five years. For Roberts-Holmes and Moss, the very notion of national frameworks, curricula and quality standards — and the data they generate — is frightening. Disturbed by this evidence of intensified “surveillance capitalism,” they predict that our current trajectory will lead us to “monitoring and measuring children’s emotions” and trying to make them more “compliant,” and to “mass surveillance of school populations.” It’s sweeping and Orwellian. It’s also a shame they didn’t look further afield, to Australia.

Australia has leapfrogged most of the world in codifying and regulating high-quality early learning and care, via the National Quality Framework, a rigorous set of principles, policies and practices designed to ensure high-quality early learning and care for children. The curriculum document that underpins the Australian system, the Early Years Learning Framework, does not (as Roberts-Holmes and Moss might expect) reduce young children to passive, two-dimensional economic units. It treats them as capable, wonder-filled people and active citizens. Interviews with the highly respected team of Australian pedagogues who developed the Early Years Learning Framework might have provided a very helpful counterweight in this book.

Of course, the book contains a kernel of truth. Measuring human beings’ attributes, knowledge and performance is highly contested territory, and has been for millennia. But the idea that we mustn’t engage in any measurement at all, because it is invariably reductionist and a neoliberal trap, removes any possibility that we can improve children’s learning, wellbeing and development by assessing what we’re doing right now.

The sense of doom grows as the book develops. Neoliberalism has forced us to see the long daycare centre or preschool as “a factory or processing plant… that will ready children for the future.” Roberts-Holmes and Moss loathe the term “school readiness,” and they have a point: it’s dangerous to imagine that early childhood education and care services should, for example, teach children to read and write. It’s also sound to insist that children are not “empty vessels” who need to be filled with knowledge and skills before they start school. But I’m not sure that most commentators in Australia have that in mind when they speak about “school readiness.” Mostly, people who talk or write about the importance of pre-primary education want to see children arrive at school confident and happy, ready to thrive and learn.

Roberts-Holmes and Moss also take a swipe at Nobel Prize–winning economist James Heckman. The “Heckman curve” has proven a very effective tool in explaining the importance of investing public funds in the first five years of a child’s life. But Roberts-Holmes and Moss are having none of it — not even in relation to children in vulnerable and disadvantaged circumstances. In fact, they dismiss talk of early education as a leveller, or a tool of equality of opportunity, because it “negates the need for more radical political measures,” such as government redistribution of wealth. To be sure, a Marxian approach would even things up, but in the meantime, is it so wrong to want all children to have the same chance at getting a high-quality early education?.

The final chapter of the book is a call to action, with the authors asserting that “neoliberalism is entering into crisis” and that “the end may well be nigh.” (Those who claimed the same at the time of the global financial crisis, only to be disappointed, might disagree.) Drawing heavily on Foucault, Roberts-Holmes and Moss call on their readers to resist. They hold up the prospect of radical action to create alternative pathways for early childhood education and care: for example, “scrapping a system of commodified private services competing in a market-place,” and replacing it with “a system of early childhood services based on cooperative networks and public provision.”

Their method for achieving this? To redirect public funding away from the private for-profit sector. Confusingly, they concede that “private, for-profit services will continue to exist and can continue to compete with each other, but will do so without the benefit of public money or public encouragement.” This raises the obvious question: if the goal is to create a nirvana for all children, why develop a bifurcated system? And which children get the “good” early learning and care (provided by government and community groups) and which get the “bad” alternative?

The conclusion highlights a weakness woven throughout the book: the binaries of “good” and “bad,” and what they gloss over or ignore. For example, Roberts-Holmes and Moss lament the rise of competition and choice in the early childhood education and care sector, looking back wistfully to the old days (pre-1980s) when parents simply enrolled their child in “a good local centre, perhaps provided by the local council, along with other children from the neighbourhood — a public service for the community.” But what if that local centre wasn’t so good? What if its opening hours didn’t match that parent’s work commitments (or job aspirations)? What if the “neighbourhood” was in a low socioeconomic status area and the council couldn’t invest the resources required to meet the needs of all those children?

For the authors, it’s as though neoliberalism has wiped the slate clean, leaving us in a wasteland dominated by new technocratic, managerial structures that are killing us. Neoliberalism has certainly draped itself like a veil over the top of what we already had in the West: community, government and economy (none of it perfect, mind you). But it hasn’t suffocated the world as we knew it. Parents still care about their children; early childhood educators are still interested in children’s welfare; early childhood education and care services still deliver good services for children and their families.

In essence, Roberts-Holmes and Moss over-egg the pudding. In order to demonstrate that neoliberalism has changed and challenged the early childhood education and care system, it isn’t necessary to prove that it has sucked all the goodness out of it. Because it hasn’t. As a piece of polemic, this book is impassioned; as a work of analysis, it is often frustrating; as a roadmap for how to improve early childhood education and care, it is incomplete. But the book is certainly thought-provoking — and perhaps this is what really matters, because any discussion about the importance of early childhood education and care is to be welcomed. •

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The Vetting of Wisdom has many of these qualities. We are drawn into the struggle for control of a Melbourne private school, identifying with the heroine, headmistress Joan Montgomery, barracking for her supporters even in their missteps, willing the plotters to fail, hoping for right to defeat might while suspecting that in the end the numbers will tell a different story. As they do. But we are also reminded that power gained and exercised by a highly motivated but out-of-touch minority can sometimes be fragile. Those who managed to push Montgomery out of her position soon found themselves sidelined within their own church. It is easier to pull down than to build — and that is a lesson in power with relevance to organisations of all sizes.

The book is more than an account of a factional war. It is also an affectionate biography of an influential educator by a former school captain, Kim Rubenstein, now a distinguished professor of law at the University of Canberra. And it is obviously a labour of love — a tribute to a woman, Montgomery, who wasn’t able to depart the school on her own terms, with due recognition of the esteem in which she was held by peers, parents and pupils.

Its setting matters. Presbyterian Ladies’ College was the national leader in girls’ education, established in 1875 on the understanding that it would offer an education “equivalent to that provided by the leading colonial boys’ schools.” There was controversy from the earliest years, since its headmaster, Charles Henry Pearson, formerly a professor of modern history at King’s College London, was soon moonlighting as a political activist who advocated a land tax to break up the estates of the wealthy landed class. He would go on to serve as a Liberal parliamentarian and minister and was, by the time of his death, one of the world’s more influential public intellectuals because of his book National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893).

The title of The Vetting of Wisdom is borrowed from a newspaper article published during the battle for control of the school, and references a novel by one of the school’s many distinguished former students, Ethel Richardson, better known as Henry Handel Richardson. Other famous “old girls” include Vida Goldstein, destined to become a feminist activist, and the young woman who became Dame Nellie Melba. We are dealing with Melbourne Brahmans here, but also with a school that has played a significant part in the educational life of the nation.

The origins of the dispute lay in the merger of three Australian churches — Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational — in 1977 to become the Uniting Church. While most members voted to join the new church, a Presbyterian minority was determined to continue separately. That raised the question of what would happen to the schools associated with the three denominations. A “property commission” awarded the two most prestigious of them, PLC and Scotch College, to the Continuing Presbyterians. Litigation by the school council resulted in PLC’s becoming an independent corporate body, but the system for deciding the council’s subsequent composition virtually guaranteed the Continuing Presbyterians a permanent 12–5 majority.

None of this would have mattered if the Continuing Presbyterians hadn’t been determined to return the school to what they regarded as the straight and narrow. They believed PLC was too secular, too concerned with academic excellence as understood in a profane world dominated by the fallen, and too little concerned with sound religious instruction based on the Bible. They denied they were fundamentalists, but there was the strong whiff of the Covenanters about them. Certainly, no one who read this book would imagine that the civil wars ended with the Battle of Worcester.

In some ways, Montgomery was an unlikely target. The daughter of a bank manager, she had a long and impressive record as both a teacher and headmistress before her appointment to PLC for the 1969 school year. Like many of the women who were the leaders in this world of private girls’ schools, she remained unmarried: it was hard for this lapsed Catholic reader not to think of the parallel with the nuns who ran the Catholic girls’ schools of the same era, often with a similar independence.

Yet Montgomery was hardly a radical. The school was unmistakably Christian and provided solid religious education, although with a comparative and analytical dimension that didn’t please the critics. It also welcomed girls who were not Presbyterian. Rubenstein is herself Jewish and recalls that Montgomery went to the trouble of acquiring a Hebrew bible as a graduation gift, rather than the Christian version offered most other girls.

Montgomery had initiated “Liberal Studies” and “Human Relations” — including sex education — programs in the 1970s, which some critics managed to inflate into a dangerous trend towards humanism and even Marxism. Yet, while these gentle gestures to the revolutionary changes of the era were handy targets for her enemies, they don’t appear to have been the central issue. Rubenstein believes it was Montgomery’s emphasis on preparing girls to participate in society as the equals of men that was at the heart of the dispute.

Rubenstein also hints at another possibility. In the mid 1950s, after she had returned from Britain, Montgomery had asked Max Bradshaw, the session clerk at the Hawthorn Presbyterian Church where she had previously worshipped, for a transfer to Toorak, to which members of her family had also moved. When Bradshaw refused, Montgomery replied, “Oh, have I been excommunicated?!” It was Bradshaw who would lead the charge against Montgomery two decades later. Was he still nursing a grudge against a woman who, not yet thirty years old, had shown such an intolerable level of independence? Were similar kinds of monsters being made in the PLC of the 1970s and 1980s?

Montgomery was forced out of her job at sixty but has continued as a respected educator and citizen in the decades since. This deeply affectionate but well-researched portrait has been prepared by its author over many years. Rubenstein is a conscientious biographer who, while wearing her allegiance on her sleeve, has done her best to enter the minds of Montgomery’s opponents, who often behave intolerantly and unattractively. But we do need to understand such people, not least because the legacy of the conservative gender code they did so much to uphold remains with us, and notably in many of our private schools. The outsized influence still wielded by some of the male products of those schools is a problem for all of us. •

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But this is what Australia’s education ministers do. Every ten years or so they get together, accompanied by their minders and equipped with endless briefings and position papers. A day or two later they emerge from their talkfest armed with yet another soaring statement about where our schools should be.

Those who follow this ritual will have heard of 2008’s Melbourne Declaration and 2019’s Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Declaration. Yes, the education supremos make some progress on the easy bits, but anything really challenging is wrapped up in aspirational language and then gently placed in the too-hard basket until it all happens again ten years down the track. Some issues are routinely overlooked, including the very structures that fail our schools.

It is instructive to subject the ministers’ grand statements to an evidence test, the sort of thing they expect schools to do. My co-authors and I do this in Structural Failure: Why Australia Keeps Falling Short of Its Educational Goals, a new paper from the Gonski Institute for Education. Unhappily, our paper demonstrates that Australia’s school system and political leaders have failed. Schools operate the best they can, but amid policies that are holding our country back.

What claims do the education ministers make? They keep saying that our education system promotes excellence and equity. It might promote them, but it doesn’t achieve them. On the excellence side we’ve been through two decades of very ordinary student achievement scores, many of which are heading south. Yes, schooling is about much more than test scores, and some of the tests themselves don’t measure up, but most of the national report cards say the same thing: could do better!

The education ministers’ recent declarations have placed equity up there in lights. That makes sense: serious inequities need to be fixed before real achievements can happen. But they don’t seem to have joined these dots, because they don’t keep up their equity efforts. For almost two decades the figures have told much the same story: equity in school education is in decline. It is the socioeconomic status of families and schools, rather than what schools actually do, that creates around two-thirds of student achievement. Kids from poor families are not getting the much-needed break. Statements about reducing disadvantage are mocked by recurring evidence that we’re doing the opposite.

The education declarations say we are committed to providing education that is inclusive and free from any form of discrimination. Yet school fees and entry tests discriminate and exclude. More schools than ever have overt or covert control over who walks through the gates. On top of that, competition between schools, far from improving quality, sees too many schools seeking the same preferred students. Pity about the others. Meanwhile, too many schools operate as social, academic, ethnic and religious enclaves, making mockery of the education ministers’ aspiration that education should promote and contribute to a socially cohesive society.

We constantly hear about the need to support all students, but the distribution, efficiency and effectiveness of this support is highly uneven. It doesn’t go to those who need it most, inevitably reducing its effectiveness in improving overall student outcomes. An analysis of where the money goes reveals duplication and inefficiencies: support goes to all three school sectors, but our current public–private system isn’t delivering all the goals set for school education.

Where will all this leave Australia after another decade? We have a good idea of where, because recent data lay out the trends for all to see. The diverse team who wrote Structural Failure, including academics and school principals from both public and private sectors, believe that existing structures guarantee that our schools will continue to be let down by the system. Our focus on structures and mechanisms is a deliberate step away from the advocacy and avoidance that has condemned school education to more of the same for decades. A starting point is to illustrate, as our paper does, the pointlessness of the recurring declarations that have institutionalised this failure.

Changing what we have won’t be easy. We need to agree on the purpose, principles and values of school education and prioritise strategies to achieve these. In the process we should learn from our own experience and that of equivalent countries. Other countries have reconciled the vexed issue of school equity and choice. Why can’t we? Creating a level playing field on which schools can operate is essential — it that too hard? It would also make sense to create a better and lasting balance between education as a common good and education as a provider of individual benefits. And can’t we create some distance between school education — and its funding — and the vagaries of politics? Last but not least, if we manage to venture in these directions, wouldn’t it be a good idea to monitor and report on progress?

Governments and their education ministers seem committed to achieving best practice inside schools, especially in the classroom. But they are reluctant to tackle the wider problems that cast a shadow over what they do. Meaningless declarations and good intentions are not enough. Unless we change direction, our national goals for schooling, elegantly reshaped every decade, will continue to reveal what we have failed to do rather than where we want to be. •

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Let that soak in. This year, Victorian government spending will grow by more than 25 per cent. The additional spending will amount to close to $3500 for every man, woman and child in the state. That’s roughly $70 per person, per week, in new spending.

There are tax cuts too, but they are dwarfed by the new spending. If the Morrison government’s budget relies too much on tax cuts to stimulate consumer spending and business investment, the Andrews government’s budget does the reverse: just as its coronavirus strategy was an extreme in top-down control, so is its economic strategy.

Most of that is genuine stimulus: one-off measures in response to the economic devastation of the state by months of lockdown, such as a single line item in the budget papers, with no further breakdown, assigning $2163 million to “business support.”

Some of it is transport and other investment proposed for other reasons, but brought forward as a stimulus to economic activity in a year in which Victoria’s gross state product, even on optimistic assumptions, is projected to be 4 per cent lower than a year earlier. That includes $2.7 billion in this fiscal year that will rapidly, if only briefly, scale up the previously pitiful level of state investment in social housing.

And some of it is not stimulus at all, but uses the cover of stimulus action to step up Victoria’s routine budget spending in areas that interest Labor activists, and to commit to long-term infrastructure investments that would almost certainly fail a genuine cost–benefit analysis.

In short, there is much to praise in this budget, but also much to regret. That includes the government’s commitment to build the worst transport project Melbourne has ever seen: the so-called Suburban Rail Loop, in reality a twenty-six kilometre tunnel under the middle southeastern suburbs from Cheltenham to Box Hill. Tunnels eat money, and the demand for this one is likely to be small. No business case has been produced, and no cost–benefit analysis, but it will cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.

It is not the first lemon a Victorian government has tried to sell to voters. The Andrews government won power in 2014 partly because the Liberals thought it would be a great idea to spend $7 billion of taxpayers’ money to build a 4.4 kilometre tunnel under the inner suburbs to link two freeways; the taxpayers disagreed. But the Suburban Rail Loop is the lemon that makes other lemons taste like oranges.

Not surprisingly, the ratings agencies yesterday implied that this budget could lose Victoria its AAA credit rating. Standard & Poor’s said there was a 50–50 chance that the state could be downgraded, and this would happen if it came to the view that “the state’s financial management has weakened.”

Well, with respect, it clearly has: as far out as 2023–24, well past the time for stimulus, the budget projects $3.6 billion a year of new routine spending — $1.6 billion of it net of spending cuts and contingencies allowed for in the budget — plus roughly $6 billion a year of additional investment in assets.

Stimulus is certainly what Victoria needs right now, and this budget delivers it. But it has to be paid for, just as investments in roads, rail, schools and hospitals all have to be paid for one day. Governments should be brave and bold about delivering stimulus at this time. On that front, this budget succeeds admirably.

But equally, governments should be wary about the long-term costs of doing so, knowing that the bills will come in at some point, to be covered either directly or through permanently higher interest bills. They should not use the cover of stimulus to smuggle in a step-up in spending levels, and they need to prioritise asset investments that will deliver most bang for buck. This budget fails on both counts.

A bit of background is necessary here, because Twitter gives me the impression that many Victorians have little idea how different their state’s economic position is from that of the rest of Australia. Not only was Victoria home to 90 per cent of the Australians who died of coronavirus, but even after the unexpectedly large rebound in jobs last month, the state accounted for 94 per cent of Australia’s net loss of jobs in the year to October: 124,000 jobs lost in Victoria but just 8000 in the rest of Australia.

Female employment year on year grew by 24,000 in the rest of Australia, but shrank by 105,000 in Victoria, where hospitality and entertainment were largely shut down. For the same reasons, employment of workers aged fifteen to twenty-four shrank by 4000 in the rest of Australia, but by 92,000 in Victoria.

We won’t know the full devastation of lost businesses until JobKeeper ends, but the intensity and duration of Victoria’s lockdowns make it likely that it will also lose more workplaces than the rest of Australia combined. Even with that massive increase in state government spending, projections by the Victorian Treasury and its federal counterpart together imply that while Victoria’s output this fiscal year will be 4 per cent lower than a year ago, output will be only marginally lower in the rest of Australia.

And even that forecast relies on the government’s huge spending increase igniting an extraordinarily rapid recovery. The budget projects that real gross state product will grow by 9 per cent over the course of 2021, the sort of growth rate normally claimed only by China. And most of that would happen in the first half of the year — assuming no more coronavirus and no more lockdowns. As financial market insiders would put it, the risks in that forecast are on the downside.

The level of stimulus is extraordinary, however, and it’s welcome. Unlike the Morrison government, the Andrews government is doing as economists have suggested. In response to the slump in housing construction, it has introduced several new policies, but the big one is a crash program of building social housing, for which waiting lists now extend many years. The promise of another 9000 homes for some of those unable to afford secure and suitable housing in the private market is a marriage of good economic and social policies.

One hopes the government will not then just revert to the inadequate investment levels of the past, as the Gillard government did when Kevin Rudd’s 2009–10 public housing stimulus expired. In fairness, this depends even more on what the federal government is willing to do — which, at present, is not much.

The budget also commits $250 million to the Grattan Institute’s proposal for a two-year program to hire tutors to help struggling schoolchildren catch up, particularly those most affected by the lockdowns. While most stimulus programs, including new infrastructure, provide jobs for blokes, this one will provide much-needed jobs for women.

The budget also envisages lifting the current level of infrastructure spending by almost half, which would be welcome if it also included a transparent, independent way of selecting priority projects. No such luck. In Victoria, as elsewhere, the choice of projects is driven by what the government thinks will give it the most political bang for buck. What will give Victorians the most social/economic bang for their buck is irrelevant.

The Victorian Liberals are still clinging to the East West Link as their branded project, even though it has twice been rejected by the voters and three times by cost–benefit analyses. Labor has done much better with its branded project of removing level crossings, but with that scheme now growing familiar, Andrews has been keen to find a new project.

The federal Liberals have focused on getting a train line built to Melbourne Airport. It might not be needed — it will offer no more than Skybus already provides, except easier access from other suburban lines — but the polls show it is the top project among voters. Saturday’s agreement between the Andrews and Morrison governments means it will now become reality, with the two governments adopting the cheaper of two alternative proposals. The cost is pencilled in as $10 billion, and the completion date as 2029.

Andrews’s own new branded project, however, is the Suburban Rail Loop. It appears that this emerged from his political circle rather than from the railways, let alone transport economists. As originally presented, it was intended to run for ninety kilometres around Melbourne’s middle and outer suburbs, largely in tunnels, with a number of stations in the southeast but very few in the west. The cost was claimed to be $50 billion, which no one believed.

But the government is now proposing to build only the southeastern quarter of the loop, running underground from Southland shopping plaza through Monash and Deakin universities and selected suburban shopping centres (which developers own the redevelopment rights, I wonder?) to Box Hill station in Melbourne’s Chinese heartland.

The budget commits $2.2 billion to the initial stages, primarily for planning, land purchase and so on. Treasurer Tim Pallas promised that a business case will be presented next year, and no contracts for construction would be let until the voters have their say at the 2022 election.

Even the cost of this twenty-six kilometre tunnel might well be $50 billion: no one knows, including the government, which has committed to build it regardless. It is economic lunacy to choose infrastructure projects in this way. Infrastructure Victoria, which was set up to provide objective advice to the government on priorities, has been ignored and sidelined.

No government can build every project we want: it has to prioritise, and select which projects will give the community most value for money. Building the Suburban Rail Loop means the government will not have the resources to take up other, more urgent projects such as the second line of the Metro, intended to run from Clifton Hill to the massive redevelopment site of Fishermans Bend.

Choices have implications. In the ACT, the Labor–Greens government had to shelve its hospital redevelopment plan for a whole four-year term to pay for its own branded infrastructure project, Canberra’s first tramline. The huge cost of building a long underground railway to meet scant demand will push many other projects to the sidelines, possibly for decades.

It would be welcome if, in 2022, the Liberals ditched the East West Link and promised instead to ask Infrastructure Victoria to carry out cost–benefit studies of the key infrastructure choices under discussion. Get the facts, then decide. By contrast, the Andrews government has taken its lead from the Queen of Hearts in the trial scene of Alice in Wonderland: “Sentence first — verdict afterwards.”

The Suburban Rail Loop is the prime example of a problem that afflicts not only the Victorian budget but also Australian politics generally. Just as the hard right sees every issue through the prism of its fixation on waging culture war, so governments focus on what they brand as their projects, and which projects are politically rewarding to announce, rather than on delivering services to us that provide the best bang for buck.

Then, once the political gains of the announcement have been banked, they lose interest in delivering outcomes. The $5 billion the federal government promised for projects in northern Australia, and failed to deliver, is a classic example. But all governments now make wide use of another form of it: financing new projects by “reprioritising” old ones.

This budget has a beauty: a one-line item “reprioritising” $1836 million (2 per cent) of government spending this year alone, and a similar amount over the next three years. It was obscured so well in the budget papers (as one line in table 4.5 of Budget Paper 2) that as far as I can see, no one in the mainstream media reported it. It’s a way of saying: “Oh, by the way, $3.7 billion of the spending we promised you in past budgets won’t be delivered. But just look at what we’re offering you this time!”

There is no information on what past promises have been discarded in this way. It’s politically much easier to make spending cuts that are not announced than to make ones that are. This budget appears to have no announced spending cuts, but if you can cut 2 per cent from spending without announcing what you have cut, why go to the trouble of being transparent about it? This is an issue that oppositions and transparency reformers need to focus on.

One of the budget papers was also discarded: the old Budget Paper 4, the detailed statement of the government’s investment program. Treasurer Pallas blamed the rush of getting the budget ready, and promised it would be back for the budget next May. We have to take him at his word, but the issue matters.

Among other things, BP4 told us exactly how much the government has spent, is spending, and plans to spend on each project, and when it is expected to finish. It is the annual fessing-up to any blowouts in cost or completion dates. It is also a full account of the government’s investment priorities. It should be required by other governments as well, not least the federal government.

It’s also notable that policy commitments are now being made under increasingly long timespans, to make them look bigger. The budget papers tell us Victoria has now committed to $134 billion of new investments, which is roughly ten times the level of its annual investment up to now, and seven times the level projected from here on.

There is only one tax rise in this budget: the little tax on electric vehicles ($250 a year for fully-electric vehicles, $200 for hybrids) to ensure that they pay something towards the cost of providing the roads they drive on. This has provoked predictable outrage, but I seriously question whether it will change anyone’s decision on whether to buy an electric car. Pallas said yesterday that Treasury assumes it will have no impact on vehicle demand.

Politically, despite all the problems it has/had created with Covid-19, the Andrews government remains dominant. This budget comes at the midway point of its four-year term, and the polls tell us Labor would comfortably win any election held now. The apparent eradication of the virus, at least while Victoria was isolated from the world, has turned a looming disaster into a political triumph.

Coronavirus is an ongoing story, with more twists and turns to come. Economic concerns have been ignored by Victorians and their government, but they will become more prominent as fears of the virus recede. This budget seems to leave out nothing in its willingness to lift the economy out of recession through government spending. But I did find one place where the government had exercised spending restraint.

On the same page as the commitment to spend $2200 million on the preliminaries of the Suburban Rail Loop, the government has committed to spend just $4 million over the next four years to improve bus services — the form of public transport that residents of the outer suburbs most rely on. •

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Ridiculous? Well, this is essentially the system we have set up for second-income earners in Australia, most of whom are women. Here and elsewhere, Covid-19 has shone a spotlight on how inequality is baked into our social structures, and one of the many inequalities so exposed is the differential impact of crises like this pandemic on women.

It’s a deep divide, beginning with the high proportion of women doing the essential caring work in hospitals, the indispensable cleaning of public and private places, and the nurturing of children in the home. In order to take up the last of those roles, women often have little choice but to reduce their paid working hours. If this weren’t enough, women’s jobs were among the first to be cut in sectors such as hospitality and retail.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised about these inequalities. In Australia today, just seven of the thirty federal government ministers are women — an imbalance that extends across state and territory government too, with women filling only forty-eight (or 26 per cent) of 181 ministerial positions. When it comes to pressing public policy issues, whether they are social, economic or political, women are noticeably absent from the key decision-making forums.

So, are we going to continue to buy this pre-Covid product, or are we going to demand something more fit for purpose?

This week, a formidable coalition led by former foreign minister Julie Bishop, epidemiologist professor Fiona Stanley, former SA premier Jay Weatherill and philanthropist Nicola Forrest has called for a major structural reform that has the potential to build a more equal society. What they want is a high-quality, universally accessible childcare and early learning system.

On one view, “childcare” might be thought of as being the responsibility of individual parents. Looked at differently, though, high-quality childcare is fundamental to ensuring greater equality. It is also key to increasing women’s workforce participation. In Australia, women are currently 38 per cent of all full-time employees, and 68 per cent of all part-time employees. While some women want to work part-time, research confirms that many want full-time employment but can’t afford it.

Even after subsidies, full-time childcare fees absorb a quarter of household income for an average earning couple with two children in Australia, compared with the OECD average of 11 per cent. A family getting the maximum subsidy (on an income of less than $68,000) still needs to find an annual $9000 for full-time care. Almost half of Australian parents with children under five report struggling with the costs.

This means that if both parents earn $60,000 a year and the secondary earner — usually a woman — chooses to work more than three days a week, the secondary earner currently loses 90 per cent of the income on the fourth day, and all of it on the fifth day. This obviously has a brutal impact on women’s career trajectories, with part-time work rarely leading to leadership roles.

Lifting women’s workforce participation is an important step on the road to ensuring that both women and men have an equal opportunity to become political leaders. There’s plenty of room for progress — of the 193 countries in the United Nations, only thirteen are led by a woman.

Representative democracy is about representing the needs of the whole community and drawing on the expertise of all people. The current system discourages women from becoming active citizens for a range of reasons, including their disproportionate responsibility for childcare. Sharing the caring, not only within the family but within society as a whole, is fundamental to ensuring women are equally represented at decision-making tables around the country.

Universal, accessible early learning also benefits the children who are our future leaders. Research shows that the early years of a child’s life, up to five years of age, are critical to their future academic, health, social and professional trajectories. Play-based early learning develops the executive functions critical to our nation’s economic future. Competencies and emotional frameworks that lead to high-value jobs (which should include childcare) in the fastest-growing sectors are developed in those early years. We are investing in our future if we invest in children’s education at this age.

While we know these early years are critical, preschool is currently only universally available for four-year-olds, except in Victoria, where three-year-old preschool is becoming available. Childcare varies hugely in quality and is simply unaffordable for many Australian families.

These problems are reflected in the data, which shows that many children are continuing to fall through the gaps. The Australian Early Development Census reveals that one in five children entering school are developmentally vulnerable in one or more domains. If we look only at Indigenous children, the numbers are stark: six in ten are developmentally vulnerable. By the time these kids get to school, critical neural pathways are embedded. It will be a struggle for them to catch up, whether in reading, writing or emotional regulation.

As our leaders search around for “shovel ready” projects to get the economy back on track, they need to look beyond the obvious strategies of investing in bridges and roads. An investment in building universal, accessible early learning in Australia will have a multiplier effect, improving our economy and society in ways that benefit everyone. •

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“It is the socioeducational status of students, even ahead of the work of schools, which is having an increasing impact on student achievement,” a forthcoming Gonski Institute paper finds. At the heart of our problems, it suggests, is the nature of choice and competition between schools and sectors. “Our schools are increasingly characterised less by what they do and more by who they enrol.”

The solution, Piccoli believes, is to create a level playing field in which all schools are resourced and regulated on the same basis. “We have one of the most segregated school systems in the world,” he says. “Australia needs dramatic reform to deal with this.” Specifically, he proposes that non-government schools, in return for full public funding, should be subject to the same prohibition on charging fees as government schools and required to enrol all comers.

As the Gonski paper puts it, “A public charter of operation and obligations needs to apply equally to all funded schools.” Under such a charter, private schools would continue to be self-governing and could maintain their religious character, just as church schools do in Canada and New Zealand. But they would be regulated in the same way as all other schools.

Piccoli takes this a step further. “Why not fully fund all schooling options in primary education given that they are almost fully funded already?” he suggests. “I propose only primary schools at this stage because it’s where the smallest funding gap is.”

Two premises underlie Piccoli’s proposal: first, that the intense concentrations of social disadvantage found in the Australian school system are a major driver of declining student wellbeing and achievement; second, that those clusters of disadvantage are generated by competition between fee-charging schools and free, comprehensive schools.

He is on solid ground in both respects. Consider this statement by George Pell when he was archbishop of Sydney in 2006: “Catholic schools are not educating most of our poor, especially at the primary level. Seventy-two per cent of Catholic students from families with lowest third of family income attend government infant/primary schools and only 19 per cent attend Catholic schools.”

Bishops may not have been so candid since then, but we know from My School that the proportion of disadvantaged students at systemic Catholic schools has further declined over the last decade, and the share at independent schools is even lower.

Because it is more difficult for low-income families to access fee-charging schools, children from disadvantaged backgrounds are under-represented in those schools and over-represented in public schools that can be just minutes away. The degree of disadvantage in one sector is an artefact of the lack of it in the other. Of the schools in which more than half of the children come from highly disadvantaged families, 95 per cent are public schools.

In practice this means that the kids who bring the least cultural and social capital through the school gates — whose educational success is most dependent on what happens in school — have the odds further stacked against them. Students with acute learning challenges find themselves vying for teacher attention with others in the same boat, in classrooms disrupted by behaviour that is ultimately the product of poverty and social dysfunction. The aspirations of the school community are accordingly low, as is teacher morale, recruitment and retention.

Piccoli views these arrangements as a recipe for educational failure. As the Australian Council for Educational Research has repeatedly found, the social background of students’ peers has as powerful an effect on their educational achievement as their own family background. The Gonski review recognised this, recommending extra funding for schools with high concentrations of disadvantaged children, but Piccoli is proposing that we can tackle the root cause of the problem. Making all schools fully taxpayer-funded and therefore free to users, his argument goes, would produce a more even distribution of advantaged and disadvantaged students through the whole school system, substantially reducing social segregation and removing a major structural driver of educational underperformance.

But would it be affordable? Piccoli’s argument is that the rapid growth in public funding to non-government schools in recent decades means it wouldn’t be a huge leap. By 2017, non-government schools received somewhere between 83 and 105 per cent of the recurrent public funding going to government schools that enrolled similar students. So it would now cost only an additional $1.1 billion annually to fund all non-government schools at the same level as public schools. Topping up capital funding to equivalent levels would cost the government a further $966 million each year. For perspective, the annual cost of the federal government’s Stage 1 tax cuts is $8 billion, and the additional annual cost of each of the Stage 2 and 3 tax cuts is likely to be double that.

Piccoli has suggested that wealthy schools wishing to continue charging fees would no longer receive as much, or perhaps any, government support, creating savings. Governments provide more than a billion dollars in subsidies annually to around 200 exclusive private schools where the fees are already higher than the total income per student at public schools. Starting with primary schools would reduce the initial cost of the plan further, although secondary schools are where the most acute social segregation occurs.

There’s a larger point, too. If Piccoli’s case about the structural cause of Australia’s declining educational performance is correct, the increase in government outlays would be more than justified by greater productivity, more jobs, better health, and reduced crime and welfare dependence.

Research conducted by Deloitte Access Economics for the federal government in 2016 found that a 5 per cent increase in scores in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment would increase GDP by around $12 billion by 2066. The report could have pointed out that this figure also represents the cost of the decline in our PISA scores — also around 5 per cent — so far this century. Ultimately, making users pay for school education is costing us far more than it saves our governments.

A more equal distribution of obligations and responsibilities across the school system also has the potential to transform the incentives faced by individual schools, shifting their focus from recruiting the “right” students to making the students they have brighter. Education researcher John Hattie uses the term coasters to describe schools that look successful simply because they are populated by the offspring of the affluent and well educated. They are good at recruiting students with natural aptitude, but they don’t add anything to our overall educational achievement. With less power to discriminate over whom they enrol, the coasters would be compelled to focus less on marketing and more on improving learning.

If there is a sound educational case for Piccoli’s plan, what about the politics? At the moment, Catholic and independent schools can have their cake and eat it too: they are publicly funded to almost the same level as government schools but retain the right to charge fees and enrol selectively. Why would private schools or parents entertain any disturbance of the status quo?

One reason is that current arrangements don’t actually provide choice in a meaningful way. Think of those less well-off Catholics who overwhelmingly attend public schools, and do so in much greater numbers than their more well-off co-religionists. Piccoli’s proposal would enable low-income families to exercise their first preference for their child’s education, an initiative that would likely also resonate with those parents who struggle to pay the fees at their non-government school of choice. It could also appeal to those religious figures for whom the under-representation of disadvantaged kids at their schools is a cause of unease.

And in terms of immediate organisational self-interest, full public funding would position non-government schools to expand their enrolment share. Christian Schools Australia made the case for full public funding of non-government schools in its submission to the Gonski review. National Catholic Education Commission executive director Jacinta Collins has greeted Piccoli’s proposal with qualified approval. It “may have some merit,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald.

But other parts of the non-government sector would likely reject full public funding as long as it meant they could no longer charge fees as well. The most prestigious independent and Catholic schools wouldn’t readily relinquish the market power their present status provides, and for some parents the right peer group and a resource advantage over neighbouring schools are precisely the attraction.

But if Piccoli’s proposal became a serious possibility, the non-government sectors would have to think very carefully. They could not rationalise rejection on the grounds of choice, because that’s precisely what Piccoli’s proposal provides. Nor could they appeal to affordability, because they would be arguing against free schooling. To continue to demand the right to charge fees and enrol selectively would simply be to insist on an unsustainable claim to privilege, aided by the public purse.

Because Piccoli’s approach affirms that every family, as citizens and taxpayers, is entitled to access a fully publicly funded education — and that there shouldn’t be a financial penalty attached to a conscientious choice of a non-government school — it invites a coalition between two groups that currently exist in opposition: those who want education to be free and those who want choice. This potential coalition would cut across the secular–religious lines just as decisively as when Protestant and Catholic school authorities decided in the mid twentieth century that their common material interests were more important than their spiritual differences.

Such a coalition would be a necessary precondition for fundamental change, but proponents of public education would have reason to baulk, fearing that free private schools would lead to a significant loss of enrolments. In the short term, the fear would be justified — the whole objective is to make church schools just as accessible and inclusive as public schools. In the long run, though, it would mean that schools will compete for enrolments on the basis of what they do rather than on their attractive student profiles and resource advantages.

A range of complex issues would need to be tackled to achieve this new settlement. “The starting point has to be cross-sectoral and wider community consultations to establish consensus on the purposes and principles which should underpin our schools,” says the Gonski Institute report. Its immediate achievement is to raise the thorny question of how responsibilities and obligations, as well as resources, are shared across our school systems.

The alternative to confronting this question is to continue drifting along in a post-Gonski torpor, imagining ourselves to be closing in on needs-based funding, the supposed panacea for our educational ills, as it grows ever more elusive. Between 2009 and 2018, government funding for private schools increased by more than five times the increase for government schools, even though the latter enrol four in every five disadvantaged students, research published in June in the Nine newspapers revealed. In response, the Grattan Institute’s Peter Goss observed that private schools are on track to receive their full needs-based funding allocation by 2023 while “very few government schools will ever get fully funded.” As he added, “By 2030 we’re going to be having this same argument and it’s all predictable from now.”

It is predictable, in part, because Australia continues to have two conversations about school education that never really join up. On the one hand is the central challenge of ensuring our schools are adequately resourced to meet our students’ educational needs, a challenge we are abjectly failing. On the other is the old debate about why some parents have to pay out of their own pockets for school education and others don’t, an argument that has simmered away since before Federation.

The trajectory of government funding over the last decade will seem perverse to many. But parents who pay for private schooling — and who contrast their own experience with that of neighbours, sometimes better off than themselves, whose children enjoy a fully publicly funded education — have reason to see things differently. When these parents learn that their child’s school, and other schools like them, are receiving more government support than ever, they are apt to think that this is only fair.

What Piccoli’s intervention points to is a way we can join the two conversations up, comprehensively resolving the old debate so as to create room to address the urgent contemporary questions. “We don’t think you should have to pay school fees anymore — and we’re going to provide the public funding for your school so you don’t have to,” a politician who ran with this proposal would be able to tell the electorate. “You have the right to choose your child’s school, and you shouldn’t be financially penalised for your choice.”

Having settled that question once and for all, we would be in a much better position to recognise the corollary. Once a private school is funded just like a public school, it no longer needs to charge fees — and suddenly a level playing field, in which all schools are free and inclusive, and facilitate choice and diversity, looks possible. •

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Economics — ironically one of the disciplines that will be made more expensive by these changes — would suggest this is unwise. Australian governments have a long and unusually proud history of being terrible at picking winners. The changes to university fees are just the latest example.

As we teach our first-year students in economics, if an industry has a shortage of skilled workers, the businesses in that industry will compete vigorously with one another to attract that limited supply of workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions. Those wages and working conditions then attract more people to enter that industry, thus dealing with the shortage.

If this process isn’t happening — and there is evidence that this is the case — then one of the assumptions underpinning this model is false. Institutional constraints could be preventing wages from rising. The firms in that industry may have market power and be suppressing wages. Or perhaps information is asymmetric: future workers (today’s students) may not be receiving the career advice they need to identify the industries that have the highest salaries and the most opportunities.

Getting to the core of why the market is not solving the problem, and better designing our markets so that they do solve the problem, is the most effective approach. Having the government guess which industries will need workers in the future and changing government subsidies to deliver that outcome is not helpful, particularly given that HECS defers the cost of degrees into the never-never for people who, given their tender age, aren’t thinking that far ahead anyway.

The university fee changes are just the latest example of how successive Australian governments prefer their own guesswork over the working of the market. History shows that this delivers worse outcomes for Australians, particularly when politicians and their ideological and industrial preferences start shaping outcomes.

In the post-Covid-19 recovery, the government is considering picking which industries are to be declared “essential industries” and thus deserving of government subsidies and protection from competition. It remains to be seen which industries, if any, it will deem to be “non-essential industries.”

On climate change, successive governments have revealed a strong preference for using taxpayers’ dollars to clean up the mess left by big polluters rather than using a price on carbon to get big polluters to reduce their pollution in the first place by having the market achieve least-cost abatement.

On energy, the government is considering using taxpayers’ dollars to build a coal-fired power plant instead of setting a predictable and credible energy policy that allows the market to decide the cheapest and most efficient form of energy generation.

On trade, normally it is businesses and households that determine how much trade we have and with which countries we have it. But the government seems set on imposing restrictions so that Australia doesn’t have “too much” trade with any one country, where what constitutes “too much” will be, again, determined by bureaucrats.

On investment, the government’s new foreign investment regime adds more unpredictability and arbitrariness to a system that already had too much of both. Not only does treasurer Josh Frydenberg have the power to decide which investments are “okay” and which are not — and without giving detailed reasons for doing so — but he can also now withdraw approvals that were previously given.

Perhaps the preference for picking winners is tapping into the public’s mood. Many have lost trust in markets out of a belief, often true, that they are not delivering the outcomes society wants. But this doesn’t mean markets do not work. It just means that we are terrible at designing our markets properly.

When my brother and I were kids, we decided to build a cubbyhouse while on holidays in the Grampians National Park. We used flimsy ropes to hold up a floor made of brittle sticks. It didn’t end well. Does this mean that cubbyhouses don’t work? Of course not. The problem isn’t the concept of cubby houses, the problem is that my brother and I were terrible at designing them.

The same is true for markets. If markets are not delivering the outcomes society wants, it doesn’t mean that the concept of markets is flawed, it means that we are awful at designing markets and should strive to do better. The reason firms pollute too much is that we’ve made it free for them to do so — hardly a surprising outcome. Making pollution free is a very unusual decision given the costs of pollution for our health and wellbeing. But, nevertheless, that’s the choice Australians have made through our elected officials.

The outcomes markets deliver are shaped by the rules we develop to govern those markets. Indeed, markets can’t function without rules. Take away property rights and information from buyers and sellers, for example, and markets quickly fail.

Australians need to get smarter about how we design our markets. If markets are not delivering the outcomes we want, the solution is not to abandon them. Government guesswork has not provided good outcomes thus far. There’s no reason to think it will do any better in the future. •

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On this question the government could find itself between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, if it doesn’t provide funds, it might be back to the future, a repeat of amazing scenes in 1962 when Catholic schools in Goulburn closed and sent their students to government schools — which, of course, couldn’t cope. One non-government school principal, speaking on condition of anonymity, thinks that parents will be reluctant to change schools mid-year, but after that? The impact, he says, “could be really substantial.” Many of his colleagues are reported as agreeing.

On the other? If the government pays up without thinking through the consequences, it will compound a big and chronic problem. And, we should add, it will miss a golden opportunity.

One part of that big problem is financial. Australia’s dual system — a nationwide government school system and a nationwide non-government school system — is inefficient. Governments spend more than they should because there is so much duplication of facilities and services. A bad set-up is made worse by bad administration. Many non-government schools now get almost as much from the public purse as their government-sector equivalents (astonishingly, some actually get more).

Contrary to rhetoric, this generous public funding is used not to reduce fees and increase “choice and access” but to ice the cake and attract customers away from the government schools. Over the decades since the “Goulburn strike” forced the hand of government, Catholic schools have moved upmarket, effectively sending poor Catholic families to the government sector. Many independent schools have been turned into five-star resorts. It is at this point that the financial problem becomes a social, educational and governance problem.

Australian schools play by two very different sets of rules, to the advantage of one sector but at the expense of the other and of the school system as a whole. Schools that charge fees and parents who pay them are permitted to select and choose. Most of those that don’t pay fees can’t choose or select. The choosers usually opt for schools where their sons and daughters will find other students just like them. The chosen schools become more socially homogeneous, and so do the rejected schools. In the upshot Australian schools are among the most socially segregated in the Western world, and are segregated by religion and ethnicity as well. That undermines the work of schools as engines of social cohesion and sites of students’ social learning. The evidence suggests that segregation is also bad for academic performance.

There are unfairnesses as well, and they cut in both directions. On the one hand, most government schools and parents have limited access to choice and selection. But on the other, parents who can choose must pay to exercise that publicly endorsed right, and some of them can’t really afford it. Moreover, many parents who can afford to pay don’t because they use the real estate market or selective government schools to get for free what others pay for.

On top of all that, arrangements for governing and funding all this remain inordinately complex and incompetent, despite Gonski’s attempt at repair. Australian schooling as currently organised is incapable of tackling serious reform, including reform of any of the problems noted above, and is also stymied by chronic political conflict over the second-order question of sectoral funding shares. Tom Greenwell’s Canadian contrast is a nice reminder of just how bizarre and counterproductive our “system” has become.

The immediate problem is to ensure that the non-government system isn’t gutted and the government system isn’t inundated. The risk of that happening seems likely to grow, and to go on growing, along with unemployment, underemployment, and fear of debt. If it does, the cost of a quick fix will grow too, and that will compound the big problem.

The way out has three parts.

First, the government must help schools help parents, immediately. In doing so it should remember that government schools lean on parents to make “voluntary contributions,” often quite substantial ones; they’ll need help too. The government should establish a fund to which all systems, government and non-government alike, can apply, and it should commission an urgent analysis of the likely trajectory of the problem.

Second, it should make clear that this is an interim measure only. It should announce an in-principle intention to move to full public needs-based funding for all systems and independent schools willing to work within a common charter of rights and obligations. The core principles and objectives of that charter would include: no fees, the right to faith-based schooling, the obligation to reduce within-school segregation, and full transparency as to performance and compliance.

Third, it should set up the machinery to turn these principles into a well-designed proposal.

Is this pie in the sky? Or a left-wing plot?

On the funding side, no. The non-government systems like to claim that they save governments seven or eight billion dollars a year, something like 15 per cent of Commonwealth schools spending. The real cost of full needs-based funding would in fact be around 2 or 3 per cent. If public funding to schools that refused the charter were to cease, total public outlays would be reduced.

Governance? Existing authorities, government and non-government alike, would be left in place. The key difference would be in playing by common rules on a level field of funding and regulation. The National School Resourcing Board and the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority could be beefed up to monitor performance and ensure compliance. The Commonwealth would have to accept that the national interest is better served by a rules-based, transparent national system than by incessant federal interference and second-guessing of system authorities.

Ideology? The “level playing field” sketched above would essentially be a managed market, operated in the interests of greater equity, better performance, and more equally available access to school choice. For those who wonder what that might look like: consider the AFL (and Andrew Leigh’s discussion of its structure and success).

Feasibility? Some very difficult questions arise. What is meant by “diversity”? Would the same definition apply to every school? What about schools for Indigenous kids? Would all schools have the right to provide a “faith-based” education? By what means could selection be made more widely and more equally available?

There are no easy or perfect answers to these and many other questions. Some of the answers would have to be condensed into a suite of performance indicators going well beyond the current myopic focus on the formal curriculum, and that would be a technically challenging task. But coming up with answers worse than those in current operation would be hard.

And how would workable answers to these questions be found? Who would design a level playing field and map out a process of transition? One option would be a Gonski-style review, high-powered, well funded, with a small panel and a tight deadline (but this time headed by an eminent figure from the public sector rather than the private).

A final question: could a government long identified with non-government schools come at anything along the lines suggested? Three weeks ago the question would have been absurd. Now? Still probably not likely, but you never know.

On the one hand, the non-government systems, which have intimidated governments by campaigning on the “higher fees” slogan whenever funding decisions look like going against them, would not want to lose that leverage. Nor would they want to open their books to full public scrutiny. Low-fee independent schools would be glad to see the end of fees but wary of a charter’s contents and guarantees. High-fee independent schools would invoke big words about rights and taxpayer entitlement. Canberra bureaucrats would hate a larger role for statutory authorities and a smaller one for them.

On the other hand, government school systems would be generally supportive, though at least some (and in New South Wales particularly) would be leery about the implications for their selective high schools. And a level playing field for schools could be an electoral plus, popular with non-government school parents particularly, but also among government school parents attracted by a fairer system and more equally available choice.

Taken in sum, a clear-eyed look would reveal a lot in it for the Coalition and its base, but the miasma of ideology makes that unlikely. In which case, the federal opposition should pick up a gift on a platter. •

Thanks to Chris Bonnor for assistance in the preparation of this article. Comment to dean.ashenden@unimelb.edu.au would be welcomed.

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Does that striking difference in enrolments help explain Canada’s sustained educational success? And why is public education so much stronger in Canada than in Australia? The answer to the first question is a probable yes; the answer to the second is where things get really interesting.

Canada outperformed Australia in all subject areas in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment tests run by the OECD, just as it has in every round of PISA since the test’s inception at the start of this century. In maths, the difference between the average Australian and Canadian fifteen-year-olds is equivalent to nearly two-thirds of a year of schooling. In reading, PISA’s focus in 2018, Canada’s mean score of 520 was the sixth-highest among all participating countries and economies. Australia was in sixteenth place, on 503.

Where Australia’s Achilles heel is the performance of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, equity is one of Canada’s strengths. Reporting our PISA results, the Australian Council for Educational Research observed that “students from the highest socioeconomic quartile performed, on average, about three years of schooling higher than students in the lowest quartile.” In reading, the average gap between advantaged and disadvantaged kids was eighty-nine points. In Canada it was sixty-eight: still a large gap, but significantly smaller than in Australia.

Canada has not been immune to the decline in student performance witnessed across the OECD as a whole over the past two decades (it’s the smartphones, says Pasi Sahlberg), but it started well above Australia and has tapered off much less dramatically. Canada continues to be among the top-ranking countries in the world in international standardised tests, and remains the stand-out performer among English-speaking countries.

And while test scores attract the headlines, PISA reveals other differences between Canada and Australia that may be even more important. When participating fifteen-year-olds around the globe sit the PISA tests, they are also presented with a survey that asks, among other things, whether they expect to successfully complete tertiary education. Regardless of where they are in the world, disadvantaged kids are more likely to be pessimistic on this score, for fairly obvious reasons. But bright Canadian kids from tough backgrounds are more likely to believe they will succeed after school. In Australia, 26.9 per cent of high performers on the PISA tests who came from disadvantaged backgrounds didn’t expect to enter and finish post-school study. Among their counterparts in Canada, the figure is only 15 per cent. And the expectations gap between advantaged and disadvantaged high performers is considerably smaller in Canada (12.4 per cent) than it is in Australia (20 per cent).

The PISA student questionnaire also shows that disadvantaged Canadian children are more likely to feel they belong at school. Again, the trend across all countries is that children from educated and affluent families are more likely to feel attached to school than their disadvantaged peers. What the PISA survey shows is that the socioeconomic divide is smaller in Canada than it is in Australia (and across OECD countries in general).

These are hugely powerful indicators. If, as a teacher, all you know about a student is that they have high expectations of themselves and they feel like they belong at school, you know that a very large part of your job is done. It’s almost certain that these attitudes will be reflected in at least satisfactory results. And, conversely, if self-belief and a sense of purpose are lacking, an enormous amount of teacher time and effort will be needed to try to foster these basic conditions for successful learning.

Why are disadvantaged Canadian fifteen-year-olds more likely than their Australian peers to feel school is a place where they belong? Why are they more optimistic about their prospects after school? And why is there a much smaller gap between the test results of advantaged and disadvantaged kids of that age?

The countries that tend to absorb the lion’s share of attention in Australian education policy debate, like Finland and Singapore, are cohesive and compact societies, very unlike our own. Either comparison is limited by the fact that it is not at all easy to isolate the impact of schools from the societies of which they are a part. So it’s not clear whether we should attribute differences in PISA results to education policy or to the Nordic countries’ very low levels of poverty and inequality or the Confucian cultural tradition in East Asian societies.

Canada and Australia share common histories and deep cultural similarities. Each has a diverse population thinly spread across huge land masses; each educates a large proportion of students from immigrant backgrounds (35 per cent in Canada, 28 per cent in Australia) as well as an Indigenous student population affected by the legacies of European conquest and colonisation. Schools in both countries are shaped by their federal political systems, with education being a provincial responsibility in Canada as it is a state responsibility here; and both countries have “Washminster” political cultures, in dialogue with both the individualistic, small-government ethos of American politics and the European example of strong public services and social safety nets.

In other words, the differences in educational outcomes exist even though Canadian society looks much like our own. So it’s more likely that education policies are responsible. And the most obvious structural difference between the two education systems is found in Canada’s extremely high public school enrolment share and the marginal position of fee-charging non-government schools, which enrol just 7.4 per cent of Canadian schoolchildren. As a consequence, children at any given Canadian school are much more likely to reflect a broad cross-section of Canadian society than in Australia, and concentrations of poverty and privilege are much less pronounced.

This alone is likely to affect students’ achievements at school. “A great deal of theoretical and empirical literature shows that the socioeconomic composition of a school has an effect on a student’s achievement, regardless of their own socioeconomic status,” says Laura Perry, a researcher in educational disadvantage and inequality at Murdoch University. “On average, having less segregated schools leads to higher achievement, both for individual students and actually overall because it tends to raise up the lower achieving students or the less advantaged students.”

Drawing on earlier PISA data, Perry observed that 74 per cent of Canadian students attend a high school whose only entrance requirement is local residence. In Australia, where students from affluent and educated backgrounds tend to gravitate towards each other in fee-charging non-government schools and state selective schools, the figure is just 29 per cent. Local, comprehensive public schools in Australia are consequently more than likely to have a preponderance of disadvantaged students, forming the lowest level in a stratified social hierarchy.

The OECD employs what it calls the Index of Social Inclusion to measure the variation in the socioeconomic composition of student populations between schools. In the PISA 2018 survey, egalitarian Norway topped the world on this measure, at 91 per cent, meaning that one Norwegian school looks pretty much like the next in terms of the kids who go there. Peru was at the bottom, with 49 per cent, while Australia, on 76 per cent, was similar to the United States and a little worse than the OECD average. On 85 per cent, Canada looked a lot more like Norway.

A distinct, though related, measure is the relative concentration of high- and low-performing students in particular schools. In Canada, as the OECD observes, “low- and high-performing students are clustered in the same schools less often than the OECD average.” In Australia, the strugglers are lumped together at some schools while the high-flyers congregate elsewhere with other high achievers.

The consequences are vividly illustrated by the different expectations among disadvantaged kids in Canada and Australia. If your parents didn’t go to university, you’ll find it harder to envisage going there yourself. If you find yourself in a school where none of your classmates is considering further study as a post-school option, it becomes that much harder to imagine it as a possibility. If you are at a school with a preponderance of low-achieving, disadvantaged peers, the subjects offered are going to be less academic in nature and the teachers are going to pitch lessons accordingly. If you grow up in Australia, you are more likely to find yourself in this scenario than if you are born in Canada.

Concentrating a large group of disadvantaged and low-achieving students together will also make it harder for a school to recruit and retain teachers, because teaching and learning conditions are inevitably so much more difficult. As the Australian Council for Educational Research’s head researcher, Sue Thomson, has pointed out, Australian teachers with a master’s degree are more likely to be found in front of the high-achieving offspring of the well-educated and well-off. In Canada, teachers with postgraduate qualifications are just as likely to be teaching disadvantaged students as their privileged peers.

Some gifted and determined young people will defy their surroundings; but for most, the school environment will powerfully inform their interests, identity, hopes and expectations, and will significantly affect their educational outcomes. Because there is less segregation of advantaged and disadvantaged children than in Australia, disadvantaged students in Canada tend to do better, and socioeconomic status is a weaker predictor of school performance. This is the connection between the very high enrolment share of Canada’s public schools and the country’s strong educational outcomes.

“I would attribute Canada’s success to taking public schooling seriously,” says Anthony Di Mascio, an educational historian at Bishop’s University in Quebec. “I think even with all of its problems and its tensions, Canada has remained committed to public schooling. It is a leader in the world in terms of its commitment to this project of schooling for all.” Louis Volante, professor of education at Brock University in Ontario and editor of Socioeconomic Inequality and Student Outcomes: Cross-National Trends, Policies, and Practices, concurs. “We have a comprehensive system in Canada,” he says. “Systems that have more differentiation in terms of school choice tend to have two patterns. One pattern is that they have lower overall achievement and then the second thing is they tend to have bigger gaps between their high and low achievers.” And that, indeed, is the Australian story.

If Canada’s educational success is at least partly attributable to the strength of its public education systems, what explains that commitment to public education? When Sarah Mitchell became NSW education minister last April one of her first moves was to visit Canada. In time-honoured fashion, the state opposition attacked Mitchell’s overseas trip as a “post-election holiday” in the wake of the Berejiklian government’s return to power. But, as we have seen, the choice of Canada as an international reference point demonstrated considerable wisdom.

If Mitchell was to be criticised, it was not for going to Canada but for missing the main attraction when she got there. While the minister observed some more or less interesting features of Canadian schools — a strong emphasis on maths; extensive investment in remote and rural schools; centrally administered, province-wide co-curricular programs — she appears to have overlooked the factor that does most to explain the two countries’ different educational outcomes.

When Mitchell was in Toronto, she visited Jesse Ketchum Public School, a local, comprehensive school similar, in broad outline, to any local public school in New South Wales. But just fifteen minutes away, Mitchell could have seen a very different kind of public school. Saint Paul VI Catholic School is fully publicly funded, does not charge any admission fees, and faces exactly the same obligations to enrol all-comers as Jesse Ketchum does. But like 1400 of Ontario’s public schools, which together educate over half a million children, it is also — unmistakably — a Catholic school. It is what is called a separate denominational school. Religion forms an integral part of the school’s curriculum; school life is shaped by Catholic services and rituals; and it is governed by the Toronto Catholic District School Board, led by trustees who are elected by Catholic ratepayers in Metropolitan Toronto (who must themselves be Catholic). In other words, Saint Paul VI is as Catholic in character as any Catholic school in Australia.

But it is also as public as any public school in Australia. “They are complete public schools; they’re not selective,” says Anthony Di Mascio. “It wouldn’t be the school that could select the student that chooses to attend the Catholic school. It would be the parents. They decide. A Catholic parent wanting to send their child to a Catholic school, even if that child has special needs that the school might not want to take on financially — they wouldn’t be able to refuse that child.” The only difference between Saint Paul VI Catholic School and a typical Australian public school is the obvious one: Saint Paul VI is part of a public system that accommodates different views about the role of religion in education. And this accommodation helps explain why the overwhelming majority of young Canadians attend public schools. The possibility of choosing a Catholic or secular education, within a free, comprehensive public system, entirely removes one major reason for opting out.

Canadians stress that there is no single Canadian education system, and that every province is different (the national government doesn’t even have an education department). Ontario doesn’t provide any funding to non-government schools; other provinces do. Ontario and Quebec have both French- and English-language public schools; other provinces don’t. Catholic schools are part of the public systems in Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan, but not in other provinces.

The reasons for these differences are largely historical. The law passed by the British parliament in 1867 to create the Dominion of Canada, the Constitution Act, protected existing schools that served minority religious and linguistic communities in the confederating provinces. The effect was to guarantee full public funding of Protestant schools in Quebec and Catholic schools in Ontario (and later in Alberta and Saskatchewan, when they were carved out of the Northwest Territories in 1905). In a province like British Columbia, which had no Catholic system when it entered confederation, the provisions of the Constitution Act did not apply. Much later, in 1997, Quebec eliminated denominational schools and created secular French- and English-language public systems, a long-term result of the quiet revolution against the Catholic Church’s grip on power in that province.

Given the marked variation between Canadian provinces, denominational public schools can’t be the only reason for public education’s strength across the whole country. The Canadian researchers I spoke to give the impression that Canadians feel a sense of pride and attachment to their public schools that is similar to the way Australians feel about Medicare. But a comparison between Canadian provinces also suggests that religious public schools are a significant reason for the very different status of public education in Canada.

The proportion of students attending non-government schools in the three provinces with denominational public schools, Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan, is just 6.7 per cent, 4 per cent and 2.5 per cent respectively. In British Columbia, a system with no Catholic public schools that looks more like Australia’s, the non-government enrolment share increases to 13 per cent. Likewise, about 10 per cent of students opt out of the public system in Quebec.

The contrasting fates of fifteen-year-olds in Canada and Australia reflect different choices made well over a century ago. In their own ways, both countries exhibit a significant degree of path dependence. In a place like Ontario, Catholic public schools are taken for granted and enjoy majority public support. In the 1980s, the provincial government extended full funding of Catholic schools to years 11 and 12, beyond the requirements of the Constitution Act, which pre-dated late secondary schooling. But where it might logically follow that Ontarians would support the extension of full public funding to other faith-based schools, that is not the case. Indeed, such a proposal was roundly rejected at the 2007 provincial election, and many regarded it as one of the main reasons for the defeat of the Progressive Conservatives, led by John Tory, the current mayor of Toronto.

The sectarian balance of power created by the union of Protestant Ontario and Catholic Quebec was notably absent in nineteenth-century Australia, and so we set off in a different direction from Canada, deciding all public schools would be secular. In practice, that meant that religious parents — particularly among Australia’s large Catholic population — could either access a publicly funded education or enrol their children, at their own expense, in schools that fully reflected their worldview. But they couldn’t do both.

Today, our ingrained ways of thinking about schools continue to reflect these long-forgotten decisions. We assume that public schools have to be secular, and that religious schools can only exist outside the public system — even now, when government and non-government schools receive similar levels of public funding.

Like all good travel, observing Canada’s schools challenges the assumptions and categories we have come, only half-consciously, to rely on. As surprising as the discovery that public schools can be religious is the insight that the Canadian path to greater equity does not necessarily entail less choice. It just involves a different kind of choice from what we are used to in Australia, because the availability of religious public schools means it can be equally exercised by all, irrespective of a capacity to pay fees, pass entry tests or meet any other school enrolment criteria. Students choose schools; schools do not choose students. As a result, rich and poor, advantaged and disadvantaged, high achievers and low achievers are much more evenly spread across Canada’s schools, with happy consequences for student outcomes.

Denominational public schools have their critics, and in Ontario opposition has gradually increased from about 20 per cent in the 1980s to more like 40 per cent today. In 2015, the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario abandoned their previous position and called for one secular public school system. A central grievance is that Catholic schools are enrolling non-Catholic children, competing for enrolments with other public schools. Others argue that it is unfair that non-Catholic teachers can’t seek employment in Catholic schools, despite the fact that those schools are publicly funded. One group is pursuing a constitutional challenge on the grounds that full public funding of only one faith group denies the equal treatment required by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In many respects these debates mirror those that occur in Australia, but they are variations around a different mean. A sympathetic Canadian researcher can plausibly claim that non-government school enrolments are “growing at a remarkable pace” when they increase from 5.2 per cent to 6.5 per cent of the total over the course of a decade. Canadian critics complain that 8 per cent of students at public Catholic schools are non-Catholics. And the one criticism that matters most when it comes to religious schools in Australia — that fees and enrolment policies exclude children from disadvantaged backgrounds — doesn’t feature at all in Canadian debate about denominational public schools.

In the long run, Canada’s more pluralist path has proved to be a much better way to establish and maintain a very broad-based consensus behind public education. Canadian Catholics never had to establish their own schools outside of the public system to ensure their children were educated as they saw fit. As Anthony Di Mascio comments, “That made buy-in to the public system that much easier in a country like Canada, especially in a country as diverse and divided as the population was. That may be one of the successes of the separate system, that it was able to get everyone on board with this public school project.”

As Australians contemplate continued decline in student achievement, as social disadvantage plays an ever more pronounced role in determining educational destiny, and as non-government schools increasingly enjoy the same public funding as government schools, it may be time to reconsider the way we conceived public education in the first place. •

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Some have claimed that saving to be anything up to $8 billion in recurrent funding each year. But the reality, at least in the case of two-thirds of non-government schools, is that government funding produces no savings at all. Why? Because those schools are now funded at the same or higher level as similar public schools.

Since 2011, in fact, governments would have come out ahead if all new school enrolments had gone to public schools. That would have involved capital expenditure, of course, but even the capital savings created by competing school sectors are less than a third of the amounts frequently claimed.

Australia will always have both government and non-government schools; they provide an element of choice and in some cases educational diversity, and any fundamental shift would be politically fraught. But we need to ask hard questions about funding. How has a partially subsidised choice of schools become, in two-thirds of schools, a fully funded choice? What are the educational, equity and social consequences? And if governments are funding government and non-government schools at similar levels, should their obligations also be similar?

Crude measures of how much governments save by encouraging private schools simply subtract government funding from those schools’ total spending. What’s left is largely income from fees, and this figure is presented as the saving to taxpayers. The combined claims made by Catholic and independent schools add up to around $8 billion.

To unpack such claims we need to know more about the annual costs of educating students in the government, Catholic and independent sectors, which is not easy. The most common claims are that governments (state and federal combined) provide $9350 for each independent school student, $11,180 for each Catholic school student and $17,530 for each government school student. But the most recent school finance data on the My School website, for 2017, shows an average of $9600, $11,508 and $13,339 respectively.

Why the difference? Catholic Schools NSW, among others, has cautioned that the first set of figures, compiled by the Productivity Commission, measures funding for the public and private sectors in different ways. The second set of numbers — which use consistent measures across the sectors — comes from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority.

ACARA’s numbers certainly narrow the average public funding gaps. But using averages creates an additional problem. As My School’s school-level data shows, the three sectors serve students with measurably different rankings according to the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage, or ICSEA. Independent schools have the highest ICSEA average, at 1065. Catholic schools are next on 1045, followed by government schools on 981. (An explanation of school ICSEA values is available at My School.)

Lower ICSEA students cost more to educate, and this is reflected in per-student public funding levels. On average, the government sector will always be funded at a higher per-student rate, and any authentic comparisons must take those differences in student needs and costs into account.

Comparisons become more accurate, of course, if schools enrolling students with similar backgrounds are compared. When this is done, the per-student funding differences between the sectors shrinks considerably. The funding data for schools in the narrow 1000–1049 ICSEA range, for example, shows each independent school student receiving an average of $12,136, Catholic school students receiving $12,906 and government school students receiving $14,492.

But there is yet another problem created by the use of averages. Even a “like” group of schools will include big schools, small schools and everything in-between. Averages are distorted by big and small numbers. In the ICSEA range 1000–1049 for example, the per-student public funding (in rounded figures) for government schools ranges from $8500 to $30,000. These figures contribute to the average figure of $14,492.

Using the median, or “middle,” of a set of numbers can reduce these extremes and reduce the distortions they often create. For schools in the 1000–1049 ICSEA range, the median funding figures are $12,046 (per student in independent schools), $12,274 (Catholic schools) and $12,148 (government schools). The public funding differences between the sectors in that ICSEA range all but disappear — to the point where some non-government schools are being funded more per student than are their government counterparts.

But the 1000–1049 ICSEA range represents only a quarter of all students. How similar is the public funding of schools that a majority of students attend?

Schools in the larger ICSEA range of 950–1099 — basically middle-range schools on this measure — enrol just over 60 per cent of students. The average measures for this much larger group of schools reveal that non-government schools in 2017, depending on their ICSEA, received between 83.4 per cent and 104.9 per cent of the public funding going to government schools enrolling students with similar levels of advantage. The median measures show that non-government schools received between 96.9 per cent and 106.9 per cent of the public funding going to government schools enrolling similar students.

Not surprisingly, the public funding of non-government schools since 2011 has increased at around double the rate of increases to government schools. Adjusted for inflation, the public funding differences widen further.

In financial terms, a majority of non-government schools have become “public” — often receiving even more public funding than similar government schools. Hence the question: to what extent does public funding of non-government schools represent any saving to the public purse? And another question: if most Australian schools are publicly funded, shouldn’t they all have the same obligations to the public that funds them?

What would be the recurrent cost to government if all existing non-government school students were funded at the same level as government school students with similar levels of advantage and needs? Finding an answer using My School data involves grouping schools with similar others across all ICSEA ranges, then calculating — for each ICSEA range — the median per-student spend by governments on Catholic and independent school students. This figure is then compared with the equivalent spend on students in government schools. Tables showing these calculations are available in our full report, The School Money-Go-Round.

This exercise reveals a total additional recurrent cost to governments of around $1.1 billion if all existing non-government school students were funded at the same level as similar government school students. This is made up of around $170 million extra to fund Catholic school students and around $900 million extra to fund independent school students. The $1.1 billion to notionally “transfer” all non-government students in this way still comes at a cost, but nowhere near the $8 billion commonly claimed. It is just 2.4 per cent of existing government recurrent spending on schools.

There are good reasons why these calculations may still be inflated:

• The recurrent funding of each sector may change in the future — but current trends are unlikely to reverse. On the contrary, funding changes such as the supplementary funding for non-government schools, announced in 2018, are likely to see previous increases in non-government school funding continue.

• Economies of scale from merging schools and bringing them under one authority are not included. Some economies of scale are implicit, but not calculated.

• Other costs directly or indirectly carried by all three levels of government are not counted.

The “savings” calculation assumes that governments would fully fund all students. The reality, as evidenced in comparable countries overseas, is that a percentage of families would continue to seek private schooling without governments subsidising the cost. If this became reality, an unsubsidised fully private sector in Australia would likely enrol between 5 and 8 per cent of all students; the cost to governments of funding these students would reduce to zero. Taking these students out of the calculation would reduce annual cost to governments by around $0.6 billion.

To this point we have focused on the recurrent funding of schools and how the cost to governments has been spread over the public and private sectors. But what might have been the cost to governments if, over time, the growth of student enrolments had instead been accommodated in the public sector?

We know more from work by Lyndsay Connors and Jim McMorrow for the Australian Council for Educational Research. In their 2015 report, they found that if new enrolments in non-government schools between 1973 and 2012 had instead gone to government schools, the recurrent cost saving to governments over this period would have been approximately $7.4 billion.

My School data lends itself to a similar analysis. The total recurrent cost to governments of the additional enrolments across both sectors between 2011 and 2017 was $11.4 billion. However, the per-student cost varied considerably between the two main sectors:

• The 231,333 additional enrolments in the government sector cost $4516 per student in combined federal and state recurrent funding.

• The 102,020 additional enrolments in the non-government sector cost $5697 per student in combined federal and state recurrent funding.

If the additional non-government school students had enrolled in the government sector, the annual cost to governments over the seven years would have been $460.7 million rather than the actual cost of $581.2 million. This represents an overspend, by governments, of $120.5 million each year. Private schooling cost — rather than saved — taxpayers’ dollars over this period.

But there is a catch, which is revealed if state and federal recurrent funding are considered separately.

It cost the states around $2850 each year for every additional student in a government school. If those students had attended a non-government school the figure would be much lower, at $929 per student. The states did save money. It is hardly surprising that they have been willing to provide funding to the non-government sector, especially if they also reduced funding increases to their public schools.

This odd situation helps explain the current tardiness of the states in bringing their school funding up to the agreed 80 per cent of the Schooling Resourcing Standard, or SRS. It also undermines the push for schools in each sector to be funded to their SRS entitlement. As one analyst has revealed, public schools across Australia can’t and won’t get there.

But this is only half the story. Over the seven-year period, it cost the federal government $1666 for every new government school student, but $4705, around three times as much, for every new non-government school student. This much higher spend delivers just one outcome: greater school choice for some families. Arguably, while economics drives state government spending decisions, the ideology of unfettered choice underpins decisions made by federal governments of all political colour. One solution, which requires close scrutiny, might be found in the recent call by Martin Parkinson, former head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, for the federal government to get out of school funding altogether; at the very least, school funding has to come out of one agreed pot of money.

What about capital funding? Raw figures show that governments do save by not having to meet the capital costs of non-government schools. In 2017, governments paid $234 million towards these costs — still $2.9 billion short of the almost $3 billion capital spend by non-government schools.

But why would governments be obliged to spend this much? The total (from all funding sources) per-student capital investment in 2017 was $738 for government schools, $1794 for Catholic schools, and $3230 for independent schools. Increasing enrolments in any sector require additional capital investment, but the question asked about recurrent funding also applies here: why would governments spend so much more per student?

This is a particularly relevant question to ask of independent schools. Two-thirds of their total capital funds (from all sources) are spent in the most advantaged schools, those above ICSEA 1100. In 2017 this averaged $4763 per student — over six times the per-student rate in government schools. Would governments be expected to match this largesse?

At the government school rate of $738 per student, the additional capital cost to governments would be $966 million, just a third of the $2.9 billion capital spending by non-government schools out of their own funds.

Clearly, in capital as in recurrent costs, the existing high spend in non-government schools doesn’t represent the likely cost to governments if all students attended public schools. This is especially the case given that, when similar ICSEA schools are compared, a much larger per-capita recurrent and capital spending in such schools has little if any impact on measurable student achievement.

Any proposal made fifty years ago to fund a public education system and a competing private system equally would have been greeted with disbelief and derision. Yet we are almost there. It has been slow and incremental, characterised not by any defining agreement or legislation but by an accumulation of deals and dalliances engineered by politicians and sectoral interests.

The shift hasn’t been accompanied by any serious redesign of the operation, accountabilities and obligations of schools to reflect the extent of their public funding. School education is not alone in being “outsourced” in this way, but the wider educational and social consequences of our divided school system are becoming too obvious to ignore. And the creep towards fully funding non-government schools has been accompanied by increasing growth in inequity, something which disadvantages all Australians by restricting overall educational system quality.

There’s a possible silver lining, though. The fact that governments fund most schools roughly equivalently has the potential to open the door to new and productive structures. Shouldn’t governments now insist on matching obligations and service provision from all schools? This would certainly level the playing field and reduce the very evident social and educational segregation. Shouldn’t funding be tied to each school’s commitment to serving a diverse range of families? Wouldn’t we also save by reducing the duplication of schools in so many communities? Shouldn’t restructuring in these directions be at least trialled across some levels/stages of schooling?

Little will happen unless we put aside the slogans and catchcries that have resonated over many years of debate about schools and funding. The belief that funding competing sectors saves public money no longer reflects reality. My School funding data shows that we now have, at the very least, two equivalently funded school systems, one of which is significantly advantaged by additional and unregulated private funding while enjoying fewer rules and obligations. This isn’t working: it is now time for a much better school settlement. •

This article draws on the authors’ new paper, The School Money-Go-Round, released today.

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In key respects, though, the reality of life in the United States no longer matches the reputation. In some respects, the country has become less dynamic than several of its peers and the living conditions of its people nearer the middle rank, or worse, among affluent democracies.

One sign of this shift comes from the Human Development Index, which was created by the UN Development Programme to measure not just economic wealth but also the broader wellbeing of national populations. The HDI measures three central dimensions of human development — longevity, education and material comfort — on a decimal scale, with 0 as the lowest score and 1 the highest. In 2015 the highest-ranking countries were Norway, on 0.949, and Australia and Switzerland, both on 0.939.

Figures for 1900 are from United Nations Statistical Yearbook 1955. (The Netherlands figure is for 1910.) Figures for 1950 from United Nations World Population Prospects, 1996 revision. Figures for 2000 from US Census Bureau International Data Base. Data for 2015 is from Pensions at a Glance, OECD, 2017, and G20 data.

Especially revealing is the annual rate of change over the quarter-century from 1990 to 2015. Among eighteen comparable democracies, the United States had the slowest increase, just 0.27, compared with a mean of 0.49. As a result, it was overtaken by several other countries and slipped from second to tenth place.

A key reason for this relatively poor performance was an only modest improvement in life expectancy among Americans. Life expectancy lifted dramatically in the eighteen countries during the twentieth century, and was still improving in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century. By 2015, the figures for the eighteen countries were closely grouped around 81.7 years. The highest was Japan and the lowest was the United States, the only country to record a figure below 80. Its rise was also the lowest during that period — 1.7 years compared with a mean of 3.4.

Worse was to come. In each of the next three years life expectancy in the United States actually fell. The decreases were small — totalling 0.3 years between 2014 and 2017 — and a rash of possible explanations has been offered, including opioid addiction, suicide, the cost of healthcare, rising rates of obesity and economic hardship. It may also have been a temporary blip, but it is a clear turnaround from a long period of growth.

Not entirely coincidentally, the United States is also the most unequal of the eighteen democracies by far. Several democracies became less equal over the past quarter-century, reversing the trend in the decades after the second world war.

Inequality may also be contributing to the United States’s consistently mediocre performance in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, tests. Held every three years since 2000, PISA examines fifteen-year-old students on maths, science and literacy skills. Conducted in seventy-two countries in 2015, the scores were scaled so that the mean for the thirty-five OECD member countries was 500. American schoolchildren averaged below 500 in all three domains, but were particularly poor at maths, scoring just 470, a distant last among the eighteen most comparable democracies.

The United States is still among the world leaders in research and development, with high scores on innovation and a record of adopting emerging technologies early. But inequality is pertinent here, too. Although the country played a central role in the development of the internet, for example, the proportion of the population who were internet users in 2016 was the second-lowest among the eighteen countries, ahead only of Italy. No other country among the eighteen had a higher proportion of households without broadband.

Alongside these objective measures, a nunber of subjective indicators suggest a growing alienation. Apart from Italy, American citizens had the least confidence in the legal system — 43 per cent — among the eighteen nationalities, compared with Australia’s 58 per cent, an eighteen-country mean of 64 per cent, and Denmark, Norway and Switzerland all scoring above 80 per cent. The figures for the United States and Italy also declined more sharply over a decade in which many countries showed increased confidence.

Source: Government at a Glance, OECD, 2017

Americans were also unusually suspicious of the media. Trust was greatest in Finland (62 per cent), the eighteen-country mean was 45 per cent and Australia came in at 42 per cent, but the United States languished at 38 per cent. It also recorded the highest proportion of citizens (31 per cent, compared to an eighteen-country mean of 17 per cent) who say they have been exposed to “fake news.”

None of this portends dramatic collapse, and several other areas testify to the continuing strength of the United States. But a combination of stagnation in certain areas long presumed to be improving, worsening inequality becoming more socially dysfunctional, and increased political alienation suggests a malaise that will challenge whoever wins in November. •

All the data in this article comes from How America Compares, published last month by Springer. The book also features detailed data across many other areas.

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As marketing, Morrison’s line may have worked; as public policy it simply doubled down on what was already an abject failure. Over the past twenty years, the Commonwealth has massively ramped up funding for non-government schools. And still, every summer, as reliably as Christmas and the Boxing Day Test, reports of steep increases in private school fees surface in the nation’s newspapers, along with stories of parents struggling to cope and principals struggling to explain. Now figures from the My School website, encompassing every school in Australia and incorporating all sources of revenue, confirm what the anecdotal evidence has long suggested.

The data for the seven years from 2011 to 2017, collected and published by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, reveals the sheer scale of the expansion of government funding to non-government schools. For context, between 2011 and 2017, inflation averaged 1.9 per cent annually, compounding to 12 per cent. Over the same period, recurrent government funding to non-government schools increased by around three times as much, with an average per-student increase of 37 per cent at independent schools and 35 per cent at Catholic schools. Funding to state schools grew by just 18 per cent per student.

Despite the huge boost in public funding, private schools didn’t reduce their fees. In fact, the price of entry continued to rise rapidly. Between 2011 and 2017, the average tuition fee at non-government schools grew from $3600 to $4700. By 2017, fees averaged $2290 at primary schools, $5700 at secondary level and $8560 at combined K–12 schools. Private school principals and lobbyists often point to rising costs, but this increase equates to an average annual hike in tuition fees of 4.5 per cent, more than twice the rate of inflation.

What this makes clear is that more public spending on private schools has not put downward pressure on fees; it has merely compounded the resource advantage enjoyed by those who can afford a private school education. Net recurrent income per student increased by 29 per cent to just under $20,000 at independent schools and by 33 per cent to more than $16,000 at Catholic schools.

When the Howard government presided over a substantial increase in federal funding to non-government schools at the start of this century, John Howard went on Melbourne radio to predict that fees would soon fall as a result. The headmasters of  Scotch College and Wesley College confirmed that fee cuts were imminent, and the executive director of the Independent Schools Council disclosed that many schools were “poised to move very quickly” to reduce costs to parents. Howard’s lieutenant, education minister David Kemp, claimed that “the new arrangements will particularly extend choice to low-income families.” “Choice in schooling is now a reality for working-class Australian families,” Minister Kemp told parliament.

Two decades later, the My School data reveals a very different story. Far from making school choice a reality for low-income families, the policies pursued by Dr Kemp and his successors have had the opposite effect. In 2018, 36 per cent of students at public schools came from the most disadvantaged quartile of Australian society. Only 17 per cent of students at Catholic schools came from the same group. The proportion of very disadvantaged kids at independent schools was even less, at just 14 per cent.

In August, Haileybury College in Melbourne was identified by the ABC as one of the four richest schools in Australia, which together managed to spend more on new facilities than Australia’s poorest 1800 schools combined. Haileybury clocked up over $100 million in capital expenditure between 2013 and 2017. At the same time, it enjoyed nearly 40 per cent growth in recurrent Commonwealth funding, an increase from $4300 to $6000 per student per year. Haileybury didn’t use the additional public funding to extend choice to low-income families: it increased its fees from $18,700 in 2011 to $22,700 in 2017. Unsurprisingly, the already small proportion of kids from disadvantaged families at Haileybury shrank even further: the proportion of children from the bottom half of the Australian population, according to income and educational attainment, collapsed from 16 per cent to 5 per cent in just seven years.

Haileybury might not be a typical non-government school, but it is representative of the national trend. The same pattern of rapid fee rises, declining enrolments from low-income families and substantial growth in taxpayer funding replicates itself throughout towns and suburbs across the country. Exactly the same dynamic can be found at St Bede’s College in the Melbourne bayside suburb of Mentone; or at St Gregory’s College in Campbelltown; or at Ignatius Park College in the Toowoomba suburb of Cranbrook: in all of these schools, fees increased despite steady increases in government funding, and the proportion of students from Australia’s most disadvantaged families decreased by half or more.

It may once have been plausible to claim that more public funding would improve choice and affordability. Today, such assertions amount to a refusal to face reality; or, worse, an attempt to obscure it. Federal governments have been conducting this experiment for two decades and the results speak for themselves. Twenty years since John Howard declared that private school fees would fall, we are still waiting.

Government funding has increased so much that non-government schools now enjoy similar public funding to state schools. By 2017, Catholic schools received, on average, annual government funding of $13,000 per student, while independent schools received around $11,000 per student. That’s 81 per cent and 69 per cent respectively of the average per-student funding that goes to state schools. The difference narrows even further when we account for the much larger share of expensive-to-educate students at state schools (such as kids in rural and remote locations, and children with disabilities or from other disadvantaged groups). Comparing like with like, non-government schools receive around 90 to 95 per cent of the public funding that government schools do — and yet fees continue to rise rapidly.

Why don’t private schools cut their fees in response to this ever-growing taxpayer contribution? The most important reason is very simple. They don’t have to. Education is not like many other products in the marketplace: price is seen as a signal of quality, exclusivity is often a selling point, and the uncertainty and anxiety surrounding our children’s wellbeing leads parents to grin and bear high fees and even wear them as a badge of honour. And cutting fees generally could let in a greater number of disadvantaged students, who are typically more expensive to educate. So there’s rarely a business case for cutting fees. Fee reductions and improved affordability won’t happen until governments require it — by imposing caps on fees, demanding a minimum number of scholarships or creating an obligation to enrol local students, for instance.

If we really want to improve choice, it’s not enough to just keep handing over more taxpayer dollars. Non-government schools have to assume public obligations that are commensurate with the public funding they receive. In Australia, the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council has proposed a public charter that would establish a common regulatory environment for all schools in receipt of public funding. There are plenty of models to draw on: church schools are part of public systems in Canada, Britain, the Netherlands and other European countries. In New Zealand, religious schools were integrated into the state system over four decades ago.

We could draw on these examples to expand genuine school choice, while balancing it with other imperatives like equity, quality, efficiency and social cohesion. It’s possible to create free, inclusive schools that also reflect a variety of different worldviews. But first we need a government that really believes in choice in education — for all and not just for some. •

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Despite two decades of recording-breaking economic growth, we have dropped down the ladder for reading, mathematics and science. Even Britain, despite nine years of cruel austerity and burgeoning child poverty, is doing better (though not by much). Moreover our children are among the worst behaved — in other words, the most unhappy in class — although not as bad as the French. Jean Blackburn, considered the nation’s outstanding feminist educator, would be furious.

As idealistic and devoted to reform as her in-laws may have been, it was Jean Muir, married to their son Dick, who has left the greater imprint on Australian society. Rather than politics, writing and campaigning (although did her share of those), it was her hard, backroom work of research and policy formation that rewrote the educational blueprint for modern Australia.

She didn’t have an easy life, and so (though much loved) she wasn’t an easy woman. Her family belonged to what was once called the middling class — neither poor nor affluent, just barely comfortable. Family life was ruled by a father whose attitude to his wife and daughter bordered on misogyny. Jean’s intimidated mother held herself distant from her children, but at critical times stood up for her daughter. She insisted Jean be allowed to take up her place at University High School rather than leave school at fourteen, and it was her persistence that enabled the family to find the money to allow Jean to study economics at the University of Melbourne.

It had not been a good start, and all her life Jean Blackburn struggled with depression. At times, her everyday existence required an immense effort of will, but her fierce intellect channelled both personal frustration and political anger into the university’s Labor Club and then into the Communist Party. She stayed in the party until her increasing reservations about Moscow’s aims drove her out in 1956. Her husband remained a member, and a certain estrangement, while managed, was inevitable. Life in Adelaide was sustained by good friends and colleagues.

She also had to struggle to pursue a career. Thwarted by the barriers to married women teaching in public schools, she taught in a girls’ private school — scarcely her first choice, though she found supportive intellectual friendship there. Her breakthrough came when economist Peter Karmel recruited her to work on a report into schooling in South Australia.

Among the first acts of the new Whitlam government in 1972 was to establish the Australian Schools Commission under Karmel to investigate the condition of Australian education through a Commonwealth lens. Blackburn was an obvious recruit. A distinguished service to Australian education flowed from those years, including her work with the Disadvantaged Schools Program and on the Girls, School and Society report of 1976. She then took on the challenge of reconciling the vocational with the academic in Victorian schools with a common certificate that could somehow eradicate discrimination and difference. The sociologist Raewyn Connell considers her “the most influential feminist educator in Australian history.”

After the shock at the findings of each report and the early enthusiasm for reform had died down, the monied and the holy clawed back their advantage. Government funding to church schools, instead of being used to remake the desperately needy parish schools, converted the church’s posh colleges and convents into vast excellence enterprises for the Catholic upper middle class. Already richly endowed Protestant schools built new swimming pools and music schools to replace their old ones, multistorey underground carparks for their multitudes of staff, and new campuses to expand their constituency. Then the Howard government offered support for emerging low-fee private schools to help more to escape the public system.

Meanwhile, Blackburn’s report on post-compulsory schooling had reshaped the end-of-school certificate in Victoria, introducing a system of assessment by project that inadvertently privileged learning styles favouring early developers and spawned an industry of mass cheating in private schools. Idealistic reformers had underestimated the ruthlessness of middle-class parents desperate to enable their children to hold on to their birth right.

Thus, while this book is a biography of Jean Blackburn the person as well as the reformer, it is also appropriate for us to assess her legacy — or rather the story of the persistent, duplicitous self-interest that sabotaged her ideas.

The reception the PISA results received this week says it all. Commentators have been quick to reassure those middle-class parents who can no longer afford private schooling that Australia’s poor results are not the fault of the actual school systems. Indeed, public schools system are just as good as the wealthy independent schools, so long as you exclude all those disadvantaged students — in other words, the poor, the Indigenous, the refugee. (No matter that the rest of the OECD nations include them in their results, too.)

It is comforting that the advantaged middle-class child whose parents can help with homework and upper-secondary assignments need not miss out on their university of choice provided they live in a middle-class suburb. (I am reminded of a consultant at the Melbourne Women’s Hospital in 1884 who advised that the worrying maternal mortality rate would fall if the hospital admitted a better class of patient.) After half a century of reports, reforms, changed funding regimes, political fights, selective outrage and a gargantuan educational research industry, it is still the case that the most important decision you make about your education and future chances is your choice of parents.

In this half century the central challenge has been to extend schooling to the whole population, to transform a system that worked for the elite to embrace the masses. This was Jean Blackburn’s mission, and the early signs were good. Labor prime minister Bob Hawke was proud that during his time in office the school retention rate rose from 30 to 80 per cent. The proportion of Australians who now attend university is impressive, even if wasteful of students’ potential and national resources. In the “great reform,” technical schools and the colleges had to go because it was believed that they made people feel inferior; we are now having to undertake the expensive business of re-inventing them.

The very large elephant in the room in Australian education is inequality: inequality of material means, inequality of cultural capital, inequality of social respect. Even worse, the damage to the most disadvantaged children’s life chances is largely done before they commence school. The terrible standards of functional literacy and school achievement in Tasmania, for instance, reflect deep, stubborn, intergenerational poverty that has lingered since colonial times. On the mainland, pockets of intergenerational poverty — material and cultural — fester in areas devastated by industrial decline since the 1970s and 1980s. Inequality is as bad for education as it is for health. Those countries that do better than we do, often with fewer resources, are more equal in incomes and social status and are committed to a democratic, universal school system that educates good citizens.

We delude ourselves that we are an egalitarian people living in the land in the fair go. For all our achievements as a modern democracy, it was in the free settlements — Victoria and South Australia — that the middle class took control of education, through the churches, to protect their caste and religious tribes. In Christchurch and Dunedin, they built high schools within half a decade of settlement; in Melbourne, we opened Scotch College, and the state left secondary education in the eastern and south eastern suburbs to the private schools until the mid 1950s. We have never really caught up.

Thus, as we slip down the PISA rankings, what distinguishes us is that we are the only OECD nation to subsidise private schools with taxpayers’ money; the only OECD country not to pay university students a stipend, meaning our students struggle with work and study; and, of course, a pioneer in placing the cost of higher education on the shoulders of our children rather than ourselves. We are, thus, the only nation among our peers in which the government actually subsidises inequality.

So, what of Jean Blackburn’s legacy? Her enduring achievement has been in the education of girls, though with an unintentional bias towards those that come from nice families and go to good schools. These girls now dominate most faculties of the universities to the extent that we should be worrying about the absence of boys studying the humanities, or becoming teachers or veterinarians. That’s not good for us either. Unintended consequences of the best of intentions. •

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At least, that’s how the story usually goes. In reality, state aid had already started flowing to some church schools years before the “Goulburn strike.” On 10 July 1956 the Canberra Times reported acting prime minister Arthur Fadden’s announcement that capital works in church schools in Canberra would be subsidised. The news was welcomed by the local Catholic and Anglican bishops, but critics argued that the money was needed more urgently by public schools. They pointed to the dire state of Telopea Park High School, where there were “eight classes without classrooms, a final examination class housed on a verandah-end” and “four teachers teaching 300 girls home management in one small, ill-equipped room.”

Even to motorists speeding along nearby Athllon Drive, the contrast with the school north of the footpath is clearly visible.

The subsidy for church schools was justified as a way of guaranteeing to public servants — who were moving to the capital in significant numbers — the same amenities they were used to in their home states. As the historian Michael Hogan has observed, Menzies also appreciated the significance of creating a precedent for financing non-government schools. With support from his government, numerous new church schools sprang up in Canberra in the late fifties and, when the Woden Valley opened up in the sixties, Menzies’s program helped create a Catholic boys school on Marr Street in the new suburb of Pearce.

A couple of years later, a co-educational public school opened next door. Side-by-side not far from Parliament House, separated only by a few gum trees and a footpath, the two schools represented the hybrid education system that Menzies had established, with its two distinct kinds of government-funded schools. As this system expanded under Menzies’s successors (not least Labor’s Gough Whitlam, who introduced recurrent Commonwealth funding for non-government schools), the two schools also grew. Today, Marr Street in Pearce becomes clogged with school buses and SUVs every weekday morning as nearly 2500 students arrive to attend either of the two schools. Over half a century later the pair, so closely connected with the origins of state aid, provide an insight into the consequences of Menzies’s innovation.

A microcosm of Australian schooling

On the south side of the footpath, the public school enjoys a strong reputation in the local community, and people try to buy into the surrounding suburbs to enrol their kids there. In recent years, the front of the school has been painted, roofing renewed and the oval, long renowned as an ankle-breaker, reseeded. But even to motorists speeding along nearby Athllon Drive, the contrast with the school north of the footpath is clearly visible.

Expanding across some fifteen hectares, the Catholic school features an Australian Rules football oval, a rugby union pitch overlooked by a state-of-the-art stadium, and numerous soccer fields. “Visitors typically comment on the lawns, gardens, trees and landscaping which give the school an atmosphere of orderliness, beauty and peace,” the school’s website says, as well as the “impressive collection of sculpture and other artworks.” Earlier this year, the school’s Jubilee Building was officially opened, with industrial arts workshops, visual arts studios, renovated prayer space, a senior common room and a new grandstand overlooking one of the many ovals. And this is not the only major new building erected in recent years.

If the visual contrast between the two schools is striking, other differences may matter more. Some 58 per cent of students at the non-government school come from the most privileged quarter of Australian families. When the ACT’s senators at the time, Zed Seselja and David Smith, attended the opening of the school’s new Jubilee Building at the beginning of this year, the college magazine proudly noted that they both did so as parents of boys at the school. Next door at the public school, the proportion of similarly privileged students is less than half (28 per cent). There, 16 per cent of students come from the most disadvantaged quarter of Australian families; at the Catholic school, only 1 per cent of students fit this description.

The difference between the kids at these schools might be pronounced, but the gap between the two of them and the schools in neighbouring suburbs is even more revealing. From the back of Pearce, it’s possible to climb Mount Taylor and, at the summit, turn back and look in a northerly direction to Parliament House and beyond. Turn to the south, and you are looking over the district of Tuggeranong — or “God’s country” to the locals. At the southern foot of the mountain are the suburbs of Kambah and Wanniassa, each of which is home to public schools that begin in preschool and go through to Year 10.

While they are only a few kilometres from the two schools in Pearce, these two schools serve a very different group of children. A third or more of their students come from the most disadvantaged quarter of Australian families. More than 10 per cent of their students are Indigenous (the figure is only 1 per cent at the Catholic boys school in Pearce), and the two schools have almost three times the number of students, proportionally, from language backgrounds other than English than their counterparts in Pearce.

In fact, the social disadvantage among students at the Tuggeranong schools is greater than at the average Australian school, let alone the average Canberra school. On the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage, or ICSEA — the policymakers’ measure of how lucky our home circumstances are — the average Australian school gets a score of 1000. The scores assigned to the public schools in Kambah and Wanniassa are 980 and 983 respectively. In Pearce, the government school’s ICSEA is 1049 and the non-government school’s is 1132.

Does Mount Taylor mark a major socioeconomic divide in Canberra, with the schools simply reflecting their respective suburbs? Not really. Kambah and Wanniassa are not quite as affluent as Pearce, but the difference is only one of degree. The Australian Bureau of Statistics’s Index of Relative Social Advantage and Disadvantage places Pearce in the top tenth of Australian postcodes, but Kambah and Wanniassa are in the second-highest tenth, not far behind. The differences between the suburbs are nowhere near enough to explain the differences between the schools. In fact, if the students at these four schools represented a cross-section of their local communities, they would look pretty much like each other.

Instead, they exemplify how Australia’s hybrid system of government-funded schools, with its independent, Catholic and public sectors, sorts children into different schools on the basis of their social background, dramatically exacerbating variations in social geography. In 2011, 32 per cent of children at public schools came from the most disadvantaged quarter of Australian families. By 2018, that figure had grown to 36 per cent, more than double the proportion at Catholic schools (17 per cent) and independent schools (14 per cent).

It turns out that the hills and footpaths separating these four Canberra schools wind their way through our country’s education system, increasingly separating young Australians into schools characterised by concentrated privilege or concentrated disadvantage. To understand the marked variations between the backgrounds of kids on either side of Mount Taylor — and on either side of the footpath in Pearce — is to gain an insight into a pattern that repeats itself again and again across the country, from Western Sydney to Wagga Wagga and Alice Springs to Albany.

Levers of segregation

The first clue to this understanding lies in the fact that the problem is getting worse. As the fees at the Catholic school in Pearce increased by a hefty 40 per cent between 2011 and 2017, the divergence between the student populations at the two schools on Marr Street sharpened appreciably. As the proportion of disadvantaged children at the Catholic school fell from 5 per cent to 1 per cent, the proportion of similar students next door grew from 11 per cent to 16 per cent. In effect, a bunch of kids from challenging backgrounds was transferred from one side of the footpath to the other. The shift vividly illustrates how our hybrid system, in which some schools receive public funding but are permitted to charge fees at whatever rate the market will bear, drives the segregation of Australian school students.

The steep fee increases at the Catholic school occurred despite a significant and growing taxpayer contribution. In fact, the school has enjoyed faster growth in government funding this decade than the government school next door. And, once again, the two schools encapsulate what is happening across the country. While we were supposed to be entering an era of needs-based funding — and even though we know more disadvantaged students than ever attend public schools — the non-government sectors have enjoyed much greater increases in government funding.

Between 2011 and 2017, combined federal and state government funding increased by 35 per cent for Catholic schools across the country, 37 per cent for independent schools, and just 18 per cent for public schools. When the Morrison government cut another special deal with the non-government sectors in September last year, it labelled the largesse the Choice and Affordability Fund. The reality is that our current policy settings are delivering neither. Just as it has become harder for poor Catholics — and others — to attend the Catholic school in Pearce, the concentration of disadvantaged children in public schools across the country has increased.

At the same time as those fees have become increasingly prohibitive, the school has been able to marshal more resources than ever to attract those who can afford them. On its website, the school claims that it is “fortunate in having facilities which are second to none,” but also observes, sagely, that “the climate, tone and spirit of a school are far more important than any of its physical aspects.” Buildings do matter, though, not least because, as educational economist Trevor Cobbold points out, “the lavish facilities… serve as status markers in marketing strategies to attract enrolments from rich families.” (Cobbold was responding to revelations in August that four exclusive private schools spent more on renovations and new facilities than Australia’s poorest 1800 schools combined.) And successfully recruiting students from well-educated, high-income families makes establishing the climate, tone and spirit of a school an awful lot easier.

In addition to its impressive facilities, Pearce’s Catholic school also enjoys a significant advantage in recurrent revenue over the public school next door. By 2017, it received a public subsidy of $10,100 per student, more than one-and-a-half times the needs-based resourcing allocation it’s entitled to. Combined with revenue from fees and other sources of income, this meant it had $3200 more to spend on each of its students annually than the school on the other side of the footpath. Better positioned than ever to offer the diverse curriculum and rich array of extracurricular activities that are critical in competition for enrolments, the Catholic school’s share of students from the most advantaged quarter of Australian families jumped from 47 per cent to 58 per cent between 2011 and 2018. Next door, the number of students in this group declined correspondingly.

While resource advantages help some schools pull privileged students in, and high fees push children from low-income families away, the increasingly segmented character of Australian schooling is also attributable to the power of non-government schools to pick and choose whom they enrol. When an elite Sydney private school expelled eight boys for smoking dope in 2014, then NSW education minister Adrian Piccoli condemned the decision as simply shifting the problem to another school. Controversial cases attract attention, but less noticeable and more pervasive forms of problem-shifting are embedded in the structures of Australian schooling.

Numerous parents and educators in Tuggeranong told me about incidents where a child’s Year 3 NAPLAN results were considered as part of their application to attend a non-government school. In some cases, the child’s test results were deemed acceptable and they were admitted; in other cases, the enrolment was rejected or delayed. This practice was documented in the recent national NAPLAN reporting review, and government research also made it clear that parents expect schools to use NAPLAN results for marketing purposes.

In this atmosphere, NAPLAN morphs from a diagnostic tool that can enable a candid conversation between parent and school into a de facto entrance examination used by non-government schools to skim the cream. Long before teenagers are ejected from certain schools over an illicit puff, primary schoolers can be rejected for slipping up on a NAPLAN test. As Piccoli told the ABC in August, “It is the ability of schools to select their students that creates inequity which is one of the structural weaknesses of Australian education.”

We tend to view the performance of schools in isolation, but in reality schools exist in delicate relation to each other, like the elements of an ecosystem, and decisions at one school profoundly affect the life of another school. This was vividly portrayed to me by a principal at a highly disadvantaged school in which there was a dearth of natural role models among the student group. The principal and his staff laboured like Sisyphus to build kids up to be leaders among their peers, only to eventually find that they would lose those very kids to better-resourced, more exclusive schools.

The children left behind

In his book about inequality in Australia, Battlers and Billionaires, economist and Labor MP Andrew Leigh compares the Australian Football League and the English Premier League. The AFL shares television revenue evenly among its clubs; lower-ranked teams have first pick when new talent is drafted; and salary bills are capped. In English football it’s more like the law of the jungle: salary budgets are uncapped and clubs that finish higher up the ladder receive more of the earnings from TV rights. Strong Premier League clubs get even stronger, making it a much more uneven competition than the AFL. It’s a lot easier to predict the clubs that will end the season at the top of the ladder.

But imagine a sporting competition in which some clubs were regulated like AFL clubs while others were treated like Premier League teams; in which, every week, teams made up of star talent lured from around the world by enormously lucrative contracts trounced clubs constrained by salary caps and restricted to recruiting from their local area. This, in essence, is the structural imbalance at the heart of Australia’s education system, in which some schools are fee-charging and selective (in numerous ways) while others are free and comprehensive.

In practice, school choice in Australia means that some schools choose their students, while the others are dominated by social disadvantage. If only 1 per cent of students at the Pearce Catholic school are from tough backgrounds, then there have to be very high proportions of these kids at the other schools in the area. The result is not one-sided football matches but educational outcomes that, almost a decade after the Gonski report, are increasingly “the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possessions.” Young Australians are consequently getting less and less out of the education we are providing them than they did five, ten or fifteen years ago.

For this story, I spoke to numerous parents and educators in school communities where a disproportionate number of children come from families with experiences of unemployment, unstable and transient housing, and social dysfunction. They told me of any number of innovations to address children’s learning needs, from introducing the Cambridge international curriculum to developing a Stephanie Alexander kitchen garden. One educator spoke of the joy of working with a student with an intellectual disability who swore volubly and uncontrollably but, with weeks of patient guidance and goal-setting, learnt to control his language and more effectively manage friendships. Another referred to the alacrity with which colleagues dig into their own pockets to meet resource shortfalls.

But no matter how good the teachers or inspiring the school’s leaders, the educational task facing schools with concentrated social disadvantage is incredibly challenging. Significant numbers of students with significant learning and behavioural difficulties, and a lack of the necessary parental support, inevitably affects teacher morale and staff recruitment and retention. When there are a significant number of children with troubling behaviours in the same school or classroom, the risk is that they will dictate the culture and set the patterns of behaviour for their peers.

Educational researchers call the impact of classmates on an individual student’s educational outcomes “peer effects.” They make a big difference. In fact, in its analysis of the performance of Australian school students in the OECD’s PISA tests, the Australian Council for Educational Research found that “the social composition of schools had just as strong an impact on the likelihood of being a low achiever as a student’s own family background… Disadvantaged students in average socioeconomic level schools, for example, are almost a year of schooling higher than those in disadvantaged schools.”

Our dual system catalyses a self-perpetuating process: it engenders schools with a disproportionate number of disadvantaged kids; and that, in itself, causes the concentration of disadvantage to grow over time. The process is fuelled by an often simplistic debate about variations in school “quality” and a tendency for the reputation of schools to long outlast any basis in reality.

Parents with the means to pay for schooling are placed in an invidious position. Many want their children to be part of the local community and to be able to play and learn with kids from diverse backgrounds. But they also understand that it is very difficult to provide a rich educational experience when there isn’t a critical mass of children with the disposition and know-how to learn, and they recognise when a school is confronted with a preponderance of challenging behaviours with which it struggles to cope. Sometimes a decision is finally made for them when their child comes home one day and says he or she can no longer cope with the behaviour issues and the disruption. Over time, children, particularly from middle-class families, trickle away from disadvantaged school communities.

In Tuggeranong, this movement manifests itself as a desire to get up the valley, over Mount Taylor into Woden and the leafy suburbs of Canberra’s inner south, mirroring the centripetal energy flowing through all our major cities. In addition to exclusive non-government schools, the destination is the sought-after public schools in the affluent parts of town that often have a long queue of out-of-area applicants, affording them a degree of discretion over whom they enrol.

The end result was described to me by a Tuggeranong parent. Flicking through the Year 6 yearbook at her son’s primary school, she took in the photos of the students in the graduating class, accompanied by their personal stories, including the high school they were heading to the following year. From a capacity Year 6 class, about half the students were proceeding to non-government schools. The other half were going to out-of-area public schools. Only one student was continuing on to the local public high school.

Then and now

As an origin story, the tale of the “Goulburn strike” conveys a number of morals that continue to underpin the way we think about our schools today. When Catholic parents and educators in Goulburn demanded that their children no longer be relegated to second-class schools, they asserted both the right to educate their children by their own lights and a claim to sector-blind government resourcing. Their success was critical to improving the marginalised status of Catholics in Australia and ending the nasty sectarian bigotry that accompanied it. It also helped establish a de facto consensus that, when it comes to the role of religion in education, parents should be able to decide what is right for their children, and that all schools deserve public support. After all, as the school closures in Goulburn in 1962 graphically illustrated, fee-paying parents helped reduce pressure on the public purse… at least at the time.

Today, the Canberra schools where state aid actually started symbolise how little the truths of the Goulburn strike continue to apply. Public funding doesn’t keep the Catholic school on Marr Street open, or buy it toilets it could not otherwise afford, or induce it to lower the fees it charges parents. Just as kids from poor Catholic families can’t access the Catholic school in Pearce, the majority of poor Catholics in Australia don’t attend Catholic schools. Government funding to non-government schools might once have served to facilitate choice, but it no longer does today.

Far from being sector-blind or a cost-saver, government funding to non-government schools has grown to the extent that many receive more public funding than comparable government schools. If all Goulburn’s Catholic schools closed today and the students were forced to attend public schools, governments would actually save money. While massive taxpayer support is provided to non-government schools, they continue to be able to enrol, expel and charge fees as they please — and our schools have become more and more characterised by either privilege or poverty. •

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All five of them agree that Australia is among the school reform dunces of the Western world. While other countries forge ahead (the argument goes) we are stuck. Some schools and school systems – government, independent or Catholic ­– and some curriculum areas have done better than others, but since around the turn of the century none has done much more than flatline, despite strenuous efforts by state and federal governments.

It is on this stubborn ground that the battle of the reform agendas is being fought. Some of the reformers want to press on in the current direction. Some want a quite different agenda. And some want a different system.

To press on is to persist in the view that if schools are exposed to the right combination of pressures and given the right capacity to respond, they will lift their “performance,” and this will be reflected in better student results in standardised tests. Since Julia Gillard become federal minister for education in 2007, this has been the dominant Australian reform agenda, prosecuted through NAPLAN, the MySchool website, and a flurry of other measures aimed at encouraging parental choice, making schools more accountable for student attainment, and taking us to “top five by ’25.” Gillard’s Coalition successor in the education portfolio, Christopher Pyne, bought the line and packaged it up as the “four pillars” of reform.

Two of the five recent reports ­– one by prominent academic and consultant Brian Caldwell, the other by the Centre for Independent Studies, or CIS – belong to this agenda. Their concern is not with the “pressure” side of the equation, but with the amount and kind of elbow room schools need if pressure is to turn into “performance.”

Caldwell has been the leading Australian proponent of school autonomy since the publication of his seminal The Self-Managing School (written with Tasmanian principal Jim Spinks) in 1988. He was among the first to argue that autonomy should serve educational as well as professional and organisational ends, and was therefore among the first to realise that a causal chain with ill-defined “autonomy” at one end and closely specified “outcomes” at the other end is a long and tangled one.

The most recent of Caldwell’s many investigations of the connection, based on the experience of four government schools in Victoria, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory, finds that, yes, “autonomy” does improve “performance,” or it can anyway, sort of. The analysis “tends to confirm,” Caldwell concludes, “that higher levels of school autonomy are associated with higher levels of student achievement providing there is a balance of autonomy and accountability” (emphases added). In other words: in the universe of schooling, where everything is related to everything else, it all depends.

Such inconvenient caveats, qualifications and distinctions eluded the sponsor of Professor Caldwell’s study, then education minister Pyne. “Great schools have leaders and teachers who have the independence to make decisions and deliver the education that best suits the needs of their students,” he enthused in launching the report. “And the research, including the findings by Professor Caldwell, tells us this is the right approach.”

It doesn’t, and it didn’t, of course. The concept of “autonomy,” along with the Commonwealth’s $70 million Independent Public Schools Initiative and Caldwell himself, has been roped into a highly politicised and dubious campaign that is not interested in whether, how and to what end relationships between schools and systems need reform. It is interested, instead, in making public schools more like private ones.

The CIS is also a supporter of autonomy and of independent public schools, but wants to go several steps further. It wants Australia to follow the example of the United States, Britain, Sweden, Chile and, most recently, New Zealand in introducing “charter” schools. Models vary, but the general idea is that charters are public schools privately operated (by for-profits as well as not-for-profits) within the terms of a contract or “charter.”

In the CIS proposal, charters could set or choose their own curriculum and make their own industrial arrangements. They could be either “conversions,” which take over failing public schools, or “startups” going into competition with existing schools. One objective is, of course, to lift “performance,” but the CIS also argues that charters could encourage innovation and bring choice to families currently deprived of it for reasons of income and/or a preference for non-religion-based schooling.

Considered in its own terms the case is plausible, attractive even. The charter mechanism (unlike the “autonomy” approach) recognises that the whole web of relationships of which “the school” is part needs to be rejigged. Schools working with “the disadvantaged” – the clientele the CIS has in mind – do need better ways of organising teaching and learning, hence different staffing profiles and deployment, and hence different industrial arrangements. They certainly need school-based or school-shaped curriculum. And even if the evidence about the “performance” of charters is mixed, as the CIS concedes, well, there’s still the claimed benefit of extending “choice” to those who don’t already have it.

It is not until we step outside this advocacy that the real problems appear. Wanting to introduce charters into the US system in 1991 (when the first charters were established) is a very different thing from wanting to introduce them into Australia in 2015. In the United States the charters were designed to tackle the public school monopoly in the interests of variety, choice and innovation. Australia already has plenty of all of these features, and they have not served us well, not least because the ground rules are so different.

In the United States, neither mainstream public schools nor charters are permitted to charge fees or to select on academic, racial, income or other grounds. Without seeming to notice the implications, the CIS suggests a level playing field for Australian charters and mainstream public schools: they should be funded to the same level, should not be permitted to charge fees, and should be non-selective.

This raises an obvious question. If a level playing field is a good way to run the public system, why not the system as a whole? It might be assumed that a think tank committed to free and open competition, and to its educational correlative, equal opportunity, would be the first to ask the question, and to pursue the questions that then arise. It could ask, for instance, whether the lack of levelness in the playing field contributes to “educational disadvantage” and whether more levelness might reduce it. But the question is not posed.

How is it that the CIS wants to import the charter idea, but not its regulatory framework, from the United States? How come the CIS has public schools for the “disadvantaged” in its sights but does not even mention arrangements for the “advantaged” or what has produced such a yawning chasm between the two? Why doesn’t it mention the possibility that a “failing” Catholic school might become a “conversion” charter? Why no consideration of the pros and cons of converting at least some independent schools to charters? Or of the pros and cons of more cooperation between schools in disadvantaged areas as against more competition between them?

My purpose is not to question the sincerity of the CIS and its authors in wanting to do something about a serious educational and social problem. It is to point to a downward gaze that has trumped the CIS’s own first principles. Disadvantage is being addressed on the strict proviso that certain interests and arrangements remain not just untouched, but unmentioned. It is a question to which we will return.

Geoff Masters is the long-time CEO of Australia’s preeminent education research organisation, an international authority on the complex interactions of assessment, teaching and learning, and a prominent critic of the all-too-familiar lockstep curriculum. To these research and educational credentials Masters has added a concern with how reform should proceed. In this he draws on arguments advanced by Canadian guru Michael Fullan and others, and particularly on Fullan’s critique of the Gillard agenda (title: Choosing the Wrong Drivers for Whole System Reform).

Masters argues that, contra Caldwell and the CIS, choice, competition and school autonomy are best understood as elements of an agenda that doesn’t work. That agenda (Masters says) is based on the mistaken belief that “improvement will occur if schools are given incentives to improve,” including rewards, sanctions and the need to compete for students.

Countries pursuing these strategies, Masters says – referring to but not naming Britain and the United States – “tend to be the countries that have experienced the worst declines in student performance.” Research is now casting doubt both on the “theoretical underpinnings” of the incentives agenda and on associated assumptions about what motivates people to give of their best. Rather than persist with an agenda based on rewards, sanctions and competition, Masters wants Australia to build the “capacity” of teachers and school leaders, and to ensure “high quality practice across the system.”

Masters offers an outline of just such an agenda: a higher-status and more academically capable teaching profession; a “twenty-first-century curriculum”; more “flexible learning arrangements focused on growth”; early and extra attention for children “at risk of being locked into trajectories of low achievement”; and a narrower gap between the best- and worst-performing schools.

Another to depart from the dominant agenda is the most recent in the Grattan Institute’s impressive series of reports on schooling. Like Masters, Grattan urges “more flexible learning arrangements focused on growth.” Where Masters points the general direction, Grattan gets down and dirty, reporting in detail on the work of schools that are putting the learning-based-on-growth approach into daily practice by collecting detailed information about each student’s progress and using it to inform curriculum choices and teaching strategies.

It is at least possible that Masters and Grattan share something else: a loss of faith in or hope of large-scale reform. Until recently Grattan was a leading importer of ideas about how systems could and should be reorganised, but it has moved steadily from telescope to microscope, from reform of the system to reform of practice and to the school as “the unit of reform.” Masters, meanwhile, is straight-out despondent.

There is (he says) “little evidence” that the status and academic capability of teachers is about to change, while “many features of the school curriculum have been unchanged for decades.” It is not obvious that “we have policies in place to reform mathematics and science curriculum in ways that might reverse the trend in subject enrolments and performance.” The counterproductive age-based organisation of teaching and learning “is deeply entrenched and reinforced by legislation” and “there is little evidence that… we are doing a better job of reducing the number of students on long-term trajectories of low achievement.”

Masters doesn’t investigate why all this is so, why the “wrong drivers” have been chosen, or why his preferred agenda has not been pursued. Lyndsay Connors and Jim McMorrow do, and what they find justifies both a gloomy prognosis and a different approach to reform.

Lyndsay Connors is, among other things, former chair of the Schools Commission, while Jim McMorrow was the Commission’s money man and remains the authority on where “resources” come from, where they go, and what they do. As might be expected of an experienced journalist and a de facto forensic accountant, Connors and McMorrow come at the problem in a quite different way from Caldwell and the CIS, and from Masters and Grattan. They look at the workings of the system as a whole rather than those of individual schools. They start not with an agenda but an analysis of the problem, and look at the specifics of the Australian system rather than at reform efforts elsewhere. And, unsurprisingly, they reach different conclusions about what is to be done. In this they are in debt to a report prepared for the Gonski review by a Nous consortium and that, in turn, was informed by the work of a handful of mostly Melbourne-based researchers. What follows is a free translation of this substantial body of work.

Any school in any school system anywhere (the argument goes) will reflect the demographics of its location, but Australia’s set-up compounds unavoidable differences in the social composition of schools. Its most distinctive feature is the sector system: three types of school, all receiving funding from two levels of government but in three different mixes and in three different ways. Two of the three, the non-government sectors, charge fees and are mostly religion-based. The third is nominally free, and secular.

It is often thought that these arrangements permit non-government schools to select on financial and/or religious and/or academic grounds while the government schools do not. In fact, some non-government schools behave for most practical purposes as mainstream public schools and, more to the point, some government schools select all of their students on academic and therefore social grounds, and many select some of their students, both overtly and covertly.

These structural arrangements mean that an unusually high proportion of Australian parents have an unusually great capacity to choose from an unusually wide range of schools. They typically choose schools where their children will find others just like themselves. And the more parents who do that, the more other parents will conclude that they’d better do likewise. In the doing, they make a choice for those who can’t choose, for reasons of income and/or location, or because their child doesn’t have what the choosy schools are looking for. Thus the non-choosers, like the choosers, find themselves increasingly among their own kind.

To point this out is not to blame parents who can and do choose, either for choosing or for the choices they make. It is to criticise a system of pressures and opportunities to which parents respond as best they can and which, in the upshot, gives Australia an exceptionally high and rising “stratification” of schooling by class and culture, now approaching the stage at which it should probably be called “segregation,” or segmentation at the very least.

More than a third of government school students are from the lowest quarter of students according to socioeconomic status, or SES, almost three times the proportion in the independent sector, and these ratios are more or less reversed for the top quartile. There are much higher concentrations in particular schools at either end of the spectrum. The concentration of disadvantaged students in disadvantaged schools is, Nous reports, “substantially higher than for any comparable OECD country,” while the proportion of all students in mixed or average SES schools is well below the OECD average. Research conducted since Nous and Gonski reported suggests that the concentration of low SES students in government schools continues.

Cultural divisions are, in at least some parts of the country, even more pronounced. Taking the cases of Sydney and New South Wales, researcher Christina Ho found sectoral differences in LBOTE (language background other than English) and non-LBOTE enrolments similar to SES differences, but with staggering concentrations in top-end schools. There, LBOTE families have opted for the government schools that select and exclude on academic grounds, while non-LBOTEs have headed for the independents that select and exclude mainly on financial grounds. Thus only one of the top ten NSW government selective schools (by HSC rank) has less than 80 per cent LBOTE enrolments, but Ho can list sixteen high-fee schools with less than 20 per cent LBOTE. In between these extremes Ho finds a less dramatic but still pronounced segmentation going on.

The sifting and sorting of students and families into particular schools feeds a sifting and sorting of the schools themselves, a process often referred to as “residualisation.” The term was popularised by public school advocates to describe a vicious circle. Schools with high proportions of kids from poor families find it increasingly difficult to attract and keep experienced and capable teachers, principals and other key educational resources, which makes them less attractive to those who can choose to go elsewhere, which increases the proportion of “disadvantaged” students, which makes the school less attractive, and so on, and on, around and around the circle.

There is also a flip side, not so often noted, a process of aggrandisement that produces schools of almost preposterous grandeur, with five-star resort buildings and grounds, parents paying in fees twice what is spent on the common ruck of students (and that’s before various endowments, public subsidies, accounting lurks and tax breaks), and executive salary packages three times those offered elsewhere. In the course of his review, David Gonski, who came from the world of Sydney Grammar, visited some of the schools at the other end of the spectrum, and was shocked. Australia has constructed a system not just of sectors but of gated communities and educational slums.

This process is often seen – and objected to – as the product of “marketisation.” It is true that schools parade their wares, and parents shop around. Indeed, more of both sides do the market-like thing in Australia than in any comparable country. But to think that Australian schooling is a marketplace and to argue that the problem lies therein is to make a fundamental mistake. The problem is in the way the market interacts with the funding and regulatory regime to produce massive distortions in what is offered and to whom it is available.

Thus we have both free and publicly subsidised fee-charging schools; religious and secular schools; schools lavishly funded and schools relatively impoverished; schools permitted to select on grounds of capacity to pay and/or religious affiliation and/or academic performance and schools prohibited from doing any of those things; parents who are required to pay when often they can’t afford it and parents who aren’t and can; and parents who are offered the full menu and others who must take whatever is put on their plate.

The most obvious educational consequence of all this, or obvious in the psychometrics relied on by all of the authors discussed here anyway, is “inequality” of “outcomes.”

The argument is that a student’s attainment is determined less by his or her school’s educational program than by the school’s student body. Thus a low SES student going to a high SES school, for example, will do better than his or her peers because of the company he or she keeps. The complex redistribution of students across schools, Connors and McMorrow argue, has therefore also been a redistribution of educational achievement. It has led to a gap between Australia’s highest and lowest performing students (as Gonski observed) “far greater” than in many other OECD countries. And it means that Australia was the only OECD country to see an increase in the performance gap between high and low SES schools between 2000 and 2009.

Most striking is an increase in “between-school variance,” a measure of the extent to which schools differ from each other. An Australian Council for Educational Research study of results from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment found an increase in variance from 18 to 24 per cent between 2000 and 2009. Over the same period variance in Finland’s schools rose from 8 to 9 per cent. As noted above, recent research suggests that the overall trend in both social redistribution and the redistribution of attainment rolls on.

But do standardised tests, which these various comparisons rely on, focus on too narrow a subset of the learning that goes on in three areas of the formal curriculum (literacy, science, maths)? This is an important objection, but there is another, at least as important. Standardised tests say nothing at all about what is learned in school via the so-called “informal” curriculum.

Christina Ho points to the moral as it applies to “multicultural” learning. “Scholars of ‘everyday multiculturalism’ argue that the success of Australian multiculturalism has much to do with ordinary encounters between people of different cultural background that happen every day, in neighbourhoods, workplaces, parks – and schools,” she says. “Monocultural schools, regardless of the brilliance of their teaching programs, cannot socialise students for the realities of a cosmopolitan Australian society and a globalised world.” The same can be said of learning about social difference. The general point is that students who do not learn about others do not learn about themselves either. They are being miseducated.

Then there are the social consequences. Australian schools are increasingly active in constituting an elite that knows only itself, and an underclass that is being dudded and knows it. More diffuse but no less material is the erosion of “equal opportunity” through schooling as both a fact and as an important source of legitimation for the social order as a whole.

A first conclusion: to say that we’re not getting anywhere is not quite right. Nor is it quite right to say that the problem with schooling is a problem of agendas. A big part of the problem is that we have the wrong system, and that most agenda-setters are looking elsewhere. We could go further and surmise that all that effort in reforming practice and schools is working, not particularly well or widely, but well enough to stop us going backwards as a result of the workings of the system. The schools, in this perspective, are galley slaves, badly trained and fed, not very well coordinated, but stuck with rowing against a systemic tide.

A second conclusion: are “outcomes” the thing to focus on, or the only one? All sides of the battle accept that lifting outcomes is the main game. But shouldn’t segregation itself be front and centre, by reason of its role in generating unequal attainments as well as other educational and social consequences? Why shouldn’t any school or school system that wants to select some or all of its students be held just as responsible for the resulting social mix as it is for “outcomes”? Segregation should be seen not just as an explanation of the problem, but also as a big, direct, closely reported and well-documented target of policy.

A third conclusion: the tools of thinking about reform are not fit for purpose.

The reform debate is dominated by the “effectiveness” paradigm, and that is a very mixed blessing. Thanks to its origins in psychology and psychometrics it is much better at understanding teaching and learning and, at a stretch, how a school works, than at understanding how school systems work. It is much more interested in what makes an effective teacher or school than in what makes an effective system. It has encouraged the assumption that “reform” consists of the viral spread of “good practice” and the accumulation of micro-gains.

It has another problem, noted a moment ago. The effectiveness paradigm can see only the learning that goes on in the formal curriculum. It has blurred the vision of those who do see a segmentation problem, including Masters, Connors and McMorrow (and Nous and Gonski), but then relegate it to the status of an explanatory variable. The effectiveness approach makes them less than alert to learning in the so-called “informal curriculum,” the learning that comes from spending five or six hours, day after day, in a segregated school. They pass too quickly over the fact that high and rising segregation in schools is incompatible with a multicultural society, and with a democratic one.

The language and interests of “effectiveness” have pushed out of view the system itself, and much of what goes on in schools. And it has pushed history, politics, sociology, philosophy and economics to the margins of thinking about reform. The exception, as employed and elaborated by Connors and McMorrow, illustrates the rule.

A final thought: what is it about the system that does the damage? To one way of thinking, the problem is in regulation, and the solution is “deregulation.” In other minds, including those of the Nous researchers, the problem stems from (as Nous puts it) a “robust” and “highly competitive” market. In fact, this is less a problem of too much regulation than a matter of bad regulation. The market is not robust, but wildly distorted. Maldistributed liberty has eroded equality and discounted fraternity. The problem is not the market or regulation but their currently dysfunctional combination.

And so, inevitably, to Gonski, the proposal for systemic reform, the great offset on the Gillard balance sheet, and the hope of the side. If Gonski is lost then so is any chance of arresting and reversing the segregationist logic of the system. If Gonski survives, then it must be remembered that he was sent into the fight with one arm tied behind his back. He was permitted to examine only one aspect of funding (the fee/free distinction, for example, was off limits), and the regulatory regime, including selection and exclusion, not at all.

Connors and McMorrow argue that Gonski plus some regulatory tightening in a “hybrid” system is the best that can be hoped for. That is certainly the outer limit of what government can achieve at the moment. But is it the limit of thought, argument, proposal?

My own view is that if Gonski does survive then it should be regarded not as the systemic reform job done, but as a crucial step on a long road. At the end of that road, as the CIS inadvertently suggests, is a level playing field. Between here and there is a lot of hard thinking about policy and politics, compromise and principle, which could be approached in good faith from left, right or centre. The objective is not to restore the status quo of 1960, or to defend this sector against that, or to keep adding more choice to a hopelessly rigged market, but to combine funding and regulation so that no school gets too far behind or too far ahead in the conditions needed to attract a diverse clientele and to offer an educationally engaging program. Schools are, after all, for kids. They are meant to be a bridge to the wider world, not a mere reflection of the circumstances into which a child happens to have been born.

The post What is to be done about Australian schooling? appeared first on Inside Story.

Why would hard-headed investors put their money into a venture based on the assumption, as Traill recounts it, that “a bunch of do-gooder non-profits could run a very large-scale business and do social good.” Traill surprised the doubters: the money from charities, private investors, banks and government that he helped bring together into a winning bid created a highly successful social enterprise called Goodstart.

The new company paid $95 million for a stripped-down version of ABC Learning, which at its peak had more than 1000 centres, and raised another $70 million to fund its ongoing operations. A non-profit outbidding private rivals was one surprise. Another has been the success of combining an unsentimental business approach with a soft heart.

Today Goodstart is the largest provider of childcare and early learning in Australia, with 665 centres catering for 75,600 children and employing 16,700 people. In 2018–19, its revenue grew by 8.2 per cent to $1.1 billion. The surpluses it earns as a not-for-profit are invested in raising the quality of early learning and supporting centres in disadvantaged areas.

That’s not to say everyone is happy. Particularly in the earlier years, staff complained about cost cutting, minimum staffing levels and having to pay for needed resources out of their own pocket. More recently, an employee posted a comment that “a lot is expected to be done out of goodwill” and another that staff were “not being recognised and rewarded for their hard work.” But Goodstart argues it has been steadily improving its performance.

According to John Cherry, the company’s advocacy manager (and a former Australian Democrats senator), the number of Goodstart centres meeting the national quality standard — which measures such things as staff-to-child ratios and staff qualifications and is administered by state and territory governments — has grown from about half in 2012 to 93 per cent. It’s now higher than the average among preschools, which have been regarded as the high-quality end of the early learning sector. Fee increases have been below average for the past four years, in contrast to those of ABC Learning, which were above average.

Cherry says Goodstart pays above award wages, has spent about $100 million on professional development and has increased the number of teachers it employs by about 300, bringing the total to 1300. Its social inclusion budget — which helps disadvantaged children get access to early learning — has risen from $1.5 million to $12 million in the past four years, though arguably this is still a modest amount in proportion to its revenue. Goodstart’s policy is not to turn any child away, and it provides speech therapists, occupational therapists, psychologists and other support.

What would Goodstart be worth now? “You would probably list it for over $1 billion if you wanted to run it more commercially,” says Traill, who chairs the company. As part of the original deal, three charities — Mission Australia, the Benevolent Society and the Brotherhood of St Laurence — each put in $2.5 million, an investment that returned them 12 per cent a year, as well as another 15 per cent in the form of a dividend based on the success of the business. Another $22.5 million was raised from forty-one investors, who put in amounts ranging from $100,000 to $3 million and also earned 12 per cent a year, with the money repaid after seven years. The National Australia Bank lent $50 million and the federal government a further $15 million — debts that have also been repaid.

Traill is driven partly by his upbringing in Morwell, a disadvantaged town in country Victoria, where he witnessed bright kids missing out on the opportunities that his own parents were able to give him. He went to Melbourne University and then to Harvard for an MBA, before joining Macquarie Bank, where he spent fourteen years during the 1980s and 1990s. He was co-founder and executive director of the bank’s private equity arm, Macquarie Direct Investment, which boasted a gross rate of return of 32.3 per cent.

Deciding there was more to life than getting rich at the millionaires’ factory, he left in 2002 to start Social Ventures Australia. A not-for-profit, it has supported more than fifty projects that deliver social as well as financial returns, and has a busy consulting arm.

Achieving a return on investment in its broadest sense remains central to Traill’s thinking. “We know that waiting until a child begins formal schooling is the least effective intervention if a child’s development is falling behind their peers, both for the individual and from a return on investment point of view,” he wrote in an introduction to the Goodstart’s 2018 annual report. “If as a nation we begin to place an emphasis on early learning — as nations as diverse as Finland, China and New Zealand are already doing — we will reap the rewards for this and the following generations.”

A wealth of evidence attests to the ability of children to soak up learning in the first five years of life. A report to federal and state governments in 2017 argued that children who received high-quality early education were more likely to complete year 12 and less likely to repeat grades or require additional support. A recent PwC study that attempts to quantify the returns on investment in early childhood education calculates that every $1 spent produces about $2 in benefits, taking into account factors such as children’s higher future earnings, extra income for parents and carers from additional work, higher government revenue from taxation, lower welfare and healthcare costs, and reduced criminal activity.

Other countries, particularly Britain and the United States, are ahead of Australia in social impact investing. British legislation gave the not-for-profit social sector access to almost £600 million (A$1.13 billion) in unclaimed money in banks that has been leveraged into £1.7 billion (A$3.2 billion) in investment. Mostly, though, social businesses here and overseas operate on a small scale. Goodstart’s success has attracted attention particularly because of its size.

“I think we are regarded as a bit of a global exemplar,” says Traill. “My hope has always been that Goodstart becomes a precedent, and not just in early learning.” He sees its application in areas such as aged care, further education, and social and affordable housing — areas where there is scope for the superannuation sector in particular to invest in low-risk, long-term ventures with many of the same characteristics as infrastructure projects.

One of Traill’s other hats is as chair of the investment committee of Sunsuper, an industry superannuation fund that has put $200 million into an investment trust for aged-care housing — money it says is a good property investment that also delivers social benefits. The HESTA industry super fund has a $70 million social impact investment trust managed by Social Ventures Australia and recently allocated $20 million to a Melbourne apartment project to provide affordable housing.

Traill is exploring further opportunities in aged care, where he sees many similarities with early childhood education. The hearings of the royal commission into aged care certainly are reinforcing the need for high-quality, ethical care, as are the financial difficulties the sector is facing. Traill argues that returns in the order of the 12 per cent achieved for Goodstart investors should be attractive, particularly in the present circumstances of a low-growth economy, and that it would be a comfortable level of risk for a well-run company. He adds that as a board member of Sunsuper he has a legally enforceable responsibility to maximise the return to fund members. “If these businesses are run ethically there is no reason they should not be able to generate a long-term rate of return.” He also sees potential in the further education sector, where private colleges “have lost sight of the quality agenda.”

Traill says there is no need for stratospheric executive salaries, with Goodstart showing that a business can achieve a depth and balance of skills without having to pay “nosebleed” packages. “People are paid well by non-profit standards, but nothing like the seven-figure bonuses people of comparable talent would be getting in the private sector.”

Of course, aged care is not the only sector that has suffered reputational damage. There’s the banks. And there’s business more generally, in the wake of a global financial crisis that has led to a debate about the very future of capitalism. “We need a more sophisticated form of capitalism, one imbued with a social purpose,” Michael Porter, one of Traill’s lecturers at Harvard, has argued. “But that purpose should arise not out of charity but out of a deeper understanding of competition and economic value creation… It is not philanthropy but self-interested behaviour to create economic value by creating social value.”

This not only challenges the traditional obligation of the corporation to act solely in the best interest of shareholders but greatly expands notions of corporate social responsibility. Consumers, particularly young people, are increasingly insisting that businesses behave honestly and transparently, says Traill.

And then there is government. Why is it, Traill asked in a speech five years ago, “that despite a generation of economic growth and in many areas quite significant funding growth, the data tells us that we haven’t made much progress on the core moral and economic issue that we face in this country — that many Australians live in a cycle of exclusion and cannot fully participate in the community?” He quoted two examples: at age fifteen, the poorest 25 per cent of students were nearly two-and-a-half years behind the most affluent students; and, based on 2014 statistics, more than 1.6 million Australians were without work or without sufficient hours of work. “Our conclusion is simple and powerful: money isn’t flowing to the right places to achieve social impact.”

The question is how much difference can be made by social impact investment. With governments progressively withdrawing from public or social housing and with 190,000 households on the waiting list, there is plenty of scope for a social enterprise like Goodstart. But the scale of the problem is such that, even with investment by superannuation funds, such a project can go only a small way towards filling the gap.

The same applies more generally to affordable housing. According to a report prepared for federal and state Treasury heads, the main barrier to the supply of affordable housing by the private sector is the lower returns compared to those for other property. It argued that no innovative financing model could close this gap and that “a sustained increase in the investment by governments is required to stimulate affordable housing production and attract private and institutional investment.”

Traill was appointed this year to chair a federal government taskforce to develop a social impact investment strategy. But what the government has in mind, at least at this stage, is far more modest than large scale social entrepreneurship. Rather, it is exploring the use of the social impact bonds that Traill, through Social Ventures Australia, helped pioneer in the states. According to a federal government announcement last month, it is looking for “solutions to address entrenched disadvantage and some of society’s most intractable social problems” in areas ranging from welfare dependence to social housing. As well as providing $5 million for the taskforce, this year’s federal budget dipped a small toe into the water by allocating $14 million for three social impact investment trials.

Details remain to be worked out, but the Department of Social Services says the trials will seek to increase labour force participation of people receiving working-age income support payments and to “strengthen the wellbeing and self-reliance of families with children.” Organisations will receive funding based on the results they achieve. These outcome-based payments, as opposed to fee-for-service or block grants, are a key element of social impact investments. But the department says the trials won’t involve another typical characteristic — funding from private investors.

The taskforce comes under the prime minister’s department, reflecting Scott Morrison’s interest in the area. This was expressed most clearly in 2015, when as social services minister he dressed up the concept in conservative garb. Governments would get smaller in proportion to the size of the social challenges, he said, which meant that non-government players would have to get bigger, including through private investment in social needs. “What I am basically saying is that welfare must become a good deal for… private investors.”

If this is the real motivation of governments then it raises an obvious question. If social impact investing is simply a substitute for government programs, what exactly will it achieve? According to proponents, it is a more efficient way of delivering services that focuses on the outcomes actually achieved; a more innovative approach to some of the social problems that have defeated successive governments; and perhaps, if private wealth is harnessed for social purposes, a modest attempt to address inequality.

The first social impact bond was launched in New South Wales in 2013. The state’s seven “social benefit bonds,” as they’re called, cover challenges like reducing the number of children in out-of-home care, driving down rates of youth unemployment, homelessness, and reoffending among former prisoners, and improving palliative care and mental health services.

Victoria has its own version, called Partnerships Addressing Disadvantage, which aim for a wider source of private funding, including pure philanthropy and loans. The Andrews government stresses they will not replace existing government services, whereas Gladys Berejiklian’s NSW government says that “achieving the outcomes should reduce the need for, and government spending on, acute services.” South Australia has introduced a social impact bond to target homelessness and Queensland has three pilot bonds, with many of the projects in the different states covering similar areas to those in New South Wales.

On paper, the early bonds introduced in New South Wales have been successful, with outcomes better than those under government programs, as well as returns to private investors of up to 12 per cent a year and potentially as high as 30 per cent for investors prepared to risk losing their capital if the project is not successful. But they have been operating on a small scale. The first bond, Newpin, an intensive and therefore costly program to reduce out-of-home care for children, has returned 328 children to their families in six years, compared to the estimated 114 in the absence of the program.

That result is impressive, but the net figure of 214 makes barely a dent in the 17,879 children in out-of-home care in New South Wales in 2017 and the 47,915 in Australia. It does show the potential savings available, though, given that it costs around $60,000 a year to keep a child in out-of-home care. But many children do not meet the criteria of the Newpin program.

The structure of the bonds can be complex. An average of 11,712 staff hours was taken up in developing each of the first two NSW bonds. While experience has streamlined the process, the requirements for measuring outcomes and investor risks and returns can vary. A substantial risk premium is needed to attract investment in the first place, meaning the total cost of a social impact investment project is higher than if it were funded directly by government — and also explaining why some of the more recent projects have moved away from seeking private investment, reducing their complexity but retaining the emphasis on outcomes-based funding.

Contrary to the impression often given, the money raised from private investors via the bonds doesn’t represent additional funding, since investors expect their money back, plus earnings. The only exception is if projects fail and investors’ capital is not protected. The advantage to government — assuming that it would otherwise have funded the program itself — is that it has contracted out the risk.

Elyse Sainty, director of impact investing at Social Ventures Australia, sees social impact bonds occupying the middle ground between purely experimental projects, where outcomes are hard to predict, and tried and tested programs where governments have greater certainty about results and so are more confident about carrying the performance risk themselves.

Olivia Wright, engagement manager at the NSW Council of Social Service, says there have been some savings to the NSW government from social benefit bonds but they are less than expected. She sees merit in the scheme but also has serious reservations. “They probably are not the silver bullet that they were conceived to be maybe five years ago,” she says. Her main concern is that they are a huge burden on the social sector, requiring large amounts of time, money and human resources, meaning they are not an option for the many small social welfare organisations and those dealing with disadvantage as the result of very complex social problems. “They are really only available as a tool for a very small number of organisations that have access to the human and financial resources to allow them to go through the long and arduous process of developing a bond.”

On the other hand, she sees benefits in the discipline that social impact bonds impose, especially with the requirement for measurable outcomes. And she sees an increasing trend towards people wanting to use their everyday investments to do good. “The primary issue from our perspective is how does the social sector build the capacity to meet that demand?”

On the present evidence, social impact bonds will only contribute at the margins to tackling social disadvantage, compared with the kind of resources that can be marshalled by governments through taxation revenue. But social entrepreneurship on the scale of Goodstart can make a larger impact. Traill’s ambition is to shift the traditionally conservative mindset of the superannuation funds and unlock the $2.8 trillion that they manage. Just a tiny fraction of that would be enough to fund hundreds of Goodstarts.

That requires a wider acceptance of the idea of capitalism with a social purpose, or capitalism 2.0, as it has been dubbed. It suggests a profound change in business culture that will be a challenge to achieve. But at least rhetorically, change is in the air. Some large businesses in Australia are more openly promoting social and environmental values, even at the cost of offending conservative politicians. In August the US Business Roundtable, representing big business, declared a new purpose — not just serving shareholders but also investing in employees, fostering diversity, inclusion, dignity and respect, dealing ethically with suppliers and supporting the communities in which businesses operate.

It may only be words at this stage, but it at least suggests that even big business feels under pressure to change the way it sees its role. •

The post Is Goodstart just the beginning? appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s one of the unfailing rules of human institutions that if you introduce a measurement, the system changes to meet it, like the leaves of a plant turning to face the sun. So it is that the research output measured by the international rankings grows lush at universities, and those sides of academia not rewarded can dwindle in the shade. One of those things is teaching. Another is the kind of industry-connected research that can be useful but doesn’t reach the international journals.

The students lured to our leading universities may never encounter the academics behind the research that attracted the ranking. Instead, they are often taught by sessional staff and those on short-term contracts. According to the National Tertiary Education Union, only one-third of Australian university staff have secure employment. Forty-three per cent are casuals — their contracts end at the end of each semester; 22 per cent are on fixed-term contracts, typically of between one and two years. Universities have become big employers but not particularly good employers.

The story of Chinese students is mainly about Australia’s top institutions of research and higher learning — the so-called Group of Eight, or Go8 — which charge around A$40,000 a year for courses (compared to around A$25,000 a year among the non-Go8 universities). Go8 universities now earn more from Chinese students, who make up 60 per cent of all foreign enrolments, than they do from the Commonwealth Grant Scheme, the basic teaching grant the government pays for the education of domestic students.

Time to declare my position in this story. I work at Monash University, one of the Go8, teaching journalism subjects. Before that, I headed the Master of Journalism course at another Go8 member, the University of Melbourne. I teach Chinese students, though the journalism-focused subjects don’t draw these students in large numbers — partly because a Western-oriented journalism education is of limited use in China, and partly because we demand higher English-language skills. But I have also taught in broader media and communications degrees, where it is common for lectures to contain up to 80 per cent Chinese students.

Chinese students have been among my best and worst pupils. The obvious differences — English-language capabilities chief among them — obscure the many ways in which they mirror any other cohort. Some students are diligent; others are clearly satisfying parental ambitions rather than pursuing their own. Often they are away from parental control and day-to-day support for the first time, with all that implies for fun, personal growth and stress.

In practical journalism assignments, Chinese students naturally gravitate to reporting on their own community. So it is that I have learned from them about students who support themselves by smuggling illicit tobacco from China to Australia. I have seen many reports about the daigou — students and others who buy goods for customers back home concerned about food safety and purity.

My top student last year was Chinese. I will call her Mary, for reasons that will become clear. She completed, to high-distinction standard, an investigative report on the contract essay-cheating business. Websites that sell essays are marketed to Chinese students in English-language countries worldwide. My student interviewed some of those who write the essays. They charge $150 per 1000 words for an assignment designed to attract a pass mark, or more for a credit or a distinction. This is not plagiarism: these are real, original assignments — just not written by the enrolled student. I’d be lying if I said I was confident in spotting them when they cross my desk.

Thanks to Mary’s work, I know that one of the biggest agencies, Meeloun Education, claims to have over 450 writers, more than half with master’s degrees from outside China. They spruik that they can handle assignments in all the major Australian universities, specifically mentioning the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, the University of Adelaide and Monash University. On the strength of this work, Mary got an internship at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which has since published its own stories on contract cheating. Legislation to outlaw these websites is planned.

After asking her if she will talk to me for this article, I meet Mary in Federation Square in central Melbourne. She is thrilled. She tells me she has mentioned our meeting to her mother. Such contact is rare enough to be significant news. This, she says, is the hardest thing for Chinese students. Australians are friendly to them on a superficial basis, but “this notion of personal space, that is very strange and very hard.” Many Chinese students find it hard to penetrate, or even understand, the reserve that surrounds our intimate lives. How can we be so affable yet back away so fast when a Chinese student responds with an expectation of greater intimacy?

Mary is unusual. Her encounters with Australian journalists mean she absorbs local news and views, and her English is flawless. Yet she still struggles to engage with Australians. Most of her Chinese student friends, meanwhile, move through Australian society in a bubble, speaking English only in class. They consume little Australian media, instead relying heavily on Chinese-language social media news services targeted to Chinese students in Australia.

Fran Martin at the University of Melbourne has been conducting a five-year study of Chinese international students. Her subjects are all women — partly because of her research specialty in gender studies, but also because 60 per cent of all Chinese students overseas are female. This imbalance is even more striking given that women comprise fewer than 50 per cent of the Chinese population, thanks to a skewed birth ratio under the one-child policy.

Martin found that the failure to make Australian friends is a major disappointment for Chinese students. Making friends from other countries is one of their main motivations for coming to Australia. They blame their failure on poor English-language skills, but Martin sees this as a symptom, not a cause. Australian universities aren’t doing enough to provide them with the experience they seek. The best way to learn a language is to use it — and Chinese students don’t get those opportunities.

“It’s an indictment on the universities that they don’t do more to break up the cliques, to force interaction,” Martin tells me. Teaching staff should be doing more to encourage student interaction, she says, and this in turn would help international students improve their English. But they aren’t trained in the kind of cross-cultural skills needed. By failing to do this, Australian universities are depriving both their international customers and the domestic students, who could benefit from such interaction. Despite the numbers of international students, we are not running a genuinely international system of education.

The experience of being in Australia changes female Chinese students, says Martin, but perhaps not in the ways we might expect. The young women return home with a greater sense of independence and are more likely to resist state and family pressure to marry early and have children. But when asked if this reflects their contact with Australian values, they are likely to dismiss the idea. Rather, it was the experience of being away from their family, together with an awareness of the time and money spent on their education.

Australian politics can also be puzzling for Chinese students. Living in the city, they see every demonstration that brings the streets to a halt. Martin says many are intrigued: why are people bothering? When it is explained that enough public attention might change votes, and that might change the government, they understand — but are unlikely to change their view.

This mirrors my experiences in the classroom. In my subjects, Chinese students are often openly critical of their own government, but when China is criticised by others, they can be defensive. Even the journalism students, who crave more media freedom at home, will argue that China’s large population and many challenges necessitate strong party rule. It is rare for a student from China to advocate a Western system of media freedom. And most resent how the Australian media depicts China — and their presence on campus — as a threat.

In 2017, then foreign minister Julie Bishop made a statement warning Chinese students to respect freedom of speech at Australian universities amid growing unease over Beijing’s alleged influence on campuses. Martin says most of her subjects weren’t aware of the statement until it was picked up by Chinese-language social media. Then they were “outraged — very offended.”

It has been one of the tropes, this allegation that Chinese students attempt to suppress freedom of speech. Sometimes they are accused of trying to close down debate in lectures. The same couple of anecdotes tend to get recycled — and helped to provoke a recent government review of freedom of speech on campus, conducted by former High Court chief justice Robert French, which found no evidence of a systemic problem.

Fran Martin and Mary both told me they had never seen any evidence that Chinese students were either threatened or threatening when it came to freedom of speech. I had never seen it myself, nor had any of the colleagues I asked. Then, in the week after I conducted interviews for this essay, came reports of pro–Hong Kong democracy protesters on campuses being harassed and attacked. This made Martin reconsider her earlier statement, though she still thinks “it’s a very tiny minority of Chinese students who are involved in such incidents.”

Mary doesn’t rule out the possibility that there may be Chinese spies on campus, watching people like her who express independent views. She would speak freely in a class where she knew the individuals, she said, but would be more careful in an open forum. On the other hand, she had seen students question lecturers in class, including on topics to do with China — but they were taking part in class discussions, not trying to close them down. And, she asked, wasn’t that an example of freedom of speech? Wasn’t that something we encouraged? Or were only certain kinds of free speech encouraged?

Meanwhile, Mary has asked the Australian journalists she works with whether they feel they are objective about China. Why do they always cast it as a threat? They tell her they are just writing the facts.

“What do you think?” I ask.

She shrugs and smiles. “I am still trying to find out that answer,” she says.

For Chinese students, it is comparatively easy to get into a top Australian university for graduate study. Unlike the gruelling selection system in China, there are no entrance exams apart from the English-language test. Applicants for entry to Australian universities are assessed entirely on the scores from their undergraduate degree. For many, it comes as a shock to discover that, despite having paid top dollar, there is no guarantee they won’t fail. In China, getting in is hard, but once accepted, graduating is virtually guaranteed. Failed assignments can always be resubmitted. Exams can be resat.

The other issue is English-language standards. This is the most frequent cause of discussion, and complaint, in the staffrooms of universities. Too often, Chinese students clearly lack the English-language skills to profit from their education. And this, of course, causes the pressures that underlie the contract cheating business.

Education researcher Andrew Norton says it is common knowledge among everyone who teaches Chinese students that there is a problem with English-language skills, but it is one of the most profound areas of lack of data. “Is it 20 per cent, 30 per cent, 40 per cent or 90 per cent of students?” he says. “We just don’t have the data.” Why not? He suggests it is because nobody wants to know the answer.

This is just one example of a lack of data in the international education business. Sometimes, one suspects it is because nobody has an interest in filling the gaps. It is hard to imagine any other export business that would tolerate such a deficiency in key information.

Mary is no passive consumer of her country’s propaganda, but nor is she becoming more wedded to an Australian identity. Her generation, she says, is proud that China is growing in influence and power. Migration to the West is seen as part of China’s rise, the taking of its place as an international power. It’s an attitude full of contradictions — an attraction to Australia because it offers a better life, but also a cleaving to the home country and its strategic priorities.

“We might criticise our government and president Xi Jinping. But when we are in Australia and we hear other people criticise, naturally we want to defend,” says Mary. She and her friends aspire to the option of life in Australia but “unlike the Greeks or the Italians, we see ourselves as different. We will always be Chinese Australians.”

I gave a guest lecture recently to students visiting from a prestigious Chinese university. There was plenty of discussion afterwards, including about the things these students had heard about China while in Australia. Their visit coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a topic banned in China. Some had watched the ABC’s Four Corners special on the subject. They were also following the Australian news reports on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations.

One of the students argued that it was inevitable China would gradually become more democratic. Others thought it unlikely. One spoke up against Xi Jinping and his removal of presidential term limits. “We have a new emperor now,” she said. None of the students seemed to fear speaking out in front of their fellows.

Finally, one of the women, who was perhaps eighteen years old, told me she had read on Chinese social media that the Hong Kong protesters had been encouraged and financed by hostile foreign powers, but she had seen no mention of this in the Australian media.

“Do you believe it?” I asked. “I don’t know what to believe,” she said. As she spoke, she looked, for a moment, as though she was in physical pain. Then she looked profoundly sad. The journalist in me thought, self-servingly, that this is the anguish of insufficient access to reliable information — that this is why journalism is important. The teacher in me, and perhaps the mother, worried about her obvious distress. What were we doing to her, and to all these young people, exposing them to so many contradictions, so much to process and think through, with no way and no licence to reach out and give a supporting hand when they return home?

It’s nice to think that perhaps it is not too late to do better. The huge numbers of international students are unprecedented in the history of Australian tertiary education. We are educating swathes of the Chinese middle class at a time of geopolitical tension. There are such opportunities here, such important potential outcomes.

Academics could be trained in cross-cultural skills. Universities could invest more in welcoming student cohorts and supporting their integration with the domestic body. We could learn from our students, coming to better understand the Chinese point of view. Rather than bemoaning their impact on the way we teach, we could make a more genuine attempt to reach our students, to truly educate.

But all that would take investment, including by taxpayers, and wisdom. It would mean seeing foreign students not only as dollar signs, and education not only as a business. It would mean being willing to seize the opportunity that resides in young people, in human engagement. Is it too late for this kind of strategic vision? •

This is an edited extract from Margaret Simons’s essay, “High Price: Inside the Chinese Student Boom,” published in Australian Foreign Affairs 7 — China Dependence, out now.

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Migrating the test online promised to speed up the turnaround while delivering another benefit. For students at either end of the learning spectrum, a one-size-fits-all test can indicate little more than the fact they are utterly overwhelmed or, at the other extreme, all over it. An adaptive online test could serve up increasingly tailored questions and provide a granular picture of what each child knows.

That was the theory. In practice, NAPLAN Online has been bedevilled by setbacks and snafus to the point that its very existence is in doubt. First, the rollout was repeatedly delayed. Then, after 15 per cent of schoolchildren sat the online version in 2018, it was revealed that the NSW education department had told its minister that their results couldn’t reliably be compared with those of students who had done the test the old-fashioned way.

It got worse. In May this year, around half of Australian students sat the test online — or tried to. Many were treated to a smorgasbord of technical glitches, from difficulties logging in, to connections dropping out, to the whole test freezing mid-answer or failing to register responses at all. Ultimately, 30,000 students had to resit, further complicating comparisons of results across schools and over time.

All this was a gift to NAPLAN’s longstanding critics. “NAPLAN really is a dud,” declared Maurie Mulheron, president of the NSW Teachers Federation. “We really need to slow the whole process down and review what kind of testing regime we want in this country.” But it wasn’t just the usual suspects joining in the chorus of condemnation, and the criticisms extended beyond the technical glitches. Former NSW education minister Adrian Piccoli took to Twitter to declare “NAPLAN is dead.” (His successor as minister, Rob Stokes, had last year called for the test to be scrapped.) Victoria’s education minister, James Merlino, endorsed the idea of a root-and-branch review, telling media, “We’ll be considering our future involvement with NAPLAN in the coming months.”

Three reviews came to pass. The first investigated the technical problems; the second looked at whether pen-and-paper results could validly be compared with the online tests. Third, and most significantly, the NSW, Queensland and Victorian governments instigated a comprehensive review of whether NAPLAN’s aims are being realised. “The review may lead to significant change or it may recommend scrapping NAPLAN altogether and replacing it with something new,” Merlino said when the terms of reference were released last month. An interim report is due in December with the final report to be released in June next year.

Public discussion of NAPLAN often conflates two things that are logically, at any rate, quite distinct: the nature of the test itself and the merits of making the results public on the My School website. We often think we’re talking about NAPLAN when we’re actually arguing about My School. The terms of reference for the three-state review suggest that, if it is done well, we could at last get some clarity.

The review’s first task will be to “determine what the objectives for standardised testing in Australia should be, given its evolution over time.” Is NAPLAN designed to promote “individual student learning achievement and growth,” for instance, or improvements in individual schools, or “system accountability and performance”? The key question here is whether one of the main purposes of the test is to provide “information for parents on school performance” via My School (and, if so, why has doing this for a decade seem to have done little to drive “school improvement”?).

When it was introduced in 2008, NAPLAN attracted little attention and even less controversy. In this respect (and others), it followed in the footsteps of its state-based predecessors — the NSW Basic Skills Testing Program, for instance, and the Victorian Learning Assessment Program. The 2006 decision by state and federal education ministers to establish a national assessment program, the development of the tests during the final years of the Howard government, and the inaugural NAPLAN test may have generated a few headlines, but they were hardly the stuff of animated conversations around Australian barbecues.

That all changed with the prospect that NAPLAN results would be published on a school-comparison website, enabling parents to choose the winning schools and encouraging the losers to lift their game.

The first sign came in August 2008, when the Australian reported that education minister Julia Gillard had met in New York with Joel Klein, the man who ran the city’s education system, to discuss his method of ranking schools from A to F, based on student test results. Schools that got an A or B received financial rewards; schools graded D to F were restaffed, restructured or closed.

Although Gillard made clear that she didn’t intend implementing a system of grades or introducing the accompanying carrots and sticks, Labor had announced during the 2007 election campaign that “publication of school performance information will form an integral part of federal Labor’s plan to improve literacy and numeracy.” Gillard reiterated that promise after the election, and clearly believed that much could be learned from Klein’s example. In November of 2008, Klein paid a return visit, praising the deputy prime minister profusely for her commitment to education reform. “The level of courage in a public official isn’t as rare as I sometimes thought,” he said.

At this point, NAPLAN started to attract attention in spades. At the annual conference of the NSW Teachers Federation in July 2009, for example, Gillard’s proposals were condemned as an attempt to “introduce inappropriate market competition mechanisms into the sphere of education and do away with any culture of cooperation between schools and teachers.” (A boycott of NAPLAN was only forestalled when Gillard made concessions on the presentation of results, the measurement of students’ social backgrounds, and the rights of third-party publishers.)

The launch of My School the following January precipitated headlines of the “how your school rates” variety across the nation. Millions of visitors descended on the site, giving it a legitimacy that its close ideological cousins, Grocery Watch and Fuel Watch, never attained.

Fame can change not only a person but also, it would appear, a national assessment program. With school reputations on the line and pressure cascading down from principals to classroom teachers to students, NAPLAN was now a high-stakes test. It would be the core element in any school’s marketing strategy, the main issue on every principal’s mind and the first item at many a school staff meeting. For apostles of choice and competition like Gillard and Klein, this was the point — and the secret to school improvement. NAPLAN results are a misleading way to measure and compare schools, say critics, and they are also so bedevilled by negative side effects that they do more harm than good.

Adjudicating this debate and determining the proper purpose of NAPLAN will require the three-state review to disentangle the test from the website that made it a household name. Specifically, the review is charged with assessing how NAPLAN aligns with the Australian Curriculum — a polite reference to the view that the test, turbocharged by My School, has led to a narrowing of what is taught in schools. The Australian Curriculum spells out seven “general capabilities,” of which numeracy and literacy, the subject of the NAPLAN tests each May, are just two. (The others are critical and creative thinking, personal and social capability, ethical understanding, intercultural understanding, and information technology capability.) Moreover, as the Gonski Institute’s Pasi Sahlberg has pointed out, “what is tested is only a subset of the broader areas of literacy and numeracy and an even smaller subset of the curriculum as a whole.”

The question before the review is whether the incentive to devote teaching and learning time to preparing for NAPLAN tests has intensified schools’ focus on maths and English at the expense of science, the humanities, languages, the arts and information technology; or whether prioritising strategies for answering multiple choice questions and coping with exam conditions has come at the expense of cultivating children’s capacity for higher-order thinking; or whether privileging a formula for writing a story in response to a random stimulus has come at the expense of teaching self-expression through poetry or giving kids the opportunity to interview a member of their family about a life-defining moment and write a piece of biography. These alternatives are not in themselves mutually exclusive, but in practice the curriculum is crowded and time devoted to NAPLAN preparation comes at a cost.

Another major matter the review will consider is the impact of the test on schools, students and the community. With NAPLAN receiving widespread media attention and schools under intense scrutiny, it isn’t surprising that impressionable young people are experiencing significant stress and anxiety around NAPLAN time. After all, in the case of year 3s, we’re talking about kids who might barely be able to tie their shoelaces being placed in quasi-exam conditions.

Whether or not the publication of NAPLAN results on My School has been positively harmful, what we do know is that after almost a decade it has delivered little in the way of school improvement. While the optimists point to small improvements in year 3 results, year 7s and 9s are now performing below the 2011 baseline in the writing test, and secondary-level scores for reading, spelling, grammar, punctuation and numeracy haven’t budged. International standardised tests indicate that in writing, maths and science, Australian students are, on average, well behind where their predecessors were a decade ago.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The “rare courage” that Joel Klein perceived in Julia Gillard was not applied to tackling the structural flaws in Australia’s education system. With the Howard government having presided over a massive escalation in federal funding for non-government schools, any transition to needs-based funding was hobbled from the start by Gillard’s stipulation that no school would lose a dollar in real terms; indeed, that commitment replicated one of the worst features of the Howard funding model. Providing necessary resources to public schools was subsequently delayed until 2019 (and has since been deferred until 2027).

Gillard didn’t go near the very different obligations falling on public schools, which must serve all-comers, and fee-charging non-government schools that can enrol (and expel) whom they wish. The division between schools whose students come mainly from disadvantaged backgrounds (and are often underfunded) and schools with large resource advantages and privileged student populations has only worsened, creating the perfect recipe for inequity and underperformance. By intensifying competition on a very uneven playing field, it’s likely that My School has made the structural weaknesses in our education system even worse.

So what are the alternatives? In a submission to the Council of Australian Governments in March, the Gonski Institute recommended that “the sole purpose of the national assessment and reporting system should be to monitor education system performance against the purpose of education, particularly on the issues of educational excellence, equity, wellbeing and students’ attitudes toward learning.” According to the institute’s director, Adrian Piccoli, “the current tests, where every student is tested in years 3, 5, 7 and 9, [should be] replaced with a sample-based test of students.”

This proposal would bring numeracy and literacy into line with science, civics and citizenship, and information technology, which are currently assessed with triennial sample-based tests. According to Piccoli, the publication of school-by-school results on the My School website would no longer be possible. “As a result, the high-stakes nature of the current national assessment program on both students and teachers would be dramatically reduced.”

One argument against a shift to sample testing is that NAPLAN results can facilitate candid conversations between parents and schools about children’s learning, in a way school grades and reports sometimes fail to. You don’t have to go far to hear an anecdote from parents who feel that NAPLAN results convey a reality about their child’s progress that has hitherto been shrouded in supportive platitudes. The three-state review could make a useful contribution by exploring how general this phenomenon is, whether there are alternative ways of anchoring school-based assessment in national standards, and how the validity and effectiveness of school-based student assessment might otherwise be enhanced.

As for what will actually improve the education we are providing to our nation’s young people, including their numeracy and literacy, the Australian has been enthusiastically exploiting declines in measured student performance to revive the argument that money doesn’t really matter. “$20bn Flop: Schools Fail to Lift Kids” ran a recent headline above an article by education writer Rachel Urban. “Critical literacy and numeracy skills of Australian students are languishing,” Urban wrote, “despite government funding for schools soaring by more than $20 billion over a ­decade.” The point was reiterated in the paper’s editorial that day and repeated the following week in a piece by former editor Chris Mitchell praising the conservative media outlets, like his, “that argued Australia is not getting value for its spending on schools.”

Mitchell, Urban and the Australian’s editorial failed to mention what the funding increases look like when they’re adjusted for inflation and population or, more importantly, which schools have actually benefited from them. This information is readily available. The prolific education policy analyst and former Productivity Commission economist Trevor Cobbold crunched the numbers in June, and it turns out that between 2009 and 2017 “total real income per student in public schools fell by $58 per student (–0.5 per cent) but increased by $1888 (17.8 per cent) in Catholic schools and by $2306 (15.1 per cent) for Independent schools.”

At a time when real per-student funding was cut in public schools, combined government funding for Catholic and independent schools increased by more than a thousand dollars per student, in real terms. And, as Cobbold observed, the combined current commitment from federal and state governments will only bring public schools up to 91 per cent of their School Resource Standard by 2027 (or even later in some jurisdictions). In other words, hundreds of public schools across the country are set to be significantly underfunded indefinitely. •

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The right way to look at teachers’ pay is to ask whether it is high enough to attract the people we want and need into teaching. In Australia the answer is no.

Australia is a rich country. Our incomes are high in comparison with many other countries. But our education system is competing with other industries to attract the best talent.

A more meaningful international comparison is to look at how teachers’ pay lines up with the incomes of other professionals in their own country. While Australia’s pay for young secondary teachers relative to other professionals stacks up well internationally, our pay for secondary teachers in their mid-thirties and their forties is below the international average.

Chart 1. Teachers quickly fall behind their peers in other professions
Total yearly personal income of full-time workers holding a bachelor degree, by field of study, 2016, at the eightieth percentile of the income distribution

Notes: Includes people who studied a teaching degree but now work as principals or outside teaching. Four-digit fields of education chosen because they have the highest median ATAR. “No degree” includes all levels of education below bachelor.
Sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics; Grattan analysis

In other words, Australia’s young teachers are paid well, but the pay scale is flat. Teachers’ pay at the top is only 1.4 times as much as their starting salary, below the OECD average. An Australian classroom teacher’s pay stops rising within ten years, whereas the incomes of his or her peers in other professions keep rising well into their thirties and forties.

Chart 2. Since the 1980s, teachers’ pay has fallen well below pay in other professions
Average teacher salaries as a percentage of all professionals, 1986 to 2018

Notes: Salaries measured as the average weekly cash earnings of full-time non-managerial adult employees. In 2006 the ABS started including salary-sacrifice income and changed the definition of “professional.” For years 2010–18 aggregate incomes for all professionals were not available, and so they were calculated using the weighted average of all professional occupations. The weights were derived from the number of full-time workers in each occupation and gender category in the 2016 census.
Sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics; Andrew Leigh, “Teacher Pay and Teacher Aptitude.”

But average pay is not the only factor. More important — especially for attracting young high achievers — is the potential to earn a very high income if you do a good job. Bright young Australians have a good chance of earning a high income in many professions, but teaching is not one of them. More than a third of engineering or commerce graduates in their forties working full-time earn more than $3000 a week ($156,000 a year). But for graduates with a teaching degree, that share is only 2.3 per cent.

A Grattan Institute survey of almost 1000 young high achievers (aged eighteen to twenty-five and with an ATAR of 80 or higher) shows that 70 per cent are open to becoming teachers. But university enrolment data show that, when it comes to the crunch, only 3 per cent of high achievers actually choose teaching for their undergraduate studies. Our survey shows that a major barrier is teachers’ pay.

Australia’s young bright people are being asked to make a big financial sacrifice if they choose teaching as their career. They know they will be staring down the barrel of a lifetime of pay much lower than that of their classmates who choose degrees such as engineering, science and law.

Chart 3. High achievers say teaching falls short on intellectual challenge, and pay
Young people who state that a career in teaching is more likely to provide a given attribute than their chosen occupation

Note: Career attributes are ordered top-to-bottom from most to least important. The data in the chart show the difference (teaching minus chosen occupation) in the percentage of respondents who answered that a given career was likely or very likely to provide each attribute.
Source: Grattan Institute survey of high-achieving young Australians.

This is a big problem. Teacher “smarts” matter. Evidence shows that people with strong academic records do a better job teaching in the classroom. Yet over the past forty years, teachers’ pay has been declining in Australia relative to other professions, and with it fewer bright young people have chosen teaching as a career.

The fact that only 3 per cent of high achievers choose to study teaching compares very unfavourably with 19 per cent for science, 14 per cent for health, and 9 per cent for engineering. Over the past decade, high achievers’ demand for teaching fell by a third — more than for any other undergraduate field of study.

Australia’s school education system is not in a good place. Our kids are falling behind. In international tests, the typical Year 9 student performs at a much lower level than a similar-age student in 2003 — lower by twelve months in maths and nine months in reading.

We can never know for sure what is causing our students to fall back, but it’s difficult to ignore the fact that Australia’s test-score decline has coincided with the retirement of many of the teachers who were recruited when salaries were much more competitive with other professions.

If Australia is to catch up, bold action must be taken. A new Grattan Institute report, Attracting High Achievers to Teaching, proposes a $1.6 billion reform package for government schools to double the number of high achievers who choose to become teachers. It would increase the average ATAR of teaching graduates from 74 to 85 within the next decade.

The package includes $10,000-a-year scholarships for high achievers who take up teaching, and new career paths for leaders of the profession, with pay of up to $180,000 — about $80,000 more than the current highest standard pay rate for teachers.

If governments were to implement this blueprint, it would send a strong message to Australia’s best and brightest: if you want a challenging career where expertise is paid accordingly, choose teaching. In the long term it would pay for itself many times over, because a better-educated population would mean a more productive and prosperous Australia. •

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The commission called the results “mediocre” and “troubling,” but for some sectors they were downright appalling. In farming, mining, construction, transport and retail, labour productivity went backwards. In other words, workers in those sectors were producing less per hour than they had the year before. The latest numbers continued a trend of weakening productivity growth that the commission dates back to 2013.

To understand why Australia’s productivity crisis is so serious, it’s worth recognising why productivity matters. Through Australia’s history, our economy has become massively more productive. Australian workers today produce nearly four times as much output every hour than in the 1960s. This has been a central driver of rising living standards.

Productivity measures how efficiently the economy turns labour and capital into goods and services. When the Australian economy becomes more productive, we are producing more output from a given level of inputs. Higher productivity creates the potential for household incomes to rise faster than the rate of inflation. A more productive economy can be more generous to the disadvantaged, can reduce its impact on the natural environment, and can play a bigger role in international affairs.

Productivity doesn’t automatically bring fairness: in recent times, workers haven’t received their fair share of the modest productivity growth delivered by the economy. But without rising productivity, wages will eventually stagnate and living standards will stop increasing. Whether your priority is longer lifespans or lower taxes, raising Newstart or building motorways, you should be in favour of productivity growth. Productivity is the engine of the economy, and right now, that engine is making a nasty rattling noise.

A few weeks after the Productivity Commission delivered its damning annual update, a group of boffins gathered together in Sydney for a conference about productivity. Convened by the OECD, a global think tank for advanced countries, the event brought together international experts to discuss the problem and suggest solutions.

For Australia, the most hard-hitting presentation came from Treasury’s Meghan Quinn, who revealed that researchers in her department, led by Dan Andrews, had been investing in a new analysis that links together workers and firms, and delving deeply into fresh data about the dynamics of the Australian economy. Since 2002, Quinn showed, the most productive Australian firms (the top 5 per cent) had not kept pace with the most productive firms globally. In fact, Australia’s “productivity frontier” has slipped back by about one-third. The best of “Made in Australia” hasn’t kept pace with the best of “Made in Germany,” “Made in the Netherlands” or even “Made in America.”

And then there’s the other 95 per cent. For these firms, productivity seems an alien concept. In the past two decades, their output per hour worked has barely risen. In other words, nineteen out of twenty Australian firms don’t produce much more per hour than they did when Sydney hosted the Olympics,

What’s going wrong? Part of the problem is that many firms aren’t investing in new technologies. Less than half have invested in data analytics or intelligent software systems. Only three in five have invested in cyber security, making them vulnerable to hacking and ransomware attacks.

It’s not just that companies aren’t investing in technology — they’re not investing in anything at all. This year, the Productivity Commission had to use a new term in its report. Typically, the commission measures how the amount of capital per worker has increased — a concept known as “capital deepening.” This year, for the first time on record, the amount of capital per worker went backwards. The economy had experienced “capital shallowing.” Given that capital deepening has accounted for about three-quarters of labour productivity growth, this is frightening.

Across the economy, businesses are cutting back on research and development and investing less in good management. The share of firms that are “innovative” is no longer growing. A survey of management practices in manufacturing firms found that Australia’s managers rank below those in Canada, Sweden, Japan, Germany and the United States.

It’s been said that you could already tell in the 1950s that Detroit would one day suffer a crash. Although automakers were thriving, the city lacked start-ups. Once the traditional car-manufacturing plants got into trouble, the city slumped. What is true for Detroit holds for cities, regions and countries across the globe: newborn firms are as critical to an economy as newborn babies are to a society’s demography, bringing fresh approaches, shaking up existing industries, and offering new opportunities to workers.

Yet for all the talk of Australia as a “start-up nation,” our new-business creation rate isn’t accelerating. In fact, our start-up rate seems to be stalling, though it’s partly masked by a quirk in the way we measure new businesses. The conventional start-up figures, which are rising, include anyone who registers for an Australian Business Number. This means that when a public servant takes a voluntary redundancy, only to come back the next month as a consultant, he is registered as a new business. Likewise when a tradie is “encouraged” by her boss to become a sham contractor. Neither of these cases involves true business formation, so each distorts the data.

The way to get around this issue is to look only at “employing businesses”: firms that hire at least one worker. On this metric, Treasury estimates that the new-business formation rate in the early 2000s was 14 per cent a year. Now, it’s down to 11 per cent a year. Strip out non-employing businesses and it turns out that our economy simply isn’t hatching new firms like it used to.

Another sign that the economy may be stagnating comes from figures on job-switching. A common myth is that changing jobs is bad for workers, and is happening more frequently. In both cases, the reverse is true. Workers who switch jobs typically experience a significant pay increase. In fact, if you study wages over a career, the largest salary rises tend to come when employees switch firms. Occasionally, job changes will be involuntary and painful — but more often they are voluntary and beneficial.

To see why, imagine for a moment that Australia instituted a rule saying that no one can switch jobs. People who don’t like their boss or want to try working in a different sector wouldn’t be allowed to make the change. Growing companies couldn’t attract workers from their competitors. Such a rule would be profoundly anti-worker. Consistent with this, Treasury’s analysis finds that a drop of one percentage point in the job-switching rate is associated with a 0.5 percentage point drop in wage growth across the economy.

While changing jobs tends to benefit workers, it is happening less often than in past decades. Forget what you’ve read about a fast-churning labour market and the end of “jobs for life”; workers are staying longer in their jobs. In the early 2000s, the rate of job-switching was 11 per cent a year. Now, it’s down to 8 per cent. It’s not the fault of employees: there are simply fewer good opportunities available. According to Treasury’s analysis, much of the drop in job-switching is because workers are less able to transition from mature firms to young firms. With fewer start-ups firms, it stands to reason that there are fewer start-up jobs.

What is to be done? Some people see productivity as a matter of cutting: cutting protections for employees, cutting environmental regulations and cutting the social safety net. Yet when the Productivity Commission was commissioned by the Coalition to compile a list of reforms that might raise national productivity, weakening workplace protections didn’t appear among its top twenty-eight recommendations. Rejecting claims by groups such as the Institute of Public Affairs and the Minerals Council of Australia, the commission’s 2017 Shifting the Dial report noted that “most of the workplace relations law works well to get the balance right between the desires of firms for a fully flexible resource and the need to protect workers from exploitation.”

By contrast, a progressive plan to raise productivity would recognise that the productivity slump has coincided with the marked rise in inequality over the past generation. Earnings inequality, household-income inequality, wealth inequality and top-income shares have all risen in Australia since the 1970s. In several advanced countries, including Australia, productivity growth has outpaced real wage growth: a problem the OECD calls “the productivity–inclusiveness nexus.” Ensuring that workers get an equitable share of productivity gains isn’t just a matter of fairness. Middle-class growth supports consumer demand, which in turn allows businesses to grow. It is not a coincidence that household consumption is languishing at the same time as real wage growth has slowed.

A progressive agenda for raising productivity would fall into three categories: investing in individuals, investing in infrastructure, and investing in institutions.

Investing in individuals: Education is a critical component of productivity. The median woman with a bachelor’s degree earns roughly $800,000 more in a lifetime than a year 12 graduate who completes no further study. For men, the lifetime difference is $1.1 million. This represents a 65 per cent earnings boost for men and an 80 per cent earnings boost for women.

Graduates are more likely to start new enterprises, and more likely to engage in social entrepreneurship. Education also has positive spillover effects, with better-skilled employees raising the productivity of their co-workers.

Over the past generation, the average educational attainment of the workforce has significantly increased, with Australians more likely to complete year 12 and more likely to attend university. But the share of people completing an apprenticeship or traineeship has collapsed, and is currently at its lowest rate since at least 2005. Scandals among private vocational education providers have eroded confidence in that system.

At a school level, completion rates are up, but we have a massive challenge with test scores. The OECD’s PISA tests show a troubling trend, with teenagers’ scores in literacy, numeracy and science declining significantly since the turn of the century. This continues a pattern that Melbourne University’s Chris Ryan and I documented some years ago, when we showed that teens’ literacy and numeracy levels had failed to rise between the 1960s and the 2000s.

At a university level, arbitrary caps on domestic student places were removed several years ago. The principle was simple: if a young person is talented enough to complete a degree, why not allow universities to make a place available? The policy significantly expanded university places, and therefore the productive potential of the economy. But since the beginning of 2018, the federal government has frozen university grants, which has effectively ended the demand-driven system. This has particularly hurt universities with expanding enrolments, and has hit students who want to study in disciplines that rely heavily on government funding, particularly engineering, sciences and allied health.

In a changing labour market, we should aspire to an Australia in which all young people get a great high school education and a post-school qualification. A much stronger focus on teacher quality would improve the performance of Australia’s schools. Pre-apprenticeships can reduce dropout rates in vocational education (currently half of those who start an apprenticeship do not finish). Restoring the demand-driven funding system would enable almost 200,000 more Australians to attend university by 2030. Many of those new students would be Indigenous, from low-income families, or the first in their family to attend university.

To be productive, people also need to be healthy. As the Productivity Commission’s Shifting the Dial report highlighted, it is also vital to ensure that the healthcare system is run as productively as possible. Medicare needs to adapt to provide comprehensive care that rewards general practitioners and other providers for managing complex cases of chronic illness. An examination of the primary care system by the Grattan Institute found that the dominant Medicare fee-for-service model encourages “reactive rather than systematic care,” and that “much greater emphasis needs to be placed on service coordination and integration for people with chronic disease.” Where interventions have been identified as low value, more effort should be put into informing healthcare providers, including through “do not do” lists. Electronic health records can also improve the productivity of the healthcare system by avoiding duplicate tests and ensuring that physicians have the information they need to make the right decisions.

Investing in infrastructure: As technologies advance, no piece of infrastructure is more important than high-speed internet. The difference between fibre-to-the-premises and fibre-to-the-node is critical for applications such as cloud computing, high-definition videoconferencing, telemedicine and distance education.

Choosing to replace the fibre rollout with a multi-technology mix has led to services that are slower, less reliable and more expensive. Time without internet connectivity is a critical source of lost productivity for students and professionals working from home. Unreliable copper services are letting many companies down. The immediate needs for the NBN sound like the advice parents might give a wayward teen: more fibre, higher standards, and proper accountability when providers fall short. It’s also vital that Australia gets the rollout of 5G right, providing the enabling infrastructure not only for smartphones but also for the Internet of Things.

Open data innovation can also be a major driver of economic growth. Four-fifths of American smartphone users use an app that relies on open data every day. The British Open Data Institute has identified open data–driven businesses that employ more than 500,000 people and turn over £92 million. New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure approach combines anonymised information on health, education and crime to offer insights to policymakers and researchers. Governments at all levels should be identifying high-value datasets that can be anonymised and made available to boost productivity.

Governments also need to improve their data policies. Reinventure’s Danny Gilligan points out that government policies on privacy and cybersecurity are like a brake, while innovation policies are like an accelerator. Yet unlike a car, governments often put the brake and the accelerator a long way away from each other. “Brakes” like the Critical Infrastructure Centre don’t spend enough time talking with “accelerators” like Data61. Gilligan contrasts the situation with Singapore, which coordinates how government engages with data-economy policies to minimise the costs and maximise the benefits. Data could be a significant source of productivity gains for the Australian economy in coming decades, but only if we get the infrastructure right.

Information superhighways aren’t the only kind of highway. Traffic congestion erodes our quality of life and acts as a handbrake on productivity. A fast-growing nation clearly needs better road networks, urban public transport projects and additional parking spaces at public transport hubs. But the answer isn’t merely to “build more stuff,” it’s to build the right stuff. Infrastructure spending must be based on economic cost–benefit analysis, not political calculus. This means giving greater focus to projects that are on the Infrastructure Australia priority list, and for which a business case has been completed.

Real social gains can sometimes come from arrangements such as value capture and public–private partnerships, but the trickiest infrastructure question is “should we build it?” not “how do we finance it?” If the benefits don’t exceed the costs, transport infrastructure is a bad idea, regardless of whether it will be paid for by today’s taxpayers or tomorrow’s taxpayers. And there’s a semitrailer barrelling towards us: as the Productivity Commission’s Shifting the Dial report notes, road-user charging is set for a shake-up whether we like it or not. Right now, the system depends almost entirely on fuel taxes, which will disappear with the advent of electric cars.

Although a smooth transition to clean energy is critical to maintaining strong productivity growth, Australia’s emissions and energy prices are rising. That contrasts with twenty-one other nations — including the United States, Britain, France and Germany — that have decoupled their carbon pollution from economic growth since the start of the century.

Inevitably, our energy system will move from old coal generation to gas generation and renewables. A more productive energy system will improve the productivity of the whole economy. Delaying the transition will only push up prices and increase pollution. As the Reserve Bank warns, climate-related losses pose a risk for businesses and households, and financial stability “will be better served by an orderly transition rather than an abrupt one.”

Straightforward energy reforms can be introduced. The Productivity Commission estimates that reforms associated with the electricity transmission network — such as critical peak pricing and the rollout of smart meters — could generate large efficiency gains. It points out that plenty of other nations have replaced piecemeal solutions with a single price on carbon. It recommends that governments more clearly articulate the trade-off between reliability and cost. And it suggests that we get pricing right, so that producers pay for additional costs they impose on the system (such as frequency management), and users pay for access to the grid (so that people cannot simply use it as a back-up system).

Investing in institutions: The third part of the progressive productivity agenda is to improve institutions so that they support a more productive economy. This starts with how government institutions support innovation. As past Australian Innovation System reports have noted, innovation and adaptation to technology are vital for productivity growth. However, the 2019 Global Innovation Index ranks Australia just twenty-second in the world. Since the global financial crisis, the volume of venture capital investment has fallen by nearly two-thirds. Innovation collaboration between government, business and academia is less common in Australia than in many other OECD nations.

The economic rationale for subsidising research and innovation is that it is not only businesses that benefits from new techniques and products — the community does as well. Federal government funding for science, research and innovation through grants and tax subsidies amounts to at least $10 billion annually. But right now, there isn’t much incentive for firms to work with universities. The government has been slow to implement its proposed Consumer Data Right. Educational bodies and disability groups have complained about the stultifying effect of a copyright law that lacks fair use exemptions. Ironically, innovation policy isn’t very innovative, since the federal government doesn’t devote enough energy to evaluating the impact of its many innovation policies.

The institutions that support trade and investment are also essential to improving productivity. As a medium-sized economy, Australia’s productivity performance is invariably intertwined with our engagement in the region. World trade is just another form of comparative advantage, letting countries specialise in what they do best. Just as your hairdresser doesn’t defeat you when you get a haircut, Japan doesn’t defeat you when you buy a PlayStation. Sellers aren’t vanquishing buyers — both are benefiting from specialisation.

We must do openness better. When it comes to trade, it’s vital to recognise that the best type of trade agreements are multilateral agreements, followed by regional and then bilateral. Bilateral deals can have benefits but can also distort trade. One way of ensuring that trade agreements are in Australia’s economic interest would be to allow the Productivity Commission to scrutinise them before signing, and again a decade after they come into force. This would provide some certainty that vested groups had not captured the negotiation process, and ensure that if we make mistakes, we learn from them.

On foreign investment policy, it would be worth reviewing the plethora of screening thresholds. It is difficult to mount an economic justification for requiring the Foreign Investment Review Board to approve a $300 million business acquisition by a Canadian investor but not a US investor. It would help the public conversation on foreign investment if the Treasury set out reasons for all significant foreign investment decisions: both acceptances and rejections.

We can also be more productive through an institutional push to improve Asian engagement. As the Committee for Economic Development of Australia notes, Australia has less outbound foreign direct investment in China, Japan, Korea, India and all ASEAN countries combined than it does in New Zealand. Among year 12 students, only one in fifty study Chinese. Fewer year 12 students study Indonesian than in 1972. AsiaLink found that more than half of all ASX200 board members demonstrated little or no knowledge of Asian markets. If we are to grow services exports to our region, a higher level of Asia literacy is essential: from the classrooms to the boardroom.

And then there are the institutions that govern markets. In uncompetitive markets, firms have a weaker incentive to pursue productivity gains. One British study found that a 25 per cent increase in market concentration leads to a 1 per cent fall in productivity. Another study attributed about one-fifth of productivity growth to better competition policy.

Over recent decades, several sectors have become significantly more concentrated. The annual volume of mergers has increased fivefold since 1990. At the same time, as we’ve seen, the new-business formation rate has fallen. The result is a significant increase in market concentration across key industries in Australia. One rule of thumb is that a market is excessively concentrated if the largest four firms control more than a third of it. Under this definition, ANU’s Adam Triggs and I found that over half of Australian industries are overly concentrated. In department stores, newspapers, banking, health insurance, supermarkets, domestic airlines, internet service providers, baby food and beer, the biggest four firms comprise more than 80 per cent of the market. The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report found that Australia does badly on “the extent of market dominance,” ranking us fifty-third in the world.

Compared with many other countries, penalties for anti-competitive conduct in Australia are too low, and our competition watchdog is underfunded. Unlike in other countries, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission lacks a market studies power, meaning it can’t use investigatory powers to explore public interest issues such as pricing discrepancies and increased market concentration. And after approving a merger, the commission has no systematic process of deciding whether it made a mistake. Like a coach who watches the video replays, post-merger reviews of productivity, wages and prices could help improve decisions in the future.

Tax institutions matter too. Good tax reform involves closing loopholes. As the late Harvard economist Martin Feldstein liked to point out, winding back tax concessions raises revenue more efficiently than increasing tax rates. In economic jargon, closing loopholes has a lower deadweight cost than raising rates. Yet, as the 2019 federal election showed, the economics are easier than the politics. Every loophole in the personal and corporate tax system has its ferocious defenders. If Australia wants to increase productivity, it needs to consider whether it can do so with a tax system that has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese.

Another key set of institutions are those governing management quality. Firms with a healthy management culture are places where employees look forward to arriving at work, where people respect one another, and where diversity flourishes. The best companies listen to their employees, implement good ideas regardless of their origins, and aren’t afraid of change.

The quality of management directly shapes the ability of businesses to adapt and innovate. Managers who lack appropriate technical and personal skills can’t provide the leadership that their firm needs to find continual productivity improvements. Managers who face overly short-term incentives may fail to focus on sustainability and longer-term productivity gains. Discrimination and unconscious bias may lead organisations to overlook talented applicants for appointment and advancement.

There are many creative ways companies can draw on the ideas of their workforce. In one large New Zealand dairy company, for instance, the union initiated a management improvement system with the aim of boosting productivity. Workers are trained in productivity measurement, and the concepts underpinning productivity growth, such as change management and improved teamwork. From their first day on the job, they are encouraged to take responsibility for raising quality, reducing waste, and even considering whether new products can be made with material that is currently being discarded. Managers play a role more akin to coaches than commanders, urging workers to think about improving the way the firm is run. The firm raised its output and quality, but without any loss of jobs.

On a systemic level, a number of German companies foster productivity growth by having worker representatives on company boards. There is even a word for it — Mitbestimmung — meaning worker participation in a company’s decision-making. Many of these firms find that a less confrontational approach produces significant efficiency gains. This occurs to some extent in Australia through our industry superannuation system. Industry superannuation funds are established jointly through employer and employee representatives, and as they become significant investors they have the ability to encourage corporate managers to make better long-term decisions.

There is some evidence that employees in worker-owned firms, such as cooperatives, are more productive and more satisfied. Government policy could do more to foster the growth of cooperatives and mutuals by facilitating greater access to capital for such firms, and access to government grants, particularly for Indigenous cooperatives under the Indigenous Advancement Strategy program.

Productivity gains also need to be shared. Just as business owners would have little incentive to invest in productivity-boosting improvements if none of the benefits translated into higher profits, so too workers have less incentive to support measures that increase productivity if they do not lead to higher wages.

In the 1970s, real wage growth outpaced productivity gains. Economists called it “the real wage overhang,” and the solution was to moderate wage growth so that it came back into line with labour productivity. Today, the economy faces the reverse problem. Even the modest increases in labour productivity that the economy has been producing haven’t flowed into workers’ pay packets. Australia is now experiencing a “real wage underhang.”

As in other nations, this decoupling of wage gains from productivity growth has led to a fall in the labour share of national income. Some estimates suggest that the drop in the labour share since the 1970s might have been as large as 15 percentage points.

One of the theories for the drop in the labour share is that monopolies don’t need as many employees. As economist Jan Eeckhout argued at a recent Reserve Bank conference, “market power depresses the demand for labour: firms set higher prices and therefore they produce less output, for which they need less labour. For the labour market to be in equilibrium, the economy moves along the upward sloping labour supply curve until a new, lower wage is obtained.” Other research presented at the same conference found that the wage slowdown was especially pronounced in sectors that don’t face international competition. Economists have long known that monopolies hurt consumers — now it appears they can harm workers too.

Left unchecked, this trend threatens to undermine the incentive for employees to continue to pursue productivity gains. A more collaborative approach to industrial relations is likely to be in the long-term interests of capital as well as labour. As economist Saul Eslake points out, corporate managers aren’t judged on their share of profits but on their actual profits. Firms would be better with a smaller share of a growing pie than a larger slice of a shrinking one.

Government institutions often pay lip service to evidence-based policy. Instead, they’re often driven by the idiosyncratic ideas of a few people in charge — what has been called “eminence-based policy.” In my book Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World, I argue that agencies should be more modest about theories, and more willing to rigorously evaluate programs. One way of doing this would be to systematically conduct randomised policy trials, using treatment and control groups to test government programs in the way that companies test new pharmaceuticals. Already, randomised trials have provided unexpected insights about how to reduce recidivism by drug offenders, how to use video feedback in teacher training, and how to encourage new-business formation in developing nations. Building a better feedback loop helps drive continuous improvement in the productivity of government.

Too often, Australians see productivity as a dirty word — synonymous with working harder, rather than working smarter. But productivity should lead to a better quality of life, in which people have more choices in the workplace and more opportunities to spend time with friends and family. The path towards higher productivity should also allow us to live in a cleaner environment, and to be more generous to the needy. Tackling major challenges, from gender equity to traffic congestion, is easier in a highly productive economy.

Economists talk about the “rule of seventy-two.” If you want to know how long it takes to double living standards, just divide seventy-two by the growth rate. This means that a 2 per cent growth rate doubles living standards every thirty-six years, or about once a generation. But a 4 per cent growth rate doubles living standards every eighteen years, or twice a generation. That’s why we should invest in individuals, infrastructure and institutions, to lay the groundwork for lasting improvements to Australia’s productivity growth rate.

Australia doesn’t have to choose between fairness and productivity. We should be aiming to achieve inclusive growth by sharing productivity gains across the community. This not only creates greater wellbeing but also supports ongoing reform. If an elite cabal captures all of the benefits of reform, its members should not be surprised if the next round of reforms meets a public backlash. The goal should be to raise productivity to the benefit of all Australians. •

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At present, the federal government subsidises fifteen hours a week of preschool for four-year-olds through a deal with the states and territories called the Universal Access National Partnership. But it has still not committed any funding for 2020, preventing preschools from signing long-term leases and contracts or preparing their budgets. Meanwhile, it shows no sign of following Labor’s lead and extending the subsidy to three-year-olds.

Under attack in parliament last week, education minister Dan Tehan was keen to change the topic. The real point, he said, is that the Coalition is able to fund services because it runs a strong economy, at which point he segued into the story of a self-funded retiree aggrieved by Labor’s dividend imputation policy. Warming to the theme, assistant children and families minister Michelle Landry told the House, “We are building a strong economy, and part of that is because we are not afraid to stand in this place and say a certain four-letter word, and that four-letter word is ‘coal.’”

Among the many shortcomings of the government’s response has been its failure to engage with the compelling economic and fiscal case for investing in early childhood education. As their erstwhile Coalition colleague Adrian Piccoli told the Press Club, “There are significant economic benefits, both from a workforce participation perspective as well as economic benefits from improved performance in education.” Or, as Susan Pascoe and Deborah Brennan write in Lifting Our Game, their report for the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence, “there is considerable and consistent evidence that investment in quality early childhood education has a strong return on investment.”

One of the numerous examples cited by Pascoe and Brennan is a study of the impact of Spain’s decision to include three-year-olds in public preschools in the 1990s. The study, conducted by researchers at Utrecht University, found that the Spanish reform ultimately returned four dollars for every dollar spent. While increased workforce participation was a factor, the researchers concluded that “the gains for children are the major driver of the total societal gains of universal ECEC [early childhood education and care].”

To understand why this is so, we need to recognise that “the past twenty years has seen an explosion of research on how brains develop and a wholesale rethinking of how children learn,” says Stacey Fox, a leading Australian early education researcher who spoke alongside Adrian Piccoli at the Press Club. “We now know that in the first five years children learn more and learn faster than at any other time in their lives,” Fox said. “By the age of five a child’s brain has reached 90 per cent of its total growth.” So what happens before primary school even begins will shape the fundamental architecture of a child’s brain, forming the foundation for all future learning.

In this critical developmental window, play-based learning is an extension and enrichment of the natural tendency of children to explore, discover, improvise and create. By way of example, Fox referred to children building a castle out of blocks, an activity that in itself will develop their fine motor skills. But if the castle falls down because it lacks a stable base, an educator might prompt the child to ask why or to rebuild it in another way. The activity might even evolve into an impromptu experiment to compare the stability of two castles. Then, when another child comes along and knocks the castle down or wants to build something else, “the educator helps mediate that moment; helps coach them in how to resolve that conflict; gives them tools and tips on how to manage their emotions: take a deep breath; think about what’s going on for the other child.”

If everyone gets interested in building a castle, it might be possible to develop a sequence of learning that extends children — the history of castles; how bridges work; an excursion to see a bridge — and gives them a chance to try, practise and consolidate new know-how. “It’s really skilled early childhood educators who create those opportunities and extend the learning that’s going on moment for moment for each of the children,” Fox observed.

The evidence of the longer-term significant impact of interventions like these is essentially beyond dispute. As the Productivity Commission outlined in its most recent five-yearly productivity review, “There is evidence of immediate socialisation benefits for children, increased likelihood of a successful transition into formal schooling and improved performance in standardised test results in the early years of primary school as a result of participation in preschool programs. The benefits are even greater for children from disadvantaged backgrounds and can persist into adulthood.”

The Longitudinal Survey of Australian Children came to a similar conclusion. It found that preschool attendance was associated with improved performance in Year 3 NAPLAN tests in numeracy, reading and spelling, equating to fifteen to twenty weeks of schooling. Across its member economies, the OECD’s Starting Strong 2017 report found, the average advantage in science performance among fifteen-year-olds who attended two years of preschool equated to half a year of formal schooling.

These findings support the conclusions of seminal studies like Britain’s Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) project, which tracked 3000 young people over a decade and a half and found that, at age sixteen, students who attended two years of preschool achieved higher overall exam scores and better grades in English and maths.

Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are overrepresented among the 22 per cent of school starters who are considered to be developmentally vulnerable, and stand to gain the most from access to two years of early childhood education. A critical challenge lies in the fact that enrolment and consistent attendance are not the same thing. Ninety-six per cent of four-year-olds are enrolled in preschool, but around 30 per cent are not regular attendees. As Dan Tehan told parliament, “35 per cent of vulnerable and disadvantaged children and up to 41 per cent of Indigenous children are not attending for the fifteen hours on offer.” It is a very real problem, even if it is unclear how the minister believes the government’s refusal to commit funds will help.

In this connection, Stacey Fox praises the Victorian government’s Access to Early Learning program, which identifies barriers to attendance and assists families to locate, enrol in and engage with early childhood programs. “They actually work in the local community to work out what those barriers are and to get rid of them, and really work with families to help them understand why early childhood education is every bit as important as school,” Fox said. “I’ve seen the evaluation results of that particular model and it was really effective.”

In their report, Susan Pascoe and Deborah Brennan highlighted the NSW government’s Start Strong program. It requires at least three-quarters of any funding increase to providers to be passed on in fee reductions (a government-imposed discipline that is almost unimaginable in dealings with fee-charging primary and secondary schools). The requirement, as Pascoe and Brennan noted, saw some preschools dropping their fees to the levels of a quarter of a century ago (again, pretty much unimaginable in the compulsory school sectors).

At heart, Adrian Piccoli’s message to Minister Tehan (and the treasurer and the prime minister) is a simple one. “Budgets are moral documents. They say what you think this country should be about.” If the Morrison government doesn’t heed the moral and policy imperative to expand early childhood education, it might be forced to reckon more closely with the political considerations. As Piccoli pointed out, “early childhood resonates with voters; it’s a major cost-of-living issue.” Public support for Labor’s position is at 77 per cent, according to polling conducted by Essential Media, and even higher among the 11 per cent of voters with children under five. It might pay for the government to bring more than coal and franking credits to the debate when it returns to parliament in April. •

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But the new school year is about much more than student numbers. Principals know improving the quality of teaching and learning is their priority. They also know some students, more than others, help this happen. Students bring to school varying levels of prior learning, family education, networks and know-how. Getting the “right” students is the hidden agenda in the competition between schools.

It can be a vicious competition, and it’s also very unequal. Some schools set entry tests or charge fees, while others must take all comers. Families tend to value the former over the latter: regardless of their innate quality (which is actually high), schools enrolling all comers don’t always ooze the traditional impressions and measures of quality. And, of course, when schools enrolling students with similar backgrounds are compared there is surprisingly little quality difference between them.

The real problem is that schools increasingly don’t enrol similar students, which means Australian families and children can have a quite disparate experience of school. It is schooling, not school, that is the common experience: those well placed to do so are walking away from less advantaged schools at an increasing rate.

There is no shortage of reports about this phenomenon and the hierarchy of schools that it creates. If we track school-by-school results over time, the link between this widening hierarchy and the spread of student achievement becomes more obvious.

As well as seeing this in terms of Australia’s NAPLAN testing and the OECD’s PISA rankings, it’s becoming apparent in the measures of student achievement that every family knows about: the Higher School Certificate in New South Wales, the Victorian Certificate of Education, and the OP (Overall Position) ranking in Queensland. What these measures are showing is enough to sober up any dinner table conversation about league tables and what it all means for families, schools, communities and Australia.

New research showing where high achievers go to school tells the story that was summarised in what we once called the Fairfax media this week. Let’s start with the city and the bush. In the NSW HSC the number of “distinguished achievers” has increased considerably in urban schools over the past decade, but has stagnated in rural and regional areas. In Victoria, average VCE scores in regional areas have been in decline for years. In Queensland, the major cities are increasingly winners when it comes to high-level results.

Rural–urban migration explains some of this, but the distribution of students isn’t changing that much; the bigger change is that the losing-out schools have an increasing proportion of the most disadvantaged students. The schools haven’t changed, but who goes to them certainly has.

The second part of the story is that high-achieving students increasingly attend high-SES schools — those schools that are ranked higher in terms of socioeconomic status — regardless of location and sector. Distinguished achievers in the HSC are no longer found in lower-SES schools in anywhere near the numbers they were a decade ago. The story is similar in Victoria and Queensland.

Cutting across these layers is the third story, the division between government and non-government sectors. Non-government (and selective government schools) have the lion’s share of high-end Year 12 results. That won’t come as any surprise, but what’s striking is that the gaps between these schools and the others are widening. Discriminators like entry tests and school fees are producing separate experiences and outcomes for students related to their level of advantage, their location and their ability. Unequal opportunities have always existed, but it is simply getting worse.

Surely some schools are still better than others? Indeed some are, particularly those showing significant and sustained improvement. Schools should always be seeking to improve, but when so many of them in a similar location or sector lose their high achievers then there is much more than school quality in play. What’s happening is that school choice — available to some far more than others — is pushing aspirational and advantaged students up the school SES ladder. And they are taking their high scores with them, leaving deficits in the schools they’ve left behind.

In more than one sense families are paying for class. This is not a matter of blaming parents; this is about how the system works for some but not for everyone. It is failing to improve overall student achievement, including in schools at the top end, which some educators consider to be cruising. Instead, we are seeing growing clusters of high-achieving students attending advantaged schools, and the opposite trend in poorer schools.

Whenever policymakers are confronted with such findings they revert to the language of choice. It has become like parenthood itself: everyone seems to believe in it. Or do they? Discussions about school choice are mainly a niche conversation among those who have it — and this might extend, at a pinch, to around half of Australia’s households. Interestingly, a 2016 survey revealed that less than a fifth of respondents wanted greater choice of schools.

A couple of years ago the late Bernie Shepherd and I crunched the data behind the My School website and could only see a school future that included rising inequity and inequality, enrolments shifting to advantaged schools, concentrating disadvantage, a deepening school SES hierarchy, an increasing achievement gap, and increasing costs of failing to tackle disadvantage. The changing distribution of student achievement confirms that we are on target for this unhappy future.

So what do we do? The priority should always have been to make every local school the school of first choice for families. This means shifting the focus of school improvement, innovation and resourcing to these schools — if necessary at the expense of others. This has to be accompanied by a progressive reduction in the extent to which we currently subsidise students to go elsewhere. Until all that happens nothing much else will change. •

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To be aware of Malcolm and Hall’s debt to O’Farrell, even when they disagree with him, is not to disparage their scholarship or achievement. On the contrary, their mastery of their subject matter is always evident. They have amassed and sifted a wealth of detail that O’Farrell either missed or misunderstood, which prompts a re-examination of some of his judgements.

But readers who take up this New History should be warned that they won’t be embarking on a new narrative. They are being invited into the latest round of a continuing debate among academic historians. This book, unlike O’Farrell’s, never quite manages to escape the plodding rhetorical style of the postgraduate seminar room. Compare A New History’s unremarkable opening sentence — “St Patrick’s Day in Brisbane in March 2018 saw a joyous and colourful celebration of Irish identity and its popular symbols” — with the robust challenge in the introduction to O’Farrell’s book: “Precisely who, and what, shall be called up from the ranks of the dead? Those Irish and that Irishness that came to Australia? That Irish Australia they found and made there? Their descendants? Within the moving swirl of that evocation, all precision vanishes: an elusive complexity rules.”

Malcolm and Hall’s argument is not only with O’Farrell but also with other historians, who, unlike him and unlike them, either don’t find anything particularly distinctive in the Irish contribution to the settler history of Australia or, if they do, regard it as having been largely negative. O’Farrell wrote his history to vindicate his contention that the role of the Irish in Australian history was both central and uniquely creative: “The distinctive Australian identity was not born in the bush, nor at Anzac Cove: these were merely situations for its expression. No; it was born in Irishness protesting against extremes of Englishness.”

It was a very specific Irishness that O’Farrell had in mind — not that of the Anglo-Irish, and Anglican, ascendancy class, and not that of the Presbyterian Scots settlers in Ulster, but that of those he called “the Gaelic Catholic Irish.” The abrasive and sometimes openly insubordinate presence of this large minority within settler society, O’Farrell maintained, fostered “a general atmosphere in which exclusion, discrimination and rigid hierarchies became increasingly less possible to sustain.”

It was a bold claim, even with the considerable evidence O’Farrell marshalled in support of it, and his critics have always been able to cite counterevidence. Yes, the Catholic Irish were disproportionately represented in the violent episodes of colonial political history, such as the Eureka Stockade in 1854, but whether the Irish contribution was as decisively creative as O’Farrell believed is contestable.

Another eminent Irish-Australian historian, John Molony, had pointed to the presence of English chartists among the Eureka miners, and their prominence in the wider agitation for extending the suffrage and colonial self-government. For Molony, their role was at least as important in explaining the development of Australian egalitarianism and democracy.

Nor does the long involvement of Irish Australians in the labour movement and the Labor Party prove, as some like to believe, that this Irish presence was the catalyst for progressive politics in this country. Irish Catholics were indeed predominantly Labor voters for most of the past century, and their ecclesiastical leaders certainly encouraged their participation in the party. But Australians of Irish descent did not become prominent in Labor leadership circles until the 1917 Labor split, which acquired sectarian overtones because the Catholic archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, was a principal opponent of the Hughes government’s push for military conscription, which triggered the split. Before then, the ethnic and religious mix of Labor frontbenches had been quite different: the first federal Labor cabinet, in 1904, was comprised almost entirely of Methodists with English surnames.

It is when Malcolm and Hall wade into this broader narrative of Australian political history, as they do in the final third of their New History, that the book’s continuity with O’Farrell’s is most apparent. What is distinctive, and rewarding, in their work comes early in the book, in meticulous analyses of perceptions of racial identity in colonial society and the associated popular stereotypes. If O’Farrell’s vaunted image of Irishness as the foundation of what is most characteristically Australian remains contestable, a different, but related, thesis is easier to sustain. The struggle of the Irish-Catholic minority to achieve social and political equality with the Anglo-Protestant majority in settler Australia was a struggle to shed the racist stereotypes inherited from the relations between the rulers and the ruled in Ireland, England’s oldest colony. The peasants of the Irish diaspora — and sometimes even the educated and professional few among them — had to demonstrate that they were not the superstition-ridden, subhuman brutes the English expected them to be. In the language of today’s identity politics, the Irish had to show that they were not “the Other.”

That they were ultimately successful in this task is evident enough. There is no place, and no walk of life, in Australia today in which an Irish surname and a Catholic school on one’s CV are barriers to social inclusion or, indeed, to the highest levels of achievement (the occasional but rare jibes of satirists, noted by Malcom and Hall, notwithstanding). The Irish won. But Malcolm and Hall document the downside to the victory. In the Australian colonies, the Old World stereotyping of the Irish as less than human also reappeared in the settlers’ images of new Others: Indigenous peoples, and the Chinese who arrived in increasing numbers from the time of the gold rushes. For the Catholic Irish, to show that they were as fully human as their Protestant fellow citizens was also to show that they were not like those Others. They had to be accepted as “white,” and therefore as willing defenders of white Australia.

And so it came to be. In the racist cartoons of the early nineteenth century, the brutes from the bogs were depicted as dark, hairy and ape-like; an Irish-Catholic political leader in the first half of the twentieth century, like James Scullin, never would be.

The Irish struggle to be recognised as fully human — as “people like us” — has been replicated by successive waves of immigrants. So, too, has another notable aspect of the early Irish experience in Australia, disproportionate representation in the prison system, and how the perception of the Irish as a criminal underclass was manipulated by those intent on excluding them from full social participation. (A marker of the success of Irish Australians is that they are now over-represented on the bench rather than in the dock.) Malcolm and Hall, quite rightly, don’t exceed the bounds of historical discipline with a foray into contemporary political controversies. Readers of A New History, however, will draw their own conclusions about parallels between the Irish experience of Australia’s criminal justice systems and the experience of, for example, African migrants today.

The chief route to social inclusion for Australia’s Irish has, of course, been through access to education, not only in the Catholic school system but also in the universities, which were almost exclusively Protestant bastions in colonial Australia and remained so well into the twentieth century. Early breaches of those bastions were made by the establishment of Catholic residential colleges, such as Newman College in the University of Melbourne, which celebrated its centenary last year.

Newman College: A History 1918–2018 is not a typical celebratory institutional history. It tells frankly of conflicts and frustrations, doubts and disillusionments, and the changing visions of the Jesuits who have guided Newman since its inception, as well as chronicling the college’s impressively long list of distinguished graduates and their stellar contributions to Australian life.

The story told in Newman College is part of the wider history of the Catholic Church in Australia, rather than of Irish Australia as such. But it can be read as a coda to the stories told in A New History, and in O’Farrell’s The Irish in Australia. It is the story of a disadvantaged community — or more precisely, its less disadvantaged elements — transforming itself into a flourishing and prosperous one. In the vogue phrase of the moment, this is a narrative of empowerment. But with power comes temptation and, sometimes, a fraying of connections to the past. How many of Newman College’s students — and their families — would concede a debt to those whose stories are told by Malcolm and Hall, and by O’Farrell? Time will tell. •

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While the Lindfield concept has been gestating since 2014, it resonates strikingly with the recommendations made last May by the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools. When David Gonski released his second major report on Australia’s education system he articulated a feeling — common among educators as much as the broader public — that our schools are no longer fit for purpose.

“Australia still has an industrial model of school education that reflects a 20th century aspiration to deliver mass education to all children,” Gonski argued. TV shows are streamed on demand, news feeds are curated to individual taste and most teenagers own a smartphone, but schools — those artefacts of the industrial revolution — are still “focused on trying to ensure that millions of students attain specified learning outcomes for their grade and age before moving them in lock-step to the next year of schooling.”

Whether the recommendations made in Through Growth to Achievement will ever be implemented with any fidelity is now a very open question. The political circus has well and truly moved on since May, and where Gonski was concerned that spending on schools should be cost-effective, the Morrison government seems more focused on whether it is politically effective. But if the politicians have forgotten Gonski — at least for the time being — the challenges of what he called the “industrial model” of schooling have not gone away.

The issue with the age-based class, Gonski explained, is that there may be as many as half a dozen “learning years” separating the strugglers from the high achievers. A Year 9 class could well include one or two students who are confident doing Year 12 work, some who are more comfortable at a Year 7 level, and the rest spread everywhere in between. As Gonski observed with characteristic delicacy, “it is impractical to expect that the same curriculum content can adequately cater to each student’s different learning needs.”

But if it is easy to observe the limitations of the conventional aged-base class, it is less obvious exactly what the alternative might look like. As the Gonski report acknowledged, we already stream, repeat and accelerate students, as well as grouping them into composite classes — and the merits of these practices are heavily contested. So Australian educators are left with some very basic questions. If children are not to be grouped with others more or less the same age, who should they learn with? If progression to a new learning level is not to be occasioned by the passing of a summer, when should it occur? And if the destination is not a new level of an age-based curriculum, what should it be?

These are the questions that Stephanie McConnell, principal of Lindfield Learning Village, is attempting to answer as she brings the new school into being. McConnell agrees with Gonski that the conventional Australian school is decidedly behind the times. “As an educator for a long time now,” she has said, “I’ve felt that there is a need to do things differently, because I don’t really feel that a system that was created over a hundred years ago serves the needs of our young people today.”

How, then, should we go about meeting the needs of today’s young people? McConnell has found inspiration in a handful of schools, here and overseas, that have convinced her of the degree to which individual students can take ownership of their own learning. What schools like High Tech High in California and Clevedon School in New Zealand do, McConnell says, is give students the agency to make their own decisions about what they learn, when, how and with whom.

“What I have seen done extremely well,” McConnell says, “is students being able to articulate where they are at on their learning journey. These are very young children I’m talking about. They were able to say: ‘Here’s where I’m at. I’m in a group with this person, and we’re working on our learning goal together. Then this is how we’re going to seek further learning.’” And so, as McConnell sees it, the alternative to the industrial school is a highly individualised approach to learning — not replacing the age-based class with yet another arbitrary grouping, but giving students a new degree of freedom and flexibility.

McConnell points to the difference between “student-led conferences” and traditional parent–teacher interviews as emblematic of the capacity of young people to design and organise their own learning. “So the student would sit down with their teacher and parent and they take them through their learning journey, and they are able to describe it using the language of the syllabus and the outcomes. And it’s just mind-blowing.”

No more little boxes: Lindfield Learning Village principal Stephanie McConnell at the old UTS Kuring-gai campus in Sydney. Julian Andrews/Newspix

It is a vision that has captured the imagination of the local Lindfield community, with the Herald reporting a rush on enrolments. Prospective parent, Georgi York, says her enthusiasm was inspired by the experience of a similar approach at her daughter’s primary school. “The only reason I’m on board is because I have seen it firsthand with my children,” York says. The model appeals because it meets students at their individual point of need. “Every child advances at their own level,” she says, “and every child is approached by the teacher with an understanding of ‘Well, this is where your child is at.’”

When I speak to McConnell, she is consumed with enrolling students and recruiting staff in preparation for the 2019 school year; the finer detail of how her vision will work when classes start had yet to be determined. But she mentions one model in particular. “If you were looking for what might be closest in Australia, Templestowe College in Melbourne would be the one that I would say most closely mirrors the philosophy.” So it is in Templestowe, in the northeastern suburbs of Melbourne, that we may get the clearest glimpse of what might replace the industrial school.

When the Gonski report came out in May, Peter Hutton, the former principal of Templestowe College, proclaimed in the Guardian, “I built a school that goes even further than Gonski 2.0, and it’s a success.” When I speak to Hutton, he is no less forthright. “We have an answer,” he tells me. “It’s humane. The kids love it. It needs to be experienced.” Hutton must have done something right. Ten years ago, Templestowe was on the verge of closure, with only 286 students, just twenty-three of them enrolled in Year 7; today, it has more than 1100 students.

At the heart of Templestowe’s transformation, Hutton explains, was the adoption of the radically individualised approach to learning that has inspired Stephanie McConnell. Students are given almost complete choice over what they learn and whom they learn with. Individual learning plans are used across Australian schools to modify curriculum and assessment for students with special learning needs; at Templestowe all students go onto one when they reach Year 8 (or what is called “Above Entry”). This is the practical mechanism that allows students to effectively choose their own adventure. In student-led electives like Geek Studies (robotics), the Science of Warfare, and Working with Animals, students negotiate their study focus and level. And because classes aren’t confined to one age group, students at Templestowe are able to choose from over 150 subjects.

As for the age of their classmates, about all the students at Templestowe can be sure of is that they will probably be teenagers too. In some instances of what Hutton calls “radical acceleration,” students who would be in Year 8 at a traditional school even complete Victorian Certificate of Education subjects.

Hutton tells the story of a Year 7 boy named Josh who was very keen on physics and joined a Year 12 class. “So a couple of weeks in,” Hutton explained, “I went and saw Josh and the rest of the class and I spoke to a few individuals and I said, ‘Look, what’s it like having this little fella in your class?’ And they said, ‘Well, it’s a bit weird.’ And I said, ‘Why is that?’ And they said, ‘Because he knows more than we do.’” It’s an extreme example but, in what are known as “vertical classes” at Templestowe, it is normal for students to work with peers of very different ages.

Hutton emphasises that the course load of many Templestowe students doesn’t differ greatly from that of their peers at more traditional schools. “When we look at it,” says Hutton, “almost all kids are still doing some form of English communication and maths and science, particularly in those early years.” But, he goes on, “there is a vast mental difference between walking into a classroom, knowing that you’ve chosen to be there and you can choose to leave if it’s not meeting your needs, rather than walking in going, ‘This is compulsory. I didn’t choose it. I didn’t choose you to be my teacher.’”

And then there are the kids who have “a dramatically different program. So they leave at lunchtime. Or they don’t start until 10.30am. Or there are a couple of kids who don’t have any classes at all and they work in something called a heutagogy [self-determined learning] centre on their own series of projects and they’re responsible to a supervisor.” Students and teachers now refer to the school by its acronym, TC, standing for “take control.”

As Hutton wrote in the Guardian, Templestowe College has gone further than anything Gonski recommended, and the ethos of students “taking control” extends beyond the classroom. Students sit on curriculum committees and selection panels for new staff, and at the end of last year they decided to abolish the school’s uniform. The school’s One-Person Policy — “All people will be treated equally regardless of the position they hold” — encapsulates this egalitarianism.

In a range of fascinating ways, the school has blurred the lines that conventionally distinguish students and teachers. Hutton mentions “employing some students who are really good at maths to tutor other kids that are needing some support,” as well as paying students to do work in areas including IT and audiovisual operations, reception and events. “Whenever we have a need to be fulfilled we ask do we have a student who can do that? Because it’s their school.” And students also start enterprises as part of their coursework. “We have eighty businesses, from ideation to operation,” says Hutton, ranging from a coffee club run by thirteen-year olds, to clothes manufacturing, photography and snake-breeding enterprises.

Like David Gonski and Stephanie McConnell, Peter Hutton believes Australian schools are in need of fundamental renewal. “When you empower kids and let them control their learning, amazing stuff happens,” he says. It’s not just the turnaround in enrolments at Templestowe that fills Hutton with confidence. “We had 98 per cent parent satisfaction on the Attitude to School survey,” he says, referring to a statewide survey of satisfaction with schools. “Our ‘connectedness to school’ is in the ninety-sixth percentile: huge gains in student engagement. Our kids are hugely happy.” And, he adds, “It was the most improved school in NAPLAN according to the Australian newspaper between 2012 and 2015.”

Peter Hutton left his job as principal of Templestowe College at the end of 2017 to create the Future Schools Alliance, an organisation promoting the widespread adoption of the philosophy of individualised learning he has implemented with much success. “I left at the end of the year a job that I loved. Even the bad days I still loved,” Hutton tells me. But he was challenged by a colleague who asked him, “Is TC going to be a skyrocket? Just a blip on the timeline of educational history, or are you going to actually scale it?” For Hutton, it is clear that Australian education is in need of a revolution, and he has found an answer to what a twenty-first century, post-industrial school should look like.

Templestowe College clearly embodies original and fascinating responses to enduring questions about how schools organise students, teachers, curriculum, space and time. Is it, as Peter Hutton ardently believes, the answer to the questions raised by Gonski 2.0 and the problems faced by Australian schools more generally? While the school has improved its NAPLAN results, its Year 9 students still underperform in spelling, and — more significantly — the school achieves below-average student gain in reading between Years 7 and 9. NAPLAN is a limited measure of a narrow part of the curriculum, but it is an indicator that should give pause for thought when we are contemplating a sharp break with our educational past.

I also wonder whether Templestowe is a boutique solution, one that may not work well in many Australian schools. I teach in Canberra’s senior secondary system, in which — like at Templestowe — there are no bells or uniforms, students call teachers by their first names, and there is very little in the way of compulsory curriculum. With no statewide exams, continuous assessment allows students to substantially direct their learning, from posing their own research questions to responding to novels with their own creative work. It is a wonderful environment to teach in and, on the whole, the young people I work with respond to the freedom they are granted with great maturity.

But I am also conscious that what works for senior secondary students in the nation’s most educated and affluent cities may not work as well elsewhere. And I wonder if the same goes for Templestowe. Thirty-nine per cent of Templestowe College’s students come from the most advantaged quartile of Australia’s population, and only 8 per cent come from the most disadvantaged. It is one thing to transplant the Templestowe model to Lindfield, an affluent part of northern Sydney barely a fifteen-minute drive from the Harbour Bridge. But will a model that relies so heavily on intrinsic motivation and self-direction work for all ages in all contexts?

My curiosity deepened when I heard comments Hutton had made early last year. “We tend not to pick up kids who have got bad behaviour and things like that, just because it’s not suited,” he said in an interview on the Modern Learners podcast. “Unless the student can demonstrate that they’ve got some ability to self-regulate it’s actually probably not a good environment and they need more structure about their learning.”

If the Templestowe model isn’t suited to kids who “have got bad behaviour and things like that,” its application could be very limited indeed. When I ask Hutton about this he is anxious to clarify: individualised learning and student empowerment are “absolutely not” just for kids who are already motivated learners and don’t have any behavioural issues. “The only reason where we sometimes end up with situations like that where kids are not self-motivated and they’ve got significant behavioural issues is because we’ve picked them up that way through a primary school, in many cases, that hasn’t met their needs back then.” But the best way of clearing up this doubt, he says, is to talk to a principal by the name of Wayne Haworth who has implemented the Templestowe model at Mount Alexander College in the Melbourne suburb of Flemington.

Just over two years ago, Mount Alexander College featured in an Age report on white flight in Melbourne’s inner suburbs. While neighbouring schools were oversubscribed, Mount Alexander College was running at half-capacity: affluent parents were bypassing the school and the large group of migrant students it served. With 44 per cent of its students from the lowest socioeconomic status quartile and 66 per cent from language backgrounds other than English — many are the children of refugees from the Horn of Africa who live in the nearby public housing estate — Mount Alexander is clearly doing the heavy lifting. When Peter Dutton attempts to demonise Australians of African origins, this is the kind of community that is right in the firing line.

When Wayne Haworth arrived at the school in 2015, he discovered a mood for change. “In Victoria,” he explains, “the parents are part of the selection panel for principals.” The parents told him they “were keen on a model they had read about running in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne” and he duly set about driving the adoption of Templestowe College’s model of individualised, vertical learning. The result, he says, has been remarkable. In 2015, just ten Year 6 students nominated Mount Alexander College as the high school they wanted to attend; now one hundred young Victorians have put the school as their first preference for Year 7 in 2019. “We’ll be moving into being close to, if not at, capacity with more than 500 students at the school, and that’s something that hasn’t happened in more than four decades.”

Thirteen-year-old Erin Breeze started at Mount Alexander in 2017, in large part because she was attracted to its novel approach to learning. “As well as it being my local school, I really liked the structure and how you can mix in with the older year levels. I think that’s really cool. I like how you can choose your subjects and if you think that you are a higher level in say maths or English then you can really go and try those levels and succeed,” says Breeze. “I’m doing an elective called Social and Augmented Reality and in that class there are Year 8s, 9s and 10s.” I ask Erin whether she is intimidated by her older peers. “Not really,” she says. “Everyone kind of just does their own work, and if we need help then we can talk to other students so I wasn’t ever really intimidated.” In her experience, she adds, “some Year 8s are smarter than some of the older students as well, so it’s kind of a good mix.”

Sixteen-year-old Towheed Altahir explains how vertical learning works for her at Mount Alexander. “So, last year, I was in Year 10 and I was doing a Year 12 subject and that was because my teachers, they really pushed me to do a high-level subject. They believed in me and they gave me a lot of support.” Bill Truong, also sixteen, says that the shift to mixed-age classes has created much stronger bonds across the school. “Basically in my maths class I have a few Year 9s, a few Year 10s, and a few Year 11s,” says Truong. “Everyone talks to each other, everyone knows each other.” Erin Breeze agrees. “Compared to other schools, we’re all trying to be the best we can be. So at our school it’s not so much about beating other students but trying to be our best.”

Wayne Haworth believes that multi-age classes have engendered a positive cultural shift. In essence, young people get used to difference being the norm. “We are three years down the track now of implementing the program and we’ve seen a significant shift in the connectedness of students to each other,” says Haworth. Where Mount Alexander previously ranked below or only slightly above the state mean in the various categories that make up the Attitudes to School survey, it now ranks in the top 25 per cent of the state in nine categories. In terms of “connectedness to peers,” Mount Alexander has moved from the thirtieth percentile in the state to the seventy-fifth. For Haworth, these results echo a phenomenon he saw on a study tour in England prior to arriving at Mount Alexander. “They were doing multi-age classes and they said that bullying disappeared overnight as a result. There was a great mixing and because there is mixing, it’s breaking down those barriers and… the school was more harmonious.”

More than 700 kilometres away, in the western suburbs of Adelaide, Findon High School has a similar student profile to Mount Alexander College’s, with a very high proportion of disadvantaged students and forty-three different cultures represented among the school’s 260 students. Like Peter Hutton and Wayne Haworth, new principal Phil Fitzsimons has a brief to turn the school around after years of declining enrolments. Fitzsimons is convinced that schools like Templestowe and Mount Alexander show the value of individualised learning and its relevance to students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

School captain, Sumaya Keyse Abdinoor, likes the changes happening at Findon High, and she makes an interesting point about how they are helping her and her peers see the relevance of education and make connections with the world beyond school. “Student-centred learning goes beyond the classroom,” she points out. “It goes into creating your own business at school and learning how to run that with the support of your teachers and then learning how to manage it on your own.” These kinds of activities, she says, help young people like her identify post-school pathways.

Fitzsimons acknowledges the cultural transformation at the school over the past year has not been completely plain sailing, but sees that as perfectly natural. “Some students have struggled a little bit taking the responsibility, to transition into that space. That’s probably because for a long time they’ve not been given that opportunity,” he reflects.

Schools like Findon High and Mount Alexander College show that Peter Hutton’s philosophy of radically individualised learning can travel successfully. They are also testimony to his outsized impact on the Australian education landscape. And yet his frustration with the pace of change is palpable. “It has just got really good outcomes for kids, but for some reason it just hasn’t… Sorry, the message is spreading, but nowhere near the viral contagion that it should be,” he says. “As educators we continually look overseas to places like Finland and Canada for models. We are going, ‘If only we had a solution’ and ‘If only we had an answer,’ and yet there is one in our own backyard and people are too blind to actually go and have a look at it.”

Hutton cites the lack of response to his overtures from the Victorian Department of Education and Training. “I have made this offer to the education department: ‘Give me your twelve worst schools and let us turn them around.’ And I have made this offer to the deputy secretary: ‘You give me the schools, and I’ll show you the turnaround.’ I am just frustrated that they have not jumped on something that is working and taken it to scale.”

Hutton’s impatience derives not only from a profound belief in the value of the kind of school he created at Templestowe, but also from a scathing critique of the status quo — of what Gonski called the industrial model. A few years ago, Hutton gave a TEDx speech that began as follows. “I hated school. The violence. The bullying. The day-to-day put-downs. It was almost as much as I could take.” Then came the punchline: “And that was from the staff.” The muffled laughter among the audience was quickly extinguished: “I’m not joking about that… Now my question today,” Hutton continued, “is how did we let learning get that bad?”

At heart, Hutton’s critique is a visceral response to the raw institutional power of schools, conspicuous in the call for students to “take control.” He approvingly refers to the late John Taylor Gatto, the New York school teacher who famously resigned with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and titled “I May Be a Teacher, but I’m Not an Educator.” Gatto went on to write Weapons of Mass Instruction, in which he quoted the satirist, H.L. Mencken, to characterise what he regarded as the real purpose of schools: “simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardised citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”

While Hutton advances an extreme version of the critique of contemporary schools, he is only the most strident spokesperson for a view that, in one form or another, is very widely shared. David Gonski, cautious consensus-builder and bespectacled denizen of Australia’s boardrooms, is not Peter Hutton, and Gonski’s critique of our schools is significantly more qualified in substance, as well as less vociferous in style. (In response to criticisms, Gonski panellist, Ken Boston, clarified that “the report proposes evolution not revolution.”) And yet Gonski was happy to describe the schools serving millions of Australian children right now as belonging in another century and another era. Indeed, the fact that Gonski was willing to endorse this sweeping critique of the current education landscape is an excellent indication of its pervasiveness.

A thoughtful feature in the Good Weekend late last year aptly described this likening of schools to factories: “Ringing bells tell students when to clock on and off and mark the times at which they must move from one stage of their manufacture to the next,” while teachers are “conduits of content that must be memorised and later regurgitated in a barrage of standardised tests.” As Lindfield Learning Village’s principal, Stephanie McConnell, puts it to me: “I think in the system that exists currently, we train students to be the “round peg in the round hole.” Learning is done to them. It’s not co-constructed and owned by them.” The default position among educators I spoke to for this story was that whatever it is we are doing now, it must be wrong. I worry this attitude will lead us to dispense with the bathwater before we have a firm hold on the baby.

For Peter Hutton and others, the case for change is clear. The status quo only survives courtesy of cultural inertia, organisational blindness, callous indifference or worse. But is it really the case that conventional schools move students in lockstep through a mass education, as Gonski would have it? Or that learning is “done to” students, as McConnell claims? Or that the goal of schools is to stifle dissent and originality, as Peter Hutton suggests?

As hard as I reflect on my own experience, I just can’t see this. In a unit I taught last semester, students presented seminars on the origins of an international conflict of their choice — and choose they did. We ended up hearing about everything from Darfur and the South Sudanese civil war to the first and second Congo wars and the Rohingya crisis. Students didn’t just choose their topics but negotiated their research questions, as they did when they wrote an essay on a conflict a classmate had presented on. They then did a unit of work on achieving agreement and managing disagreement, the premise of which was that they had a range of views that deserved to be heard and that would only be enhanced through sharing and exchange.

None of this, it seems to me, fits in the critics’ picture of what happens in our schools. It’s true that in an English class I took, I dictated that we study Joe Cinque’s Consolation. In that sense, the book was imposed on students, but it was an imposition based on a judgement that the local setting and true crime elements would appeal enough to inspire students to engage with Helen Garner’s meditations on the nature of justice and responsibility. And this time, at least, my judgement proved correct: numerous reluctant readers finished a book. If that outcome was achieved via a teacher-controlled process, it also seems to me like the essence of education, in which we are introduced to things we would not find, or could not do, by ourselves.

I share my own experience because, I venture, it is entirely unexceptional. “Student voice” is a mantra of educational orthodoxy. It is standard for students to choose from an array of electives; for topics within subjects to be chosen by students; for teacher judgement to be heavily guided by perceived appeal to students; for students to have opportunities for self-directed inquiry; and for teachers to use formative assessment to gauge the state of a student’s understanding prior to a unit of learning, thereby enabling them to differentiate learning experiences for the different students that make up a class.

Even in the most conventional classroom, discussion, group activities and developing, articulating and defending one’s own opinion are entirely standard. Critical and creative thinking are at the core of the Australian Curriculum, just as they are at the core of what happens in Australian classrooms. The strong tendency towards student-centred learning within the educational orthodoxy extends to significant modifications of the conventional “grammar of schooling”: flipped classrooms, team-teaching, multidisciplinary approaches like inquiry and project-based learning, and open-plan learning spaces are widespread. In some instances, these innovations are found in schools that are run according to a distinctive philosophy, like Big Picture Schools, but often they are the modus operandi in the local public school.

There is clearly a need for ongoing innovation in Australian education. Our decline in the OECD’s PISA tests — relative to past performance as well as other countries — is profoundly disconcerting. It should cause serious reflection, as it has. And there is evidently much to learn from Peter Hutton and schools like Templestowe and Mount Alexander College. But just as schools can become anachronistic, so can critiques, and it would be a mistake to take a caricature of the present as our point of departure. It’s not just that solutions for problems that no longer exists are unlikely to help; the danger is that individualised learning will be taken too far. A lack of balance could result in students who might be able to think for themselves but won’t be familiar with the traditions in which their thinking takes place; free to pursue their own curiosity but ignorant of things they should know; empowered to challenge authority but as polarised as the rest of the culture; confident in who they are but denied opportunities to transcend themselves.

In practical terms, it is essential that students feel learning is relevant to them, but the more students are pursuing their own topics at their own pace, the more thinly a teacher’s efforts will be spread across the class. Given a constant level of investment and teacher workload, there is an inevitable trade-off between giving students the freedom to pursue individual topics and supporting them in a methodical, systematic way.

More generally, the tendency to casually dismiss current practice also discounts the complexity of the ongoing challenges schools face. This point is illustrated by the story of an Australian school that is as innovative and individualised as any. Set amid the bars and nightclubs of Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, Music Industry College is a senior high school aimed, as the name suggests, at helping young people find a future in their passion for music. The school week is divided between “arts days” on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and a more traditional mode on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On arts days, classes are condensed to maximise the time students can spend on their most pressing — or exciting — creative projects.

In their book about the school, University of Queensland researchers Stewart Riddle and David Cleaver write that it “not only prepares students for the creative industries, but also allows marginalised, disengaged and often troubled youth to re-engage in learning, and most importantly, to find themselves.” Music Industry College’s principal, Brett Wood, established the school after running a youth centre and finding that music was the magnet that kept kids coming back. Wood says feedback from students consistently confirms Riddle and Cleaver’s findings. “In fact, we had a performance night here last night,” Wood tells me. “One of our graduates came, and as she left she just burst into tears. I go ‘What’s up?’ She goes, ‘This is my family and I miss it.’”

I ask Wood how his students respond to the freedom to pursue their creative passions. “It’s variable,” he says with a chuckle. “As you can imagine with teenagers, there are some who use that opportunity to do not much. There are others that use the opportunity to do a lot, and there’s some [who] might be passionate about doing something in a particular area rather than focusing on what’s coming up with the next deadline.” Wood explains that the school has tweaked its approach to help students achieve a greater balance between what they want to do and what they need to do, introducing compulsory tutorial sessions in which teachers call on students who need extra support and encouragement on upcoming assignments. “It hasn’t come without its challenges, obviously, because teenagers are teenagers… Humans are humans, actually,” he adds. “We can all be a bit like that.”

As original and exciting as the school clearly is, there is also something very familiar going on here. Students are given a great deal of freedom, but structure and limits are necessary to enable them to realise the possibilities of that freedom. To observe this is not to discount the school’s achievements. Giving young people a sense of who they are and where they belong is no small achievement. But it is to acknowledge that Music Industry College is engaged in the same balancing act — between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, student and teacher-centred learning, freedom and constraint — as more conventional schools. It offers not a paradigm shift but an accommodation of these competing tensions, refined through a process of iteration and recalibration.

About an hour’s drive west from Lindfield Learning Village, St Luke’s Catholic College is located in Sydney’s northwestern growth corridor. Having opened in 2017, it is effectively two years down the track that Lindfield will embark on when it opens this month. Like Lindfield, it will eventually grow to be a kindergarten-to-Year 12 school with thousands of children in its care. At this point, it has around 700 students in kindergarten to Year 8.

Like Stephanie McConnell at Lindfield, St Luke’s principal Greg Miller is convinced of the value of individualised learning. “One of the commitments that I personally have is to do my best to structure things so that students get as much time to lead their own learning in areas of interest,” he says. Miller envisages that “in Year 8, Year 9 and Year 10 students will have the choice of accelerating in certain subjects and maybe even commencing VET subjects or HSC subjects earlier. But they’ll determine that, not some teacher or school criteria.”

That has to wait, though, until St Luke’s has a full secondary school; only in its second year and effectively still only a primary school, it has yet to roll out the full model. So individualisation of the curriculum at St Luke’s currently occurs through Adventure Learning, a weekly program in which students pursue a passion project in subjects with names like “Design and Make Pokémon,” “Let’s Create a Mess,” “Kitchen Chemistry,” and “It’s My Beanstalk, Not Jack’s!”

While it was only introduced recently, Greg Miller says Adventure Learning has created genuine excitement. “Students talk about Adventure Learning from Thursday morning to the following Tuesday afternoon.” One class, the Minecraft course, is run by a student, with teachers in the room. Another class is based around slime — which, Miller explains, is the product of the moment for five and six year olds. “So, we’ve turned that into a course where there’s sixty-five kids and three teachers doing all sort of experiments with slime, and they are young kids, you know — kindergarten and Year 1. Now, they are just in raptures every Wednesday afternoon, these kids. And they are learning.”

One reason for individualising learning is that students who can choose what they learn will be more motivated. Another reason is that it’s important to recognise differences in ability and thus ensure that learning is challenging (but not too challenging) for each student, at least most of time. These two objectives are both important, but they are distinct and they may not always be compatible.

Adventure Learning is evidently tapping into children’s passion for inquiry, but it is not clear that it is any better than a more conventional class at differentiating instruction to respond to each student’s individual learning level. Miller tells me that in one photography class, Year 1 students sit next to Year 7 students. “If someone was to say to me six months ago, you would have a Year 7 kid sitting next to a Year 1 kid in relation to learning, I would have laughed at them,” he reflects. Doesn’t that exacerbate the differences within the class that a teacher has to attempt to differentiate for, I ask? “Yeah. Look, there’s no doubt about that,” he acknowledges. The school is offering an array of electives that tap into students’ intrinsic desire to learn, but those classes are only affordable because students of very different ages, and possibly stages of learning, are grouped together.

Miller very reasonably points out that Adventure Learning is a work in progress. But the deeper reality is that any school faces trade-offs in the way it groups students. Learning can be completely differentiated if it occurs entirely individually, but social experience is part of what makes learning effective and navigating social experience is one of the major goals of learning. Mixed-ability groups mean, by definition, that instruction needs to be simultaneously pitched to a range of levels, but grouping similar ability students according to stage or stream will likely result in negative peer effects for less advanced students.

Stephanie McConnell says that the urgent challenge is to tailor education to each student’s level of learning. “That’s where engagement happens,” McConnell says. “And wherever that engagement can be connected to the real world, I think that’s the holy grail.” In pursuing the holy grail, McConnell will face the same conundrums as Greg Miller at St Luke’s, along with every other school principal. Peter Hutton argues the answer is choice. “Allow them to choose, and they won’t choose something that is too easy — even if it is with their friends — because frankly it’s boring. And they won’t choose something that’s too hard because it’s meaningless.” Perhaps, but as the experience at St Luke’s bears out, schools continue to face trade-offs in their grouping of students. They can provide more subject choice by creating multi-age classes, but it is likely to leave educators with more work than ever to tailor instruction to the different students in their care.

Schools like Templestowe College, Mount Alexander College and Music Industry College have found ingenious and inspiring ways to negotiate the complex trade-offs all schools face. They offer an invitation to think and rethink how young people can participate in the design of their own learning, as well as the underlying structures in which that learning takes place. It is an invitation we should accept. But these schools may not represent something as emotionally satisfying as epochal transformation. And it might not help to think of them in those terms either.

Back at Lindfield Learning Village, Stephanie McConnell’s vision of individualised learning has been embodied in the design of the school building. She explains that, in contrast to a “box with thirty desks in it all facing a blackboard,” which implies the teacher “at the front of the room owns the knowledge,” Lindfield’s open-plan design will feature a series of flexible, open learning spaces. “What it allows which I think is a real advantage, is that team-teaching approach, to have a space which is much more flexible where you can move students and furniture around in different ways to work together in smaller and larger groups as needed.”

Lindfield’s site used to be the Kuring-gai campus of the University of Technology Sydney — and before that the William Balmain Teachers’ College — and McConnell says that the renovations have recovered the founding vision for the building. “I was actually privileged to be able to meet with the original architect… who, back in the sixties, had an incredible vision for what learning might be like in the spaces,” McConnell says. “And they, in fact, designed the building to be far more open-plan than it became. In the time since then and as a university building, a lot of walls have been put up, a lot of little boxes have been created. And so really what we’re doing for the school… is just pulling down those walls.”

I have taught in open spaces and found that students couldn’t hear each other in class discussions — and I often couldn’t hear them. So when McConnell relates this story, I can’t help but wonder whether those walls weren’t put up for a reason: to bring students together rather than box them in. Let’s hope the experience will be different at Lindfield and open learning spaces, and multi-age classes, will succeed. Let’s hope, too, that in our yearning for change we don’t sweep away much that is of value in schools as they currently exist. •

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As Inside Story reported in September, Bourke’s Aboriginal community formed a partnership with Just Reinvest NSW, a Sydney-based body, to start the project. It had a pressing cause. About a third of Bourke’s 3000 people identify as Aboriginal, and for more than twenty years this community has had the state’s highest rates of juvenile crime and domestic violence. Old government law-and-order methods, costing billions of dollars, were simply not working.

The Bourke people called their alternative the Maranguka Justice Reinvestment Project (Maranguka means “caring for others” in Ngemba, a local language). Its underlying strategy, drawn from the Soros think tank, is that governments should stop building yet more prisons and divert the funds to community projects designed to help people stay out of them.

Five years after the Bourke project started, its dividends are proving impressive. After following its progress, the accounting firm KPMG produced a report in late November estimating a “gross impact” of $3.1 million in 2017. About two-thirds came from lower costs in the justice system, and the rest from broader savings in the Bourke region.

Even more striking were improvements in the main areas where justice reinvestment has focused in Bourke: domestic violence, juvenile crime and early childhood development. KPMG reported a 23 per cent drop in police-recorded domestic violence in 2017; a 31 per cent rise in Year 12 student retention rates; a 38 per cent fall in five main juvenile offence categories; a 14 per cent cut in bail breaches; and a 42 per cent reduction in days spent in custody.

KPMG estimates that the project’s $3.1 million economic impact was five times the $600,000 cost of running it in 2017, much of which came from state and federal government contributions. (Substantial extra philanthropic backing comes from the Dusseldorp Forum and the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation.) If Bourke can sustain even half the economic results achieved in 2017, says KPMG, “an additional gross impact of $7 million over the next five years could be delivered.”

The changes stem from at least one key departure from the time when Bourke’s Aboriginal community was beholden to policies set by governments in faraway Sydney and Canberra. This has been the involvement of Bourke’s Indigenous community itself in guiding the justice reinvestment approach. Alistair Ferguson, a local Indigenous man, helped to create two bodies to get it going. One is the Bourke Tribal Council, which represents Bourke’s twenty-two language groups and makes decisions about strategy. The other is Maranguka, a community hub where local Indigenous officers meet daily with police to monitor any trouble cropping up with young people. The cooperation of Bourke’s police force, headed by Greg Moore (no relation to youth worker James Moore, pictured above), has been another part of the project’s success.

The KPMG report was launched at the state Parliament House in Sydney before a room of parliamentarians and other notables. They included Tom Calma, a former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner, who was among the first to call for justice reinvestment trials in Australia. Sarah Hopkins, a Sydney-based lawyer who heads Just Reinvest NSW, told the room, “When we say justice reinvestment is Aboriginal-owned and led, we think of Tom Calma.”

Brad Hazzard, the NSW health minister, who has followed the Bourke project, said the number of Aboriginal people in prisons statewide “remains appalling.” Maranguka had shown “the solution has to be the empowerment of the people themselves.”

But the KPMG report also places the onus on governments to look at changing their approaches to locking people up. It will put pressure on them to take seriously the idea that prison money can be better spent on community-led early intervention to steer vulnerable young people away from crime. The Coalition government, for instance — to which Hazzard belongs — announced almost $4 billion in 2016–17 for what it boasted to be the “largest single prison expansion in the state’s history.”

The report offers four possible models for a “core unanswered question” about justice reinvestment: how to reinvest prison funds in Bourke and elsewhere. These include diverting savings from building fewer prisons towards preventing crime; rewarding communities for achievements that cut costs for governments; doing more to encourage communities to work on their own solutions; and encouraging seed funding from private donors to secure government grants related to crime prevention.

Alistair Ferguson missed the Sydney launch. He was busy in Bourke with Mick Gooda, another Indigenous leader and early justice reinvestment advocate. When I caught up with him in Sydney last Friday, he had just spoken to a seminar in Canberra, where the ACT government has embarked on justice reinvestment trials, and was preparing for “cross-leadership” meetings involving the Bourke project later in December in Sydney, Dubbo and Bourke.

Despite the KPMG report’s positive assessment, the Bourke project that Ferguson initiated has no plans to wind back. “It shows quite an achievement,” he says of the report. “It’s got to the point where stakeholders now have to consider where and how to reinvest.

“Who’ll take those decisions? It doesn’t mean I’ll be sitting in a dark room making nocturnal decisions about spending that money saved from the criminal system. We’ll be making those decisions as a community. It will be a case of sitting down with police, family and community services and the Bourke Shire Council, co-designing it with the Aboriginal community.”

Ferguson nominates education, jobs and vocational training among areas where prison money could be invested better. Then he spells out why governments can’t ignore the changes at Bourke: “First Nations people have provided a compelling case that this can’t be done without our involvement. What gets overlooked is how willing Aboriginal communities are to roll up our sleeves and address legacy issues.” •

The post Breakthrough at Bourke appeared first on Inside Story.

Bourke is pioneering Australia’s most innovative way of tackling a problem haunting many parts of the country: the shockingly high rate of incarceration among young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Of Bourke’s 3000-strong population, about a third identify as Indigenous. Before the scheme started having an impact, the town had the state’s highest conviction rate for Aboriginal children and teenagers under seventeen, and about 90 per cent of young people released from custody were in trouble with the law again a year later.

“We’d been left to die slowly,” is how Alistair Ferguson, a local Indigenous man, describes his community’s fate under past government policies. “But Bourke and outback river towns are worth fighting for.” Fed up with billions of dollars of government money being poured into the “old law-and-order approach,” with little to show for it, Ferguson turned to an idea developed by the Open Society Institute, a New York think tank run by the American billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Known as “justice reinvestment,” the strategy is based on the argument that the money governments spend building yet more prisons should instead go to projects designed to help people stay out of them.

It is Ferguson’s initiative that eventually brings this group of expert backers to Bourke for a crucial “leadership group” meeting. Five years after introducing justice reinvestment to his town, he opens their gathering at Diggers on the Darling by declaring, “We are on the road to recovery.”

My own 800 kilometre journey from Sydney to Bourke — still one of Australia’s most isolated places — revealed much about the town’s vivid frontier history and its disastrous legacies for Indigenous people. From the 1880s, Bourke was a booming port handling wool bound for world markets via the Darling River. The press called it the “Chicago of the West.” In 1885, jealous at seeing its wool exported to Britain via Victoria and South Australia, the state government extended the rail line to Bourke so it could be shipped from Sydney instead.

The last 186 kilometres of this great piece of late-nineteenth-century infrastructure was closed down in 1990, and now lies crumbling beside the dead-straight road from Nyngan to Bourke. The remnants of Bourke’s wharf, where Darling River steamers once loaded multitudinous bales of wool (40,000 a year at its peak), have fared a bit better, and it’s there that Alistair Ferguson spoke to me between a stream of meetings with summit participants.

Ferguson, an energetic man with close-cropped greying hair, was born in Brewarrina, a nearby town on the Darling. He traces his own heritage to four states, and has family links with Barkindji, one of four tribal groups that were living in this region when white settlers began arriving in the mid 1860s. As the historian Bobbie Hardy writes in her book Lament for the Barkindji: The Vanished Tribes of the Darling River Region, some tribes “disappeared early under the impact of white settlement, and their conquerors were less than explicit as to the fate that overtook them.”

The Back O’ Bourke Exhibition Centre at North Bourke is a bit more explicit. In its small section on “The Traditional People,” it quotes an early settler: “The blacks on the Darling had been most barbarously murdered by our early predecessors, hunted like kangaroos or wild dogs wherever they were known to exist.”

Governments removed many Aboriginal people from traditional lands, and later brought others from outside the region to mission stations at Bourke. The thoughtless mixing of rival groups changed the makeup of the area, expanding the region’s four tribal groups to twenty-two in Bourke today. Ferguson and others see that dispossession and loss of identity as the main underlying cause of high crime rates.

Ferguson, who had planned to be a chef after he left high school in Bourke, became a public servant in the Bourke office of the state attorney-general’s department. From there he watched in despair the “constant revolving door of young people in handcuffs” at the local courthouse. Using Bourke’s twenty-first century lifeline to the world, the internet, he learned about trials of justice reinvestment in around twenty-four states in the United States, and in Britain. Tom Calma and Mick Gooda, both former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioners, had already called for similar trials in Australia.

“I became intrigued,” says Ferguson. “I wanted to know more.” In 2012 he approached Sarah Hopkins, a Sydney-based lawyer and chair of Just Reinvest NSW, a body advocating justice reinvestment as public policy. The following year, Just Reinvest and Ferguson formed a partnership to start a project in Bourke. “We didn’t go to Bourke,” Hopkins says. “They came to us.” She is keen to stress the Aboriginal community’s determination to find a new approach to solving its problems that didn’t leave it beholden to governments. “Self-determination is fundamental to justice reinvestment,” she says.

A “lot of moving parts” soon came together, says Ferguson. The Australian Human Rights Commission and the state Aboriginal affairs office offered early support; Gilbert and Tobin, a law firm, pitched in later. The first funding, in 2014, came not from governments but from two family philanthropic outfits: the Dusseldorp Forum and the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation. Along with money from smaller family foundations, this allowed the project to kickstart with a backbone of staff in Bourke.

A September 2016 report prepared free of charge by accounting firm KPMG found that philanthropic funding for the project had amounted to $554,800 each year over the three years to 2018–19. It argued that the early progress and the goodwill the project had attracted made a strong enough case for governments to get behind it.

Teya Dusseldorp, the Dusseldorp Forum’s executive director, is a granddaughter of its founder, the late Dick Dusseldorp, who also founded the Lend Lease construction company. She visited Bourke at Ferguson’s invitation when he was trying to get something started. “We could see the real desire of the Bourke community to be drivers of change for their town,” she says. “I found that far more promising than people just advocating to governments. They wanted to confront the problems they identified of too many young people being incarcerated. There were enough people there who wanted to be part of designing the solutions themselves, rather than waiting for government to fix things.”

Goodwill was palpable when the fifty-odd people gathered at Diggers on the Darling on 30 July. There was something symbolic about the fact that the meeting was taking place across the road from the Darling River, where Henry Lawson set several short stories drawing on his time in Bourke in 1892. Lawson sharply observed the region’s swagmen, riverboat captains and other pioneer characters, but Indigenous people featured in his stories only fleetingly as part of the exotic frontier backdrop.

“Finding a balance from the first nations’ perspective isn’t an easy thing to do,” Ferguson told the meeting. But now, the descendants of Lawson’s largely invisible people were telling a story of trying to reverse a downward spiral that had started back then. By any standards, it has a promising ring of success.

A report to the meeting showed a sharp drop in juvenile crime last year. Break-and-enter offences fell by about half. At Bourke Primary School, 4 per cent of Aboriginal students were suspended, a dramatic reduction from about 20 per cent four years earlier, though the fall in suspensions at Bourke High School was not so impressive. The proportion of children going to school, and staying there, has risen.

One of the most encouraging shifts involved domestic violence committed by Aboriginal men. Unemployment, alcohol and dislocation have long made this a problem in Bourke: reoffending rates per capita are among the highest in Australia. And its reverberations spread to the streets, where children forced to flee violent homes embark on crimes of their own. The meeting heard that the proportion of adult men charged with domestic violence had almost halved since 2014.

This news preceded the opening of a new “Men’s Space,” further along the Darling, later that afternoon. The substantial block of land and modest brick house on the edge of Bourke was donated by the Sisters of Charity, a Catholic group. Ironically, it was once a prison site; but now, says Jonathon Knight, an Aboriginal man who works with a group called Men of Bourke, it will become a place where “men can come to seek help and feel comfortable.” His hope is that “we can be role models for our community.”

A group of Aboriginal children and young men had gathered for the event, and five nuns had travelled from Orange in New South Wales to join a Catholic priest in blessing the Men’s Space. (One of them recalled how the Indian missionary, Mother Teresa, had visited Bourke fifty years ago to bless the sisters’ land.) Led by several Aboriginal women, the men, black and white, walked in a semicircle through a smoking ceremony under a magnificent river red gum tree.

Brad Hazzard, the NSW health minister, was among them. “I still shake my head in wonder as to why so much state and federal resources are coming into regional towns and not achieving the outcomes we want,” Hazzard told the Bourke meeting. He offered as one explanation the politics in some Aboriginal communities: “They make Labor and Liberal look like a bunch of amateurs.” After recent leadership turmoil in Canberra, he may be right.

Yet that seemed to miss a key point. The Bourke community’s creation of the Men’s Space is one example of its bid to take pressure off a key cause of crime in its midst. “Do they have the right to make decisions for us?” asks Phil Sullivan, a Bourke elder, referring to governments. “We’re still not in the Constitution you know! I think the justice reinvestment approach, a tool to do what we want to do, is a perfect start.”

Like most governments in Australia, the Coalition to which Hazzard belongs beats a law-and-order drum relentlessly. In its 2016–17 budget, the NSW government announced almost $4 billion for what it called the “largest single prison expansion in the state’s history.” Yet Hazzard seems impressed with what he has seen in Bourke. “The men here say they asked for the Men’s Space,” he tells me after the smoking ceremony. “No central office dreamed it up. The ground-up mode means the community owns the process and the outcomes. My instinct tells me that is the most likely recipe for success.”

When he embarked on justice reinvestment in Bourke, Alistair Ferguson built crucial new links into the project. He involved local Aboriginal people by helping to create two bodies: a community hub called Maranguka (“caring for others” in Ngemba, a local tribal language), and the Bourke Tribal Council, representing the town’s twenty-two language groups, whose role is to make decisions about strategy.

“This concept, allowing the community to be the decision-makers, isn’t new,” Ferguson says. “It’s been here for thousands of years. It got lost after white settlement pushed traditional structures away.”

He also insisted on involving Bourke’s police force as key players. Too often around Australia, high imprisonment rates have followed combative relationships between police and Indigenous communities. Greg Moore, Bourke’s police chief, presides over a staff of about forty-five police; he is also commander of a larger force that serves other outback districts in the state’s northwest. He has keenly embraced justice reinvestment, which he sees as a way to “shift the focus from building prisons to addressing the causes that feed crime in the first place.”

“In the old days, you had the cops, health, education and the local council,” Moore says. “That was about it.” Of the new Aboriginal bodies, he says, “We set these structures up so the community could have greater involvement in decision-making and resolving community conflicts. The community has always said, ‘We want policy designed with us, not on us.’”

Greg Moore identifies domestic violence, mental health, alcohol, drugs, idleness and truancy among the main underlying causes of Bourke’s high Aboriginal youth conviction rate. They are the same as those revealed twenty-seven years ago in a royal commission the Hawke government set up to examine Australia’s then alarmingly high rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody and juvenile detention. That inquiry said the main way to stop rates climbing even higher was for governments to tackle these causes first. But since then incarceration rates have only doubled, according to Amnesty International.

While governments have ignored the royal commission’s recommendation, Ferguson says he has taken it as his template. The work starts every morning at the Maranguka hub office in Bourke. James Moore (no relation to Greg), the Birrang SOS (“Save Our Sons, Save Our Sisters”) youth coordinator, meets there with police to review any trouble in town overnight.

Moore is a local Aboriginal man who left school without finishing Year 10. He fell foul of the law himself and spent time in jail. He understands the problems of the people aged between eight and eighteen whom he now tries to help: “Like them, I felt disconnected and had little sense of belonging.” This understanding, and working with kids to encourage more positive outlooks, is probably the key to Bourke’s justice reinvestment project. It was missing from long-time government approaches in Sydney and Canberra: setting policy from a distance, and sending welfare to the town.

“Because of a lack of jobs, a lot of families depend on welfare,” James Moore explains. “Kids just dropped out of school. Many fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds were on police radar every day. Maranguka asked, what can we do to help them? My role is to change their mindset, to work towards getting jobs.” SOS was set up last year to encourage kids to go back to school.

Maranguka has also set up a youth council to discuss proposals from Moore and his colleagues, and contribute their own ideas. “It’s all about giving them a voice,” says Moore. “In the past, young people never had a say in anything.” The council consists of local young Aboriginal role models and “other more vulnerable ones.”

Moore also works with an Alternative Education Program, to equip young people with job skills. Bourke’s schools identified twelve kids who they thought could benefit. Moore says the twelve had about 300 “interactions” with police between them in the three months before the program; in the three months after it started, police interactions had fallen to fourteen. Meanwhile, school attendance rates among the twelve have risen.

Another initiative exposes young people to environments outside Bourke. James has taken some to Nowra, on the NSW south coast, for boot camps on leadership and life skills. “It’s all based on discipline, respect and responsibility,” he says. Closer to home, he takes young people out “on country” to connect them with traditional cultural practices. “Culture today is the answer for our vulnerable kids,” he says. “It should be part of day-to-day routine for Aboriginal people.”

Vivianne Prince, whose parents are Ngemba and Wangukmarra people, coordinates services at Maranguka. Each Thursday, school principals and other town officials join the meetings. “It means everyone is working together, breaking a silence,” says Prince. “If a pupil has been suspended from school, everyone knows. Evidence shows the children are benefiting from this approach. They’re getting the support they need.”

Leonie Brown, corporate services manager of Bourke Shire Council, tells me the council has supported justice reinvestment “since Alistair put it together.” With jobs scarce on the region’s great sheep stations nowadays, especially during the drought, the council is one of Bourke’s biggest employers. An abattoir, due to open in Bourke this year, could offer up to 200 jobs.

“A lot of government and non-government money comes into Bourke,” says Brown. “Incarcerating youth is a big cost. If we can stop that, and reinvest it, this is one way of working through those problems.” She praises Greg Moore as police chief for his “supportive” approach, helping to bring crime down: “You can see the difference.”

I sensed a difference myself since my last visit to Bourke, in 2010. On that occasion, I was reporting on another intractable issue: water. Crime then seemed out of control. Among the handsome old stone and wrought-iron buildings from Bourke’s grander days, shops were shuttered with steel grids. The town had a sense of siege.

Eight years later the shutters are still there, but the siege sense has waned. Perhaps wary, Bourke’s business figures largely had held back from engaging with justice reinvestment. Now, though, some are happy to commend it.

“It’s doing what it should be doing: getting kids off the street. It’s a marvellous thing,” says David Randall, manager of the Betta Home Living electrical goods shop in Oxley Street. “Eight years ago, you wouldn’t have contemplated that I might take my shutters down. Now I’m contemplating it. It’s very rare that we have problems with hardened kids any more. A lot has to do with attitudes of the police, who are getting involved before crime happens.”

Across the street Peter Crothers, the pharmacist at the Towers Drug Co (“An outback icon since 1878”), says Bourke had long suffered from a “feeling of powerlessness.” He adds, “All decisions were made on how money was spent without reference to the community. What’s happened since justice reinvestment started is that Aboriginal, non-Aboriginal, local government, community associations, business and professional people have all said, ‘Just give us the money and let us work out what needs to be done.’ We’ve started in this town trying to address a different way. Unlike any community I have worked in, we have started to say, ‘We’re special.’”

Support is growing for projects like the one in Bourke. Although none is as advanced as Bourke’s, other justice reinvestment trials are planned or getting started at Katherine, in the Northern Territory, Cherbourg, in Queensland, and in the Australian Capital Territory and South Australia.

The Australian Human Rights Commission calls it a “powerful crime prevention strategy.” The Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee five years ago recommended that the Commonwealth “adopt a leadership role” to support justice reinvestment and that it fund a trial with “at least one remote Indigenous community.” In a report last March, the Australian Law Reform Commission called on federal, state and territory governments to establish an independent justice reinvestment body to “promote the reinvestment of resources from the criminal justice system to community-led, place-based initiatives that address the drivers of crime and incarceration.”

So far, governments show little inclination to take this on. Beating the law-and-order drum seems calculated to win them more plaudits from tabloids and shock jocks than cutting spending on prisons. Yet the 2016 KPMG report on Bourke offered a cogent economic case for a different approach. It contrasted the justice reinvestment project’s estimated running cost of $554,800 a year with the estimated $4 million annual cost to the Bourke area’s criminal justice system of Aboriginal children and young people’s involvement in crime. KPMG is preparing another report on the Bourke project’s economic impact.

Its achievements so far have prompted the federal and NSW governments to commit $2.5 million up to 2022 towards cutting family violence, helping young people to find jobs and enabling the Maranguka team to collect more data. The project’s influential private backers are impressed. “We have a long-term commitment to this work, because that is what it will take,” says Teya Dusseldorp. “We’re talking about generational change. Maranguka is one of the most promising initiatives I’ve seen. They’ve been very effective in building a bridge between community and government to last.”

Alistair Ferguson reckons the “reinvestment” side of justice reinvestment is now in sight. Bourke’s crime reduction, he argues, could warrant redirecting a quarter of its $4 million spend on criminal justice into more work helping the town’s young people. “That will be the real turning point.” When? “It can’t come soon enough.” ●

Robert Milliken returned to Bourke later in 2018; his short followup report is here.

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What the experts have in common is considerable distance from schools. Far too many have a blinkered view of what kids are and what schools could be. They rarely have the inside view that teachers have. But teaching is an all-consuming profession: good teachers are immersed in where they are and what they are doing, and rarely get the chance (or make the time) to step back to see the bigger picture. At the end of the school day you don’t reflect, you recover.

This makes commentary about schools from insiders, or from those close by, all the more valuable. Lucy Clark’s Beautiful Failures is an evidence-backed parent’s critique of a school machine that leaves so many behind. Drama teacher Ned Manning’s Playground Duty captures the thoughts of teachers who dare. While others gather the evidence about schools, people like this describe them more effectively with stories. And now here is Gabbie Stroud’s Teacher, telling of her journey through schools right the way from childhood through to teaching in a system that had lost its way.

Teacher is about an educator and a system under siege. The elements of the crisis are displayed from the start. By page fourteen, Stroud is a first responder, nurse, counsellor, traffic cop and psychologist. She deals with the needs of kids, parents, the law, administrators… and the system. Against the odds, she radiates professionalism, compassion and cheer, but lurking in the background are the pressures that, in the end, wore her down.

Her narrative of her life as a student and teacher not only makes a good story but each experience makes its own contribution to the teacher she became — and eventually to her decision to leave. It adds up to a telling critique of what has happened to school education in this country.

Her own school life and tertiary education were about encouragement, creativity and achievement, including in writing. Like so many, she developed a passion to be one of the teachers she admired. But when she became such a teacher, it was in what she describes as a very different era for schools. One of the themes in her book is this dichotomy between her early experience and the constrained and over-directed world that schools became during her career.

To some extent this contrast between schools then and now is overstated. Many would challenge the notion that schools years ago were places where a thousand flowers were allowed to bloom. We all remember the teachers who inspired us. But many of the inspiring teachers were mavericks, just as they often are today. Progress through school was even more lock-step; textbooks and the three Rs ruled. As for achievement, if retention rates are any guide, then half the flowers wilted. Schools largely sidelined the strugglers until they fell away into jobs that no longer exist.

But there certainly have been changes for the worse. Stroud’s book complements the growing chorus of criticism of the takeover of school education by the market, and especially the belief that quality grows out of competition between schools. Today’s instruments include the My School website and the hijacking of NAPLAN to fuel competition. Most schools play the game, most students endure the system, but if the criteria of its success are high levels of student commitment and achievement it is an abject failure. Stroud is just one of a generation of teachers who have lived through this failure.

Her introduction to teaching was actually in London, where she threw herself into the job. Like most beginning teachers, she found that teaching took a lot out of her: it was “a part of me given away, day after day.” That could be endured; it was the other things that got in the way.

It was in London that she was introduced to the joys of standardised assessment tests and league tables. “I bet it’s not like this in Straylia,” one student quipped. It might not have been like that when she returned to Australia, but it soon would be. The challenges in her remote NSW school were already considerable. Her initiation into the complexity and dysfunction in the lives of her students and their families was tough by any standards. She set aside her meticulously prepared teaching programs, along with assumptions about what works and what doesn’t.

From there she taught in a Catholic school, then in Canada and later back to a regional school in New South Wales. The names and stories of her students weave in and out of a narrative that would resonate with anyone familiar with schools. Teachers often tell these stories; it’s about coping. She survived and thrived with the help of the informal support and mentoring from colleagues. In many schools, teachers hang together in this way — or hang separately.

Like many, Stroud became somewhat cynical, but it was a healthy cynicism among teachers who must periodically ride out the pendulum of school change. She especially struggled with A to E student assessment and reporting. “Something inside me wanted to rage against this imposition,” she writes. “I wondered what the letter E would mean for all the Warrens and Ryans of the world. I thought of a younger me flipping herself inside out to achieve an A and hating myself when I didn’t get it.” While it is a decade too late, the recent Gonski recommendations might still come to the rescue of the Warrens and Ryans — and the Gabbie Strouds.

As a teacher, Stroud combined her passion and professionalism with a measured degree of resistance. While it is never easy, smart school principals and bureaucrats need to value good teachers who do this. Amid the inevitable, ephemeral and often questionable changes we impose on schools, teachers like these keep the whole enterprise grounded and authentic.

For Stroud it probably became too much when My School and NAPLAN entered the scene. After her London experience she knew the game and what it would do to schools and students. She could see that schools would be unfairly compared and that some kids would become sought-after social capital.

It was beginning to beat her. “Everything I was doing seemed to be driven by something beyond me…” she writes. “I had lost all sense of autonomy and had learned to stop asking ‘why.’” And she recognised the same symptoms in colleagues who also resented having to put meaningful things aside to prepare for tests. She recounts her daughter, playing at being a teacher with her classroom of dolls, telling one of her charges, “We don’t have any time for that.”

Then came the national curriculum, “rolled out like a steamroller flattening us into conformity.” Then the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers loomed, “like the bogeyman in my childhood hallway.” As she explained to a colleague, “It’s a deficit model. Our system examines what’s lacking rather than valuing what’s achieved.”

She only managed a couple more years after that: depression, burn-out… we call it different things. She became part of the statistics that measure the scores of teachers we drive away, the ones we can least afford to lose. “I miss the classroom,” she writes. “I miss the kids. I miss the feeling that I was making a difference. But I don’t believe that I left teaching. Teaching left me.”

This book is essential reading for anyone in, or anywhere near, a school. Many will reject aspects of her critique, but we can’t afford to ignore its overall message. The good news is that her concerns are also being recognised, through the second Gonski review, in a way that might see sustainable solutions. In our efforts to create something better, Teacher is a timely warning that we ignore the teaching profession at our peril. If we don’t take them with us, we’ll go nowhere.

It is also a plea to politicians, pundits and principals to follow three steps to make a difference for teachers and kids: give them support, give them trust — and then get out of the way. ●

The post “I don’t believe I left teaching. Teaching left me” appeared first on Inside Story.

But were they capable? Would all that extra money disappear in the black hole of schooling? The questions were asked of the first Gonski’s sponsor, Julia Gillard, who came up with the risible idea that every school would have to submit a performance plan for approval. When the Coalition, via education minister Simon Birmingham, abruptly switched from opposing Gonski to embracing it, the are-we-wasting-all-that-money question became Mr Birmingham’s to answer. His response was to recall David Gonski and ask him to “examine the evidence and make recommendations on the most effective teaching and learning strategies.”

Gonski and his colleagues set to work in August 2017 and sent their report to the minister in late March. It was released to the public at the beginning of this week.

The panel was constrained by four realities. It was asked to “focus on practical measures that work,” an approach that, it turns out, it didn’t really agree with. Second, what no doubt looks to the minister to be a perfectly reasonable effort to ensure value for money may look to others like a velvet glove around Canberra’s financial fist. A third difficulty is that the report had to come up with an approach that could and would be implemented faithfully by each of Australia’s twenty-plus very different school jurisdictions. And, finally, the review was required to focus on school and classroom practice when most of the problems, including problems in practice, have their origins elsewhere.

In sum, the panel was asked to resolve two deep and ancient schisms in Australian schooling — the conflict between “conservative” and “progressive” educational approaches, and the conflict between the federal government and the states — while pinning down the notoriously elusive relationship between school funding, educational practice and academic outcomes — and to do it all with one hand tied behind its back, in eight or nine months.

It is in the nature of the task that the Gonski 2.0 report would lack the clarity, coherence and do-ability of Gonski 1.0. The report hovers uneasily between a strategy, a list of things that would be worth doing, and a “vision statement.” It offers only elements of a strategy, but not a fully formed strategy. Some of its specific suggestions are worth pursuing, but they don’t add up to a plan. The great achievement, and the biggest risk, is in the vision. Gonski 2.0 is the first official declaration that a long-familiar model or “grammar” of schooling, premised on selection and therefore success purchased at the price of failure, is obsolete, and must be replaced.

The report begins with a compelling tale, but fails to draw its morals. Things are going badly — falling rankings in the OECD’s league tables, worse outcomes in 2015 than in 2003, a decline in maths performance across all four socioeconomic quartiles, falling attainments across all sectors, a substantial gap between the best-performing countries and Australia, and so on, and on. It boils down to the fact that since Australia adopted a strategy that promised to improve outcomes, outcomes have continued to deteriorate. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this strategy, organised around “outcomes” and the notion that accountability and competition would cause teachers and schools to lift their game, has been a complete failure, and should be ditched.

The review panel doesn’t say this and probably couldn’t. But did it have to accept the basic premise of the failed strategy, that “outcomes” are indeed the problem? Of course academic outcomes are crucial, particularly in the foundational areas of language, science and maths. But they are a problem, not the problem. The problem, or the most substantial single problem in Australian schooling anyway, is the massive redistribution of the population across schools and school systems, a continuing increase in the concentration of “advantaged” students in their schools and “disadvantaged” students in theirs, and a shrinking proportion of schools with socially mixed enrolments.

This segmentation is destructive in several ways. It encourages relationships within rather than across social and cultural groups. It narrows the social understanding and learning needed in a democratic, multicultural society. It is at least as important, educationally and socially, as academic outcomes, and is, moreover, a primary driver of our outcomes problem. Declining outcomes are a symptom of an underlying problem as well as a problem in itself. (I wrote at greater length about this problem in an earlier article for Inside Story.)

In the review’s defence, it could be said that fixing the segmentation problem was the business of Gonski 1.0, and so it was. But Gonski 2.0 could have lined up clearly behind Gonski 1.0 by pointing out that there is only so much that schools can do as long as they are rowing against the segmentation tide. It could have said that laying the foundations of social cohesion is as fundamental a task for schooling as delivering better outcomes performance, and it could have pointed out that tackling segmentation head-on is the most promising way to lift outcomes.

That would mean, among other things, drawing as much attention to declining diversity within schools as to declining outcomes, and asserting that arresting and reversing segmentation is the top priority for reform. It would mean recommending that social learning and diversity within schools be tracked and publicised just as assiduously as we now track outcomes. Unfortunately, the review did none of these things.

The panel makes a number of specific recommendations. Two of these relate to those particularly troubled phases of schooling, the early years and the senior secondary years. Others bear on schooling as a whole: better career paths and professional development for teachers; ditto for school leaders; better workforce planning; more innovative and adaptive school systems; a national “evidence institute”; and the biggie, a transition from an “industrial” model to teaching premised on the continuous progress of every student.

Three of these areas, early learning, senior secondary schooling, and workforce planning, are delegated to further reviews. The early learning review is already under way. The senior secondary review will take in the “purpose, content and structure” of the last two years of schooling and tackle the “disengagement” of so many secondary students. The suggestions seems to be that Australia might follow many other systems in making age fifteen or thereabouts the moment of choice between two distinct forms of schooling, one essentially academic, the other vocationally based.

The workforce planning proposal is less convincing in several important ways. It fails to link workforce planning to the future of schooling or to link educational with industrial relations considerations. It therefore misses the opportunity to engage teacher organisations and draw them away from oppositionism and a narrow focus on the terms and conditions of employment. And, since most industrial relations questions are settled at the state level, any review process should include the local as well as the national.

All this implies a sustained, strategic collaboration rather than a conventionally framed, fly-in-fly-out review. Pending such a major undertaking, the review’s proposals for change in the career structure, professional development and rewards of teaching and school leadership will remain, like their many antecedents, merely the kind of thing that has to be said.

By far the most important of the review’s conclusions is that the “industrial model” of schooling — the forty-five-minute lesson in a single subject delivered to twenty-five or so students of the same age by a teacher standing at the front of the classroom, followed by assessment of all against a single standard — is obsolete. Formed in a long-gone era, it leaves the slow behind and the quick bored, and fails to develop the kind of broad competencies that life and work increasingly demand.

The essence of a better model or “grammar” of schooling, the review says, is a focus on growth rather than attainment measured against a single standard for a given age, to make it possible for “every student [to] progress regardless of starting point or capabilities.” The review wants the curriculum — in other words, the work that students are asked to do — to be organised around “learning progressions” against which growth can be assessed and by which further “personalised” work can be guided.

This is a powerful idea that makes intuitive sense to anyone who has tried to cope with the typical class comprising students four, five or even more learning years apart. It owes much to “measurement science” and to the advocacy of three Melbourne-based institutions, the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, the Australian Council for Educational Research, and the Grattan Institute. It would be surprising if the panel’s moving spirit in this was not Ken Boston, member of both Gonski panels and a former head of Britain’s national curriculum body.

The big problem in this very big idea is obvious. How do we get from here to there? The review offers several suggestions: a web-based assessment tool, the recasting of curriculum as a series of developmental progressions, and professional development for teachers and school leaders. Its version of the “evidence institute” is more sophisticated than Labor’s, and could be construed as supporting the new grammar as well as dispensing “what works” advice.

These recommendations assume that much or all of the matching of learning to learner will be done within the organisational frame of the lesson, the teacher, the class and the subject. The review, advised by a “measurement science” derived mainly from the discipline of psychology, has limited its recommendations to teaching, curriculum and assessment. In the initial stages of a transition, that would be plenty to go on with, of course, but sooner or later — sooner for some students, schools and areas of learning than others — the focus would need to shift from technique to the organisation of people, time and space. That raises the question of the capacity of school systems to inspire, plan and carry through a substantial reorganisation of work and workplace.

On these issues the report’s talk of “obstacles” is allusive at best. The current model of schooling is embedded in heavily defended industrial awards, in the physical infrastructure of schools, in the habits and skills of the workforce, and in parent and community views about what real schooling should look like.

If the report’s picture of a new grammar is limited by language and purview of psychology-derived research, its view of school systems is limited by management-speak. It wants school systems to confront these “challenges” by being “innovative” and “adaptive” through “continuous improvement.” But there is not much point urging systems to be innovative and adaptive if they are not capable of it.

I have relied before on an observation by the chairman of the long-gone Schools Commission, Ken McKinnon, that Australian schooling is good at gardening but not at engineering. A new model of schooling can be gardened into existence only to a certain point, beyond which engineering is required. The school systems weren’t good at engineering in McKinnon’s time. Have they got the hang of it now? My own view is that they are less capable now than they were in the 1970s because the structural circumstances within which they work are even more constraining now than then.

Within each state, authority is dispersed across three sectors, and then between statutory authorities, the industrial relations systems and teacher organisations, universities, government departments, and ministers’ offices. Decision-making is often heavily politicised, and conducted by a constantly changing cast of governments, ministers and senior public servants.

The problem is compounded by the Rudd and Gillard’s consolidation of a “national approach.” The key areas of strategic policy formation and accountability, as well as some aspects of resource allocation and curriculum, have all been ceded to national agencies and processes, leaving the states and non-government systems as not much more than retail outlets. Looked at from the other direction, the national “system” has no authority over the many matters still in the hands of the states and systems.

Perhaps worst of all, the “national approach” herds every system into a single reform strategy. When it fails, all fail, and there is no alternative to learn from. Of course systems should collaborate, but at their own initiative and in varying combinations, not in a lock-step march to the “national” drumbeat.

The “shared ambition, action and accountability” the review calls for will not overcome these limitations. It is very difficult to imagine that each of Australia’s twenty-plus school jurisdictions — some big, some small, some tightly hierarchical, some “devolved,” some in this sector, others in that, some already advancing elements of the review’s agenda, others not — will want or be able to do the report’s bidding. This is not the fault of the review panel or its report. To the contrary, they have made the best of a bad job. It is simply to point out that nobody, not the state governments, not the systems, not the federal government, not the national apparatus and processes, is capable of the “sustained, long-term and coordinated improvement” that the review correctly says is required.

These realities have bedevilled countless reviews over decades. Teacher education holds a dubious record of being the subject of more than a hundred reviews since the 1970s without actually changing much. Reviews are endemic in schooling, one form of the prodigious quantity of talking done in and around schools and school systems. Talk is the virus-like means by which slow, haphazard and not necessarily intended change is effected. Most reviews are stones thrown against castle walls, expressions of frustration at the gap between what could and should be done and what is done. Reviews kick the can down the road, as the old hands put it. Their net effect is a cumulative incrementalism in which problems and costs mount up more quickly than solutions can be found and implemented.

The first Gonski report was an absolutely outstanding exception to this rule. The rule will continue to apply, however, unless that report is seen as a platform upon which further structural and governance reform can be built. The second Gonski report is closer to the rule, but it has one very good chance to escape the oblivion into which its many predecessors have sunk: it has made the genuinely historic call that the familiar way of organising and conducting teaching and learning is obsolete, and that a very different grammar is needed and available. The risk is that the “transition” from one to the other is beyond the capacity of the system, and that the failure will be put down to the idea. •

The post An end to the industrial model of schooling? appeared first on Inside Story.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics adds that the pace of jobs growth is now slowing sharply — as well it might. On those figures, we added one new job last year for every thirty we already had. That’s almost twice our long-term average pace of jobs growth. It’s astonishing.

What makes it even more astonishing are two other bits of data. First, jobs growth was rocketing up when the economy was barely chugging along in third gear. Over 2017 our total economic output (gross domestic product, or GDP) grew by just 2.6 per cent. The real bottom line, GDP per head, grew by just 1 per cent — barely half its long-term average.

So jobs growth was running at twice the long-term average at the same time as economic growth per head was running at half the long-term average. That’s odd.

Second, all that jobs growth did little to reduce unemployment. When it began, the Bureau’s trend unemployment rate was 5.8 per cent. After adding 400,000 jobs, it is now 5.6 per cent.

That is not low unemployment. In the nine years from early 2004 to early 2013, unemployment was that high in only seven months — and that was in the middle of the global financial crisis.

Or take a global comparison. Yes, unemployment is much higher in southern Europe, but our rate is higher than in the most important of our peer-group countries. It’s 2.5 per cent in Japan, 3.5 per cent in Germany, 4.1 per cent in the United States, 4.2 per cent in Britain and 4.5 per cent in New Zealand.

Some of them are celebrating unemployment at record lows. Yet, while we’ve just had record jobs growth, our unemployment rate has barely moved. That too is odd.

Moreover, our rate of underemployment — people in part-time jobs who want more work but can’t find it — remains among the highest in the Western world, at 8.3 per cent. It too has fallen only slightly, from 8.7 per cent a year ago, despite all those new jobs.

Something strange is happening here. What is it?

There’s no one explanation. Globalisation, lax regulation and the gutting of unions has left workers with little power or wage growth. It’s an ideal time to be an employer, and to take on new, compliant workers. Jobs are growing fast because wages aren’t.

Net jobs growth is also high because fewer people are retiring early. In the second half of 2017, almost half the net growth year on year in full-time jobs was among workers aged fifty-five and over. Half a million people are working on after turning sixty-five.

Once these were the workers wanting early retirement. Now their demand is “Hell, no! We won’t go!” This table sums up the dramatic change:

But the single biggest reason why high jobs growth has not reduced unemployment significantly is that it’s not meant to. That fact was touched on in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it paragraph in this week’s Treasury/Department of Home Affairs report, Shaping a Nation.

The report’s starting point and conclusion is that immigration is always good for us, whatever the circumstances. Yet in a paragraph that appears to have been missed by all the media reporting its findings, it notes:

Recent migrants accounted for two-thirds (64.5 per cent) of the approximately 850,000 net jobs created in the past five years. For full-time employment, the impact is even more pronounced, with recent migrants accounting for 72.4 per cent of new jobs created.

Let those numbers sink in. Almost two-thirds of all jobs created in the past five years have gone to recent migrants, leaving just over a third for Australian jobseekers. In round figures, that means that of the 850,000 net jobs created, 550,000 went to recent migrants, and only 300,000 — that’s 60,000 jobs a year — to Australians looking for work.

The gap in full-time jobs is starker still. It is typical of the report’s sloppiness that it fails to define its terms or time periods, but let’s assume that it means the five years from 2012 to 2017, and is using year-averages. There were just a net 375,000 full-time jobs created in those five years.

If almost three-quarters went to recent migrants, then in round figures, almost 275,000 new full-time jobs were created for recent migrants, and just over 100,000 for Australian jobseekers, or 20,000 jobs a year.

Some readers may recall that we’ve been here before. Inside Story reported broadly similar figures a year ago, for the eight years to 2016. They showed that in net terms, the Australian economy in those years created two full-time jobs for recent migrants from South Asia for every one created for someone born in Australia.

How can that be? Because labour-market policy has abandoned any attempt to balance the interests of employers and workers/jobseekers. The government has simply given employers what they want, and ignored the needs of young Australians.

Employers have been given a carte blanche to bring in skilled migrants to do the jobs, rather than training young Australians to move into them. The section 457 visa is only the best-known of many paths to that end.

The NBN is a classic example. It lets out contracts to Indian firms, which then import their entire workforce for the project from India. Australian jobseekers don’t get a look-in.

You can’t blame the migrants — they’re responding to the opportunities they’re offered. It’s the fault of government that it fails to prioritise training young Australians.

The evidence is the plunge in apprenticeships and traineeships since the Coalition took power in 2013. The National Centre for Vocational Education Research reports that the number of apprentices and trainees slumped from 413,000 in September 2013 to just 262,000 four years later.

Research by the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University reveals that governments spent less in real terms on vocational education in 2015–16 than they did ten years earlier. Who needs vocational education when you can just bring in migrants to do the work?

Treasury’s report doesn’t ask what happened to young Australians in the labour market. It simply assumes that importing migrants to do the work has no impact on job opportunities for young Australians — and quotes other government reports based on the same assumption. Sure, boss, anything you say!

In reality, between 2012 and 2017, the population aged fifteen to twenty-four grew by 113,000. What happened to them in the labour market?

The number in full-time jobs shrank by 113,000.

The number willingly working part-time grew by 41,000.

The number unwillingly in part-time work — the underemployed — grew by 102,000.

The number unemployed grew by 25,000.

The number not even looking for work grew by 58,000.

We are sacrificing the futures of our young people by ignoring their interests, and using glib assumptions to make ourselves feel good about it. Immigration should not be an issue on which economists, of all people, let their hearts rule their heads.

You can be pro-immigration and still conclude that right now we have far too much of it. That is the inescapable reason why jobs growth has failed to lower unemployment. ●

John Quiggin: How to fix vocational education

The post Why is unemployment still so high? appeared first on Inside Story.

The first was a cosmetic change we needed to stay viable. Pursuing desirable students, and the benefits they bring, is common enough among schools in a competitive environment. The second was more challenging and risky; it meant reshaping the school and who it served, and could be far more significant if it worked.

What to do, and how far to go? To me, the most innovative schools seemed to fall into two categories: high-demand schools that could do no wrong, and low-demand schools that had nothing to lose. It was true up to a point, but I mistakenly consigned much of what they did to the fringes of schooling. What schools like mine did to lift engagement and retention was to tweak the system by introducing a more diverse curriculum, including vocational education. It was quite successful, as far as it went — but it didn’t go far enough.

After I retired I visited a number of innovative schools and always walked away not only with admiration for the energy of school leaders and teachers, but also with a greater awareness of the institutional, cultural and micro-political constraints on what they wanted to do. As a part-consequence, the innovations, just like mine, tended to be added to what was considered the main work of schools rather than changing how we do schooling itself. And the diversity I saw was as much about schools positioning themselves in the market as it was about catering for differences in student learning.

Two big things have changed over the years, and both have implications for where we go next. The first big change comes from our decision to allow, and even encourage, students with ability and advantages to gravitate to schools with similar students — not just in private schools but also in certain government schools. The flipside is that we have compounded disadvantage in other schools, and increased the challenge of improving their experience and performance. The late Bernie Shepherd and I have put numbers on this trend. It is incremental but alarming, and not much can improve if we don’t reverse it.

But it is the second change that is the focus of this article. There’s ample evidence of a serious disconnect exists between young people and their schools. The Mitchell Institute has detailed the extent of the problem at various stages of schooling, and the Grattan Institute concludes that as many as 40 per cent of school students are unproductive in a given year.

While it is rarely stated in these terms, the problem of disengagement lies behind many of our efforts to improve student outcomes, the latest big effort being the second Gonski review. When the review panel asked us what students need to learn at school, my first thought was to come up with an erudite list of capabilities, skills and knowledge. But if students aren’t engaged in learning then not much else will happen, and we will always fall well short of our most treasured goals.

This sent me back to what David Smith talked about decades ago. Maybe the real question is whether game-changing innovation can take hold if schools still look decades old. Lock-step student progression; siloed learning driven by externally created curriculum; exquisitely designed and imposed assessment hoops through which students must jump on command — it could well be that these features of schooling are blocking the innovation we need.

Has anyone managed to do it differently? Some schools tick all the boxes for the critics of the current system, producing students who are engaged, equipped and successful. “One student at a time in a community of learners,” as one group of schools puts it. Learning is designed around characteristics that are proven, in combination, to be essential for student engagement. These are the Big Picture schools that I first saw in operation in the United States, a country where I’ve seen the very best and the most ordinary of schools. Over the past decade, Big Picture schools, both government and non-government, have expanded in Australia, especially in New South Wales, Western Australia and Tasmania.

My lasting impressions of these schools include memories of the students who told me about what they were doing, in language of learning and purpose that I have rarely heard in a mainstream school. I won’t forget the Big Picture school in a poor area, without a fence, untarnished by graffiti and vandalism, an island of pride and hope in a neighbourhood of despair. And it was a great experience to be in these schools with teachers who were probably working harder but didn’t want to go back to what it was like before.

For students between years nine and twelve, Big Picture schools bring together a future focus, academic rigour, real-world learning, collaboration and participation. The approach is highly personalised and built on the student’s own passions. Relevance is maintained by links between schools and workplaces: students spend up to two days a week in an interest-based, curriculum-linked internship with a mentor from the community. It is a fundamental redesign of learning.

The significance of these schools is not that they will or should supplant mainstream schools. It’s the fact that their very existence urges a rethink of how we do schooling, and who benefits and who misses out. The questions framed by the current Gonski review were aimed at encouraging people to rethink what they were doing, contemplate what they wanted and state what gets in the way. Even the federal minister urged us to “think outside the square” — but more on that later.

Gonski asked us what students need to learn at school and how their achievement can be measured. Any educator can come up with a list of what should be learnt, though it will be hard to make real progress without authentic student engagement. The sting in the tail is the second part of the question: how do we measure achievement? If there is any aspect of pedagogy that is ripe for change it is the system of external assessment, which stifles student engagement and in-depth learning.

Gonski also asked what we can do to improve learning for all students. We’re starting from a position where schools manifestly don’t serve all students. They come to school with a diversity of personal resources, interests, abilities and learning styles; there is no guarantee — and in many cases not even the remotest possibility — that the schools available to them will maximise their potential to achieve their best. It is a substantial and unacknowledged equity problem, one that touches young people across the socio-educational spectrum and should be a major target of the review’s recommendations for innovation.

Gonski has asked us to be specific about what works and what gets in the way. This brings me back to the minister’s entreaty for those of us writing submissions to think outside the square. The idea of a square is a perfect metaphor to describe the boundaries within which schools operate. The boundaries, the four sides, are patrolled by people and forces that act to keep schools contained and conventional.

Forming one of these boundaries are the decisions of governments, schools and related authorities. These include the requirements imposed by curriculum and testing authorities; government decisions, both proactive and reactive, about priorities for school reform; and processes of accountability. The Gonski panel calls them enablers, but they don’t seem to enable, or at least encourage, deep innovation. Narrow measures of student worth and achievement can especially undermine the great things schools do, and distort the purpose of schooling itself.

Forming a second boundary are the public’s views about what constitutes a desirable and successful school. They include inherently conservative, recycled and often dated ideas about schools — and are reflected in much media reporting of how schools should be judged.

The third boundary is created by a market culture that drives competition and choice, and seems to inhibit risk-taking innovation. Bringing market forces into education has meant that schools are more similar than most people imagine: only the brave stray beyond the expected look and feel. It’s time we called out school competition for what it is: a failed policy that has created and further divided winners and losers.

But not all the problems are external. The fourth boundary is the culture within which some schools and school systems operate. School leaders work hard to introduce improvements but are often handicapped by pockets of conservatism and inertia in the teaching profession — and certainly not helped by ill-advised initiatives from governments and school authorities. It takes a special school leader to overcome external constraints and the lack of trust in the system among teachers.

We have reformed schools for decades, pitched them into competition and tested them to the hilt — while slicing and dicing the student population to suit the preferences of some. Improving the capacity of all schools to reach and inspire all students must be seen as the priority. We need not only to rethink what goes on inside classrooms but also be prepared to redesign how learning takes place across the school. Engaging all students is a serious equity challenge, equal to the ongoing need for resource equity highlighted by the first Gonski review six years ago.

We have the opportunity to learn from schools that succeed outside the square and to make them part of the mainstream. We need those who put the boundaries around schools to serve rather than constrain or distort the agreed priorities of schooling. And if we are going to measure anything inside schools then we should start, and maybe finish, with the indicators of students’ engagement, belief in learning and belief in their futures. If we improve these then the other things we want will stand a much better chance.

Everyone even remotely involved in school innovation has a stake in what happens after Gonski reports. Our students have the highest stake of all. School leaders and their peak groups especially need to remember what happened after the first Gonski review, how an opportunity to create a far more even playing field for all students was substantially lost. We can’t afford to make the same mistake twice. ●

The post Has Gonski stepped outside the square? appeared first on Inside Story.

The Goulburn dispute began in 1962 when health inspectors insisted that extra toilets be installed in a local Catholic primary school. The schools cried poor, shut their doors and sent their 2000 students off to the local government schools. Not surprisingly, there wasn’t enough room for them. The state government surrendered, handing over funds to help solve the sanitary problem. It was a classic case of successful brinkmanship, and it helped create the funding mess we have today.

Another idea was born at around the same time — the idea that governments were actually saving money by funding private schools. The notion might have made sense in the days when government funding was modest, but these days it’s little more than a stubborn myth, as the latest school funding figures on the My School website make clear. These 2016 figures mean that we have an idea of what would happen if the Catholic schools in Goulburn shut their doors again and sent their flocks off to the local public schools.

My School’s figures show that governments provided $13,117,061 in recurrent funding to Goulburn’s three Catholic schools in 2016:

● Each student attending Goulburn’s Trinity Catholic College during that year was funded at $14,168, which is more than the public funding ($13,830) that went to each student at Goulburn’s Mulwaree High School. (Mulwaree is chosen in this example because, measured by the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage, or ICSEA, it is the closer of the two government high schools to Trinity.) If the 539 Trinity students had attended Mulwaree High School instead, governments would have spent an extra $7,454,370 at that school, but saved the $7,636,552 they spent to have the students attend the Catholic school.

● Each student attending Saints Peter and Paul’s Primary School in 2016 was funded at $10,549, which is well over the $9284 going to each student at the closest ICSEA local public school, Goulburn West Primary School. If the 241 students had attended Goulburn West instead, governments would have spent $2,237,444 rather than the $2,542,309 they outlaid to have them attend the Catholic school.

● Each student attending St Joseph’s Primary School in 2016 was funded at $9960, which is 7 per cent higher than the $9284 going to each student at Goulburn West Primary School. If the 295 students had instead attended Goulburn West, governments would have spent $2,738,780 rather than the $2,938,200 it cost to have them attend the Catholic school.

Combined, the cost to government of all the students in Goulburn’s Catholic schools in 2016 was $13,117,061. If all these students had attended local government schools the figure would have been $12,430,594, a yearly cost saving to government of $686,467. (None of these figures includes fee income, which was $2,560,245 for Trinity Catholic College in 2016.)

These calculations are conservative. They assume that the recurrent cost of the transferred Catholic school students would be the same as the per student cost of the government school in which they were enrolling. In reality, the cost would be lower for two reasons. First, students in Catholic schools are measurably more advantaged, on average, than the students in the government schools in which they would be enrolling, and so the per-student cost of the combined enrolment would be lower. And, second, the calculations don’t take account of the economies of scale that would come from increased enrolments in Goulburn’s public schools.

Of course, money would need to be spent on expanding accommodation at the public schools. But My School reveals $12.5 million in federal government funding of capital improvements in the three Catholic schools between 2010 and 2016. Along with recurrent funding savings, even a portion of this investment in the area’s public schools would certainly ease the burden of accommodating a larger number of students.

Is Goulburn typical? Anyone can check what My School reveals about his or her local schools, but the most meaningful comparisons are between schools that enrol similar students (as indicated by similar ICSEA values). On this measure, the vast majority of Catholic schools in Australia are publicly funded at between 91 and 99 per cent of the level for similar government schools — but this rises to over 100 per cent in many places, especially in Victoria.

Why might it matter? Catholic and independent schools are recurrently funded as if they are public schools, yet they clearly aren’t. The significant increase in support has been accompanied by only minor increases in accountability, and so they essentially remain as private as they were in 1962.

Goulburn’s Catholic schools — funded at more than 100 per cent of the rate for government schools — have no obligation to serve all the families of Goulburn. Their charging of fees, alone, is enough to ensure that they don’t. At the very best, they are accessible to half of the families living locally. On average, they enrol the more advantaged, Catholic or otherwise. They can use discriminators, mostly illegal in the public system, to deny a request for enrolment, and any student who poses a challenge or is more costly to teach can be shunted off to a public school. And the town’s Catholic schools will rarely be mentioned in reports on incidents in schools, student behaviour problems and suspensions because they aren’t covered by freedom of information legislation and aren’t required to divulge such information.

In their own ways, Goulburn’s Catholic schools probably try to even out this tilted playing field. But Australia’s schooling framework — a patchwork of governance structures and processes, financial incentives, obligations, responsibilities and accountabilities — pulls in the opposite direction. The results are absurd enough when private schools are 90 per cent publicly funded, but they make a mockery of fairness when, as in Goulburn, private schools receive more government money per student than their public counterparts nearby.

This is a sleeper issue in the interminable debate over school funding. The pressure on Catholic school authorities to accept a wider range of obligations in return for public funding can only increase. It’s a good reason for them to be careful in pursuing more funding, even if they try to present it as a restoration of previous funding levels. Leaving aside comparisons within Australia, our Catholic schools are now funded at a similar level to their counterparts in New Zealand — but without anything like the same obligations.

The government’s welcome resolve to introduce “school resource standard” funding is already under pressure and could easily be corrupted by existing or proposed special deals. It was ever thus. In reporting on the actual dollars that end up in real schools — rather than on what was projected to happen after previous changes in funding rules — My School shows how good intentions often dissolve in the face of vested interests. The risk is that it’s about to happen all over again.

The solution needs to include a major review of the extent to which all publicly funded schools — government, Catholic and independent alike — have equal obligations to the taxpayers who fund them. Until this happens, not much else is going to change. ●

The post What if Goulburn’s Catholic schools were closed again? appeared first on Inside Story.

Consider two critical moments in the unfolding of school funding policy this decade. The first is in 2013. The Gillard government is in its dying days and the shadow education minister, Christopher Pyne, is attempting to sabotage the prime minister’s signature reform by calling on state Coalition counterparts not to sign Gonski funding agreements. Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory heed Pyne’s call. Victoria wavers. A national initiative with just South Australia, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory on board won’t amount to much.

But then, in April, New South Wales signs on and Gillard now has the largest jurisdiction in the country, led by a Coalition government, on her side. And a National Party minister, Adrian Piccoli, is spruiking her policy, giving it serious bipartisan credibility. The centre holds and, a month before the 2013 federal election, opposition leader Tony Abbott feels enough pressure to join a purported “unity ticket” on the issue. When Pyne attempts a backflip only four months later, the public outcry quickly forces him into a humiliating reversal.

The new federal education minister, Simon Birmingham, clearly wants to be less like his predecessor and more like Adrian Piccoli.

Fast-forward to May 2017, and the second moment. The Turnbull government resurrects Gonski, and the man himself appears in the flesh at a press conference for the benefit of the sceptics. The not-so-subtle subtext is that the government is jettisoning Pyne’s “money doesn’t matter” mantra. Money clearly does matter — otherwise the government wouldn’t be announcing a commitment to spend more of it. Again, Christopher Pyne is humiliated. Again, Piccoli’s role is critical.

For the past four years he had been calling on his federal Coalition counterparts to make an announcement just like this one: to commit to delivering the final two-thirds of Gonski money. Throughout that time, he consistently argued that getting the funding right is a precondition for a successful school system. In his own state, he implemented the needs-based Resource Allocation Model. And now, the new federal education minister, Simon Birmingham, clearly wants to be less like his predecessor and more like Piccoli.

Given Piccoli’s influence on the national conversation, it’s fitting that the new research outfit he is heading at the University of New South Wales has been called the Gonski Institute of Education. “It’s going to sit in between the academic world and the practice world,” Piccoli explains to me when I meet up with him at the National Library in Canberra. “Let’s take what schools and systems and leaders often need and then use research to address what they need. And the other way round.” If researchers are “doing really good stuff that has a distinct application, part of our role is to turn it into something that is actually usable by schools.”

Piccoli has come to Canberra to speak at an event hosted by the influential Grattan Institute looking at what the federal government should do to “drive improvement” in school education. The occasion has been prompted by the new review David Gonski is conducting into Australia’s schools, announced when Gonski joined Malcolm Turnbull and Simon Birmingham at that press conference last May. Where Gonski’s 2011 report was on funding (how much and who gets it), his new review will make recommendations on “how money is best used” to “achieve educational excellence.”

Total government funding to NSW public schools increased by $1073 per student between 2012–13 and 2015–16, and by $586 per student in private schools, according to the Productivity Commission’s latest Report on Government Services. This is the tangible part of Adrian Piccoli’s legacy. Disadvantaged children in New South Wales are now receiving a substantially better-resourced education. But has it made a difference? Given the current Gonski review’s emphasis on spending educational dollars efficiently and effectively, I ask Piccoli if there’s anything to show yet for the extra money.

“Last year’s NAPLAN results were the best results that New South Wales has ever had,” Piccoli replies. “Perhaps not across every testing domain but across quite a few of them. We had the premier’s priority, which was increasing the number of students in the top two [NAPLAN] bands by 8 per cent over the four years from 2015 to 2019. And now we’re already at that, two years ahead.” And, he continues, “just the other day the Closing the Gap report came out and it showed that since 2011, they’ve doubled the retention rate for Indigenous students in New South Wales. I think it’s still below the state average but it’s a doubling. So we’re seeing lots of improvement.”

These results aren’t definitive, but when many indicators show Australian schooling stagnating or even going backwards, the NSW data can only be seen as promising. So what does Piccoli — as the former minister who got a lot right when it came to the nexus between funding and outcomes — believe is the key to driving improvement in Australian schools?

His response is a surprising one. He suggests that maybe the real change needs to happen outside the school gates. “I think we have a cultural problem in Australia when it comes to education,” he says. “This is one of the things that is actually worthy of research. Is Australia suffering from twenty-five years of uninterrupted economic growth? Are we becoming complacent about how hard it is to get a job? Are we saying, ‘It doesn’t matter how well you do at school because, you know, you can [still] get a job?’”

Reassuringly, he is not suggesting that “you deliberately throw the economy into a recession” as a wake-up call to parents.

Getting more pointed, he adds, “I think parents, I think the public — even the way that adults reflect upon schools and teachers in front of children, generally speaking, doesn’t respect schools and doesn’t respect teachers.” He presented the same view at the public forum that evening, eliciting a headline in the Sydney Morning Herald: “Former Education Minister Blames Complacent Parents for School Results.” That might be an over-simplification, but he surely knew what he was doing. He clearly sees a role for himself as a provocateur, prepared to tell the community, in effect, “Sure, you want schools to deliver all these things. And do it better than ever before. But it’s a two-way street.”

It’s an interesting — and potentially valuable — way to position himself. But, it’s not immediately clear where he hopes this kind of conversation might lead. Reassuringly, he is not suggesting that “you deliberately throw the economy into a recession” as a wake-up call to parents. And he recognises that complacency may be better than being “in the situation of some of these other countries where kids’ stress levels are through the roof.”

So, what exactly is he suggesting?

Piccoli is clearly frustrated about a range of signals that invite students (and their parents) to take school less seriously than he believes they should. “A number of universities don’t even require maths [at school] to do maths at university. I mean, to me, that just kind of does my head in,” he says. “Now, a big chunk of the kids in Year 12, in New South Wales, get a place at university before they even do the HSC exam. I’ve had lots of principals tell me that we should change the rules.”

Equally, Piccoli is concerned about the relative ease of entry into the teaching profession. “When you think about professions that are highly regarded, it’s pretty closely aligned with how difficult they are to get into,” he says. “You know, doctors, lawyers — you must be smart because they’re hard to get into. Whereas teaching — you know, ‘I didn’t get into anything else. It was my last option. Didn’t get into physio, so I went into teaching.’”

The result, Piccoli believes, is that teachers are not accorded the respect they deserve. “I mean if you sit around a table and say, ‘Oh yeah, what do you do for a living? I’m a school teacher.’ You’ll most likely hear somebody say, ‘Oh aren’t you lucky you get all those school holidays?’ But if you say, ‘I’m a doctor’, they’ll go, ‘Oh wow.’”

If Piccoli’s views of education — and human motivation — rely too heavily on instrumental self-interest, there’s an undeniable kernel of truth in what he is saying. And as minister he took significant steps to enhance the standing of the teaching profession. He instituted more demanding prerequisites for undergraduate teaching courses. To study to become a teacher, NSW school leavers now need to have three Band 5 HSC results (meaning that they must have ended up in the top 20 per cent of their cohort in at least three subjects, including English). “So we introduced a minimum standard,” he says, “which I hope is one of the things Gonski recommends.”

Piccoli thinks it is an example of where the Commonwealth can play a useful role in supporting the state and territory governments that run schools. “Where the federal government does it, you get more consistency nationally,” he says. “We now have the situation in New South Wales where we have higher standards than our neighbouring states, so some universities are getting round it by enrolling students from other states.” The Commonwealth’s responsibility for tertiary education means it doesn’t have to use the blunt instrument of HSC results and can allow universities some discretion about the criteria (academic results, aptitude tests, interviews, principal recommendations) they use to select the teachers of the future.

Struggling schools are still a very long way from entering needs-based funding nirvana.

When Piccoli talks of a cultural problem in Australia, he is clearly thinking of high-performing Asian nations (as well as high-performing Australian children from Asian backgrounds), but he also appears to have Finland in mind. In December came the news that Piccoli would be joined at the Gonski Institute by the man who has done the most to spread the word about Finland’s success, Pasi Sahlberg. Thinking about a country like Finland helps make Piccoli’s point clearer. To take one example, Sahlberg has written about how his niece missed out on entry to a teaching degree. “Finnish primary school teacher education programs that lead to an advanced, research-based degree are so popular among young Finns,” he writes, “that only one in ten applicants is accepted each year.”

And yet Finnish teacher salaries differ little from Australia’s or those in comparable countries. There seems to be something else going on in relation to how the culture thinks about the importance of education. And it’s that “something else” that Adrian Piccoli wants us to think more deeply about.

On the eve of the release of a new Gonski report, the politics of school education involve the interplay of three distinct but related questions. How much do we need to spend? Who gets it? And what’s the smartest way of spending it?

The Turnbull government’s narrative is that the school funding wars are over. This time, it really is on a unity ticket. Everyone supports needs-based funding now, it says, so let’s move on (to the conversation about return on investment, which the new Gonski review is intended to engender).

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Struggling schools are still a very long way from entering needs-based funding nirvana. Gonski 2.0 delayed delivery of the full needs-based Schooling Resource Standard, or SRS, until 2027. And even more disconcertingly, most public schools may continue to be underfunded even then.

The crucial technicality is that the Commonwealth has taken responsibility for delivering 80 per cent of the SRS of private schools but only 20 per cent of public schools’ SRS, leaving the states and territories to make up the difference. The problem, as Piccoli acknowledges, is that “some states fund above 20 per cent of the SRS to non-government schools and below 80 per cent of the SRS to government schools.” In fact, on the current trajectory, public schools in New South Wales are on track to receive 91 per cent of their SRS in 2027, while Victorian public schools will be at just 86 per cent of their needs-based entitlement, Northern Territory public schools at 87 per cent, and public schools in other jurisdictions will also remain underfunded. Hundreds of private schools will continue to be overfunded. If that scenario unfolds, school funding in Australia will be neither nationally consistent nor needs-based nor sector-blind.

I ask Piccoli — as somebody with a deep commitment to equity, whose time in government focused on advocating and implementing needs-based funding — whether the states should respond to the Commonwealth’s 80–20 rules by realigning how they are allocating their funds to public and private schools. He bats the question away, saying, “This is what the Commonwealth is requiring states to do.”

The Commonwealth is negotiating funding agreements with the states that would require them to deliver 75 per cent of the SRS for public schools (not the full 80 per cent). It has not signalled any intention to require states to bring funding of private schools back down to 20 per cent of the SRS.

At this point, Piccoli only offers generalities. “Everyone goes, ‘We love needs-based funding.’ Well, that’s what it is. You can’t say, ‘I like needs-based funding for somebody else and not for me.’ It doesn’t work that way. You’re either for needs-based funding or you’re not for needs-based funding.”

That’s true. And the trouble is, unless we get all three things right — the right spending on the right students in the right way — we’re unlikely to change Australia’s educational culture. As head of the Gonski Institute, Adrian Piccoli is set to play a fascinating role in debates on all three questions. It’s only to be hoped that he directs his provocations at politicians as well as parents. •

The post The Piccoli prescription appeared first on Inside Story.

Boldness is badly needed — boldness in developing policy, in abandoning policies that haven’t worked, and in facing up to what can and can’t be done from Canberra. Above all, you will need to make a clear-eyed assessment of the educational achievements and failures of the last Labor federal government and its “education revolution.”

This means your priorities must be very different from those of the Rudd–Gillard and Abbott–Turnbull governments — and, indeed, significantly different from those you have flagged so far.

You should:

1. Reclaim Gonski, by setting a Gonski Plus scheme against the Coalition’s Gonski Lite.
2. Dampen down the monomania about “outcomes,” and begin measuring indicators that better reveal and explain what schools do (and what parents want from them).
3. Push the responsibility for “performance” back to the school systems. Be clear: you intend to be the federal minister for education, not the national minister for schools.
4. Shift the conversation about schools: no more talk about “revolutions,” much more about schools and social cohesion.

We’ll return to those four points shortly, as well as one other thing: the need to rethink your recent proposal for a national “evidence” institute.

Labor’s “education revolution”

Both your problems and your opportunities descend from 2007, when Labor came into office promising an “education revolution.”

All revolutions need stories to explain and justify themselves and to enlist wide support. As education minister and then prime minister, Julia Gillard told three stories. The first was that schools were, above all, a preparation for a turbulent but exciting future. Students and, through them, the economy must be equipped with the new, complex skills demanded by accelerating technology-driven change. A second story centred on “outcomes” in the foundational areas of language, maths and science. International comparisons showed that we weren’t improving while other nations — including our economic competitors — were; now, we needed to recover our position near the head of the pack. A third story was more familiar: we must achieve greater equality of opportunity in and through schooling. Schools are there, as Gonski would say, to “ensure that differences in educational outcomes are not the result of differences in wealth, power or possessions.”

The available evidence suggests that the performance of Australian schools, on the revolution’s own measures, is worse now than when the revolution was launched.

A national agenda was intrinsic to each of these stories. Successful schooling was a national priority. The revolution was a national undertaking, to be led and driven by the national government.

Revolutions need strategies as well as stories. There were four of them, each related in different ways to the stories.

By far the most prominent was “Gonski.” It drew on the outcomes story and contributed to a more national architecture for schooling, but it was first and foremost the bearer of the equality story. A second strategy tackled the other end of the schooling machinery. Where Gonski focused on the big structures, the “educational practice” strategy targeted the day-to-day life of the school and the classroom with “quality of teaching” and “school improvement” campaigns. This practice strategy focused on — indeed, was obsessed by — outcomes, and demanded “transparency” about the “outcomes performance” of each and every school.

A third, less prominent strategy was to develop national infrastructure and machinery to guide and frame practice, deliver funding, and make and legitimate the big decisions. And the fourth was the storytelling itself. Julia Gillard was a tireless and articulate campaigner in the cause of the revolution.

This combination of stories and strategies successfully became the official agenda for schooling and erected a new national schooling infrastructure. It was entirely unsuccessful in its stated aim of lifting “performance.” Indeed, the available evidence suggests that the performance of Australian schools, on the revolution’s own measures, is worse now than when the revolution was launched.

The challenge facing you as shadow minister is to understand why this is so, and to work out what is politically possible for you to say and do about it. If you can’t, there is every reason to believe that the situation in ten years’ time will be much as it is now, and as it was a decade ago.

1. Reclaim Gonski and build on it

The Gonski report was sent to the minister late in 2011 and released to the public in February 2012. It gave the minister a winning formula which, over the next eighteen months, she squandered, leaving Gonski to be purloined some years later by a Coalition government. It must be your first priority to get it back, by restoring some of its original features, by doing a reverse purloin of a couple of Coalition improvements, and particularly by building on it.

Gonski recommended that schools doing the hardest educational yards should get extra funding, irrespective of which sector they belonged to; that state and federal governments should work out the cost and decide who would contribute what and how to distribute the funding; and that this should be done with the ongoing assistance of a new “national schools resourcing body.”

Gonski solved several problems at once. It cut through a tangle of state and federal funding formulas and schemes; it reduced the grounds for endless conflict between sectors about funding shares; it breathed new life into the dispirited struggle for equality; and it lent credibility to the revolution as a whole. For all these reasons it was popular and energising, among teachers particularly, but also more widely. Its slogan — needs-based, sector-blind — was concise and memorable, and “Gonski” quickly entered the language.

The Coalition’s Gonski is a mixed bag. On the negative side: it makes government schools largely dependent on the often indigent state governments but gives non-government schools the shelter of more reliable federal funding. This inserts a fault line that seems destined to become a split. On the positive: Labor’s “no school worse off” requirement, expensive and by no means “sector-blind,” has gone. The national schools resourcing body, proposed by Gonski but ditched by Gillard, has been resurrected. More ambiguous is the review being chaired by Gonski himself, which has been charged with filling a gap in the original plan by telling schools how best to turn extra “needs-based” dollars into outcomes. So, that is Gonski Lite.

You might also start thinking about another Gonski-level review to tackle the things that Gonski didn’t, the  Karmel double standards. There is an historic opportunity here.

And Gonski Plus? It must restore the original funding commitment because it is important to honour the commitment that has been given. It should return to the principle of all governments being jointly responsible for the funding of all schools. The “no school worse off” provision should lie unmourned in its grave. The National School Resourcing Board should be kept. I’m not so sure about the current Gonski how-to-get-most-educational-bang review. It might have some useful things to say, in which case you should support them (or borrow them), but for reasons explained more fully below, the federal government needs to get out of the business of telling systems how to do teaching and learning.

In any event, you should gazump Gonski Lite with a proposal of your own: extend the needs-based principle to resource allocation within schools as well as between them. Undertake to convene high-level conversations between the willing industrial parties — and only the genuinely willing — about how to give each school more scope for aligning its resources, and particularly its teacher time, with need.

There is one more ingredient in Gonski Plus, bigger than the others and more complicated. Its starting point is this: Gonski is not the be-all and end-all in the reform of the big structures of schooling, and if it is the end, it won’t work. It is a beginning, a very good beginning, but not more. Your problem, and your political opportunity, is this: what next?

Behind the Gonski prescription is the “residualisation” diagnosis. Schools in disadvantaged areas have the hardest educational job to do, but can’t attract the best teachers and principals to do it. Their “performance” falls. The families that can leave, do. That exodus increases the proportion of disadvantaged students, which increases the school’s problem in attracting staff and other resources, and so on down the spiral. Needs-based funding, Gonski proposed, would combat residualisation by lifting the quality of practice in residualised schools and hence improving outcomes and reducing inequality.

The trouble is that there’s more to the problem than residualisation, and more to the solution than better funding and practice. Residualisation is the extreme result of an across-the-board shift in school populations triggered in the early 1970s by the double standards built into the Whitlam government’s landmark Karmel Report.

The first double standard was that some schools would charge fees and some parents would pay them, and most schools wouldn’t, but all would get public funding — an internationally unique arrangement. The second: some schools (including some government schools) would be allowed to select and exclude students on grounds of capacity to pay and/or religion and/or academic potential, while others would be forbidden from excluding anyone on any grounds at all.

These double standards have meant that an unusually large minority of Australian families has an unusually wide choice of schools, yet many have little or no choice at all. Those with a choice have typically used it to send their sons and daughters to schools where they mix with students just like themselves. Equally, the sons and daughters of those who don’t have a choice end up mixing with each other too.

In other words, when Australia went for more diversity between schools it also got less diversity within each school. On the one hand is a steadily increasing “between-school variance,” up from 18 per cent in 2000 to 24 per cent in 2009 (compared with Finland, for example, up from 8 to just 9 per cent over the same period). On the other is a high and rising proportion of schools with concentrations of the “advantaged” (at one end) or the “disadvantaged” (at the other), and a correspondingly small and falling proportion of schools with socially mixed enrolments.

One problem with segmentation in school populations is that it’s a generator of under-performance, and not just in residualised schools. It is bad for outcomes and bad for equality of outcomes. Less noticed but more worrying is that segmentation makes for a narrow social experience and therefore a sub-standard social education, and it encourages the formation of social relationships within groups rather than across them. I have often quoted economics writer Ross Gittins on this point and will quote him again. He notes that Jewish kids go to one school and Islamic kids to another, and then asks a trick question: what did the rich kid say to the poor kid? Answer: nothing, they never met. Segmentation cuts across one of the basic tasks of schooling.

It’s so basic that you must do something about it. But what? This is difficult territory, but as Julia Gillard demonstrated when she commissioned Gonski, good policy can turn difficulties to advantage. Moreover, the politics of the issue have been transformed by the two Gonskis. Just one startling example: a Catholic schools authority has recently attacked the unconscionable policy of giving public money to high-fee private schools! You have much more room for manoeuvre than Gillard did when she commissioned Gonski.

At the very least, you should start making clear that diversity within schools is essential to better overall “performance” and a better society, and you should argue for new indicators of the extent of diversity within each school and of students’ social learning. On the last of these, more below.

You should also start thinking about what comes after Gonski. The light on this particular hill is the opportunity to replace Karmel’s double standards with a common funding and regulatory regime. That would include full public funding up to Gonski standards for all systems (government and non-government alike) willing to sign up to a charter of rights and obligations, including the obligation to increase diversity in each school’s enrolment.

You should start thinking about how to prepare the ground for movement in that direction. This would include talking about relieving parents of the burden of fees, and about making choice not more “widely” available but more equitably and sustainably available. You should make it a priority to explain why diversity within schools as well as between them is of fundamental educational and social importance.

You might also start thinking about another Gonski-level review to tackle the things that Gonski didn’t: those Karmel double standards. There is a historic opportunity here.

2. Dampen down the outcomes monomania, and push for a broader set of indicators

The “practice agenda” flowed from research that found teachers vary greatly in their “effectiveness,” as do “interventions.” Thus, a highly effective teacher could move students along one-and-a-half “learning years” in a single school year while an ineffective teacher might generate just half a year’s growth. In the same way, some strategies and tactics at classroom and school level “work” and some don’t. For example, smaller classes, repeat years and ability grouping aren’t “effective” (it is claimed), but peer tutoring, phonics instruction and feedback are.

This approach captured, even captivated, policy-makers and politicians. It was so clear, simple and plausible that even Christopher Pyne could say the words. It was “evidence-based.” And the policy implications seemed both obvious and practicable.

So successful was Gonski in winning hearts and minds that it ran the risk of being seen as the answer to every prayer.

The “quality of teaching” could be improved by getting more effective teachers into schools and lifting the effectiveness of those already there (and, sotto voce, getting rid of very ineffective teachers); by linking better appraisal and professional development to more rewarding career paths; and by upgrading standards of entry and practice and lifting the standing of the teaching profession.

Getting schools to make more use of “what works” meant four things. Schools and their principals were given more “autonomy,” and hence responsibility, for “performance.” Evidence about “effective interventions” was more widely disseminated. The idea of a national curriculum was revived and renovated. And “performance” became a stronger focus via a new national standardised testing program (NAPLAN) and a new website (MySchool). Two new agencies, ACARA (the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority) and AITSL (the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership) would do the work.

The measure, the raison d’être, the sun around which these planets of reform revolved? “Outcomes.” When research found that a teacher or an intervention was “effective,” that meant better outcomes. When the “performance” of a school or a system was being discussed, that too meant outcomes. And if outcomes were the one true measure of effectiveness and performance, the one true measure of outcomes was PISA, the OECD’s triennial assessments of “what students know and can do” in the foundational areas of language, science and maths. That test was so central that the entire strategy would be measured against a single, culminating objective: we would be in PISA’s “top five by ’25.”

There are things to like in this agenda. If teachers don’t change the way they work, it’s hard to see anything else changing, and they can’t do that by themselves. Many schools do need the right kind of “autonomy.” Academic or “cognitive” outcomes matter in themselves, and capabilities in language, science and maths matter across the rest of the curriculum. Academic/cognitive learning is a special responsibility of schools. Students, teachers and school systems all need to know how students are going, and that certainly includes outcomes — there would have been no Gonski, for example, without data on outcomes.

But it didn’t work. A decade on, nothing has changed. Every third year the education minister of the day issues another PISA-prompted “wake-up call.” The “top five” is further away than ever. In some parts of the system things are not even failing to improve. They’re getting worse.

How can this be? Perhaps the practice agenda has worked well enough in enough schools to reduce the impact of rising segmentation? Perhaps. And it is more than possible that it suffered from poor execution, on which more in a moment. But there is also very good reason to conclude that the whole agenda was a dud.

Compare and contrast with Gonski. Gonski was grounded in a penetrating analysis, historically, sociologically and politically informed, of the dynamics of the Australian school system. That analysis was not complete, but it was revelatory nonetheless. It tracked down interrelated problems of funding, governance and educational delivery, and responded with practical policy. The changes it proposed would ripple out across the system and into the future. It was politically smart. “Stakeholders,” numerous and entrenched, were lined up behind the proposals before they went to the minister. It had that catchy, compelling slogan: needs-based, sector-blind.

Gonski appealed to people, in schools and elsewhere. It tapped into a deeply and widely held belief that every kid deserves a fair go and that schools must give it to them. So successful was Gonski in winning hearts and minds that it ran the risk of being seen as the answer to every prayer. The lawns of Parliament House were spiked with thousands of hand-shaped cut-outs, each declaring: I give a Gonski!

The practice agenda was none of these things. It was fully imported, off-the-shelf, pre-bundled. Both the underlying research into “effectiveness” and the “what works” prescription were made in the United States by people who dealt in generic “factors” rather than complicated relationships particular to place and stretching over time. It was a miscellany of measures, neither internally coherent nor consistent with other policy. The MySchool website, for example, reported raw-score “outcomes” for each school. That effectively told parents which schools to avoid, thus fuelling the residualisation spiral that Gonski was trying to arrest. The emphasis on teachers and teaching encouraged teacher-centred instruction, which cut across the story about developing “twenty-first-century capabilities.”

The OECD made the same point more crisply. ‘School reform’, it said, ‘will not work unless it is supported from the bottom up’. In Australia, it wasn’t, and it didn’t.

The assumption underlying much of the practice strategy was that “transparency,” pressure and competition would cause schools and teachers to lift their game. But teachers saw the “teaching quality” push as none too subtly blaming them for the problem, and saw the policies arising as merely remedial. That in turn contradicted the stated aim of lifting the standing of the profession. Teachers also saw the exclusive focus on a certain kind of academic outcome as a trivialisation of what they and schools were on about, and a treatment of the symptom rather than the cause. The emphasis on appraisal and accountability was minatory, and “transparency” could be seen as a euphemism for naming and shaming. Stakeholders (including teacher organisations) were blitzed rather than enlisted. The lawns of Parliament House were not crowded with I want MySchool! placards.

To compound all these problems, the one part of the practice agenda that could have offset at least some of these negatives went largely unimplemented. Teaching does need better pre-service training, better career structures and professional development, more respect and a higher professional standing, but any gains were at the margins.

Visiting Australia in 2009, Canadian whole-of-system change expert Michael Fullan predicted that the practice agenda wouldn’t work. “It might be considered unfair to judge [the reforms] before they have an impact,” he said, but they were using “the wrong drivers,” and there is “no way the… wrong drivers can motivate the masses, which is required for whole system reform.” The OECD made the same point more crisply. “School reform,” it said, “will not work unless it is supported from the bottom up.” In Australia, it wasn’t, and it didn’t.

The problem for you as shadow minister is that the practice agenda is entrenched in a national apparatus of assessment and accountability and in policy-makers’ heads. When the latest round of PISA brought the usual bad news, the minister issued the usual “wake-up call,” as if to say that we’ve got the right policies and all we need is for schools to pull up their socks. For your part, your recent national schools forum spent three of its four sessions (on “Improving learning outcomes,” “Raising the status of the teaching profession,” and “School leadership”) cocooned in the mental world of a failed agenda.

A rethink should begin at the centre of it all: “outcomes.” The problem is not so much the thing itself as the way it has been used, and “outcomes” have been used very badly indeed. Outcomes data should never have been used as a public measure of each school’s “performance.” As the seminal McKinsey report on school reform notes, systems that are in the top five “refrain from target-setting and only make system-level data available publicly.” Nor should outcomes data as generated by NAPLAN ever have been given to parents as an index of their child’s progress. And nor should outcomes ever have been seen as the only part of schools’ work that is crucial. The misuse of data has been mitigated by the introduction of “like school” comparisons and measures of progress, but much of the problem remains.

You should be clear that in your mind these things need equal top billing with academic outcomes… None is easy to measure, but nor are any harder to measure than cognitive outcomes.

Neither a federal minister nor anyone else could abolish the whole thing, even if he or she wanted to. What you can do is announce that, as minister, you will press your state and territory colleagues to commission an expert national review of how information about the “performance” of students, schools and the system can be collected and used in ways that support improvement, broadly construed. Such a review might take as its starting point McKinsey’s finding that successful reformers release system-level but not school-level data, preferring to use the latter to engage schools “in a private dialogue about how they can improve.”

You should also say that, for your part, you support moves to measure and report on “twenty-first-century outcomes” (learning to learn, collaborative problem-solving, and so on) but you are also persuaded that cognitive or “academic” outcomes are not enough. They should be at the centre of reform efforts, but not by themselves.

“Non-cognitive” outcomes, the values and attitudes that kids take from schools, are every bit as important. The experience of school matters as much as outcomes of whatever kind; school is not only a preparation. Twelve years or so represents a fifth or more of most people’s working lives. Are they good years? Safe, happy, engaging, rewarding? And schools are about the ties that bind, or fail to as well as each individual’s learning and experience. Schools matter more to the social order than they do to “the economy.” They help (or fail) to sustain the cohesive social order on which economic activity depends. In a democratic, multicultural, wealthy society, that means schools that are socially, ethnically and culturally diverse.

You should be clear in your mind that these things need equal top billing with academic outcomes, which means measuring and reporting them just as strenuously as we measure and report academic outcomes. None is easy to measure, but nor are any of them harder to measure than cognitive outcomes.

Putting the spotlight on non-cognitive outcomes, on the quality of the experience of schooling, and on the diversity of school populations would pay off in several ways. Technically, it would give a much clearer picture of how schools are actually going, and a stronger basis in evidence for finding out why. And a set of indictors that more fully reflects what parents (and students) want from schools, what teachers do and try to do, and the complicated, multipurpose, difficult-to-steer reality of schools would help to turn passive resistance to reform into active support. Politically, it would sustain the sentiment that when it comes to schools, Labor is the one that cares.

You must concern yourself with “outcomes” because they are part of the national framework within which systems and schools operate. The rest of the practice strategy — the “teaching quality” and “what works” agendas — are not. They are to do with teaching and learning, matters into which the federal government has long intruded, to the cost of all concerned.

3. Push responsibility for “performance” back to the school systems

The taken-for-granted in each of Julia Gillard’s stories about the schools revolution is that the revolution would be national.

Australia’s unique way of being not-national in schooling includes close involvement in schooling by two levels of government, the division of schools into three sectors — each with its own funding, organisation and governance — and the replication of these arrangements in each of eight states and territories.

Labor’s ambition was to bring a new level of coordination and common purpose to these twenty-plus “jurisdictions” through a new (national) funding scheme, a new mechanism of cooperation between governments, a new (national) curriculum, new (national) accountability instruments and institutions, and a single (national) reform agenda driven by unanimous subscription to a single theory of school reform.

Ironically enough, this approach replicated in form if not in specific content the approach that gave us the problem in the first place. Since the 1960s it has been a Labor article of faith (to which I subscribed until relatively recently) that better schooling and more equality in and through schooling would come from Canberra, not the states — indeed, in spite of the states. That the states have floundered in schooling is a matter of record. That Canberra can make matters worse is not.

Of the four elements of the Rudd–Gillard “national approach” — rationalised funding, cooperation between governments, a performance infrastructure, and a school-reform doctrine — only the funding scheme (Gonski) was likely to work, and that was the only one not implemented. The others were implemented, more or less, and served to compound the problems.

Hence the spectacle of the only minister who employed not a single teacher and ran not a single school stumping the country telling the others how to lift their educational game

The idea of a peak body of governments to align policy on things such as schooling was not Labor’s invention, but the Rudd government did come to office determined to use it to drive a different kind of federalism. The idea actually came from one of the states (Victoria) and involved pursuing a “national reform agenda” through “national partnerships” hammered out by new COAG (Council of Australian Governments) working parties.

That did not survive. On one flank were Canberra’s bureaucracies. Their reflex was to tell the states what they would deliver in return for federal money. On the other side were state ministers who soon saw that the “more national” approach was in fact a more Canberra approach. COAG and its working parties became arenas of contestation as much as cooperation. There were structural problems as well, including the fact that government school systems were directly represented but non-government systems, controlling a third of the nation’s schools, were not.

Chronic overlap in and confusion about who was responsible for what was intensified by the practice agenda. It took the federal government deep into teaching and learning, deep, that is, into the core business of the systems. Hence the spectacle of the only minister who employed not a single teacher and ran not a single school stumping the country telling the others how to lift their educational game, and of a Coalition minister who took it for granted that he could set up a review of the “national” curriculum and have it report to him for action as required.

The construction of the federal minister for education as a de facto national schools minister has continued. You have promised that a Labor government would “work closely with principals, school leaders, [and] teachers.” In the same vein the current minister has, among other things, told school systems what kinds of teachers they should be recruiting, and advised schools on what they should do about students’ smartphones.

We can respect the concerns, but not the overreach and mission creep. Teacher employment is none of Simon Birmingham’s business, and your referents, if you take his place, should be systems, governments and national organisations, not principals, school leaders and teachers. These solecisms are the tip of an iceberg comprising a long history of federal governments using tied grants, funding agreements and targeted programs to get the states and, through them, the government and non-government systems to do Canberra’s educational bidding. Some of these programs appear to have been productive if seen in isolation but not as parts of a whole.

Perhaps the most counterproductive component of the “national approach” is that each increment in “the national” — in curriculum, in performance indicators, in accountability and performance, in the articulation of a theory of teaching and school reform — has meant a decrement in the capacities, the sphere of action, and the expectations and sense of responsibility of the twenty-plus systems. In the upshot, no one — not the federal government, not the emergent “national” apparatus, not the state governments, not the systems themselves — is capable of driving reform.

Theories of whole-of-system reform agree on two fundamental requirements: “alignment” of the many elements of schooling — values, objectives, curriculum, assessment, the organisation of teaching and learning, teacher selection and training, career structures, kinds and degrees of school “autonomy,” accountability, resourcing — to support each other and pull in the same direction. And, second, this effort must be sustained over extended periods. As the Nous report to Gonski put it, “the key to improving Australia’s education system is not in doing a lot of new things, but rather it is in applying what we know works in a comprehensive, integrated and sustainable manner.”

If you cannot go forward and cannot go back, you will have to go sideways. The imperfect but best available answer lies in a redefinition of the federal government’s role, and of a “national approach.”

To give Julia Gillard one of her several dues, she saw that the Australian school system wasn’t capable of doing anything in a comprehensive, integrated and sustained manner. The trouble is, her fix didn’t work either. The “more national” approach fell between two stools. It did not produce a national system, and it did not empower local ones.

What can you do? Here as elsewhere you are between a rock and a hard place. The government systems are protected by the Constitution and incumbency, the non-government ones by incumbency and interest groups. Any attempt to push further into their territory will guarantee a repeat of the 2007–13 experience. In any foreseeable future, there will be no national system or anything like it.

Nor can Australia follow the example of Canada, or the advice of one of the Abbott government’s reviews: get the federal government out of schooling. Both sides of federal politics are locked into Gonski-style funding commitments, and the sector system makes that almost impossible to avoid. The national agencies and apparatus are established facts and would be very difficult to dismantle. The electorate expects that federal governments — and particularly federal Labor governments — will “do something” about schools and will vote for those that do.

If you cannot go forward and cannot go back, you will have to go sideways. The imperfect but best available answer lies in a redefinition of the federal government’s role, and of a “national approach.”

The “national” should be confined to a broadly specified framework, with goals, objectives and funding on the one side, “performance” on the other. Within that framework school systems should be responsible for finding their own salvation, their own way of aligning curriculum, assessment, approaches to teaching and all the rest, subject only to full disclosure within the terms of the framework, including disclosure of exactly where the money went and why.

In other words, the “national” should cease to be “federal” in thin disguise. Neither the “national” nor the federal government should promulgate theories of the reform of teaching and learning or get involved in their conduct or reform. Specifically, the national curriculum should be joined by a statement of principles to guide school systems that want to develop or adapt other curriculums. Each system should be free to develop its own performance indicators as a supplement (or alternative to) those specified in the Measurement Framework for Schooling in Australia.

If systems want to collaborate, in whatever combination, the federal government should offer to convene and support such collaboration. It should keep and publish the national books. Unavoidably, it will continue to be the biggest single funder of schools. And, as I’ve suggested, the federal government still has fundamentally important work to do in reforming the funding and regulatory elements of the framework of schooling.

To repeat, this is an imperfect solution. The line between a framework for schooling and the conduct of teaching and learning is obviously blurry, particularly in the accountability area.

More consequentially, the school systems (and particularly the government systems) have serious structural problems of their own. What should be expert and arm’s-length decision-making is highly politicised. Authority and responsibility are dispersed across statutory authorities, government departments, ministers’ offices and the universities, most of them influenced or even dominated by interest groups. Ministers and senior bureaucrats have short half-lives.

Systems are captive to quasi-legal industrial agreements that specify everything from class sizes to the disposition of time to career structures. Most systems have made the mistake of pushing teacher organisations to the margins instead of drawing them into a big, long-term strategy of reform. And teacher organisations have made the mistake of focusing on immediate gains in terms and conditions rather than considering these with a view to the long-term future of teaching and learning and the schools workforce.

Many systems, and particularly the smaller ones, have lost intellectual capital and institutional memory. There are continuing difficulties in getting the right relationships between “autonomy,” support and accountability; between schools in the same neighbourhood; and between governments and the “government” and non-government school systems.

These are dolorous facts, but they will be there, disguised and compounded, in any “national approach.” Federal governments have a particular role in convening the development of a national framework within which school systems can operate more productively, but beyond that their only contribution to driving “comprehensive integrated and sustained reform” is to keep out of the way. You should be clear about where the responsibility for the reform of teaching and learning lies, and that a federal government cannot be held responsible for things that it does not control.

Unless and until that point is taken, school systems will continue to look for national resolution of local problems and hide behind the PISA-encouraged obfuscation that it is “Australia” that has the school performance problem.

4. Shift the conversation about schools, and put social cohesion at its centre

In a labour-intensive, hearts-and-minds industry like schooling, storytelling can be a powerful strategy, but only if the stories ring true, and can be acted on. Julia Gillard was a gifted storyteller, and it got her into trouble. Her story about schools and equality worked because the schools–equality relationship is something that people really care about and want, and, in Gonski, the story came with the means of its realisation. The stories about schooling and the economy, and about “outcomes” as the one true measure of schools, were unconvincing because they were based on fallacies. But the story that really went wrong was the one about “revolution.”

You should make out the case for schools as builders of social cohesion, as giving students the chance to learn for real that they belong to a wonderfully diverse society with some big common values including a commitment to democracy, and to multiculturalism.

It is not hard to see how it happened. There is a great deal that needs to be done in schooling, perhaps even enough to warrant the term “revolution” (as long as it’s a lower-case “r”). Both Rudd and Gillard subscribed to the Labor doctrine that Canberra has a special mission in schooling. For well-known biographical reasons, both cared about schooling and believed in it. The trouble was that the aspiration was way out of kilter with the means. For reasons discussed a moment ago, Canberra cannot make a “revolution” in schooling, however much it might be needed, and talking as though it can raises unmeetable expectations, invites disappointment and cynicism, and effectively takes responsibility for an unavoidably unsatisfactory result.

Bearing that cautionary experience in mind, what stories should you tell?

Your first story should be about what you can and can’t do. You should promise a federal government that will play its part and expect other governments and school systems to play theirs. You will deliver better funding in a better way, and you will press hard to build on Gonski and to deliver a stronger national framework within which systems and their schools can do their job.

Your second story should go to the heart of that framework, to the kinds of schools that parents, teachers and students want, and to the proper appreciation of the work that schools do. You should commit to fighting for measures of schooling that see academic progress as crucial but care equally about the experience of children and young people in school, and their personal and social development.

Third, you should make out the case for schools as builders of social cohesion, as giving students the chance to learn for real that they belong to a wonderfully diverse society with some big common values, including a commitment to democracy and to multiculturalism. This story will have to take on the tricky task of explaining that in this area Australia is not travelling as well as it has, and that schools are compounding the problem rather than reducing it, and that is why you will give so much of your attention to shaping a national framework that encourages and rewards greater social and cultural diversity in each school.

In short, you should be the human face of an alternative federal government that, in schooling, is committed, thoughtful, encouraging and realistic. There should be no mention of revolutions. And no “wake-up calls.”

A postscript: please rethink your proposal for a national evidence institute

You recently committed to spending $73 million over four years to establish and operate an independent organisation to commission research, assess programs sold into schools, and publish summaries of “evidence on best practice.”

Four things can be said in favour of this proposal, and rather more against. Politically, it provides some insurance against the Gonski 2.0 report, due soon. It supports teachers rather than monitoring them. It implicitly acknowledges the loss of intellectual input to the schools sector. And it is proposed to be independent.

And against? The proposal comes from the tradition of federal intrusion into the core business of systems discussed and criticised above. For that reason alone, it should not proceed in its present form.

Like the forum you convened late last year, the proposal belongs to the mental world of the Rudd–Gillard reform-of-practice strategy. It is, moreover, redundant. Those wanting to find out more about the “what works” approach have no difficulty in doing so, as a simple Google search on “what works in schools” will demonstrate. The proposal arrives very late on a well-populated field; it is now fifteen years since the US Department of Education launched its What Works Clearinghouse, for example.

As for research, Australia has 3000 full-time-equivalent education research academics, and contributes 4 per cent of the discipline’s total global output. Australia does more than its share. Research on effectiveness is grossly overdone. You will no doubt be aware of John Hattie’s formidable digest of 800 meta-studies (soon to be expanded to 1200), themselves digests of more than 50,000 studies of effectiveness. In short, there is no case for more; but there is a case for different. Cost-effectiveness research, for example, offers a much more useful and needed angle of view than the effectiveness approach and should be encouraged. As minister responsible for higher education you would be well placed to suggest such redirection of effort.

Then there are the limitations of information, of “evidence,” and of evidence on “what works.” It is true that until quite recently schools proceeded on the shaky basis of assumption, experience and professional folklore. Putting these to the test of research represents a crucial step forward.

But no evidence, including that generated within the effectiveness paradigm, can be the basis of practice, as both the term “evidence-based” and the proposed name of the institute imply. That idea has been imported into education from the health industry by effectiveness researchers, but schools are fundamentally different from hospitals and surgeries. The latter are sites of the delivery of a service (of medicine); schools, by contrast, are sites of production (of learning), a much more elusive matter in which judgement, character, intuition and values do and will continue to play a large part. By paying no attention to a fundamental input (cost) and ignoring all the consequences of schooling except one (cognitive outcomes), the claim to be following in the “evidence-based” footsteps of medical science has been a political rather than an epistemological success.

Evidence and its cousin, technique, are increasingly important elements of practice. They inform it, but not mainly through mere reticulation. In school and classroom improvement, as in system-level change, many things, including information and evidence, must be aligned within a strategy pursued over years. The clearing-house idea encourages a quite misplaced plug-and-play expectation.

Perhaps the most fundamental limitation of the effectiveness approach is its symbiotic relationship with a “grammar” of schooling familiar to all: thirty-odd “lessons” per week, each in a “subject,” delivered by a teacher to a group of students of the same age, and so on. Effectiveness research tells us what works in that particular setting.

Here is something for an institute to do, not by “research” or even research and development, but by something closer to development-research-development, a well-organised, sustained interaction between thinking and doing.

Will that grammar of schooling serve into the foreseeable future? Probably not. It has never worked for a significant minority of students (teenage boys particularly). It is a highly person-dependent and therefore low-productivity work process. It has great difficulty in exploiting the digital technologies. And it is not well suited to the circumstances in which children and young people do and will live, or to the kinds of learning they need.

Moreover, it seems at least possible that a very different grammar is emerging. It focuses not on the quality of teaching but on the organisation of learning. Specifically, it looks to the reorganisation of schooling around the continuous progress or growth of each student, and to a very different student working day and “learning career.”

The shift towards a grammar of that kind would (or will) bring with it a problem that the right kind of intellectual effort could help tackle: how can systems and schools make what they’ve got work better and at the same time move towards what’s needed? Now here is something for an institute to do, not by “research” or even research and development, but by something closer to development-research-development, a well-organised, sustained interaction between thinking and doing.

Not every school system will see that as a priority, or not yet anyway, in which case such an institute could be (like the OECD) subscription-based. The role of a federal minister? You could float the idea and see how many hands go up. You could encourage, convene and, perhaps, use some of that $73 million to subsidise, but all within a clear understanding: this is your call, systems, not ours. •

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When a series of disturbing failures in the South Australian TAFE system came to light recently, education minister Simon Birmingham saw an opportunity to embarrass a Labor government in the leadup to a state election. He referred the mess — which had prompted the Australian Skills Quality Authority to suspend qualifications registrations by ten TAFE courses — to a Senate committee.

As a political stunt, Birmingham’s move turned out to be a lamentable failure. The committee, with a Labor–Green majority, had no difficulty in shifting the focus from local failures to the nationwide problems of the vocational education system. It was aided by the fact that nearly all the submissions (including mine, on which this article is based) pointed to systemic failures caused not by individual wrongdoing but by underfunding and a blind faith in market forces.

Vocational education in Australia is in crisis. Traditional on-the-job training, through apprenticeships and traineeships, is in decline. Technical and further education funding has been slashed, leading to the closure of many TAFE colleges and large-scale loss of teaching staff. Billions of dollars have been wasted on ideologically driven experiments in market competition and commercial provision, most notoriously through the rorting of the FEE-HELP system.

The most obvious problems have arisen in the commercial sector itself, where most of the leading large-scale providers have been exposed as essentially fraudulent, exploiting government subsidies and leaving students with worthless qualifications. But the pressure to respond to market competition has also had damaging effects among TAFE colleges. The problems reported in South Australia are consistent with this analysis.

As this chart from the Mitchell Institute shows, funding for vocational education and training has fallen drastically since 2011–12 and is now, in real terms, barely above the 2005–06 level. This is despite an increase in the size of the population, including the eighteen-to-twenty-four age group. And, because education is a labour-intensive activity, real costs have been rising and resources per student declining. Caught in a pincer movement between funding cuts and competition from dubious profit-oriented providers, the sector has experienced a disastrous decline.

Expenditure on education by sector 2005–06 to 2015–16
Base year 2005–06 = 100

Source: Mitchell Institute analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics data

For-profit educational providers have almost invariably failed to deliver good educational outcomes, particular when they have access to public funding. It is far easier to game funding systems than to offer good-quality education. The failures cover all forms of education, from childcare (where the big commercial provider, ABC Learning, collapsed spectacularly, as, more recently, did G8 Education) through to tertiary institutions, most notably in the FEE-HELP fiasco.

The problems were known as early as 2011. In a report published by the National Council on Vocational Educational Research in 2013, I drew on evidence from the Victorian sector to point to the likely failure of FEE-HELP. Many of the initiatives had already been abandoned and others were characterised by chronic problems of fraud and exploitation of regulatory loopholes.

It is now generally admitted that the policy was a disastrous failure. Even the Productivity Commission, in a report advocating more competition in human services, singled it out as an example of what not to do. “Reforms to the vocational education and training sector,” said the commission, “illustrate the potential for damaging effects on service users, government budgets and the reputation of an entire sector if governments introduce policy changes without adequate safeguards.”

Yet the commission’s report gave no indication of how governments might recognise, and mitigate, the potential for such damaging effects, and its own track record of monitoring vocational education and training gives no grounds for confidence.

While it acknowledges the failure of existing policies, the federal government has done little to resolve the crucial problem of funding. Its latest proposal, the grandly named Skilling Australians Fund, proposes that national funding for vocational education should be derived from a levy on temporary work visas and employer-sponsored migrants. Leaving aside the divisive effects of such a policy, the revenue would be manifestly inadequate to address the massive decline in TAFE funding.

Vocational education and training FEE-HELP payments 2010–16

Source: Mitchell Institute, using VET FEE-HELP Statistical Reports

Universities have been subject to many of the same pressures but have resisted more successfully. The performance of for-profit universities has been very poor, just like their counterparts overseas, and drop-out rates are high. Attempts to convert existing universities to a commercial model — Melbourne University Private and Universitas 21 are the best-known examples — have been significant loss-makers.

Yet the current government has persisted in its attempts to cut funding and promote a variety of initiatives under the label of “deregulation.” These policies threaten to have the same disastrous impact on university education as we have seen in vocational education and training.

Is there a better way? To begin with, we need to recognise that school education alone is not a sufficient basis for participating in the modern workforce or in increasingly technologically sophisticated study. The class division between “vocational education and training” for the working class and “higher education” for the middle and upper classes is inappropriate and unworkable. Commercial education and training should have at most a marginal role and should not be subsidised through student funding schemes such as FEE-HELP and VET Student Loans. Non-profit and community providers should receive adequate funding, as should TAFE.

All young Australians should be encouraged to undertake some form of post-school education and training. And the two sectors — vocational education and training, and higher education — should be combined into a single national system, funded by the Commonwealth.

Those are long-term objectives. The crucial short-term need is for a reversal of the massive cuts in funding to TAFE, and the end of subsidies to commercial providers. If those providers are to remain in the system, they should either stand on their own feet or provide courses under contract through the TAFE system.

The experience of the past decade shows that the problems in the South Australian TAFE system are merely symptoms of failed policies designed by state and federal governments. They should be reversed urgently. ●

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Gains in numeracy, reading and school retention among Indigenous children and teenagers will be welcomed by schools more used to wearing the blame for deficiencies in student achievement. But a new report from the Centre for Policy Development, A Creeping Indigenous Separation, shows that current educational policies risk widening gaps among Indigenous students — gaps that result from where these students go to school — and stalling the overall improvements.

Christina Ho, Garry Richards and I wrote the report for a series entitled “In a Class of Their Own.” It shows how most Indigenous students, especially struggling students, end up in the schools with the least capacity to deal with their pre-existing disadvantages.

Many of these schools have made heroic efforts to lift the achievements of the most disadvantaged kids. Some are stand-outs — the work done by Chris Sarra and the Stronger Smarter Institute is especially well known — and new learning designs are challenging what schools should do, and what success should look like. We also hear (because the schools themselves often tell us) about the numbers and success of Indigenous students in better-off schools.

But the biggest task falls to the schools at the bottom end of Australia’s regressive socio-educational ladder. As this and earlier CPD reports show, our hierarchy of schools is bad for disadvantaged students in general, but more obviously so for most Indigenous students. “Most” rather than all, because layers of advantage and disadvantage exist within and between Indigenous communities, just as in the wider community. Those who can scramble up the school ladder will do so; those who can’t face a greater challenge — increasingly in a class of strugglers, a class of their own.

Generalisations about Indigenous Australia have always been misleading. Stan Grant reminds us that while we all know that Indigenous people are overrepresented in jail, we don’t seem to be aware of the 30,000 Indigenous university graduates and another 15,000 currently enrolled. He points to hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people for whom the gap has already closed. Ross Gittins shows that while the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians has been narrowing, differences among Indigenous people have been widening, including between those in urban and regional Australia.

These trends form much of the background and some of the explanation for the findings we report in A Creeping Indigenous Separation. Most Indigenous students attend schools well down the socio-educational school ladder, mainly government and Catholic schools and some remote independent schools. The government schools face the biggest challenge because the two private sectors tend to enrol the more advantaged among Indigenous students, even in poorer communities. In doing so they can still tick an equity box, of sorts.

There is nothing surprising about this. Indigenous families enrol their children in local, accessible schools. In most cases this means government schools — the schools that are required to be available to all families, regardless of location and circumstance. Schools that don’t have to provide such access, particularly non-government schools, don’t usually have high Indigenous enrolments; school fees at any level usually determine who gains access.

Enrolment data also suggest that enrolment practices for Indigenous students vary considerably. Anglican schools in regional New South Wales, for example, have low Indigenous enrolments while Christian community schools, often in the same town, have higher numbers.

Not surprisingly, better-off Indigenous families will seek to send their children to government schools in higher socio-educational communities and/or pay the required private school fees. But just like any other family that seeks this perceived advantage, they inadvertently contribute to the compounding of disadvantage in the schools they leave behind. This isn’t to blame anyone; it is just how the system works.

How does this compounding disadvantage play out on the ground? Schools with students who are advantaged accumulate the social, cultural and even financial capital of their supportive and resourceful parents. Schools that enrol an increasing proportion of disadvantaged students gradually lose the resource of higher performers and role models. Teacher experiences and expectations, and curriculum offerings and access can change and resources might be scarce. Teachers increasingly have to concentrate on trying to consolidate students skills and knowledge rather than move forward. The odds against making the much-needed breakthroughs mount up: schools can still make them, but it becomes much harder and considerably more expensive.

The residualisation of the schools closer to the bottom of the socio-educational advantage ladder is magnified in regional areas where a majority of Indigenous students attend school. The reality for these schools is that there is no one below them on the school ladder. They don’t win the more advantaged students from the higher rungs and must accept anyone on the way down.

This is more noticeable in regional centres and towns because the successful and the strugglers often live close to each other — with their children going to very different schools. Centres such as Coffs Harbour, Orange, Tamworth–Gunnedah and Wagga Wagga might offer a considerable choice of schools, but for poorer families the choices are an illusion. Even in the smaller towns, there are usually fewer Indigenous students in the Catholic schools. What might resemble a black–white enrolment divide may not even reflect active discrimination: it is the level of school fees that sorts everyone out. In such communities there is no such thing as a low-fee school.

Why does it all matter? In earlier CPD reports, the late Bernie Shepherd and I showed the relationship between the socio-educational divide and measurable student achievement. But the enrolment divide for Indigenous students is about much more. It impedes what could be progress towards closing the gap. It highlights an unhappy racial aspect atop longstanding, if loose, layers of social class. It inhibits the development of interpersonal understanding and social harmony. It limits the development of social and cultural capital. Schools become less able to deal with the most intractable problems faced by many Indigenous families. In short, we just won’t improve equity for all if we persist in compounding disadvantage.

While an experience of schooling is shared by all, Indigenous and non-Indigenous children increasingly don’t share the same school. Closing this gap needs to be part of the obligation of every school: we will only bring it about if we increase the number and proportion of our schools that are obliged to be open to children from every family in every circumstance in every part of Australia.

Concerns about slow progress towards targets appear to have triggered an overhaul of the Closing the Gap strategy. It will reshape the targets, maybe broaden their reach, widen the consultation and be happy enough with a job well done. Little will change unless it comes to grips with a system of schools intent on widening the gaps. ●

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Davis brings a new argument to this long-running conflict. If Australia’s public universities are to survive the looming threats of digitally delivered education, globalisation and big capital, we need a new policy framework and new kinds of public institutions. The Dawkins monoculture must give way to a “rich ecosystem of institutional types.” The Australian Idea of a University is about much more than ideas and universities; it is an argument and proposal for reshaping the entire tertiary education system.

All but two of Australia’s forty-odd universities, Davis argues, conform to the model established with the University of Sydney in 1850: they are publicly owned, self-governing, meritocratic, commuter, comprehensive and vocational. As one colony after another commissioned its very own university, each followed the example of Sydney, then of Sydney and Melbourne, then of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, and so on down the line. The model was subsequently elaborated by a growing emphasis on research, and vastly expanded, but successive attempts to depart from the template have all melted away. Davis sees this striking continuity as a case of “path dependency” arising from “an initial choice [that] shapes subsequent options.” Once we start down a pathway (the theory goes) the costs of departing from it exceed the costs of following it, the familiar becomes the ideal, and sheer habit “is a lane cut deep in the landscape.”

In this account of the origins and development of the Australian university — highly recommended, by the way, for its combination of clarity, readability and succinctness — John Dawkins plays a key role. He is remarkable not just for his attachment to the standard model but also for his zeal in applying it to everything in sight. Institutions of all shapes, sizes and specialisations were swallowed by or turned into universities, defined in legislation by Dawkins as conducting both teaching and research in at least three broad fields of study.

The upshot, Davis argues, has proved to be expensive, overweening and cumbersome. Academic staff from the old CAEs (colleges of advanced education) were now required to undertake research as well as teaching, so costs shot up. A huge increase in the number and range of vocational courses at university level put the entire VET (vocational education and training) sector at a discount. And the newly merged, multi-campus, multipurpose, rapidly expanding institutions were too big, too complex and too wedded to one way of doing things.

If Dawkins is the evil genius in this story, his successors have played the part of accomplices, taking over the machinery of the “unified national system” to control both public subsidies and what the universities could charge their customers, putting the universities between a financial rock and a hard place. Moreover, neither direct funding nor prescribed fee levels have borne any clear relationship to actual costs. Davis argues that the universities have been able to survive only by virtue of their successful entry into the international education market and by developing a maze of cross-subsidies — between international and domestic teaching, between cheap-to-deliver courses and expensive ones, between teaching and research.

The universities, and particularly the high-prestige Go8 (Group of Eight) universities, have long agitated to bring this regime to an end, most recently in their doomed campaign to deregulate fees. But now there is a quite new situation, or a new argument at least: the logic of path dependency is up against the logic of creative destruction. The highly regulated Australian public universities must contend with new players who can offer what the market demands without having to do research, or offer a broad menu, or, in an increasing number of cases, run an expensive campus. We already have around 170 non-university providers of higher education, most in IT, business or design, many of them for-profit, some overseas-owned. The Australian online education market is worth an estimated $5.9 billion a year and growing quickly, “an attractive prospect for Silicon Valley players such as the ‘MOOCS-for-credit’ offered by Kadenze or the self-explanatory offering of nopayMBA.com.”

Australian universities know how to play this game. They do it all the time overseas, and with great success, but perversely they are not permitted to play it at home. For now, they remain in a strong position, as protected by legislation and regulation as they are hampered by them. But in the not-so-distant future? What Australia needs, Davis concludes, is a system of regulation and funding that “allows innovation and rewards difference.” It would have four elements.

First, a national framework must embrace “the entirety of post-school education,” including particularly the badly degraded vocational education and training sector.

Second, funding must be geared to the actual costs of teaching and research. As things now stand, “no institution can afford to specialise in a discipline such as engineering or visual arts without the cushion of large law, business, nursing and teaching courses to pay the bills.”

Third, an arm’s-length agency of the kind that operated from the 1950s to the 1980s, first as the Universities Commission and then as the Tertiary Education Commission, should be revived to “oversee policy implementation from vocational education to doctoral programs, and so provide Australia with a coherent framework for higher education.”

Fourth, we need new public institutions, diverse in size, mission, student mix, course offerings, mode and language of instruction, undergraduate and postgraduate offerings, generalist and professional programs.

It is not necessary to agree with every part of Davis’s argument —particularly on the degree of uniformity in the Australian system, on the origins and consequences of the Dawkins revolution, or on the universities as the victims of policy — to support his conclusions and applaud most of his proposals. In fact, the first three of them comprise an unusually coherent and far-sighted “vision” for tertiary education.

Davis is not the first and will not be the last to put proposals along these lines. He is well aware that their boldness means that they have a very hard row to hoe. Ironically enough, they would probably require a Dawkins to be achieved. The Tertiary Education Commission idea is not popular among his colleagues, as he points out. And, as a student of path dependency, he is also aware that the structures of the education system and the processes of policy formation are heavily defended. The two tertiary sectors are funded and controlled in very different ways, the universities by the Commonwealth, the VET sector by a tangled combination of state/territory and federal governments. Prerequisite to Davis’s plan is a Commonwealth buy-out of the states’ stake in VET, an objective that eluded even the indomitable Dawkins.

The transfer of any responsibilities from ministers and departments to statutory authorities has a similarly discouraging history. Departmental heads see statutory authorities as invaders, while the coordinating agencies, Finance, Treasury and Prime Minister and Cabinet, see them as a threat to, well, coordination. For their part, ministers are happy to present a smaller political target but also like the power and profile that comes from handing out money and running things.

For all these reasons, statutory authorities in education have had short and unhappy lives at the national level. Whitlam’s Schools Commission and Curriculum Development Centre barely survived a decade. ANTA (the Australian National Training Authority) had a similarly brief half-life, as did Dawkins’s NBEET (National Board of Employment, Education and Training). Perhaps others created by Gillard and, most recently, by Birmingham will do better? To date, the main exception is the Tertiary Education Commission, which Davis wants to revive. Its relatively long life saw it become a secretive creature of the sector rather than a buffer between it and government. It had little say in any significant change and reform, which remained in the gift of government.

Davis’s underlying idea is the right one, though. What he wants is a field structured and managed in a hands-off way so that “innovation” and “difference” will align players and strategies more closely with variety in demand and mode of delivery. Perhaps the emerging forces of creative destruction will change the political equation in its favour? Or other means will be found to the same end? We can hope so.

The fourth of the Davis proposals is quite different from the first three. It addresses not the framework for tertiary education but its contents. Here the problem is not in the context and prospects of the proposal, but in the proposal itself.

Davis wants new tertiary institutions, and lots of them. We must have more diversity and we must get costs down, he says, and that can’t be done within existing institutions. They’re locked into the teaching–research nexus, and “no government will (or should) contemplate changing [their] status,” so future growth should be channelled away from them and into new institutions diverse in every respect bar one. They must be teaching-only.

These are odd propositions. It is an oddly relaxed and comfortable conclusion to an argument about the gathering forces of “creative destruction.” It is odd to argue that the teaching–research nexus is a central problem and then accept that it will be the dominant mode into the indefinite future. And it is odd to imply that the universities are travelling tolerably well on teaching and research and the relationship between the two.

On the teaching side of the nexus, “quality” seems to have more or less flatlined at a relatively low level ever since the course experience questionnaire was introduced in the 1990s, no small achievement under circumstances discussed below. But the proof of this, like all other puddings, is in the eating, not in the “quality” of the process. Teacher education, for example, enjoys relatively good ratings for “course experience” but not for its usefulness. Between one- and two-thirds of newly qualified teachers have reported feeling ill-prepared for a range of routine teaching tasks, and around three-quarters have declined to say that they felt well or very well prepared “for the realities of teaching.” Principals’ ratings of these new graduates are lower still. The problem is that some of the knowledge needed by teachers is of the university kind and some is not; some “learning to be a teacher” can be done on campus and in advance of actually trying to teach, and some cannot.

The same kind of thing is true, in different ways and extents, across the extraordinarily wide range of occupations now entered via a university course, from chiropractic, Chinese medicine, dietetics and nutritional science to journalism, fashion design, film-making and animation to management accountancy, law and social work to town planning, surveying, architecture and building. The common problem, of which many university leaders are increasingly aware, is in getting the specific mix of on- and off-campus teaching and study, simulation and workplace experience required to generate specific combinations of knowledge and capability required for occupational and workplace success. It is likely that teacher education is somewhere near one end of a spectrum of success in university vocational preparation, some of the health-related occupations — advantaged by mystique, lavish funding and the threat they pose to life and limb — at the other.

If the graph is more or less flat on one side of the nexus, on the other it climbs steeply. The massive growth in research output is usually seen as a response to the demands of a knowledge-based economy, thus conveniently implying that it is functional, indeed fundamental to the entire social order. But the research boom also owes much to the universities’ anxiety about differentiating themselves from lesser breeds and, more recently, to the development of research as a global industry with its own “economy.”

This growth in research has been purchased at the cost of teaching, partly in class sizes and staff–student contact, mainly by bringing in “sessional” staff employed on short-term and often part-time contracts to fill the vacuum left by academics rushing to spend more time on research. Steadily increasing cynicism and resentment within universities is matched by increasing scepticism in the laity about the point of all this research, and about whose interests are actually being served. The pressure is building not just for measurement of research “quality” or impact, or even for cost–benefit analysis, but for a really serious effort to understand the opportunity costs of it all.

In short, there are real problems on both sides of the teaching–research nexus, and in the nexus itself. What to do?

The answer is both obvious, and complicated. The obvious part: the flow of resources from teaching to research should be reversed.

The complications? Doing a better job of “teaching” is less a matter of getting academics to “teach” better than a matter of changing the shape of learning programs. The problem is structural, as new teaching graduates recognise when they complain about weak links between theory and practice in their training, and the lack of relevance of much “theory.” Davis’s own university took the same point when it set up (with Davis’s very active support) MTeach, a new kind of teacher-education program organised around extended periods of well-supervised practice, plenty of opportunity to digest the lessons of experience, and a formal curriculum derived mainly from practice-focused research. It works, and others are moving in the same direction — but it is not an easy thing to do.

Another complication: shifting effort from research back to teaching can easily be done in ways that compound the underlying problem of getting parity of esteem and reward for teaching and research. The big problem in the Dawkins plan wasn’t so much in the imposition of uniformity (as Davis argues) but in the kind of uniformity imposed. The universities’ privileging of research over teaching extended to embrace the whole of the higher education sector. Thus, “underperforming” academics are offered a “teaching-only” appointment.

A third complication: could and should a campaign to restore teaching to parity proceed without dealing with the employment conditions of those doing the teaching that “real” academics don’t want to do?

And a fourth: would putting effort back into teaching necessarily mean reduced research output, a lower international ranking and lower international enrolments and revenues?

Then there’s the complication of cost. Melbourne’s MTeach relied mainly on extra funding rather than a shift of the “load” from research to teaching, and it cost around $5000 per year per student more than the conventional campus-based programs. Good vocational preparation is expensive, even if “industry partners” can be got to contribute, as they should. Contract teaching staff are there because they’re cheap and “flexible.” Putting them on decent contracts would cost. Perhaps most expensive of all, if “teaching only” is not to mean “can’t do research,” a teaching-only career has to compete for status, interest and prospects with research, and that also costs. “Teaching only,” whether inside universities or in new institutions of the kind Davis wants, is expensive, unless it is done badly, in which case the hated binary system would be restored, Davis’s vehement denials notwithstanding.

Despite these many difficulties, an increasing number of universities are pursuing the teaching-only option. A closely evidenced study by a former university deputy vice-chancellor found “a consistent upward trend” in numbers of teaching-only academics. Most of this growth has been “opportunistic rather than strategic,” pursued for good and bad reasons, with both good and bad results. These Australian developments belong to Davis’s “creative destruction” process, a worldwide “unbundling” of functions performed by academics and by universities.

Much of this is of a piece with Davis’s analysis. Why does it not find its way into his prescription for universities? It is partly an artefact of his angle of view. From his lofty perch, the system and its institutions fill most of the field of vision. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls. But there is more to it, and to Davis, than that. He is a prominent and thoughtful contributor to debates on research and research policy, and an active reformer of university teaching. His comprehension of the plight of the VET sector suggests an unusually enlightened self-interest — where “self” refers to universities of the Melbourne kind — but self-interest nonetheless.

This combination of perspective and interests condenses in the “diversity” catchcry, and in the argument that what we need is “diversity” all around the universities but not inside them. The Australian Idea of a University was written by the vice-chancellor of one Go8 university, was launched in passionate support of the diversity principle by the chancellor of another Go8 institution, and carries a note of emphatic support for the same cause by the former chancellor of yet another member of the Go8. That the book rules out any change in “the status of existing institutions” and ignores the possibility of diversity within them will encourage the perception that “diversity” is being used here as it has been used for many years in schooling, as a flag of convenience for the beneficiaries of history, and will in that way, and very unfortunately, discredit or distract from his larger proposals. ▪

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The Secondary Teacher relied much on cartoons as a weapon and Ron’s forte was disrespect for authority. His most memorable images were of the school principal as a loudspeaker. In those days every classroom had a loudspeaker above the blackboard and lessons were conducted to the tune of the principal calling for someone to come to the office to collect papers or pick up the lunch his or her mother had dropped off. In one drawing, Ron pushed this nuisance a step further by having the principal sample and comment on the lunch.

The ubiquitous classroom speaker: two of Tandberg’s cartoons for the Secondary Teacher.

When I met Ron he was drawing a comic strip celebrating a little man, Fred, which ran in the local Leader papers. He was just starting on his shorter-frame drawings, which kept that focus but in a concentrated form that depended on sharp dialogue. Fred became Everyman, and in our magazine that meant he was a lowly teacher. He was short, and had big feet and a large forelock. Most of his interlocutors dwarfed him. The joke was in the one or two lines of dialogue through which the innocent little man learnt the ways of the great world.

Ron’s world was the teacher’s world. His targets were the authorities: principals or the department. His little men were innocents, trying to get on with the job against the interruptions and obstructions of authorities, represented by men around a table or word bubbles from a loudspeaker. They reflected every teacher’s irritations with bureaucracy and authority.

Ron’s cartoons depend on the punchline, and I still find it hard to imagine how he managed to come up with one or more almost every day. He seemed to do it without much effort and continued to do so for the next forty-odd years.

I ran whatever Ron drew for the magazine. Sometimes we would sit together in my dining room going over material for cartoons. Sometimes a cartoon or two would be slipped under the front door.

Although Ron, given his own teaching experience, could have drawn general cartoons about schools and teachers, he concentrated from the outset on the political struggles of teachers. At the beginning of the 1970s these were more intense than they ever had been or would later be. Indeed, there were so many fronts to fight on — the bias of the supposedly independent Teachers Tribunal, the question of what were acceptable qualifications for employment as a teacher, the indignity of being inspected, the excessive hours of work, and generally the drive to be treated as professionals — that I decided to roll them into a single campaign under the heading Professional Action.

The hated inspector: Tandberg in the Secondary Teacher.

“Professional Action,” I wrote in the Secondary Teacher at the beginning of 1971, “is an offer of hope for the future. It is not a promise from a politician or an administrator; it is a vow by teachers that from now on teachers will be qualified, teachers will be trusted and teachers will be able to teach. If it looks like strong action, remember that we have the habits of half a century to break.”

The margins of this militant rhetoric were illustrated by our two cartoonists, the great Alex Stitt, who had carried the magazine through the 1960s, and the newcomer Ron Tandberg, whose native militant disposition made him our most potent humorist. Teachers long remembered the day the Professional Action pamphlet arrived in schools and in their memories they perhaps thought of it in the form of Tandberg’s image of a pamphlet being handed out of a cloud to a little figure on a mountaintop.

The campaign against school inspectors probably worried more teachers than any other of our campaigns against authority. Tribunals, departments, governments could be readily scorned. Opposing inspectors was much closer to danger; individual careers depended on their opinions. Which is why we sought to lighten our union rhetoric with mockery and why Tandberg of all our cartoonists was the most powerful. “Some kids outside want to know what we do,” says the thought bubble coming from behind the inspectors’ door. “What’ll we tell ’em?” asks the other bubble.

One day an editor at the Age asked me if the paper could re-run some of Ron’s cartoons in its Education Age section. This was awkward. Ron happened to be away so I couldn’t ask him. The paper was vague about which cartoons they wanted and how they would run them. They were also cautious about payment. But I decided on Ron’s behalf that being in the Age would be a good thing, and that matters of permission and payment could be sorted out later. Happily, when Ron came back he agreed. From Education Age he moved inevitably to the paper’s front pages.

Unpopular premier: Tandberg on Sir Henry Bolte, who was often in conflict with the teacher’s union.

Ron’s transition to Education Age clearly imposed more discipline than he’d laboured under for our small publications but it had the virtue of not requiring him to tackle too much new material too quickly. He was thus able to move to more general themes within a familiar context. If he felt daunted by the larger context, I saw no signs of it.

Humour relies on disrespect. Tandberg’s disrespect was humane. He didn’t attack or demean his targets. Instead he allotted them their place in an absurd world that put the little men outside, looking on and wondering.

I guess, given his background knowledge of schools and teaching, Tandberg already knew who his targets might be and what their follies were. Even so, his talent moved easily on to the large stage of journalism, where it sustained him for nearly half a century. I can never quite fit together in my head the friendly, quietly funny bloke I worked with for a while with the wide-ranging leader of attitudes we met in the press.

I’m sure he saw himself as one of his modest little men, but to the rest of us Ron was an honest and powerful leader. •

Ron Tandberg’s latest collection of cartoons is A Year of Madness (Wilkinson Publishing).

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My submission to the review accepted that “practical measures,” readily undertaken in schools, have a part to play. It also argued that such measures will succeed only to the extent that the review panel can find good answers to its wider questions.

1. Allocating resources according to need is as important within schools as between them

The arrival in schools of additional, needs-based funding will bring with it significant problems as well as great possibilities.

One risk is that schools will see this “extra” funding as an opportunity to do “extra” things. In the worst case, “enrichment” and “remedial” programs will address need while an undisturbed mainstream program — less than rich and routinely leaving some or many students behind — will go on generating the need. At best, using supplementary funding to do merely supplementary things will be an opportunity missed.

A challenge for the review will be to find ways of encouraging schools to use new money to free up old — that is, to support “doing a Gonski” within each school as well as between schools by shifting teaching time and effort from areas of relatively low need to areas of high need.

The review asks: “Are there barriers to implementing improvements?” The answer in this area is an emphatic yes. There are cultural barriers created by habitual ways of organising teachers’ work and by legitimate concerns about the implications of doing things differently. There are also structural and therefore political barriers in the rules governing class sizes and teaching loads that make it difficult or impossible for schools to reallocate effort by (for example) putting more students in some classes so that there can be fewer in other classes.

2. In trying to improve their “performance,” schools may be rowing against a systemic tide

Research commissioned by the first Gonski review found that a relatively low proportion of Australian students are in schools with socially mixed enrolments and a relatively high proportion in schools with concentrations of disadvantaged students (on the one side) and advantaged (on the other).

An Australian Council for Educational Research study looked at the same question via an index of “school variance.” It found an increase in variance in Australian schools from 18 to 24 per cent between 2000 and 2009; over the same period, school variance in Finland rose from just 8 to 9 per cent. Other research has identified a rising incidence of both ethnic and social-class segmentation.

These developments underlie problems in performance. The gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students is far greater in Australia than in many OECD countries, and Australia was the only OECD country to see an increase in the performance gap between schools with high numbers of disadvantaged students and schools with high numbers of advantaged students between 2000 and 2009.

This research looked mainly at the consequences of segmentation for the academic performance of students in disadvantaged schools. But in a recent analysis, Melbourne University’s John Hattie has argued that students in schools with high concentrations of advantaged students are also underperforming because (as he puts it) the schools are “cruising.”

An effective way to improve “performance” would be to arrest and reverse the trend to segmentation. To the extent that it is not arrested and reversed, schools are being asked to row against a systemic tide.

The federal government’s recent decision to introduce needs-based, sector-blind funding is an important step towards tackling the problem of segmentation. But it alone may not be equal to the task.

Several of the key structural drivers of segmentation remain. These include: the division between fee-charging and free schools; the absence of a ceiling on school expenditure; and a regulatory regime that permits some schools (in both government and non-government sectors) to select students on various grounds but requires other schools to take all comers, and that gives some Australian families an exceptionally wide choice of schools but others little or no choice at all.

This is more than just a problem for “academic” performance.

3. Academic outcomes in fundamental areas are not the only outcomes that matter fundamentally

Much attention is being given to defining, teaching and assessing new kinds of “outcomes,” variously referred to as generic, cross-curriculum or twenty-first-century skills. They range from “collaborative problem-solving” and “learning to learn” to “applying deep understandings of key disciplinary concepts.”

Less attention is given to a category of learning regarded by many parents and others as fundamental to schooling: the development of values, attitudes, and ways of seeing oneself and others.

The role of the school in this area of learning is limited but real, and more challenging than delivery of the academic curriculum. It is not just a matter of running anti-bullying programs or establishing a student representative council; the educational task is to make the entire “hidden” curriculum explicit, and to make a sustained effort to align it with fundamental social and educational goals.

Much of this hidden curriculum exists in the relationships among the students themselves. The school is the place where children and young people spend extended periods of time together, and where they therefore do a lot of growing up, of themselves and of each other.

What students learn from and about each other depends crucially on who the other students are. Who goes to school with whom? Some schools have a great deal of control over the who (as noted in the previous section) while other schools have little say at all, and the upshot is something that no one intended.

When economics writer Ross Gittins notes that Jewish kids go to one school, Islamic kids to another, and poses the trick question, “What did the rich kid say to the poor kid?” (answer: nothing, they never met), he is drawing attention to a social problem, but also an educational impoverishment, for all concerned.

Diversity is a fundamental social principle, but it should also be a core educational value. That value can be taught, but even the best teaching in this domain is no substitute for, or counter to, what many students see and experience. The fact that research and national policy have turned their attention to rising social segmentation mainly because of its impact on academic outcomes suggests that the “what works” agenda can encourage an unfortunate myopia.

4. Outcomes of schooling matter, but so does the experience itself

Schooling is unavoidably a preparation for life after school, but it is not only that. Twelve years is, after all, one fifth or more of most working lives. To most parents it is as important that their sons and daughters really look forward to going to school each day as it is that they make good progress in the formal curriculum. Its importance to students themselves is obvious.

How many do look forward to going to school? Why or why not? How far does that differ from one school or kind of school to another? Is the “performance” of schools in this vital area improving, or the reverse? How does it relate to their “performance” in other domains?

Answers to questions such as these do exist, but within systems, and often in less than robust form. Nationally, schools can use standard instruments to collect data on student, parent and staff satisfaction, and under the terms of the National Education Agreement they are required to “report on it,” and to include a link to the MySchool home page in the section of their annual reports dealing with school satisfaction.

“Satisfaction” is a limited concept. The questions posed in the standard survey instrument are anodyne, and don’t allow students to say at least some of what they see, think and feel about their experience at their school. Data thus collected would not support national aggregation.

The case for a robust, national collection of direct feedback from students as the basis for an experience-of-school key performance indicator is that:

⦁ what students experience is more fundamental than — indeed, is the point of — what the school provides (“school quality”)

⦁ the students themselves are the experts: data on attendance, engagement, retention, suspensions and the like are all important, but all depend upon inference; none can be as direct or specific as what students themselves say

⦁ the feedback would contribute to a broader, more realistic account of “performance,” and make possible analysis of the relationship between key performance elements.

5. Schooling as currently organised cannot deliver the experiences or the outcomes that increasingly matter

It was suggested above that resources, including particularly teaching effort, should be reallocated. Here I suggest that it should also be reorganised.

In a widely discussed paper, Geoff Masters, head of the Australian Council for Educational Research, contrasts what schools are now asked to do with what they do do:

⦁ Current curricula are often dominated by factual and procedural knowledge rather than deep understandings and their application to real-world problems as demanded in many workplaces.

⦁ Subjects are often taught in isolation from each other, at a time when cross-disciplinary solutions are needed.

⦁ Passive, reproductive learning and the solution of standard problem types prevail when creativity and innovative solutions to new problems are called for.

⦁ Assessment provides information about subject achievement when employers want information about ability to work in teams, use technology, communicate, solve problems and learn on the job.

⦁ Students often learn in isolation and in competition with each other, when workplaces demand teamwork, and interpersonal and communication skills.

⦁ Curricula are designed for delivery in traditional classroom settings at a time when new technologies are transforming how courses are delivered and learning takes place.

Masters is here calling for a new category of outcomes (as noted in section 3 above) to be taught and assessed. But he is also calling for a different organisation of work in schools — and, it should be emphasised, of the work of learning (rather than of teaching).

One implication of this analysis is that more of the work of learning should be managed by the students themselves — that they need to do more “teaching” of each other, and more work in collaboration and in learning to collaborate. But the primary reorganisation required is (as Masters and many others have long advocated) of the relationship between each student and his or her curriculum.

Students can only work at full tilt to the extent that the work they are asked to do makes sense, is engaging, and is above all doable — but not too easily doable. Students should be working as often as possible in their “zone of proximal development,” and the work of learning should wherever possible be organised as a series of “developmental continua.”

That this is not easy to achieve is obvious. It is possible only in fits and starts within the typical organisation of people, time, space and task — a group of twenty or more students, often three, four or even five “learning years” apart, brought together for just forty-five minutes to work on a more or less common task in ways necessarily orchestrated by the teacher — that is, within a “grammar of schooling” formed in its essential features early in the twentieth century.

The phrase “grammar of schooling” was coined to refer to “the regular structures and rules” of schools that function “in the way grammar organises meaning in language.” In these terms, what Masters and many others are looking for is a different grammar of schooling.

The elements of a different grammar can be found in many places: in special programs and schools for students who could not or would not swim in the mainstream; in efforts to work out how the digital technologies can be deployed to increase (rather than decrease) the productivity of schooling; in efforts to devise new kinds of assessments and new ways to integrate them into the learning process; and in a few thoroughly reconfigured mainstream schools, past and present.

Programs and work of this kind are proliferating. They are important in themselves and in what can be learned from them. But an obsolete grammar still confines them to one or other of schooling’s margins — the earlier years; the low-status or non-core areas of the curriculum; and programs for “non-academic” or “difficult” students.

The task for schools and systems over the coming decades is to form these elements into a new compound, one that answers to Masters’s criteria — cross-disciplinary, collaborative, project- and workshop-based, high-tech, and organised to ensure the continuous growth of each student — and is capable of displacing an anachronistic grammar.

6. Schools cannot reorganise themselves by themselves

The prevailing grammar is deeply embedded in the culture of schooling, in habitual ways of thinking and doing things.

It is also the case, however, that this culture is supported by structural arrangements and defended by associated interest groups and institutions. These include:

⦁ an influential segment of selective schools (both government and non-government), well served by the received grammar

⦁ tertiary selection systems which codify and, in high-status areas, insist on that grammar

⦁ industrial agreements and associated ways of allocating resources that take for granted “classes,” “lesson periods,” and a workforce dominated by a single category of education worker, the “teacher,” and embed them in quasi-legal regulation

⦁ a physical infrastructure centred on “the classroom”

⦁ an “effectiveness” industry, which has tended to obscure the fact of a specific grammar by taking the current one as given.

The combination of these well-defended structures with widely shared habits and assumptions has kept the familiar grammar in its dominant position long after the circumstances to which it belonged have disappeared, to the frustration of many working in and around schools.

A new grammar of schooling will not be moved from the margins to the mainstream of schooling by diffusion or persuasion or by the efforts of schools and innovators alone. Structural reform will be required too.

What could the review do?

The review should see its recommendations on specific “practical measures that work” within the larger task of developing a more productive grammar of schooling, and of moving that grammar from the margins to the mainstream.

Specifically, the Review should:

1. recommend that schools be permitted to increasingly allocate core as well as supplementary resources (teaching effort particularly) according to need

2. propose that the government consider further reforms to funding, and to the regulation of student selection, that build on needs-based, sector-blind funding to increase diversity within each school and reduce disparities between schools

3. suggest that the government give consideration to changing the Measurement Framework for Schooling in Australia so as to give parity with academic/cognitive outcomes to:

⦁ the character and quality of students’ experience of school

⦁ diversity within each school — as distinct from the invidious demographic comparisons currently offered on the MySchool site — and disparities between schools

⦁ students’ social perceptions and values

4. propose a sustained, high-level conversation between the industrial parties to consider:

⦁ for the near-term, ways of encouraging more needs-based allocation of resources within schools (for example, by shifting from a maximum size for each class to a maximum average class size);

⦁ for the longer-term, ways and means of driving substantial change in the organisation of learning and teaching

5. recommend an investigation into whether and how the impact on school curricula of selection for highly competitive courses, and courses in the strongly sequential disciplines, is being and could be reduced by means including replacing the TER with more broadly-based assessments of capability

6. suggest that:

⦁ substantial change in the grammar of schooling demands a clear, sustained strategic direction and coordination of effort

⦁ this is unlikely to emerge from Australia’s complex school governance arrangements

⦁ the government should therefore propose the creation of a national agency to lead the development of a long-range strategy for schooling through authoritative, policy focused and consultative analysis, review and recommendation of the kind exemplified in the international sphere by the OECD. ⦁

This is an edited version of Dean Ashenden’s submission to the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools.

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Submissions to the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools close in just three weeks. Expressing your opinions about schools might seem like a daunting task but it can all be done online and the review panel is seeking responses to a series of questions. Yes, you should read the terms of reference and the issues paper… but responding to the questions is most important.

And what interesting questions! The first basically asks what students should learn at school and how their achievement would be measured. We can and do come up with a shopping list of things for schools to teach, including social skills — but when we measure success we ignore most things on the list and focus on the things easiest to quantify.

Sorry parents, NAPLAN trumps social skills every time. We measure what we can, and we value what we measure; until this changes, our broad views about what schools should do will amount to very little. My own take on this is that student engagement is the key to success and we urgently need to measure and value this. Narrow measures of student worth and achievement constantly undermine the purpose of schooling.

Gonski 2.0 wants your opinion on what we can do to improve — and how we might support ongoing improvement over time. The background to this, and the Turnbull government’s rationale for the review, is the need to use funding more effectively and efficiently. Frankly, our funding of schools lacks both, but the problems only partly relate to how Ms Waterhouse teaches simultaneous equations to Year 8. As Bernie Shepherd and I have revealed, we waste mega-dollars on some schools where students don’t achieve any better than similar students elsewhere.

Like the first Gonski review, this one has a focus on improving learning for all students. Clearly our schools fall well short of this goal at the moment: they serve mainstream students in mainstream places quite well — in fact they compete with each other to get these students. But an increasing number of students don’t respond well to production-line schooling. Our inability to serve these students has created an equity crisis equal to that surrounding the issue of funding.

To meet the needs of all students we really have to think differently about how we “do” schooling. Despite all the conversations about school choice, the marketisation of school education has meant that schools are actually very similar — only the brave stray beyond the expected look and feel. Education minister Simon Birmingham has implored the review panel to think outside the square. Unless this is done in ways that reach those who are disengaged from school, little else will happen.

So this means getting serious about new modes of delivery, as explained by Tom Greenwell in his closer look at online schooling. It means providing greater recognition and support for schools that do think outside the square, commonly with outstanding results. It means rethinking the role of what the review panel calls “system enablers,” the bodies that oversee targets and standards, qualifications and accreditation, regulation and registration, quality assurance measures and transparency and accountably provisions.

The review wants to know about new or emerging areas for action that need further development or testing — as well as barriers to improvement. But such questions need to be continually asked, not just by a one-off review — especially one arguably established by a government looking for some Gonski legitimacy. Any recommendations arising out of this review will require ongoing oversight, reporting and updating.

Let’s face it, Gonski 1.0 fell well short because its implementation became a plaything of politicians. We can’t allow this to happen a second time around. This review should recommend that a task force — at arm’s length from governments — be established to revisit the issues raised and monitor progress being made against the recommendations of both Gonski reviews, and report publicly at regular intervals.

Given the investment in such reviews and the high stakes involved, we can’t afford to fail twice. ●

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Since all three — students, teachers and classrooms — are dispersed around the state, this is going to require some coordination. “This year we share students with sixty-four schools,” Robertson explains, “as far north as Kyogle, as far south as Eden, as far west as Broken Hill, and all points in between.” He reckons one of those points, Culcairn — about a three-hour drive along the Hume Highway from where I am in Canberra — could be a good place to visit. He tells me he’ll get in touch with the principal there and get back to me.

First conceived as part of a NSW government blueprint for rural and remote education, virtual secondary schools are intended to provide students with access to specialist subjects that aren’t available in small country schools. Aurora College, as it came to be called, does this in two ways. First, Year 11 and 12 students can enrol in Higher School Certificate classes not offered at their home school. Second, there’s a virtual selective school for bright kids in Years 7 to 10.

“I very firmly believe that a public school should be able and capable of catering to all students in our community,” principal Kurt Wawszkowicz tells me, “whether they’re gifted and talented, whether they fit in the mainstream scene or they need a support class.”

New South Wales has around four dozen wholly or partially selective public schools, which enrol students on the basis of academic ability. (Victoria has not much more than a handful, and other states very few between them.) For those gifted country kids who live a prohibitive distance from a bricks-and-mortar selective school, Aurora College provides a virtual option. Each day, these students log in for advanced online classes in English, maths and science while continuing to study history, geography, languages and other electives in their home schools.

“In setting the school up, we made a deliberate choice to share the curriculum delivery with the local school,” Robertson says. “Families in rural and remote areas now have the opportunity of keeping their kids in the local community where their social and emotional needs are best catered for, whilst also being able to access a specialist gifted and talented students program.”

Aurora College is just over two years old, but virtual schools of one variety or another have been around for about two decades. Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2017, a report published by the University of Colorado’s National Education Policy Center, counts over a quarter of a million students in the United States enrolled in 528 full-time virtual schools. Some, like the San Francisco–based AltSchool, established by former Google executive Max Ventilla with capital (and all the accompanying buzz) from Mark Zuckerberg, are funded by private tuition fees. More commonly, they are public charter schools run by for-profit education management outfits, like K12 Inc. (which runs ninety-six full-time virtual schools with around 100,000 students) and Connections Academy (thirty-one schools, 64,000 students).

In the for-profit context, virtual schooling generally entails a teacher–technology swap. To a greater or lesser degree, adaptive online software — incorporating tutorials, exercises and activities — replaces teachers. The National Education Policy Center report found that “while the average student–teacher ratio in the nation’s public schools was sixteen students per teacher, virtual schools reported more than twice as many students per teacher: thirty-four.”

In designing Aurora College, Robertson and others deliberately adopted a quite different approach. If anything, Aurora College classes are smaller than the norm, and — critically — the default mode of learning is in groups, with students and teachers interacting in real time. It’s what’s called synchronous online learning, Robertson explains. Students log in to the class from locations anywhere in the state, but technology is employed to replicate the experience of a group of learners working together with a teacher, in much the same way as they do in a physical classroom.

I’m still curious about how it actually works. How, for instance, can a teacher tell when a student has lost interest or doesn’t understand? Can feedback be provided as quickly and comprehensively as in a physical class? And, I wonder, can the dynamic of students learning together — which is, after all, what makes a class — be reproduced online?

Halfway between Wagga Wagga and Albury–Wodonga, Culcairn is a small service centre supplying the surrounding farms and hamlets of the Eastern Riverina, an area known as Mad Dog Morgan country after the bushranger who terrorised the district in the 1860s (and inspired the 1970s film). The local high school gets its name from the waterway that runs through the district, Billabong Creek.

At Billabong High School I meet Kurt Wawszkowicz, the energetic principal who has driven the adoption of virtual learning at his school. “I very firmly believe that a public school should be able and capable of catering to all students in our community,” he tells me, “whether they’re gifted and talented, whether they fit in the mainstream scene or they need a support class.” He places Aurora College on a continuum of experiences designed to meet students’ learning needs at Billabong High. That continuum includes a transition program designed to identify individual needs when students enter from primary school, small support classes for students with diagnosed learning disabilities, a specialist program to help kids with low literacy make up for lost time and extension study sessions for senior students.

Wawszkowicz’s commitment to extending opportunities to academically bright children in the country seems personal. As a high-achieving student growing up in the Hunter Valley, he was too far away to attend the nearest selective school, in Newcastle. Now, as a school principal with two very young boys, he thinks about the opportunities available to them when he is posted to different schools — especially if, like him, they turn out to be academically gifted. “If the facility is available to my kids that is available here at Billabong,” he says, “I’ll be very, very happy.”

He takes me to an open, light-filled computer lab in the back corner of the school’s library. This, in effect, is Aurora College’s Culcairn campus. Soon, three bubbly Year 8 students, Robbie, Charlie and Joely, appear. As they log in to their computers for this morning’s science class, their classmates’ faces start appearing on their screens. They say hello to friends as far away as Nowra, on the south coast, and Broken Hill, in the state’s west. “Nice haircut,” a kid in Dubbo says to Charlie.

If this business of slipping through the back corner of the school library into another school entirely has a Narnia-like quality about it, the magic seems a little lost on the children, for whom it seems to be just another lesson. To imagine what it’s like for them, picture rows of faces peering back at you from across the top quarter of the screen: your teacher’s, your classmates’ and your own. (The audio and video connection for Aurora classes is established through Adobe Connect web-conferencing software.) Down the right-hand side is a “chat pod”: a constant stream of comments, questions and replies. The remainder of the screen is occupied by the lesson content. Microsoft OneNote allows students to alternate between the material the teacher is delivering to the whole class, generally via a slide show, and the virtual equivalent of an exercise book.

Teacher Christine Black is in Sydney. She has just returned from leave, and she tells the class about a cruise she went on with a group of scientists, wildlife-watching off the coast of Western Australia. One student keys in, “Cool,” and another types, “That sounds like fun.” “Seriously cool,” Black agrees, as she continues her account of her travels. Throughout the lesson, I watch with admiration as she seamlessly incorporates responses to the questions and comments popping up in the chat pod into her presentation to the class. A third student writes, “So, you didn’t just ditch us.” Charlie, who I’m sitting next to, jumps into the chat, “No offence but it’s hard to miss a teacher.” Black chuckles and replies, “Thanks Charlie.”

Today’s lesson is a review of the structure of an atom. “Electrons are not evenly spread but exist in layers or shells,” Black explains. She puts a diagram of an atom on the screen and asks the class to correctly label the configuration of electrons they can see. I’m quickly becoming aware of the very real limitations of my disappointing high school science career. Stuart Campbell, Billabong High’s Aurora coordinator and a science teacher himself, tells me it’s work he’d normally cover in Year 10 or 11.

As the class begins working individually, messages keep flying to and fro. “Wait, so the atomic number is different to the atomic weight?” one student asks; another quickly replies in the affirmative. The lesson exhibits all the easy back-and-forth and knowledge-sharing found in a physical class working at its best. Seeing it unfold calls to mind the case Chris Robertson makes for synchronous online provision. Students and teachers working together in real time, he told me, allows a sense of community and camaraderie to develop, as well as fostering peer-to-peer learning and immediacy of communication. “That is why the school was set up in the way it is.”

Aurora’s design also evinces a sensitivity to the limitations of online interactions. As well as remaining in home schools like Billabong High, Aurora kids get together twice a year for intensive week-long residential courses. When I catch up with Joely’s mum, Cindy Scott, at lunchtime she explains to me how important they are. Until Joely attended the first residential course, Scott says, her classmates “were just these little faces on the screen. After the residential school she was able to put names to faces and they were even texting each other about assignments.” Likewise, when I ask Charlie and Robbie who their friends are in their virtual class, they tell me about two boys they got to know when they shared a dorm at the last residential course.

At the end of the science lesson, Christine Black explains to the class that they will each be required to conduct an independent research task over the course of the semester. The students will need to pose a question, advance a hypothesis and test it by collecting data, and measuring and recording changes. “Think of MythBusters but we’re not going to blow anything up,” she jokes. “If only,” Charlie chimes in. The class will present the findings of their investigations at the next residential meet-up in Bathurst.

While Chris Robertson and others continue to monitor the progress of this experiment in virtual learning, for Joely, Robbie and Charlie the benefits of Aurora College are readily apparent. Grouped together with similarly able students, they are consistently being challenged and extended. It would be very difficult to provide these kinds of opportunities within a mainstream class, and it’s impossible for them to attend a bricks-and-mortar selective school (short of living away from home or their families moving). Virtual classes remove the tyranny of distance.

Aurora College has created new opportunities for kids in places like Culcairn. It seems natural to explore whether, internet connection allowing, the model could be used to provide distance education to young people who aren’t able to physically attend any school, let alone a selective one. But Chris Robertson also thinks city kids could benefit from a virtual offering. “What we have shown is that the technology exists to provide opportunities for groups of schools to work together, to share resources and to share expertise,” he told SBS. “And those schools could be geographically remote from each other, as is the case with Aurora College, or it could be that two or three neighbouring Sydney schools could share a timetable and share a classroom teacher in this way using the same technology that we’re using.”

Why would you run a class virtually, unless it’s impossible for students and teacher to gather in one spot? A place like Culcairn can only sustain a relatively small secondary school — in Billabong High’s case, around 400 students. That number of students, spread across six year levels, places very real constraints on the range and diversity of classes that can be offered. It would be financially difficult for Billabong High to offer a special class for Year 8 gifted and talented students on its own — it couldn’t fund a teacher for a class of just three students. But it is possible to constitute such a class when pooling students from all of rural and remote New South Wales. And that’s what a virtual school can do. So the problem solved by Aurora College is one of scale as much as distance.

Schools everywhere are constrained by scale. A handful of students may want to study Italian, Arabic, robotics, an advanced level of science or medieval history — or they might need remedial literacy support. Schools strain to cater to their students’ interests. There might be only ten students in a grade who want to do Indonesian but the school thinks it’s important that it is encouraged. It’s the Asian century, after all. Either the class runs — and it’s costly — or the budget doesn’t allow it, and students miss out. Virtual learning could make it possible for all schools to offer all subjects, at all levels, at a lower cost. And rather than trying to replace teachers with technology — as some American charter schools are attempting — efficiencies could be achieved through the immensely greater scale that technology makes possible.

Those aren’t the only features of the Aurora model that seem worthy of imitation, irrespective of location. “Once a week, on average, we have a masterclass operating in our school,” Robertson says. “Our masters — the people delivering them — come from a range of organisations from across the world.” He describes an experimental physicist delivering a masterclass from CERN in Switzerland and a human rights lawyer delivering a lecture to kids from nearby Geneva.

A virtual learning component could enhance all schools, but schools with small and declining populations would stand to benefit most. They experience the most acute constraints on the curriculum they can offer, and their declining enrolments can start a vicious cycle. Having fewer students reduces the capacity to deliver a rich curriculum and attractive programs. These factors, in turn, make it harder to recruit and retain teachers. So enrolments keep declining.

Would virtual learning be suitable for all students? Aurora College enrols a very distinct subset of young people at present. They are secondary students who are either gifted and talented or in their final two years of school, or both. So they are likely to be more mature and motivated than many of their peers. I watch the Billabong kids with much admiration as they nimbly toggle between applications and deftly find workarounds for the inevitable technical glitches they encounter. They want to learn and they make it happen. But, as a teacher myself, I can’t help thinking of other students, on other occasions, for whom as minor a problem as a forgotten password necessitated downing tools and suspending the pursuit of knowledge until further notice. How would those students respond to a virtual learning environment?

After lunch, Joely, Robbie and Charlie filter back into the lab and log in for maths. The lesson is on inverse operations and their teacher, Kathy Howard, wants them to pay particular attention to setting out their mathematical reasoning correctly. “Quite often students will tell me the answer and I’ll ask, ‘How did you get that?’ and they’ll say, ‘I don’t know,’” Howard explains to the class. “We need to be perfect at process.” She takes them through an example before the kids start working on more complicated problems individually. “Lots of good communication going on in the chat pod,” she reflects to the class.

I catch up with Howard later to talk about the experience of teaching a virtual class. At the start of the lesson she’d had to ask a couple of students to turn their camera on and I ask her about this. “Some of them are reticent about it. Some of them need a reminder every lesson,” she explains. But it’s important. After all, there is no teacher physically present with students. The supervising teacher is the one in the virtual classroom, somewhere else around the state, possibly hundreds of kilometres away. (At one point, Kathy Howard had reminded students, some of whom are in libraries or similar shared spaces, “The people outside our Adobe room are not there. They’re figments of our imagination.”)

For the students, having the camera on is much like being on a Skype call with twenty people, with that slightly unnerving sensation of having your own face on the screen. It’s a powerful form of accountability. On one occasion, when a student’s head is bobbing around and he seems to be peering stage left, the teacher calls on him to answer a question and he duly responds. “I can see from the way they’re behaving that they’re doing something other than what they should be,” Howard tells me.

If she continues to be concerned, she will try privately messaging a student. If that doesn’t elicit the desired response, then she might take them into a “breakout room” and talk with them there — roughly equivalent to taking a student out into the corridor for a tête-à-tête. I’d seen the use of a breakout room earlier in the day when additional faces appeared at the top of the screen some way into the morning’s science lesson. Christine Black suggested to the late arrivals that she would “pop them in another room” and catch them up while the rest of the class continued working on an exercise. She and the late arrivals moved into a separate space — where they could chat with each other while not being heard by the rest of the class — and Charlie, Robbie and Joely had kept beavering away on the periodic table.

Virtual learning of this nature won’t work for all students. At the very least, the degree of computer proficiency required would likely exclude young children. But it’s also clear that Aurora has created an array of tools for supporting student engagement and managing behaviour that are similar to those available in more conventional settings.

Expanding virtual education could enable schools to provide a richer, more diverse curriculum at lower cost. It could also be less divisive than our present methods of catering to students’ differing needs.

Bricks-and-mortar selective schools are criticised for drawing gifted students away from comprehensive local schools, sending some schools into a downward spiral. Consider, for example, two schools, two minutes’ drive from each other, in Western Sydney. One is a partially selective public school with over 1000 students. Overall, as MySchool reveals, its students are doing slightly better in terms of socioeconomic status than other young Australians (58 per cent are from the top half of the distribution). The other school is a comprehensive public school with barely 300 students. Seventy-six per cent of the children who attend this school are from the most disadvantaged quarter of Australian families. Only 1 per cent are from the most privileged quarter.

It looks like competition with the selective school is making it harder for the comprehensive school to enrol and retain students. That will make it harder (and more expensive) to provide a rich offering to the students left behind.

It also appears that the two schools’ differing enrolment obligations are contributing to the social divide between them. If so, it would be in keeping with a larger pattern. A researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, Christina Ho, has found that three-quarters of students in Sydney’s selective schools come from the most advantaged quarter of the population (and just 2 per cent from the most disadvantaged quarter). In other words, she found, selective schools tend to cater only to “the wealthy, gifted and talented.” Local comprehensive schools are more likely, meanwhile, to be characterised by high concentrations of disadvantage. And we know this further stacks the odds against kids, over and above any challenges associated with their own personal background.

In a thought-provoking article, education writer and former principal Chris Bonnor argues that the Aurora College model of selective schooling has the potential to change the equation. Under the virtual model, the selective program comes to the local school — a school like Billabong High — instead of the gifted student departing for a selective one. In Culcairn, that’s a matter of necessity. But expanding virtual learning holds out the possibility of providing educational experiences that are precisely tailored to individual student needs in a way that doesn’t create a zero-sum game between schools — and doesn’t separate students on the basis of their social background. As Bonnor wrote:

The benefits of serving gifted and talented students in this way are substantial… [T]he power and social benefits of comprehensive and inclusive schooling can sit easily with the advancement of students who benefit from additional opportunities. In effect, the often conflicting views of education as a collective good or a private and positional good can be reconciled.

Rather than separating young people into different schools to give them additional opportunities, Aurora provides those opportunities by bringing students from dozens of schools together. Instead of cannibalising local comprehensive schools, Aurora strengthens them — differentiating the curriculum without exacerbating social division. And precisely because the program is provided virtually, the specialist offerings are not a feature of one school but of all schools.

As Cindy Scott and I are wrapping up our conversation, she says with emphasis, “Kudos goes to Billabong High School for creating the opportunity, because if it weren’t for Billabong and Kurt [Wawszkowicz] actually driving this, it wouldn’t have happened.” She’s right. And the comment reflects the fact that Aurora College is an organisational achievement as much as a technological one. The whiz-bang technology is indispensable, but so too is the syncing of school timetables across New South Wales so students can log in to their virtual classes at the same time. That kind of coordination is required every day to work with partner schools to support students, liaise with parents, manage relationships and keep everyone, across dozens of locations, on the same page.

Policy-makers tend to think of schools as independent units. Schools compete with each other. Parents shop between them. Thus, over the years, measures to increase choice and competition — more funding for private schools, independent public schools, MySchool — have been introduced and implemented. All the while, educational outcomes have continued to decline. Aurora College is an exciting illustration of what can occur when digital tools are harnessed to boost coordination rather than competition between schools. •

The assistance of the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund in providing funding for this article is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Inside Australia’s first virtual school appeared first on Inside Story.

In March, Australian academic Feng Chongyi was prevented from leaving Guangzhou and subjected to interrogation; the matter reached the offices of the Australian prime minister and the Chinese premier. In a number of separate incidents, Australian university lecturers have been denounced on Chinese social media and the web for offending the patriotic sensibilities of their students. And in mid August, an intimidating convoy of luxury sedans heading for the Indian government mission in Sydney slowly toured the campuses of UTS and the University of Sydney bearing a slogan drawn from a popular Chinese movie: “Anyone who offends China will be killed…”

It does not take much to offend China. One offending lecturer at the University of Sydney used a standard-issue map in class that varied from official Chinese government maps of the contested China–India border. Another lecturer pilloried on social media displayed a sign in English and Chinese in an ANU classroom that read, “I will not tolerate students who cheat.” A third offending lecturer, based at the University of Newcastle, used a third-party document listing Hong Kong and Taiwan separately from China. In this case the Chinese government intervened directly. The campus arm of the official Chinese Students and Scholars Association is reported to have protested, while the Chinese consulate contacted the university to register its displeasure over the lecturer’s teaching.

The bulk of research engagement between Australian and Chinese universities is not in history or sociology but in science and technology, where universities are partnering at scale. Is Beijing’s behaviour likely to make headlines in the sciences as well?

In China, punishment is meted out daily to lecturers who offend the Communist Party in the classroom. Authorities encourage students to report on their lecturers if they say anything out of line with official policy. The effect is chilling. In teaching history, for example, little can be said in a university seminar on modern history that can’t be found inside a tenth-grade textbook. Beyond history, the practice dampens serious scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

Punishment is now being meted out in Australia. As the former Fairfax correspondent John Garnaut recently noted, scholarly intimidation is being imported into Australia under official Communist Party licence as “red hot” patriotism. Given the scale of Chinese student enrolments, the dependence of university budgets on those enrolments, and the desire to maintain goodwill in Australian and Chinese international education circles, the Party’s directives could have a dampening effect on critically informed university education in Australia.

The same can be said globally. In August, Cambridge University Press acceded to a request from Chinese censors to remove over 300 articles from the version of its online China Quarterly journal archive accessible to scholars in China, and eventually restored the offending pieces only after international pressure was brought to bear. More worryingly, China legal expert Glenn Tiffert recently revealed that the major Chinese-language archival sources to which university libraries subscribe at great expense are being retrospectively censored by the removal from back issues of content that no longer complies with current political sensibilities in Beijing. Once a database has been corrupted in this way, it can no longer be trusted as a scholarly resource.

While they may make headlines from one day to the next, Beijing’s censorious behaviour and underhand censorship have had little impact overseas outside the humanities and social sciences. The bulk of research engagement between Australian and Chinese universities is not in history or sociology but in science and technology, where universities are partnering at scale. Is Beijing’s behaviour likely to make headlines in the sciences as well?

Between them, Australian universities host hundreds of collaborative research programs in partnership with Chinese universities and research agencies. Where the university meets the city, considerable investments are at stake. In April 2016, the University of New South Wales announced a $100 million investment from China in support of a new “Torch” science and technology innovation precinct. In August 2017, RMIT University and the University of Melbourne announced a joint agreement with the Australia–China Association of Scientists and Entrepreneurs to build a science innovation hub in the city of Melbourne, funded with up to $80 million over three years by the Suzhou High-Tech Venture Capital Group.

Some of these collaborations have defence applications and are presumably monitored on that account. But the majority of the partnerships support good science, smart innovation and sorely needed commercialisation. What’s not to like?

In fact, we don’t know. Australian universities are sailing into uncharted waters when they venture into major research collaborations with institutions and systems that do not share their commitment to liberal values and free and open critical inquiry. It is not clear that they are equipped to manage the risks that can arise when they align their research, teaching and corporate missions with universities in other national systems that hold academic freedom in low regard. Faced with these opportunities, the current corporate model of university governance is systematically inclined to go for alignment, and to set aside values that were once considered a liberal university’s greatest assets. It’s on this point of values that the sciences and the humanities meet.

For two decades now, Australia’s relations with China have been conducted through an informal compact under which each side agrees to leave its values at the door. Australians value freedom, equality and the rule of law. China’s government values proletarian dictatorship, authoritarian hierarchy, and rule by the Party rather than by law. Under the compact, Australia and China agree to respect and to set aside the other’s professed values in order to focus on shared interests in expanding trade and investment.

The compact works well for miners, farmers, investors, lawyers, architects, tourism operators and other businesspeople who go about their business trading in goods and services with China, as they do with other countries that do not share the same values. Unlike mining companies or agribusinesses, however, universities deal in values and one of their core values is academic freedom.

Australian universities profess to uphold academic freedom in their charters, and are routinely called on to do so in everyday practice. China’s education and research systems are arms of a party-state that is openly hostile to the idea of academic freedom. So, as a rule, Chinese universities do not spell out their commitment to free and open critical inquiry. These differences are not trivial when university partners from Australia and China come together to transact agreements for mutual benefit.

As the American legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin has written, academic freedom carries duties, including the “duty to speak out for what one believes to be true” and an accompanying recognition that it is fundamentally “wrong to remain silent” in the face of assaults on freedom. Australian universities that leave their values at the door arguably neglect their duties and place their reputations at risk.

In the past these risks were negligible. But in transitional moments such as the present, when China is asserting its Leninist values globally and the United States appears to be retreating into its shell, risks to the freedoms that we take for granted are real, pressing and substantial. Are Australian universities capable of assessing and managing these risks?

The corporate university

Writing in the 1950s on the development of academic freedom from twelfth-century Europe to mid-twentieth-century America, the historian Richard Hofstadter associated the ideal with the struggles of the independent scholar in the face of challenges from ecclesiastical and state authority. Today, the legendary Western ideal of the solitary mendicant scholar, free to roam without interference and speak truth to prelate and prince, sits uneasily alongside the immense resources invested in contemporary universities charged with driving innovation, industry and business in highly competitive national and international markets.

More recent scholarship has drawn attention to a different set of challenges to academic freedom arising from the corporatisation of the university itself. In The Lost Soul of Higher Education, the historian Ellen Schrecker presents a sustained critique of the “assault on academic freedom” presented by the corporatisation of the university in our time. Vice-chancellors and presidents apply market principles to university management, expand administrative budgets and introduce business-friendly priorities into the life of the university, expand the casual workforce, and promote competition for resources among individual scholars and competition for status among institutions. Taken together, Schrecker argues, these incremental developments have transformed the mission of the university, reduced its autonomy, and limited the time and inclination of individual academics to participate in the collegial decisions bearing on appointments, curricula, research and peer review that underpin the everyday practices of academic freedom and independence.

Whether or not we credit these developments with limiting academic freedom, observers of Australia’s higher education system would generally concede that Australia moved earlier and more uniformly towards adopting the corporate methods of the enterprise university than the American higher education system did. Faculty governance is no longer practised to any meaningful degree. And yet in Australia, unlike America, it is by no means clear that the corporate university poses graver threats to traditional freedoms than the system that preceded it.

In 1974, the Whitlam government’s abolition of tuition fees made universities uniformly and wholly dependent on Commonwealth funding for operating and capital expenditure for over a decade. From the mid 1970s to the late 1980s, universities were made to feel their dependence on Commonwealth funding through a process of attrition known as “steady state” funding, which reduced their budgets to a parlous state by the end of the decade. Commonwealth funding failed to keep pace with operating expenses. Capital stock deteriorated as older buildings were not maintained and new construction was postponed indefinitely.

Dependence on Commonwealth funding made universities especially vulnerable to managerial innovation. In the mid 1980s, the national economy was harnessed to the fortunes of the world economy following tariff reductions and the floating of the dollar. Vice-chancellors and university councils anticipated further shocks, including reductions in Commonwealth funding and greater demands for accountability to government agencies in relation to their enrolments, the courses they offered, their staff performance and their financial accounting. Peter Karmel at the Australian National University and David Penington at the University of Melbourne began to develop their own internal change agendas that anticipated key features of what was to be called the Dawkins model.

In 1987, John Dawkins took advantage of the federal government’s dominance of the system to reduce dependence on federal funding and at the same time sharpen the tools of public administration to reshape the provision of higher education in Australia. With the introduction of the unified national system, followed by a decade of institutional amalgamations and quality-assurance rounds, virtually every Australian university had come to embrace the enterprise model of corporate governance.

After Dawkins, the federal government shifted from rowing the boat to steering it, as the saying goes. It exchanged direct control for a dashboard of buttons and levers with which to shape higher education and research. It made improved corporate governance a condition for university entry to the unified national system. Among other things, improved governance involved redefining the role of vice-chancellor from primus inter pares to CEO of the university enterprise, and led to reduced staff and student representation and greater business and government representation on governing university councils.

In one sense, Australian universities have prospered under these reforms. But they came at the cost of transferring decision-making powers over curricula and research from participatory department and faculty committees to line management. Academic personnel policies were redrafted to align the performance of individual academics with overarching corporate missions, translating corporate strategic goals into individual academic targets covering research, education, scholarship and engagement. Today, university managers adjust their internal reward and punishment mechanisms to lift their university’s standings in global rankings, to hold academics accountable for burnishing the university’s brand in public correspondence, and to encourage academic participation in formally structured engagement with corporate end-users and international cooperation in research and teaching.

Here I would draw attention to one incidental effect of corporatisation that surfaces at the point where Australian universities align their strategies and partnerships with universities overseas that do not share respect for academic freedom or tolerate the wider liberties in which this freedom is nested. The convergence of strategic planning styles and line-management methodologies in China and the West masks the ultimately non-convertibility of the values of the liberal university and the values underpinning the Chinese university system. When corporate managers do deals without regard to values, they place those values at risk.

China

Domestically, higher education is one of China’s many success stories. Over the past three decades, the national tertiary participation rate has risen from under 1 per cent to around 25 per cent of the current age cohort, in a population one-third larger today than it was three decades ago.

China’s achievement can be attributed in part to a model of higher education that Simon Marginson has termed “The Confucian Model,” a term referring to national university systems extending from the People’s Republic of China to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, countries that have all been influenced by Confucian educational traditions, in which the state plays a number of critically important roles.

As a rule, systems that hold higher education and research accountable to the principles, goals and needs of the national state are prone to state interference in their executive autonomy, academic discovery and innovation. Still, the degree of state interference varies from one nation to another. The Confucian hierarchical model of education found in Singapore, Japan and South Korea makes provision for academic freedom commensurable with the greater or lesser degrees of freedom tolerated in each country, including freedom of expression and of the press, and freedom of religion and of assembly. China eschews all such freedoms and shows commensurably little respect for the principles derived from them, including academic freedom. There, the convergence of Confucian and Leninist models of strategic management presents challenges for free and open critical inquiry of the highest order.

The strategies through which the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government guide and control teaching, research and publication in higher education are embedded not in the principles of civic life East or West, but in strategies for waging war. The higher education sector is a “forward battlefield” in the conflict between Chinese communism and the values of a liberal education, according to 2015 State Council guidelines for higher education, and lecturers have the job of “consolidating a common ideological basis for the united struggle of the entire Party, the entire country and all the people.”

At the institutional level, individual academics are held accountable to university and national strategies through their university’s performance appraisal system, as in Australia. China’s academic personnel appraisal system appears to have been adapted in part from the Australian model, showcased through twinning programs matching Chinese universities with Australian higher education providers. In China, it is employed to measure compliance with Communist Party ideology and policy in joining battle with “harmful ideas.” The education ministry’s guidelines on academic personnel performance appraisal issued in August 2016 include measuring staff compliance with “the basic line of the Party” in their teaching. Academics who tolerate “the illegal spread of harmful ideas and expressions in the classroom will be dealt with severely according to regulation and law.”

The “harmful ideas and expressions” banished from university classrooms were set out in another Party communiqué issued in April 2013, and forwarded to university presidents and Party secretaries as a prescribed list of “seven prohibitions” governing university teaching and research. They include bread-and-butter topics in the liberal humanities such as constitutional democracy, civil society, economic liberalisation, freedom of the press, historical critiques of the Communist Party, challenges to socialism with Chinese characteristics, and discussion of “universal values” (local code for human rights and freedoms, including academic freedom). Not only are these topics banned from the classroom and the seminar. The communiqué banning them was designated a secret state document, partly out of habit, partly to avoid embarrassing overseas university partners.

Significantly, in December 2016 the Chinese president Xi Jinping went further to extend Party control beyond the humanities disciplines into the sciences. All science, according to the president’s office, is based on Marx’s scientific socialism. All science is on the battlefront. Those wishing to engage in science and technology teaching and research “must become firm believers in the core values of socialism.” No classes on campus are to escape political indoctrination and all who teach in them are to be tested for political compliance.

Directives such as these, designed to “strengthen management of the ideological battlefield,” are applied vigorously in all of China’s higher education institutions, with the exception of a few exemplary programs set up to impress foreigners at a handful of prestigious universities. In most of China’s 2400 universities, serious scholars revert to practices once favoured by medieval European philosophers faced with the ecclesiastical authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Some get on with their studies quietly, ignoring restrictions as best they can, without publishing or teaching anything that would directly challenge the authorities. Others defer to the right of higher authorities to correct their errors and oversights when they publish their research findings. Some seek refuge in one of a number of less restrictive urban jurisdictions where a particular university president or local Party secretary is known to provide protection from overweening central authority — assuming, that is, they are permitted to transfer their personal “dossiers” from one jurisdiction to another, which is often forbidden. In a country where state and ideological authority are one and the same at every level of government, interstitial spaces allowing scholarly refuge are relatively few compared with those in medieval and early modern Europe.

What is to be done?

An iconic moment in recognising the independent scholar’s right to move between towns, cities and states in search of political refuge in medieval Europe was the Constitutio Habita declaration of Bologna University in the mid-twelfth century. It is remembered today chiefly because European university presidents cited it as precedent when they met in Bologna in 1988 to sign a continental charter of academic principles, Magna Charta Universitatum. The 1988 Charta was a forward-looking document laying out the “principles of academic freedom and institutional autonomy as a guideline for good governance and self-understanding of universities in the future.” In the following year, the Charta helped to guide and to govern mergers and transitions among East European and West European universities following the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

One course of action would be to encourage more Australian universities to sign on to the Magna Charta Universitatum and to encourage prospective Chinese partners to become signatories on the understanding that they will profess and abide by the principles set out there. To date, four universities in China have signed — Peking, Nankai, Tongji and Wuhan — and eight Australian universities have done so. Australian universities could opt to give preference to research and teaching partnerships with universities that are prepared to sign.

Another approach would be to call out compromising behaviour on the part of Australian universities, and to talk more frankly about what the Chinese government is saying and doing in the field of higher education. We do China a courtesy by reading and translating what Party and government agencies are saying in their own language and to their own people, rather than repeating ill-founded assumptions advanced by retired Australian political leaders or senior university executives. More importantly, we do our Chinese colleagues in Australia and in China a disservice by not accepting the obligation to speak up about these matters.

Third, Australian universities could deploy the tools and drivers that corporate universities themselves employ to enhance their status and promote their services. One readily available set of tools is competitive global rankings. The entry of Chinese universities into the top echelons of published league tables, Oxford University’s Rana Mitter observes, suggests that academic freedom no longer matters for university standing. It could equally be read as an indictment of ranking systems that make no provision in their measurement indicators for free and open critical inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. This omission could be remedied by encouraging ranking agencies to introduce a minimal commitment to academic freedom as a threshold for entry onto competitive league tables, and to devise a workable measure of the exercise of academic freedom in each national system and university that crosses the threshold. Global rankings could then drive reforms favouring freedom through the competitive market mechanisms that currently stifle them.

A fourth intervention would be to limit the influence of external donors in shaping university appointments and research centres. Given the value differences separating our national higher education systems, Australian universities dealing with China face unprecedented pressures to meet the expectations of external donors and partners wishing to shape their research and teaching activities. Risks to academic freedom are magnified when university executives place the prospect of promising opportunities, big money and long-term strategic partnerships with Chinese entities ahead of traditional academic values. One remedy would be to invite an overarching body, such as Universities Australia, to develop and promote a best-practice guide for accepting and managing donor funds. This would ensure that their sources and origins are clearly documented, that donors present minimal risk to the standing of the university, and that firewalls are erected separating donor engagement from the selection of academic staff and research and teaching projects.

A fifth would be to require all existing centres funded from Chinese sources to demonstrate their commitment to the liberal values and academic freedoms that underpin the Australian higher education system. The entry of Confucius Institutes onto Australian campuses — twelve at last count, funded through China’s education ministry — offers a pointed illustration of the challenges the corporate university presents for academic freedom in international engagements. These innocuous entities play almost no role in formal education or cutting-edge research and yet they are considered important for international collaboration.

The reason is simple. To Chinese authorities, Australian universities’ disregard for the principles of academic freedom and autonomy in allowing the establishment of Confucius Institutes marks a breach in the battlefront with Western liberal values. As a rule, host universities have little say in the selection of Chinese staff, who are subject in Australia to the guidelines and restrictions on academics that apply within China. Their curricula and teaching materials are censored at the margins to pass the test of approved “battlefront” scholarship, and their directors are expected to play a gatekeeping role in preventing the circulation of materials in Australia that Chinese government authorities deem offensive — basically, the bread and butter of a liberal arts education. In short, they establish the moral equivalence of the principles governing the Australian and Chinese higher education systems. Having agreed that all values are relative, Australian universities are welcome to pursue collaborative research and education opportunities with Chinese institutions in science disciplines on a scale that far outstrips anything a Confucius Institute could possibly match. Their innocuousness is a measure of their success.

In bringing values more clearly into view, moving them from the doorway and putting them on the table, as it were, the aim should not be to impose them on others but to impose them on ourselves — to remind Australians of who we are and what we believe and where we draw the line. International engagements vital for the future development of higher education in Australia should not be allowed to place at risk the values that mark the university as an institution. The humanities and sciences are in this together. •

This essay, which first appeared in the Australian Financial Review, is an abbreviated version of the Annual Academy Lecture delivered in Melbourne on 15 November 2016 as part of the 47th Annual Symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, “Asia Australia: Transnational Connections.” The full text appears in Humanities Australia, No. 8, September 2017.

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To readers of Inside Story, Bernie Shepherd’s name will be best known for a series of articles we wrote together analysing My School data. Over the past two years we have been fortunate to join with the Centre for Policy Development in the publication of Uneven Playing Field in 2016 and Losing the Game, the latter released last week, just two days before Bernie died. He kept contributing to Losing the Game until his final few weeks, always making sure that it met high standards. His command of English and his endless pursuit of accuracy guaranteed precision in reporting what we found. On only one occasion did we have to amend a published article – and it certainly wasn’t Bernie’s mistake.

Bernie was an undemonstrative person, which meant that when something really raised his eyebrows you knew it was significant. After the first couple of years of My School, I suggested that the data might show what changes were occurring, over time, in schools. He insisted we wait two more years; only politicians and the tabloids get excited by changes in just one or two years. Then, in 2014, his analysis showed that, in the years following Australia’s non-implementation of the Gonski recommendations, equity and achievement in our schools was worsening. The rest is recent history.

Bernie’s career initially followed a common trajectory: classroom teacher at Liverpool Boys’ High School, head teacher at Drummoyne Boys’ High, and deputy principal at Seven Hills High. He then became the foundation principal of the newly created St Marys Senior High School – the first state senior high school in New South Wales.

In between those appointments he was a curriculum consultant and also led syllabus development in science. He became a foundation member of the NSW Board of Studies and for years was an indispensable part of curriculum, assessment, scaling and standard setting in that state. He served on the executive of the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council. He was an elder statesman among his colleagues long before he became an elder.

He would do all this while occasionally revealing, again in that understated way, his wide range of other talents and interests, whether it was photography or the magic of the theatre. Bernie was truly a Renaissance man in the digital age. Technology and computers were among his tools, and he could make a spreadsheet sing.

Bernie Shepherd made a difference at all levels, from individual students up to the movers and shakers… or maybe as he saw the priority, from individual students down to the movers and shakers. He didn’t seek the limelight but it sought him out. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia and a Fellow of the Australian College of Educators and of the Centre for Policy Development. He seemed to gather life memberships, including those from the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council, the NSW Parents and Citizens Federation and the Australian Education Union. Given the politics of education, this was a remarkable recognition from such diverse organisations.

We’ve all seen remarkable people in our lives. Bernie Shepherd’s name is up there in lights. I’m proud to have been able to share parts of his life with so many others. A gathering to celebrate Bernie’s life will be held in the second half of July. Details, when available, will be posted on EdMediaWatch. •

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By Saturday, Hanson-Young had issued a clarifying statement. The Greens had not yet made a decision on Gonski 2.0, they reiterated their call for a Senate inquiry, and they would reserve their decision until after they have considered the evidence presented to the inquiry.

Are the critics right when they say that the Greens shouldn’t entertain the possibility of doing a deal with the government? No, I don’t think they are. Are there flaws in the latest version of Gonski that could jeopardise the principle of needs-based funding it purportedly advances? Yes, there are.

The first problem is that the journey towards the needs-based funding benchmark set out by Turnbull and his education minister, Simon Birmingham, is excruciatingly slow. As the Australian Education Union’s Victorian president, Meredith Peace, pointed out, “a student in Year 4 today will have left school by the time this funding is delivered.” Instead of the nearly $4 billion of additional funding that was originally scheduled to arrive in years five and six of the Gonski agreements (2018 and 2019), the Turnbull government has committed to $2 billion over four years. Most of the funding growth is delayed until beyond the forward estimates.

The government’s obvious response is that funding will grow: in real terms, and faster than it promised at the last election. That’s true. But it’s also true that the Turnbull government has signed up to be judged by a different standard. In accepting the fundamental findings of the Gonski Review, it accepted that funding should be provided according to student need – and on that criterion many young Australians don’t receive an appropriate level of educational resourcing. The onus on a government that accepts this reality is to act with all speed to change it.

It’s also the case that we’ve been here before. The year 4 student of today wasn’t even in preschool when David Gonski presented his report to the Gillard government in November 2011. Now we’ve reached the point when the big bucks were supposed to arrive, and they’ve been deferred again. If recent events have confirmed that a week is a long time in the politics of school funding, circumspection about ten-year timelines is in order. Things change, including governments. And, as the preschool parents of 2012 have discovered to their chagrin, commitments beyond the forward estimates are particularly susceptible to revision.  

What the Greens’ critics don’t seem to have noticed, though, is that the minor party has clearly recognised the imperative of locking in needs-based funding increases as quickly as possible. In the same comments in which she indicated a willingness to negotiate with the government, Senator Hanson-Young signalled that getting more money, sooner, to disadvantaged students would be a priority.

The next problem with Gonski 2.0 is probably more profound, and definitely more complicated. And it compounds the first one. If you're a disadvantaged young Australian, you generally (though not always) attend a public school. The federal government is committing to provide just 20 per cent of the funding entitlement for public school students (and 80 per cent for non-government school students). For the overwhelming majority of disadvantaged Australian school children, what the Commonwealth does is important, but not nearly as important as what state and territory governments do.

To deliver needs-based funding, governments must work in concert. Julia Gillard recognised this. She didn't just deliver more Commonwealth dollars to the kids facing the highest hurdles; she used the injection of Commonwealth funds to elicit funding increases from the states and territories. This most obviously worked in New South Wales, in large part due to the outstanding Nationals education minister, Adrian Piccoli. It manifestly failed in in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland, where Christopher Pyne, in a manner both juvenile and delinquent, succeeded in persuading his conservative counterparts not to cooperate. But Gonski 1 included a plausible story about how governments would work together to deliver needs-based funding. 

Turnbull’s version of Gonski has jettisoned both the agreements and the concept of an agreed approach. Under Gonski 2.0, the Commonwealth will do what it thinks is its bit, the only proviso being that states and territories maintain current funding levels in real terms. There is no reciprocal obligation that other jurisdictions deliver the requisite increases to ensure students receive their needs-based resource allocation. And there is no guarantee that states and territories will fund 80 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard for public school students (or 20 per cent of total government funding for students at non-government schools).

States and territories, remember, have not signed up for this division of labour. So the journey to needs-based school funding will not only take ten years; it will also be at the mercy of all the jurisdictional and partisan rivalry and rancour that will inevitably unfold over that period.

While the Greens may be hard-pressed to address this problem directly from the Senate crossbench, they can push for the National Schools Resourcing Body recommended in the original Gonski Review (and advocated for more recently by Gonski panellist Ken Boston). The purpose of the body would be to provide robust, independent, expert advice on the precise amounts of funding that students need. A needs-based funding model places a lot of weight on defining and measuring need accurately. It’s crucial that the task is tackled with appropriate expertise and independence.

Following through on that recommendation could also help pressure governments to cough up, reduce blame and cost-shifting between jurisdictions, and ensure funding is targeted towards addressing disadvantage. Such a body could ameliorate, if not solve, Gonski 2.0’s lack of a unified federal–state approach.

So Hanson-Young and the Greens are right to submit Gonski 2.0 to a Senate committee for review, to pursue significant amendments and to reserve their decision to vote for it. They should seek more money sooner, greater guarantees of getting the requisite buy-in from the states, and an independent body that drives understanding of the resourcing that students need to succeed.

But what if they have only limited or partial success? Should the Greens really, as Bill Shorten insists, “Just. Say. No.” to Gonski 2.0? To some extent it depends on what exactly the Greens can win — and they may have considerable leverage. The school funding legislation is at the heart of the Turnbull government’s shift to the centre, and of the prime minister’s hope of reminding voters why they once thought he’d do a better job than Tony Abbott. The vehemence of Labor’s opposition strongly suggests that they sense this. And because Labor has rejected Turnbull’s Gonski plan out of hand, the Coalition will very probably need the Greens.

In the final assessment, however, the ambition of Gonski 2.0, flaws and all, matters. The conservative embrace of needs-based funding shifts the ground on which debate about schools funding takes place decidedly to the left. It offers the opportunity to elevate needs-based funding to the level of Medicare, where any deviation from the national consensus is quickly corrected and ends up costing the Coalition. If Labor won’t seize the opportunity, the Greens should. •

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So what’s new? Nothing, and everything. 

It’s still the case that all involved are plotting and pitching and thinking inside the only box that most of them have ever known, a uniquely Australian Rubik’s Cube of sectors and fees and rigged rules and governments tripping over each other.

But they’re also playing astonishingly different roles from before, so different that some half-remembered lines from Handel’s Messiah came to mind. I looked them up. “Ev’ry valley shall be exalted, and ev’ry mountain and hill made low; the crooked straight and the rough places plain.”

Baddies have suddenly become virtuous (the Christian schools lobby, the Coalition government), heroes have turned into villains (Labor, the government schoolteacher organisations). Only the Catholic hard men, the Hapsburgs of Australian schooling, remain depressingly familiar, forgetting nothing, learning nothing.

The Coalition: With a list of perfidies going back to the 1960s – from making obligation-free grants to independent schools to backing them in their fight against Gough Whitlam and his schools adviser Peter Karmel, from Howard’s nifty handouts to non-government schools great and small to the post-2013 double backflip on Gonski – who could blame the Australian Education Union, or Gonski panel member Carmen Lawrence, or anyone else, for smelling a rat?

It’s true, there are some downsides to Simon Birmingham’s Gonski that the AEU and Carmen Lawrence and others should point out and worry about, and it is also true that there are some serious obstacles to be overcome between here and payday. But no sign of rats, yet. To the contrary. By all accounts, Birmingham trounced the right wing in the party room, and has given us the astonishing spectacle of a Coalition treasurer (this treasurer!) on national TV telling the Catholics that there will be no special deals, not for them, not for anyone.

The independents: The independent schools lobby’s HQ has made some familiar noises (we only get half of what they get; most of our students are in low-fee schools “serving less advantaged communities,” and so on). But that is where they’ve stopped. It is reported that the independents have told Birmingham that they’ll wear Gonski 2 – including an end to the “no school worse off” rort – if and only if (and here is another breathtaker) there are no special deals for the Catholics! The cross-class alliance that took the Catholics out of the Labor fold and into the conservative orbit in the 1960s is, for the first time that I can remember, displaying a certain vulnerability.

That’s HQ. Out in the field, bouquets. “Rather than join the line of critics from those affected,” wrote the executive officer of the Christian independent schools association to minister Birmingham, “we’d like to applaud a policy approach that is good for all schools and sectors.”

All very well for the low-fee lot (“serving less advantaged communities”). What about the other end of the independent sector’s wide, wide spectrum? The headmaster of the most notoriously “elite” school in the country, the King’s School at Parramatta, for example?

“All in all, the Turnbull–Birmingham announcements about school funding reform are to be welcomed,” said Tim Hawkes. “I’m giving it an A–,” before adding for good measure that what everyone believes to be Julia Gillard’s policy of “no losers” was actually an invention of her Coalition predecessor David Kemp – a thoroughly bad invention, because it “preserved the over-funding of some non-government schools.”

The government schoolteacher unions: Without the AEU, there would have been no Gonski. In an otherwise penetrating analysis in the Weekend Australian, Paul Kelly made the churlish observation that Gonski 1 was “an edifice to boost government school funding.”

Of course it was in the interests of government schools and their teachers, for the simple reason that they and their clientele – which includes the vast majority of the poor, the newly arrived, the disabled, the isolated and the Indigenous – had been short-changed for decades. If it was self-interest, it was very enlightened self-interest, and that is why the AEU’s efforts to mobilise mass support for Gonski were so strikingly successful. Gonski had cred, and so did they.

For the moment, however, they’ve lost it. In the course of the long, hard Gonski campaign, the teachers sometimes dwelt on the money rather than the purpose. But now they’re open to the perception that money is all they care about. “This new review is only a delaying tactic,” one state AEU president said, in tones as churlish as Paul Kelly’s.

Of course Birmingham’s drawn-out implementation plan and his big discount on the billions promised by Labor matter. But how much do they matter when stood alongside what the AEU has so passionately sought for a decade or more: sector-blind, needs-based funding? Not to mention that delicious icing on the cake, Birmingham’s hit list of “over-funded” schools.

Labor is managing to look even worse. When a couple of months ago Birmingham first dropped the phrase “over-funded non-government schools,” Labor education shadow Tanya Plibersek demanded to see his hit list. Tanya Plibersek! Not just the sensible and fair-minded MP capable of taking a position well before it becomes popular (on marriage equality, for instance), but the deputy leader of the party that has been traduced and perhaps even kept out of office by “hit list” hysteria – and which, even more than the teachers, claimed, through Gonski, the high moral ground.

That was a couple of months ago. Now, greater depths have been plumbed. Plibersek and Bill Shorten were entitled to say: You bastards! First you trash Gonski, then you back it, then you trash it again and now you say you’ll deliver it. Well, let’s hope you’ve at last realised that it’s a great thing for schools and for the idea of equality as well as an electoral asset. We’ll turn the other cheek. You dudded us, but we’ll back you – and when we’re in office, we’ll go one further. We’ll pay up, in full.

That’s what they could have said. What they actually said was all about the “political bastardry,” and the money – and not about its purpose-driven distribution or its effective use, but just amounts of money. And, talk about doing deals for the Catholics! This is vote-chasing politics at its most base, and politically stupid as well, likely to lose Labor more votes than the hard men of the Church can deliver, in an electorate sick of political games.

The Catholic hard men: Difficult though it is to imagine, the Catholics were Labor-aligned in the 1950s, and the bumbling amateurs of school politics. By the end of the 1960s, they had moved into the conservative camp, where they played the hardest of political hardball, and they have done so ever since. There have always been those in the Catholic school system and, to a lesser extent, inside the Church, who disliked that stance and behind closed doors said so. But it has been men like Stephen Elder, executive director of Catholic Education Melbourne, who have run the line.

“Catholic schools aren’t there to make a buck,” Elder declared in his response to Gonski 2. “Instead, they stem from a sense of service to the community.”

“Because they are born from a sense of service,” he continued, “we have always sought to make our schools open to as many people as possible. We have sought to keep them low-fee.” But now, “all this is under threat.” Many parish primary schools will have to double or triple their fees over the next decade and “parents will be forced to take other options for their children.”

This kind of humbug has, until now, worked. As recently as 2015 it delivered a sweetheart deal with the incoming Victorian Labor government entirely at odds with the “Gonski principles” that the government professed.

But the wheel is turning. The problem for the hard men is that they have been too successful, steadily driving towards a reality that now subverts the moral basis of their claims.

Fifty years ago, most Catholic families were working-class and most of their children were in Catholic schools, and those schools were impoverished to the point of collapse. Now, only half of all Catholic children are in Catholic schools, and the half that aren’t – almost certainly the poorer half – are in government schools. As George Pell pointed out more than a decade ago, “our schools now cater for the huge Australian middle class, which they helped to create.” Only one in five poor Catholic kids (Pell noted) goes to a Catholic school. “Catholic schools are not educating most of our poor.” 

The Catholics, moving upmarket, have flicked their “mission” to the government schools, which have not only vastly greater numbers of “disadvantaged” children and children with disabilities than the Catholic, but also a much higher proportion of their enrolments. What’s more, almost all of the steadily growing numbers in the nominally Catholic system are coming from non-Catholics.

Catholic schools, far from being impoverished, are better off than the government schools they once envied, and not just because they can tack fees on top of handsome subsidies from both state and federal governments. In a small but growing number of cases, Catholic schools get more from the public purse than do comparable government schools.

It is hard to know which is less edifying, the self-centred special pleading by representatives of the Catholic schools, or Shorten playing footsies with it.

Where now? Every one of the protagonists in this tale – from the patrician headmaster to the aggrieved teacher unionist, from Bill Shorten and Simon Birmingham to the spokesman for the Christian schools, indeed from the Catholic hard men to Gonski himself – is doing his or her thinking and claiming and proposing within a mental universe set by the circumstances that they address.

They all take as natural and, it would seem, eternal an arrangement that was cobbled together well within living memory, and which anyone with experience of schools systems elsewhere (including the system just across the Tasman) finds baffling, or just plain weird. It makes us, as deputy chair of the Karmel Committee, Jean Blackburn, observed, “a kind of wonder at which people [in other countries] gape.”

Nothing proposed first by Gonski and Labor and now by the Coalition and Gonski will in and of itself either solve our educational problems or bring to an end the chronic and massively debilitating conflict between sectors, governments and political parties. Nor will Gonski 1 or Gonski 2 in and of itself reverse the growing social and ethnic segregation of Australian schools and the accompanying problems of educational “performance” and inequality. Gonski, in whatever form, is an important step towards improvement on these fronts, but just one step of the several required.

On the educational and social side of the problem, more in a moment. On the structural problem: we are for the first time within shouting distance of a public discussion about a possibility that should have been discussed and carried out in the 1960s, as it was in countries as disparate as New Zealand and Finland.

Consider this: if all non-government schools, including the Catholic schools, were to be fully funded from the public purse in the way and to a level proposed by Labor and now by the Coalition – no fees to be paid, by anyone – the additional cost to the budget would be somewhere around $2 billion.

That is peanuts. It is around a third of the “extra” sought by Gonski 1, perhaps 4 or 5 per cent of the annual public recurrent spend on schools, and that is without counting the many offsets. No need for Stephen Elder to fret over those parents forced – forced! – “to take other options for their children.” He might even find himself free to spare a thought for that estimated half of Australian families who can’t afford to consider “other options” in the first place, or who live in places where there are no “other options.”

In the event of full public funding for Catholic schools, Mr Elder might legitimately worry that those schools would be “taken over” by government, or would lose their “special character.” That would be the moment to think about looking at arrangements in any one of dozens of countries to see what might be the best way to meet these entirely legitimate concerns in Australia’s distinctive circumstances. Some of the many possible solutions to be found elsewhere might even have the advantage of extending choice to those many who currently do without.

In other words, the educationally, socially and fiscally disastrous Whitlam/Karmel settlement of 1973 has, ironically, brought us back to a possibility that Karmel himself entertained more than forty years ago. As Karmel wrote:

The committee sees positive advantages in [a] drawing together of the public and private sectors, based… on a greater degree of independence in government schools and not on a decrease in the independence now open to schools outside government systems…

Such developments when taken together with changed patterns of funding open up the possibility of the eventual development of a school system itself diverse, where all schools supported by public money can operate without charging fees.

That was Labor’s adviser, decades ago. What should Labor do now?

It is important for schooling (and for the party) that Labor regain the high moral ground. That can’t be done by outbidding the Coalition or by cosying up to a Catholic leadership that has yet to grasp that its golden run is coming to an end. It can be done only by building on the Gonski platform, and doing so before Gonski 2 reports in December.

By all means persist with commitments to deliver funding as promised, but promise also an expansion of Gonski 1 in ways that tackle educational reform more directly, and that canvass the possibility of more thoroughgoing structural reform.

Some suggestions, offered with apologies to those who read all but the last of them a week or so ago:

• Labor should say very clearly that Gonski is vital, but neither Gonski nor any other single-focus reform can deliver, by itself, substantial educational improvement. It might underline the point by citing a list of necessary reforms prepared by the head of the Australian Council for Educational Research.

• Labor should say that Gonski 1 was right to regard improved “outcomes” of the PISA and NAPLAN kind as fundamental. But, Labor should now add, so are other things. The character and quality of life at school, differences in the social composition of schools, and “social” learning are all at least as important and no more difficult to measure and report on than “outcomes,” and that is what it should undertake to do.

• Gonski 1 wanted funding for need to go directly to the schools concerned. A problem for this commendable policy is that most schools have little or no experience in deciding how to spend money to greatest educational effect – that is, in finding the most cost-effective interventions. Nor do most researchers, captivated as they are by “effects,” but with no consideration of costs. A very good start has been made elsewhere in finding out how to get the most bang for the educational buck, and how to help schools do it. Labor should commit to a substantial program of R&D – not “research” – to adapt that approach to Australian circumstances.

• Doing a Gonski across schools is only half of the job; the other half is to do a Gonski within each school. Schools, too, should allocate their resources according to need. Gonski’s new dollars should be used to free up old ones, to mobilise the resources that already come through the school gate in frozen form. Labor should undertake to get the industrial parties to sit down and work out how to give schools more scope for aligning resources with need. It might even make the specific suggestion that the best starting point would be to move from a maximum size for every class to a maximum average class size.

• Gonski 1 recommended a new “national schools resourcing body.” That recommendation was the first of many to be discarded. It must be reinstated. No new funding scheme can work without it or its equivalent. Labor should commit to it.

• Finally, Labor should commit to establishing a review of a stature equal to Gonski to consider whether and how fees might be abolished for all schools and school systems willing to work within a charter of rights and obligations. The former should include parents’ right to choose appropriate schooling for their children, and the right of schools to maintain a “special character,” including a faith-based character. The latter should include a more widely shared responsibility for catering for all, and a common commitment to reversing the slide into ever-deeper social and ethnic segregation and to building more socially and educationally diverse school communities. •

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It probably won’t happen; both numbers rest on optimistic assumptions. But they imply that if this budget works as intended, 95 per cent of the job of turning our deficit to surplus will be achieved by Australians paying higher taxes, and only 5 per cent by spending cuts.

And this is a Coalition budget.

Last night treasurer Scott Morrison delivered what he called a “practical” budget. It is quite different from anything the government has delivered since taking office in 2013, quite different from all but one of Peter Costello’s budgets – the one that introduced the GST – and quite different from the rhetoric the Coalition has poured out for more than a generation in support of cutting taxes and spending.

This budget raises taxes and spending. It aims to repair the budget balance in the medium term yet weaken it even further in the short term. It is not that different from the budget that shadow treasurer Chris Bowen sketched out during the election campaign.

Labor lite? Some in the Abbott camp would call it Labor heavy, a tax-and-spend budget. Politically, this is a seachange for Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison. They have dumped the concerns of the right and headed out to plant the Liberal Party’s flag on the political middle ground, and take it back from Labor.

To me, it tells us that Turnbull is no longer worried about a threat to his leadership from Abbott. The enemy he is now focused on is Bill Shorten. And this politically bold budget has made giant strides in narrowing Shorten’s room to manoeuvre.

Is this a one-off shift, to break the impasse on reducing the budget deficit, with no wider consequences? Or is this, and the emergence last week of Gonski 2.0 to increase schools funding, a lasting change of tack? Is Malcolm Turnbull taking charge of his party, rather than letting it take charge of him, and steering it back to his natural habitat in the middle ground?

In economic terms, the budget is not perfect, but there are many good things. If you believe its numbers – and in some cases that’s challenging – it’s more of a tax, spend and save budget. In the next four years it aims to raise a net $20 billion of extra taxes, spend a net $14 billion of them, and put the other $6 billion towards reducing the budget deficit.

By and large, Morrison and his colleagues have chosen their tax victims with care. It will not be easy for Labor to fight the tax rises (although, seeing the outrage Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek are now voicing on behalf of overfunded Catholic schools, anything is possible). By and large, they have boosted spending in places where Australians want them to spend more – abandoning the harsh “zombie” spending cuts of Abbott’s 2014 budget. And by scrapping “savings” they could not deliver, and (at least notionally) keeping that $6 billion, they have improved their chances of finally getting the budget back into surplus.

The economics of this budget are not bad; the politics are quite extraordinary. Let’s start with that first.

Since he lost control of the tax reform debate at the start of last year, Malcolm Turnbull has appeared to be a prisoner of the Coalition’s conservative wing. He has backed away from positions he was previously identified with, on issues from tax reform to same sex marriage and climate change. As Abbott’s intention to take back the leadership became clearer, so did Turnbull’s retreat from his own views. On issue after issue, he seemed to be looking over his shoulder at his rival, asking, “What would Tony do?” and then doing it himself.

But the more Turnbull tried to please the Liberal right and the Nationals, the more he alienated mainstream Australia, those in the broad centre of public opinion. They have little interest in politics, but on many issues they hold the kind of views the right-wingers disparage as “Labor lite.” They want the budget deficit fixed, but not by harsh spending cuts like those proposed in the 2014 budget. They want their kids to go to well-funded schools. They want to have good hospitals there when they need them, they want good public transport as well as good roads, and they don’t see why the Coalition is holding up action on same sex marriage and climate change.

Abbott made no attempt to appeal to this broad centre, which was why he lost thirty Newspolls in a row. When Turnbull became PM, mainstream Australia greeted him as a saviour, but gradually soured on him as he failed to deliver. The only really significant reform Turnbull drove personally was the proposed refugee swap with the United States – but then ran into President Trump, with the result that, six months later, not one refugee has yet been freed.

The Coalition resumed its slide towards life in opposition. Since September it has lost eleven Newspolls in a row. It had reached that danger point where people were starting to switch off mentally, and stop listening to Turnbull. Unless he did something dramatic, or some rainbow of luck fell on him, it would soon be too late to revive his leadership – or the Coalition’s fortunes, since it had no other viable leader. 

When the WA election ended in a thrashing for the Coalition, I argued that the 2017 budget was the Turnbull government’s opportunity to reboot, and reoccupy the political middle ground. I can’t claim any credit, but that is exactly what it did yesterday. In many ways, this was like an election budget, except that it hit enough revenue targets to let the government reduce its overdraft, rather than simply hand out more largesse.

Don’t underestimate this change. For years, Coalition treasurers and shadow treasurers have chanted the mantra “no new taxes.” In their policy decisions, the two parties repeatedly looked after the rich, and took money off the poor. Under the Howard government, the Bureau of Statistics estimates, the Gini coefficient, the measure of inequality, shot up from 0.29 to 0.34. Howard got away with it, because he was a masterly politician, and a lucky one. But that’s a rare combination.

The 2017 budget is quite the opposite. It plans to gradually withdraw money from overfunded schools, and distribute it where it is most needed. It puts a new tax on five big banks (the CBA, Westpac, ANZ, NAB and Macquarie, raising $6.2 billion over four years). It puts a new tax on employers who import skilled workers ($1.2 billion, earmarked for a fund to train Australians in skills), closes a loophole on rental investors claiming dodgy deductions ($800 million), and beefs up Tax Office resources to take on tax avoiders (hoping for $1 billion from the black economy and the Mafia, and another $1.6 billion from tax cheats in the building industry). Not too many votes lost there.

The banks of course will pass on the tax to their customers. Grattan Institute chief John Daley estimates that it could add an extra 0.03 or 0.04 per cent to mortgage interest rates. The government can’t stop them; Morrison’s only threat was to direct the overworked Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to investigate when they do so, and expose them for passing on a tax intended to be paid by their shareholders.

The tax is justified as an annual insurance premium for the implicit government guarantee of bank borrowing, which allows the banks to borrow money on global markets far more cheaply than otherwise. When Labor tried to impose a similar tax, at the urging of the Reserve Bank and other financial regulators, the Coalition blocked it in the Senate. How times change.

The biggest single revenue measure is an across-the-board tax on most of us: a further 0.5 per cent rise in the Medicare levy from 2019, in order to fund the unfunded half of the National Disability Insurance Scheme. I doubt that many Australians will complain about that. They want the NDIS in place, they know it has to be paid for, and the Medicare levy is a fair and appropriate way of doing it.

Yet you could not have imagined the government doing it a year ago, or imposing any of the other tax rises. It inherited a budget deficit of $37 billion, promptly blew it out to $48 billion with unfunded spending, and has reduced it only back to $38 billion for 2016–17. The Coalition’s first three years failed to reduce the deficit at all. Whatever it saved in spending cuts was immediately spent on other things, or given away in tax cuts. The budget is still spending $1.09 for every $1 of revenue it raises.

Morrison has again blamed the Senate for frustrating the spending cuts proposed in the 2014 budget – the 20 per cent cut in university funding, for instance, and making young people wait six months before going on the dole. In fact, those measures would have saved only $3 billion a year. The Senate has been used as a scapegoat for the government’s lack of fiscal discipline.

But on that front, Scott Morrison’s second budget has made three significant changes. First, if its numbers are right, its policy decisions will raise a net $6.25 billion – entirely between 2019 and 2021 – to reduce the deficit and then ensure a surplus. (The numbers are dodgy, though, because they assume a rapid rebound of wages growth from less than 2 per cent now to 3.75 per cent by 2020–21. Wages growth lifts income tax, which lifts the budget’s bottom line.)

Second, by committing the Coalition to raise taxes, Morrison has opened the way to finally getting the budget back under control, and not just promising to do it.

A relevant comparison: in the eight years after the Howard government introduced the GST, its revenues averaged 25.4 per cent of GDP and its spending 24.2 per cent. If these budget projections are right, by 2020–21 revenues will again be 25.4 per cent of GDP, and spending 25 per cent – of which roughly 1 per cent will be on the NDIS, which did not exist in Howard’s time.

Third, the budget abandons the remaining unpassed spending cuts from its first term in government. This worsens its bottom line by $13 billion over four years, but restores its honesty and credibility. Unfortunately, the budget also proposes new spending cuts that are unlikely to pass the Senate – its second attempt to squeeze billions of dollars from university students and new graduates is likely to die the same death as its first – but they are of a lesser order, and the bargaining on them has yet to begin.

The main spending cuts were flagged well in advance, with a bit of dissonance last week when, on successive days, education minister Simon Birmingham outlined big cuts to funding for the university sector – including a 5 per cent cut in university funding, and accelerated repayments by young graduates with HECS/HELP debts – followed by big increases in funding for schools.

Tertiary education is already Australia’s third-biggest export industry, and if nurtured well, it could provide a vital source of income for the nation for generations. Yet Birmingham was instructed to come up with savings as big as those the Senate has rejected since 2014. What is the benefit to Australia in cutting university budgets, or in creating disincentives for young people to study? I don’t get it, and I’d be surprised if the Senate does either.

The proposed freeze on family benefit payments, announced in March, continues a squeeze by governments of both sides, which is gradually turning family benefits from a near-universal right of parents into a welfare measure for the poor. I, for one, regret this. Children are the future of the country, and parents face high costs in raising them. The family benefit is a contribution made by society at large to those costs. A welfare system without universal benefits is one subject to perverse poverty traps, which reduce incentives to work. We should thoroughly debate this one.

Take away the decision to scrap the zombie spending cuts and, on paper, the rest of the budget’s new spending initiatives are roughly balanced out by spending cuts. In practice, the new spending is far more likely to get through the Senate than the cuts are. The cuts include the latest round of whack-the-unemployed, a new “three strikes” policy which would see repeat offenders lose half a payment the next time they breach the rules (such as missing an appointment), lose a full payment the time after that, and be thrown off all support for a month if they commit a third breach.

A second measure would allow welfare recipients to be put on the cashless debit card if they cite a drug episode or hangover as an excuse for missing an appointment. A third measure proposes a random trial in which 5000 young people on welfare would be tested for drug use, with a similar penalty if they test positive. Morrison told journalists this would help them get off welfare, since drug dependency is often a key factor keeping them out of work.

Other important spending measures include lifting the freeze on Medicare benefits, which was not going down well in the bush or in marginal seats. Some very expensive new drugs will be added to the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, and paid for by forcing manufacturers to reduce the price of older drugs. But how to restrain the growth in health costs is another issue we really need to debate.

There is no space here to debate the new school funding model, which has been well covered in Inside Story by Dean Ashenden and in the Financial Review by Tim Dodd.

Overall, this is a budget with more to applaud than oppose. But some of it is tricky, and nowhere more so than in one of its key selling points: infrastructure. 

You’ve heard the sales pitch. More than $70 billion of investment in new roads, rail, airports and bridges over the eight years to 2020–21. The Commonwealth to build its own rival to Sydney airport out in Western Sydney, and fund road and rail links to it. A $10 billion National Rail Program to fund regional and urban rail improvements. A further $8.4 billion to build the Melbourne-to-Brisbane inland rail. $1 billion for Victoria, half of it pledged to regional rail. The Commonwealth to help fund the new Labor government’s Metronet scheme in Perth. There’s a lot happening here.

Morrison has talked up this sort of spending as “good debt,” an investment in the future which should be paid for largely by the future taxpayers who benefit from it. If well chosen, projects like these generate economic and social returns which more than cover their cost. Borrowing to build them is different from borrowing to pay for your current spending, which – apart from education spending – generates no such benefit in future.

I’m with him on that, and with Treasury when it argues in the budget papers that for the Commonwealth, even the net operating balance used by state governments as their budget bottom line doesn’t work. The money the Commonwealth gives the states to invest in road and rail appears in the budget as recurrent spending, not investment, because the Commonwealth is not doing investing itself. Take that out, Treasury says, and by 2018–19 the net operating balance – revenues minus recurrent spending – would be virtually back in balance, two years before the underlying cash balance gets there.

But there is no sign of this infrastructure spending binge in the budget papers. The two big projects – the Western Sydney airport and Inland Rail – are both being funded off-budget, like the National Broadband Network. The government will borrow up to $13.5 billion to invest in both projects as equity; but in the case of Inland Rail, it concedes that the project will still be in the red in fifty years’ time. Moving them both off-budget, but under Commonwealth ownership, means spending on them will not be counted in the budget’s bottom line.

The infrastructure spending recorded in the budget papers is set to fall, quite steeply, over the next four years: from $9.2 billion in 2017–18 to $5.1 billion in 2020–21. That might mean the government has decided its plans for next year, but not for four years’ time, which is fair enough; but if so, it means future spending growth might not be as restrained as the budget papers suggest – making the 2020–21 surplus less secure.

And when it comes to Victoria, the government is using theatrics to substitute for delivering the goods. The $1 billion infrastructure package in the budget is just an upgrade of the $877.4 million it has already offered Victoria in place of the $1.45 billion the state claims it is entitled to under the Commonwealth’s asset recycling initiative. It’s just prolonging the argument. Why not fix it?

On the data provided in the budget papers and ministerial statements, the Turnbull government plans to provide $3.9 billion in 2017–18 for transport infrastructure in the PM’s home state of New South Wales – $4.6 billion if you include a concessional loan to the WestConnex road project – yet just $796 million for Victoria. Victoria will get just 9 per cent of Turnbull government spending, New South Wales 45 per cent.

The funding for specific projects includes $1 billion for Sydney (excluding the WestConnex loan) but only $193 million for Melbourne. Of the $5.7 billion earmarked as grants for specific projects next year, 18 per cent will be invested in Sydney, and 3 per cent in Melbourne – which is taking almost a third of Australia’s population growth.

The Andrews government is difficult to deal with, but the Turnbull government shows no interest in reaching a solution. It acts like its priority is to look after New South Wales and Sydney. The PM’s claim last week that Victoria receives 20 per cent of road funding was false, and he surely knows that. Why allow this silly little parochial anti-Victorian bias to continue? Why not fix it, and move on to bigger issues?

Big issues are lying in wait. Yesterday’s budget papers barely mentioned climate change. But next month, chief scientist Alan Finkel will deliver his report on how Australia should meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 by 26–28 per cent from 2005 levels. That’s a 50 per cent reduction in emissions per capita – whereas, on the government’s own estimates, our emissions have risen by almost 2 per cent since the carbon tax was scrapped in 2014.

The budget brought back the old Malcolm Turnbull. It’s a long time since we’ve seen him around climate change policy; that’s been handled by the other Malcolm, the one who looks like Tony Abbott. His government’s budget shows a sea change in priorities – but will that extend to other areas? Its response on climate change will tell us. •

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The government says it will introduce needs-based, sector-blind funding for all schools, and spend more money over the coming decade to do it – all straight out of Gonski version 1. What’s more, it will get David Gonski, together with Gonski 1 panel member, the redoubtable Ken Boston, to fix one of its weak spots, making sure that more and better-distributed money does the needful. Gonski 1 was merely a “review of school funding.” Gonski 2 is a Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australia.

In its attempt at that very big ask, the review will face substantial obstacles, in the structure and politics of schooling, in the habitual practices of schools, and in unmeetable expectations.

The structure of schooling

Gonski 1 was asked to make workable Australia’s unique and dysfunctional Rubik’s Cube, a school “system” comprising two levels of government, both of them heavily involved in each of three sectors, a two-by-three set-up replicated in each of eight states and territories.

The Gonski fix was ingenious but, thanks to its terms of reference, far from complete. It recommended that state/territory and federal governments agree on a funding total and their respective contributions; that every school gets a basic level of funding plus loadings according to the size of its educational task, as indicated by its location and demographics; that the loadings go direct to the schools concerned; and that a new “national schools resourcing body” should oversee the new allocation system and do the research needed to refine it.

All that was a big improvement on what everyone agrees was a wildly inequitable and haphazard set-up, but it did not dismantle the Rubik’s Cube.

The federal government would continue to be deeply involved in the schools business, against very good arguments (including several pushed by Coalition governments) for getting the Commonwealth out of schooling altogether.

It left the fee/free distinction intact, and hence left those families struggling to pay to go on struggling while other families, well able to pay, went on enjoying the free schooling provided by government schools, and often in de jure or de facto selective schools, at that. It left the fee-charging schools able to charge whatever they liked, and guaranteed that none would be worse off in any future funding regime.

Moreover, Gonski 1 was prohibited from saying a word about the bizarre arrangement that allows some schools to select and exclude according to religion and/or capacity to pay and/or academic capacity, while others are forbidden to select or exclude anyone at all – a rigging of the regulatory game that, in tandem with funding arrangements and the real estate market, has been driving high and rising levels of social segregation and educational inequality for forty years.

That was Gonski 1. There is nothing in the government’s announcements to suggest that Gonski 2 will be asked to review any of these fundamental structural problems. Nor is there any reference to reinstating Gonski’s proposed national schools resourcing body, which would have moderated the structural problem.

The practice of schooling

The government’s rhetoric in announcing Gonski 2 is as myopically fixed on “outcomes” (aka PISA results) as its predecessor’s. Schools don’t and shouldn’t just produce “outcomes” in this or any other sense. At least as important are what students learn about themselves and others in and through the “informal” or “hidden” curriculum, and the quality and character of the experience of being at school. Schools should be encouraged to pay as much attention to their “performance” in these areas as to academic outcomes. In that, Gonski 2 has been given a bad start.

It also inherits other problems from Gonski 1. The first Gonski’s argument was that the harder the educational job, the more resources the school needs to do it. Gonski did not see this as just a fair go or a helping hand, but as the price of delivering an educational service. That is why it wanted the extra money to go direct to the schools concerned – so that they, in turn, could buy the services they needed to deliver in their specific circumstances. As well, Gonski wanted to maximise the impact of new money by concentrating it in a relatively small proportion of schools.

This commendable approach came with several problems: it depended on the schools’ bureaucratic masters to pass the money on, which, in scattered attempts at “implementation,” some did and most didn’t; it depended on schools knowing how best to use the new money; and, in the nature of being “extra,” it left the expenditure of the great bulk of the school’s resources going on doing what they have always done, which does not include deploying effort according to need.

Of these several limitations, the last is the most important. Doing a Gonski across schools is only half of the job; the other is to do a Gonski within each school.

Politics

The Rubik’s Cube might have been deliberately designed to generate conflict, and to give any aggrieved party, sector or government an effective power of veto.

The Catholic systems, easily the best-organised and most relentless of the veto-possessors, have already made unhappy noises about Gonski 2. Their allies in the independent sector will probably be more circumspect in public, but not behind the scenes.

Then there are the states and territories. The education minister says that he “looks forward to working constructively with states and territories to see implementation of these reforms” and that “delivery of reforms will be a condition of funding for states.” Good luck with that. His first offer is substantially below that once proposed by Labor, and the risk is that Gonski 2 will, like its predecessor, degenerate into a stand-off over funding amounts and shares.

And, finally, the politics. Last time around the problem was between the parties. That will be joined this time by the clash of ideologies within the Coalition. Tony Abbott and others have professed a sense of special affiliation with and obligation to the non-government sectors. Can Turnbull carry the day within his own party room? Indeed, come December, when Gonski presents his second report, will Turnbull still be prime minister?

Expectations

In the eighteen months between the release of the Gonski report in February 2012 and the federal election in September 2013, the campaign in support turned into a near-crusade. Gonski became in many minds a miracle cure, the answer to all of the many problems in schools and schooling.

The prime minister and his education minister have already reignited those flames with talk of ending “150 years of inequity” and delivering “consistency in Australian school funding for the first time ever.” Turnbull and Birmingham risk joining a long list, headed by Gough Whitlam, of those claiming to have put the “state aid” problem to rest. As for “achieving educational excellence in Australia,” the depth and complexity of schooling’s problems are such that Gonski 1 was only one step of several required. Gonski 2 is guaranteed to be a failure, and to be seen as one, if it is expected to “achieve educational excellence in Australia.”

Managing the impossible

Gonski 2 cannot solve all those problems, but it can manage them.

• It should manage expectations by saying very clearly that neither it nor any other single-focus reform can do the needful. It might underline the point by citing a list of necessary reforms prepared by the head of the Australian Council for Educational Research. Gonski 2 should also suggest that governments make good use of the next few years to work out what to do at the expiry of any agreement it might recommend, including what to do about the many remaining components of the Rubik’s Cube – the fee/free distinction, federal government involvement in schooling, and the current regulatory mess particularly.

• The second Gonski review should say that academic outcomes  and their more equal distibution are fundamental, but so are other things. It should point out that the character and quality of life at school and “social” learning are at least as important and as easy to measure and report on as “outcomes,” and should be treated as such.

• Most schools have little or no experience in deciding how to spend money to greatest educational effect – that is, in finding the most cost-effective interventions. Nor do most researchers, captivated as they are by “effects,” with no consideration of costs. A very good start has been made elsewhere in finding out how to get most bang for the educational buck, and how to help schools do it. Gonski 2 should recommended a substantial program of R&D – not “research” – to adapt that approach to Australian circumstances.

• Gonski 2 should also suggest that new dollars be used to free up old ones, to mobilise the resources that already come through the school gate in frozen form. It should recommend that the government encourage the industrial parties to sit down and work out how to give schools more scope for aligning resources with need. It might even make the specific suggestion that the best starting point would be a move from fixed class size maximums to average class sizes.

• Gonski 1 recommended a new “national schools resourcing body.” No new funding scheme can work without it or its equivalent, and Gonski 2 should say so. 

A final recommendation, not for Gonski 2 but for its political masters.

Gonski 2 can only succeed on a broad base of support. That does not exist. It must be built. In their announcement of Gonski 2, the prime minister and his minister headed in the opposite direction, blaming Labor for “trading away the principles of ‘Gonski’ for political expediency,” and claiming that it is “acting to right Labor’s wrongs.”

It is true that Labor bungled the Gonski process and delivered a new arrangement almost as incompetent as the old. But two other things are also true. Gonski was Labor’s idea in the first place. As can be seen from the several reviews generated in the early days of the Coalition government, had it been left to the Coalition it would never have come up with anything like Gonski. If Labor is going to get blame for the bungle, it should also get the credit for the only fully fledged, carefully thought-out, politically smart, well-evidenced and well-argued schooling reform strategy in many decades.

And if the Coalition is going to hand out blame, it should also cop it. Senator Birmingham’s predecessor played the Gonski spoiler from the moment of its release, opposing it root and branch, and fomenting opposition and subversion by his Coalition colleagues in the states and territories. Worse, at the eleventh electoral hour in 2013, when Gonski looked like a winner, the predecessors of the present prime minister and education minister declared a “unity ticket” on Gonski, then tore it up again the moment they were safely in office.

If teacher organisations and others fail to trust Gonski 2, the government has only itself to blame. It has the chance to redeem itself, but it won’t if it prefers cheap political shots to giving Gonski 2 a platform of consensus from which to speak. •

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The new English-language requirement represents “a significant change” from the basic skill required at the moment, says immigration minister Peter Dutton. “We increase that to IELTS Level 6 equivalent, so that is at a competent English-language proficiency level, and I think there would be wide support for that as well.”

He’s not wrong. This is not just a significant change; it is a fundamental break. To see why, you have to understand how high a barrier Level 6 of the IELTS – the International English Language Testing System – will be for many new migrants.

In 2015, ACIL Allen Consulting evaluated the Adult Migrant English Program, or AMEP. Its report is the most up-to-date assessment of the English literacy of recent migrants. Unfortunately, AMEP doesn’t use the IELTS system, so a clean comparison of new migrants’ scores isn’t possible. Instead, we need to translate AMEP’s system, the International Second Language Proficiency Rating, or ISLPR, into IELTS equivalents using what information we can find on the public record:

• Answering a 2006 Senate estimates question, the immigration department said an ISLPR 2 is approximately equal to IELTS 4 or 5.

• In the ACIL Allen review, an AMEP service provider is quoted as saying that an “ISLPR 2” is equal to IELTS 4.5.

• In a submission to the Productivity Commission’s migration intake inquiry, David Ingram, a linguist who was involved in devising both of these language testing systems, said that “universities that require IELTS 6 for entry to particular courses usually require 3 in all macroskills on the ISLPR.”

We can infer that IELTS 6, the level of English proposed by the Turnbull government to be eligible for Australian citizenship, is equal to ISLPR 3. And what proportion of new migrants get a score of ISLPR 3 after completing their government-allotted 500 hours of English training in the AMEP?

None. Zero per cent. Of the AMEP attendees who completed 500 hours of training between 2004 and 2012, 0 per cent of new migrants reached the level required for the new citizenship test.

As ACIL Allen found, 28 per cent of AMEP clients leave the program with scores of 0 or 0+ (“zero or formulaic,” the lowest levels of proficiency) on all four ISLPR elements: reading, writing, listening and speaking. Just 7 per cent of clients exit at ISLPR 2 (social proficiency, the equivalent of IELTS 4.5) after receiving 500 hours.

The Adult Migrant English Program’s performance in reducing the proportion of clients scoring at the lowest levels (0 or 0+) on the International Second Language Proficiency Rating, or ISLPR.

Source: AMEP Evaluation: Report to the Department of Education and Training, ACIL Allen Consulting, May 2015.

In 2004–05, about 20,000 new migrants enrolled in AMEP, a number that grew to about 30,000 in 2011–12. Sixty per cent of the new migrants in AMEP classes are women and children. Of course, many new migrants do not attend AMEP classes for a variety of reasons. In 2014–15, about 80 per cent of eligible humanitarian migrants, 20 per cent of eligible family migrants and 8 per cent of eligible skilled migrants attended AMEP.

What these figures show is that somewhere north of 30,000 people each year would be ineligible for Australian citizenship under the new rules. While a proportion will increase their English proficiency with time, outside the classroom, language proficiency research shows that this is a slow and gruelling process.

Using conservative estimates of the three key elements – AMEP enrolment trends, the rate of English proficiency improvement over time, and net migration trends – anywhere between 30,000 and 40,000 new migrants each year are highly unlikely to meet the proposed English proficiency level for Australian citizenship in their first decade of settlement.

Over time, this will generate a growing population of people excluded from citizenship. It’s impossible to say with any certainty what this will look like over the long term, but the available evidence suggests a substantial number of people will never receive Australian citizenship.

Some people might say these new migrants will simply have to learn and this is a good incentive to get it right. This “tough love” argument should be called out for what it is: a willingness to see people permanently excluded from our society. No voting. No standing for public office. Exclusion from many public service jobs. The possibility of expulsion from Australia by visa cancellation.

Given that 35 per cent of humanitarian migrants score the equivalent of an IELTS 2 after their AMEP classes finish, the new rules will specifically refuse citizenship to a significant proportion of refugee migrants to Australia. This is despite the fact that the figures reveal that refugees appear to love Australia more than any other group of migrants – at least if you measure this according to their higher propensity to seek citizenship.

Others might say this means we need to give people much more English-language support and training. Perhaps this is true. But we also need to recognise that coming to a new country is really difficult. It’s hard enough for rich, English-speaking migrants. But think about a Sudanese single mother with four children who is illiterate in her own language. To introduce a formal English-language test requiring IELTS 6 is to tell this woman she isn’t welcome as an Australian citizen. And if you think this is a handpicked example on the margins of our migration program, Australia granted 1277 “Woman at Risk” visas in 2015–16 as part of the annual humanitarian program, for “protection of refugee women who are in particularly vulnerable situations.”

And this doesn’t even get into the potential for married couples to be separated by an English-language test, or for children to pass easily but have to watch their parents excluded.

IELTS Level 6 is by no means perfect English. You can read this practice essay and scoff, if you like, at the simple errors highlighted. The official definition is this:

Generally, you have an effective command of the language despite some inaccuracies, inappropriate usage and misunderstandings. You can use and understand fairly complex language, particularly in familiar situations.

But the practical effects of imposing this standard are immense. It amounts to the deliberate exclusion of thousands of new migrants from Australian citizenship. Back in 2015, on the same topic, I wrote, “The worst outcome is permanent exclusion from society because barriers to entry are too high. An English-language test for citizenship would be such a barrier. This exclusion would occur despite an indefinite right to remain in Australia. A tiered, broken system of residency with little long-term hope.”

While almost all Australians believe speaking English is an important part of what makes someone an Australian, is this the type of society we want to live in? •

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“Regardless of their own socioeconomic background,” report the authors of the Australian Council for Educational Research’s analysis of the PISA results, “students enrolled in a school with a high average socioeconomic background tended to perform at a higher level than students enrolled in a school with a low average socioeconomic background.” The same comments appeared, almost verbatim, in ACER’s 2012 and 2009 PISA analyses.

This observation captures a phenomenon that educational researchers variously call the compositional effect, the neighbourhood effect, or the peer effect – the intuitive idea that a student’s learning will be affected by the other children in his or her class, cohort or even school. Academically motivated students can bring a wealth of background knowledge to a class, contribute to a shared sense of the value of education, and spur each other on to new heights. Disruptive students reduce the time other students spend on task and the time the teacher devotes to imparting the curriculum and helping other students.

As much as teachers seek to differentiate learning experiences for individual students, they ultimately teach a group. Assessments of a group’s overall ability will affect which texts are chosen, how lessons are pitched, and how units are designed. Given the repeated finding that numerous years of learning can separate the highest- and lowest-performing students, the mix of students in a class can lead learning in very different directions. A school in which student engagement is low and misbehaviour high may also find it correspondingly difficult to recruit teachers.

On average, negative peer effects are associated with students from disadvantaged social backgrounds (and positive effects with students from advantaged backgrounds). And the effect on student academic achievement can be large: ACER’s report finds that “the social composition of schools had just as strong an impact on the likelihood of being a low achiever as a student’s own family background.” 

As the co-author of ACER’s report, Sue Thomson, explains, “Disadvantaged students in average socioeconomic level schools, for example, are almost a year of schooling higher than those in disadvantaged schools.” Similarly, she says, “disadvantaged students in advantaged schools are more than one year of schooling higher than those in average socioeconomic level schools.” 

The impact can be seen in the chart below, which maps students’ scientific literacy against the average socioeconomic background of a school’s student population. A “disadvantaged” school is one in which the average student is in the lowest socioeconomic quartile. In an “affluent” school, the average student is in the highest quartile. Strikingly, a disadvantaged student (from the lowest quartile) who attends an affluent school will generally outperform an advantaged student (from the highest quartile) who attends a disadvantaged school.

Scientific literacy achievement of students and schools by socioeconomic background

Source: Figure 6.7, PISA 2015: Reporting Australia’s Results, by Sue Thomson, Lisa De Bortoli and Catherine Underwood, Australian Council for Educational Research

ACER is by no means alone in its conclusions about the significance of peer effects. In 2011 the NSW Department of Education charted the literacy and numeracy performance of its students against the average socioeconomic background of students at the schools they attended. In the department’s words, “The results confirm the often found link between a school’s average SES and educational outcomes.” Melbourne University’s Richard Teese replicated the NSW study in Victoria, using data for government and non-government schools. Teese found that, “as in New South Wales, so in Victoria, the higher the social mix of students, the better the performance of a student – from all social backgrounds.”

Reyn van Ewijk, professor of statistics and econometrics at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, performed a meta-analysis of thirty studies on peer effects. With his co-author Peter Sleegers, he found a test-score effect of .32 standard deviations every time the average socioeconomic status of a student’s peer group increased by one standard deviation. “There’s always a debate on the exact size of the peer effect,” Van Ewijk told me. “That the effect exists and that it’s substantial, I would say that’s generally accepted.” If there is little doubt about the significance of peer effects, how should policy-makers respond? The Gonski review proposed an additional funding loading for schools with high concentrations of disadvantaged students. It stands to reason that when and where the review’s recommendations are fully implemented, they will make a difference over time. Support from speech and occupational therapists, community liaison officers, numeracy and literacy specialists and additional teaching and support staff will clearly contribute to students’ ability to learn.

Their peers will also benefit. Extra resources are likely to free up teacher time for the rest of the class and, by helping students with learning difficulties, make them less likely to disrupt the learning of others. “The whole idea of positive intervention from a funding point of view,” Richard Teese argues, “is to enable teachers to compensate for peer effects. It permits the teachers to raise the bar in contexts which are disadvantaged.” As Van Ewijk points out, “The most obvious way to reduce the impact of peer effects is to make sure the system is less segregated.” While students (or their parents) may appear to be locked in a zero-sum competition, seeking access to schools with as many students from advantaged backgrounds as possible, Van Ewijk says it’s not that simple. A wide array of research indicates that low socioeconomic status children are much more dependent on school for their learning. The children of high-income, tertiary-educated professionals are more likely to make up at home for any deficiencies at school. The result, Van Ewijk explains, is that “if you completely mix or desegregate, high socioeconomic status kids will lose a bit but the gains for low socioeconomic status kids are bigger.”

Australia’s education policy settings, on the contrary, ensure our children are sorted into schools characterised by heavy concentrations of disadvantage and privilege. By providing non-government schools with almost the same amount of public funding as government schools but allowing them to charge unregulated fees and choose whom they enrol, we ensure that disadvantaged students are significantly over-represented in government schools. Selective government schools, which overwhelmingly enrol children from privileged backgrounds, make this situation worse. Grouped together with similarly disadvantaged peers in comprehensive government schools, disadvantaged students are challenged not only by their own family backgrounds but also by highly negative peer effects. The odds against these kids are doubled.

In the short term, federal education minister Simon Birmingham’s announcement in coming weeks on the future of funding arrangements will be critical. In the long run, the structural arrangements that concentrate disadvantaged students into the same schools need to be challenged. “You’ve got two policies fighting each other,” Teese says. “The more you push choice, the more you promote that and finance it, the more you create segregation at the school level, and the more you advantage the advantaged. And therefore you try to compensate for that to make up for the deleterious effects you’ve created through your choice policy.” •

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The term “credentialism” is used in many different ways, some of them contradictory, but the implication is consistent: too many young people are getting too much formal education, at too high a level. This implication was spelt out recently by Dean Ashenden, who contends that “education has not just grown to meet the expanding needs of the post-industrial economy, but has exploded like an airbag.”

The claim that young people are getting too much education, and the supporting critique of credentialism, is pernicious and false. To explain this, it is necessary to disentangle a range of concepts commonly associated with the term credentialism in public debate. These include:

• Legal requirements that particular jobs can only be performed by people with a specific educational credential. I’ll call this “formal credentialism.”

• Employer preference for university graduates to fill jobs that would once have been filled by high school graduates.

• The replacement of on-the-job training by formal educational courses in specific occupations. In particular, this includes replacing apprenticeships, as a way of obtaining credentials, with classroom training.

• The problem of people with formal credentials not obtaining the jobs associated with those credentials.

• Demand for university education among young people (or their parents) who might once have gained a trade qualification.

Let’s take these points in turn. The stress on formal credentialism – the specific requirement for an educational qualification to be a member of a defined profession – is a phenomenon whose time has passed. The traditionally male-dominated professions, such as medicine, law, accounting and engineering, took their present, credentialled forms in the nineteenth century or early in the twentieth. Traditionally female-dominated professions, such as teaching and nursing, lagged a little, but the process was completed for teachers by the 1960s and for nurses by the 1980s.

In at least some discussions of credentialism, this seems to be treated as a continuing process. In reality, though, the newer professional occupations associated with the information economy, such as programmers, systems analysts and social media experts, have no such formal structure. The same is true of twenty-first-century job categories like “sustainability adviser” or “event planner.” Although plenty of courses cover such subjects, no specific requirements or standardised job definitions exist. 

Rather than obtaining formal credentials, typical new professionals combine training and experience relevant to their occupation with general skills acquired through school and university education: written and verbal communication, research skills, the capacity to organise projects independently, and so on. Job titles and responsibilities are generally fluid, and the same person may shift between a number of related occupations over the course of a career.

A more relevant basis for concerns about credentialism is the increasing preference of employers to hire university graduates to fill office and service sector jobs when a job with the same title might once have been filled by a high school graduate. The best evidence on this topic comes from the United States.

The proportion of jobs classified by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics as typically requiring at least an associate degree has risen steadily over time, and is now around 26 per cent. But the proportion of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds enrolled in degree-granting post-secondary institutions is around 36 per cent.

A 2013 New York Times article dramatised this under the headline “It Takes a B.A. to Find a Job as a File Clerk,” reporting on firms that hire only people with a bachelor’s degree, even for jobs that “do not require college-level skills.” The report canvassed a number of reasons why firms might prefer to hire college graduates as file clerks, but missed the most obvious one. A file clerk today is routinely expected to have database management skills that far exceed anything that might have been asked of a similarly titled employee a few decades ago, when computers were the province of experts operating in specially air-conditioned rooms.

Similarly, as email has replaced telephone calls and face-to-face communications, office jobs of all kinds now require skills in written communication that were less important in the past. A university graduate can generally be assumed to have acquired such skills, regardless of their specific qualification. The other side of the computerisation coin is that much of the routine work (photocopying, manual data entry and so on) that used to be associated with office jobs has disappeared. 

This is one instance of a more general point. Just as the proportion of unskilled jobs in the economy has declined, the skill requirements for jobs have changed. Even where this is not recognised in a changed job title (executive assistant replacing secretary, for example), the reality is obvious. Where unskilled work in professional and semi-professional occupations has not been eliminated by technological change, it has commonly been assigned to lower-status workers. Much of the physical work once undertaken by nurses, for instance, is now done by nurses’ aides.

These processes in turn help to explain the gradual replacement of on-the-job training (“sitting next to Sally”) by classroom instruction. The viability of on-the-job training depends on the existence of simple tasks that can be performed by an unskilled new starter. The willingness of “Sally” to provide training as part of her job reflected the fact that such tasks could be handed over to the apprentice. But, as the file clerk example illustrates, the kind of routine office work suitable for an unskilled on-the-job learner has largely disappeared. In most offices, a high school graduate requiring training would be a liability rather than an asset. 

An obvious implication of this process is that much of the training that was once done on the job is now undertaken in classrooms. Someone seeking a job as a file clerk, for instance, would be well advised to acquire a knowledge of computer programs such as Microsoft Office, and an understanding of database management. This is likely to be done more efficiently in a classroom setting than by osmosis in a busy office.

The flipside of the complaint that jobs not requiring a university education are being taken by graduates is that many graduates are employed in jobs that don’t require their credential. This complaint is implicitly directed at an extreme version of credentialism, presupposing a one-for-one match between jobs and credentials. The implied policy is a system of central planning, in which the education system has been designed to ensure that there is no excess supply or shortage of workers of any given kind. Showing that this extreme kind of credentialism hasn’t worked is taken to be a demonstration that there is too much education of all kinds.

Finally, the view that people attending university might be better off getting a trade qualification is a false dichotomy. Some kinds of skilled trades provide wages comparable to those of university graduates. But they typically require a lengthy training period in which the importance of formal education, in trade schools or similar institutions, is increasing over time. The relevant choice for society as a whole is not between different forms of post-school education, but between higher and lower participation in post-school education.

Ever since the rise of the industrial economy in the nineteenth century, technological change has replaced unskilled human labour with the work of machines. Some skills have also become obsolete, but the overall tendency has been to require ever-higher levels of average skill in the workforce. The rise of information technology since the mid twentieth century has extended the process to routine information processing of all kinds, from running messages to adding up accounts. 

If the mix of skills in the workforce doesn’t change, the effect would be to increase the demand for skilled workers, and reduce that for unskilled workers, thereby increasing inequality. 

Having made this case, it’s important to reject the idea that education represents a panacea for the growth of inequality. This idea is wrong in two ways. First, the skill-biased nature of technological change means that, unless the supply of skilled and educated workers increases over time, the skill premium will rise, as it has done over the past thirty years or more. Put simply, it’s necessary to run hard even to keep still. 

Second, while growing wage inequality is important, the biggest contributor to increased inequality is the growth in the share of national income going to profits and to the financial sector. Expansion of education is not going to fix this, at least not directly. A better-educated electorate might well see through some of the spurious claims made by the defenders of inequality and elect governments committed to producing better social and economic outcomes. But at least in the recent past, the votes of the educated have not been sufficient to produce such outcomes.

An increase in average levels of educational attainment is not a sufficient condition for a more equal and productive society, but it is a necessary condition. Attacks on “credentialism” and the resulting devaluation of education serve to support an increasingly unequal society. The fact that these attacks are commonly put forward by people who have themselves benefited from education, and have no intention of depriving their own children of those benefits, only makes matters worse. •

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Given the number of middle-aged men in lycra pedalling to work in this city, I guess your local equivalent is the bloke on the Brisbane bikeway.

We presented the Gonski report to the federal government in December 2011. More than five years, four federal governments and two elections later, what, I wonder, does the bloke on the Brisbane bikeway understand about the report and what has happened as a result?

Like the man on the Clapham omnibus, his views will be drawn from newspapers, radio and television.

First, he almost certainly believes that the Gonski report said additional funding was the key to improving Australian education. Second, he probably believes that the Gillard and Rudd governments adopted Gonski by reaching “Gonski agreements” with the states, and promising additional “Gonski funding.”

Third, if he reads the Fairfax press, he will think that most of the problems facing Australian education will be solved if we get the last two years of “Gonski funding.” But fourth, if he reads the Murdoch press, he is likely to think that socioeconomic status has little bearing on educational outcomes, and that the differences between low-achieving and high-achieving schools are caused by poor teaching, inadequate curriculum, low standards, and lack of school autonomy.

Fifth, and regardless of which newspaper he reads, he believes that non-government schools save money for the government. And finally, he almost certainly believes that the two sides of politics are poles apart, and that no easy solution is in the offing.

I want to challenge these beliefs by explaining some of the thinking behind the Gonski report, going back to the government’s response, and answering some of the criticisms made of the report. Finally, I want to look at the post-Gonski realities of 2017.

Where, rather than how much

First, the Gonski report did not see additional funding as the key to improving Australian education. Its most critical recommendations were about the redistribution of existing funding to individual schools on the basis of measured need.

The report envisaged the amount allocated to independent schools being based on the measured need of each individual school, and the amounts allocated to Catholic and government systems being determined by the sum of the measured needs of the individual schools within each system – a process of building funding up from the bottom.

This is in sharp contrast to the process of the last forty years: top-down political negotiation by the federal government with state governments, independent school organisations, church leaders, teacher unions and others. The outcome has been that the funding allocations to independent schools, state Catholic education commissions and the state government systems are arrived at without any agreed and common system of assessing real need at the level of each individual school.

School funding has been, and continues to be, essentially based on a political settlement, sector-based and largely needs-blind. The Gonski report proposed that school funding be determined on an educational, not political, basis, sector-blind, entirely needs-based, and built up by aggregation of individual school needs from the bottom, not flowing down from the top.

Further, the report envisaged that, instead of a large part of this recurrent funding being spent in schools that don’t need it on things that matter little in terms of education outcomes, the strategically redistributed funding should be spent in schools that need it, and on the things that matter in the classroom.

We understood, of course, that funding is a means to an end, not an end in itself. In our final chapter, we set out some priorities for expenditure: quality teaching and school leadership, local deployment and management of resources, innovative approaches to teaching and learning, effective engagement with parents and the community, and quality assurance mechanisms. We were cognisant of the critical classroom factors for success, based on research by Michael Fullan, John Hattie and many others: instructional leadership by the principal and senior staff, diagnostic assessment, differentiated teaching, and tiered interventions to extend high-achieving students and support those falling behind.

We concluded that an additional $5 billion might be needed on top of the $39 billion then being spent annually by the state and federal governments, because of the commitment given by the federal government, after the review had started, that no school would lose a dollar as a result of the review. That was an albatross around our necks.

Education is a public good. Like other public goods, it is universally available, it has a cost, it is of benefit to all of us, and the benefit to each of us does not reduce the availability of the benefit to others. Teaching one child to read does not reduce the capacity of another child also to learn to read.

Our objective was to ensure that every child – regardless of language background, or family income and employment status, or ethnicity, or location and so on – should be given whatever support it takes to be, say, reading at minimum national standard by Year 3 (age eight).

Up to age eight, you learn to read: beyond that, you read to learn. If children are still sounding out the majority of words phonetically at age eleven or twelve, their comprehension is weak, their learning falls behind, and the chances are they will never fully recover.

Educational qualifications, on the other hand, are a positional good – an inherently scarce product, which confers an advantage. A Queensland Certificate of Education, a TAFE certificate, a degree, a higher degree – all are positional goods. We sought to ensure that educational achievement, as a positional good, is earned on the basis of talent and hard work alone, rather than purchased by those in a position of wealth and privilege.

In doing both things, we aimed to maximise Australia’s national stock of human capital, and to create a genuine meritocracy.

The bloke on the Brisbane bikeway almost certainly doesn’t appreciate that Gonski was a fundamental reimagining of Australian education within the framework of existing and available resources, not simply an argument for more resources for schools.

Labor’s version of Gonski

The second misunderstanding is that the Gillard and Rudd governments adopted Gonski, and then reached “Gonski agreements” with the states, promising additional “Gonski funding” over six years.

The Gillard and Rudd governments did not adopt the Gonski report, and neither has the current Labor opposition. The history is clear. The Gonski review recommended:

• That funding allocations for schools should be sector-blind and needs-based.

• That post-hoc equity programs, the most recent of which was New Partnerships funding, should be incorporated into the total needs-based funding.

• That the basis for the general recurrent funding for all students in all sectors should be a schooling resource standard for each school, set at a level at which it has been shown – in schools with minimal levels of educational disadvantage – that high performance is achievable over time.

• That the loading of funding for non-government schools as a proportion of average government school recurrent costs, or AGSRC, should cease. This is the mechanism that ensures that funding of non-government schools increases with increasing costs in the government sector, without measurement of need.

• That there should be loadings for the different elements of aggregated social disadvantage – English language proficiency, low socioeconomic status (broadly defined, which I will return to later), school size and location, and indigeneity – and we envisaged a further loading in due course for children with disability.

• That all government schools should continue to receive full public funding, and that this should be extended to a small number of non-government schools in areas where there is no government provision.

• That any additional public funding for other non-government schools should continue to be on a scale relating to parental capacity to pay, except that – in order to meet the government’s requirement that no school should lose a dollar – there should be a minimum level of public funding for all schools of between 20 and 25 per cent of the schooling resource standard, excluding loadings.

Finally, there was a major recommendation on process.

As a Commonwealth inquiry, we had developed a model that needed to be fully tested and refined with the states and the non-government sectors before implementation. We had proposed certain boundaries to the loadings for aggregated social disadvantage, but recognised that these had to be tested against hard data held by the states and non-government sectors.

We therefore proposed that a National Schools Resourcing Body, similar in concept to the former Schools Commission, owned jointly by all state and federal ministers and supported by an advisory group from all three sectors, should be established immediately to proceed with this necessary work.

What happened?

The Gillard and second Rudd governments buried the concept of a National Schools Resourcing Body, disallowing the possibility of a federal-state technical roundtable to test and develop the Gonski model.

The government drew up a National Education Reform Agreement to be agreed by COAG, under which government schools systems would receive funding, while non-government systems and schools would be funded under a National Plan for School Improvement.

This proposal allocated additional funding to all schools provided that the state governments (under the National Education Reform Agreement) and non-government schools and systems (under the National Plan for School Improvement) would undertake to apply the funding to projects approved under the headings of quality teaching, quality learning, empowered school leadership and meeting student need; to provide greater transparency and accountability to school communities; and to allocate funding according to the needs of their students.

Now, this was not what the Gonski review recommended.

• It was not sector-blind, needs-based funding.

• It continued to distinguish between government and non-government schools for funding purposes.

• It maintained the principle of the AGSRC, under which public funding for new places for children in disadvantaged government schools automatically generated public funding for non-government schools, without any consideration of disadvantage.

• And, although empowered school leadership, greater accountability, greater transparency and so on and are all worthy objectives, Gonski was about funding what happens in the classroom of each individual school – about money going through the school gate.

The National Education Reform Agreement and the National Plan for School Improvement contain needs-based loadings, but they are not founded on rigorous national, evidence-based testing of the school resourcing standard or the loadings and indexation. The Gonski panel envisaged that this would be done by a National Schools Resourcing Body on the basis of the needs of individual schools. As in the past, Labor’s agreements were negotiated top-down on a sector basis with the Association of Independent Schools, the National Catholic Education Commission, the Australian Education Union, and state treasuries.

This response to Gonski – which was far from implementing Gonski – was packaged as “Gonski agreements” and “Gonski funding.” These terms are now widely accepted by the public and the media as meaning that Labor (now in opposition) is committed to implementing the Gonski reforms.

That is not what the record shows. In government, Labor provided additional and very welcome funding for schools; in opposition, it has been an advocate for the so-called “last two years of Gonski funding”; and it declares a commitment to needs-based funding. But the Labor Party has not committed to sector-blind funding; it has retained the principle of the AGSRC; and it has not committed to total school funding being built from the bottom up according to measured need.

Labor delivered more money for education. But, like the Coalition government, Labor has ducked the fundamental issue of the relationship between aggregated social disadvantage and poor educational outcomes, and has turned its back on the development of an enduring funding system that is fair, transparent, financially sustainable and effective in promoting excellent outcomes for all Australian students.

Just two more years?

The third misunderstanding – the Fairfax view – is that most of the problems facing Australian education will be solved if we get the last two years of “Gonski funding.”

This funding was projected to flow over the six years 2014–19, with the bulk of the funding in the last two years. Substantial amounts are involved; the balance for 2018–19 is $4.5 billion across Australia. In contrast, the present federal government has allocated only $1.2 billion for the four years 2018–21.

Much has been achieved with the money received in the first four years. In every state, there are good examples of improvements in educational achievement as a result of the intelligent application of the funding to classroom practice. Every state minister has some anecdotes of success, and the Australian Education Union has produced a useful review of its impact in various places throughout the country. But there is no sign of a reversal of our national decline in educational performance. Unless we change the current top-down, sector-based, needs-blind funding system, and abolish the principle of the AGSRC, there will be a continually spiralling increase in the education budget without any lift in performance.

Providing the so-called “last two years of Gonski funding” will not deal with the fundamental problem facing Australian education. Neither side of politics is talking about the strategic redistribution of available funding to the things that matter in the schools that need it, on the basis of measuring the need of each individual school. And in the absence of a proposal for such redistribution, state ministers have no alternative but to clamour for additional funds.

Good money after bad?

I turn now to the view of the Murdoch press that Gonski was throwing good money after bad, that socioeconomic status has little bearing on educational outcomes, and that the difference between low-achieving and high-achieving schools is caused not by lack of funding but by poor teaching, inadequate curriculum, low standards, and lack of school autonomy.

The Gonski report was based on recognition of the causal relationship between aggregated social disadvantage and low educational achievement, as demonstrated nationally and internationally, not least in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, surveys of the impact of economic, social and cultural status on educational attainment.

There is no agreed definition of socioeconomic status in universal use in the literature. Parental socioeconomic status is a composite index that can be measured in a variety of ways. Precision is important because imprecision will reduce the observed association with achievement. Conclusions about the relationship with achievement are best based on studies that encompass the full range of socioeconomic status, because if the range is truncated (for example, to parental income alone) the measured association will appear less than the true association.

The main local commentator arguing that socioeconomic status is not that important for educational outcomes is Gary Marks, a researcher at the Australian Catholic University, who uses a very narrow definition of socioeconomic status. He defines it in terms of occupation, education and income, and – writing in the Australian recently – criticises the Gonski report on the grounds that “the ability to understand calculus, balance chemical equations, comprehend and make inferences from unseen text or write reasonable essays is not because a student’s father works as a bank manager rather than a bank teller, or because their mother has an arts degree rather than a TAFE qualification.”

Of course, Gonski never proposed that such fine distinctions as the difference between the children of a bank manager and the children of a bank teller matter educationally. We were concerned about aggregated social disadvantage, about children who experience some or many disadvantages: children who do not speak English, who have never been to school, who have been in the country for less than three years and (because their parents must look for work) are unlikely to remain in any particular school for more than two years, whose families are destitute, and whose mothers are illiterate even in their own language, rather than concerned about children suffering from the apparent liability of having a mother with a TAFE qualification.

I agree with Marks’s conclusion that the key driver of student achievement is student ability, that some children are born smarter than others, and that much of the variation in student achievement is genetic. But I do not believe that potential ability is restricted to the upper levels of the socioeconomic scale. The Gonski report was based on the premise that there is potentially similar latent cognitive ability among all three- and four-year old children about to start school, whether they be from a fourth-generation Australian family with an income three times the national average, or from a family that has been unemployed for three generations, or from a newly arrived refugee family speaking no English.

The measure of socioeconomic status used in most survey research is the Index of Economic, Social and Cultural Status, or ESCS, developed as part of PISA. This is much broader than the Marks measure; in addition to parental occupational status and parent educational attainment, it includes measures of home possessions relating to wealth, measures of educational resources, and measures of cultural possessions.

It is on that basis that the OECD constructs its familiar graphs showing the socio-educational gradients in PISA results for the thirty-five OECD countries, and their average. These demonstrate the relationship between low achievement and low economic, social and cultural status, the impact of which is greater in Australia than in similarly developed countries, greater than the OECD average, and becoming more so since measurement began at the start of this century.

The Gonski measure of aggregated social disadvantage is broader still: it includes the ESCS measure, but adds to it measures of English language proficiency, Indigeneity, and school size and location. For each of these we proposed a scale of loadings, to be tested by the National Schools Resourcing Body and added for each school to the base grant. This would provide the compound resources needed in disadvantaged schools to support such things as whole-school instructional leadership, teachers’ aides, counsellors, intervention programs, and home/school liaison personnel fluent in the dominant community languages.

Three other factors are commonly raised as alternative explanations for the low achievement of disadvantaged schools.

One is teacher quality. Are teachers in our disadvantaged and low-performing schools less skilled and imaginative than those in our more advantaged and higher-achieving schools?

The term “teacher quality” is a curious one. We never talk of doctor quality: we talk of the quality of healthcare. And the quality of healthcare varies greatly from place to place: the variation is explained not by the quality of the medical staff, but by their number, the availability of specialist diagnosis and treatment, and the availability of technical and ancillary support. Low-quality healthcare is explained by inadequate resourcing for the task at hand, not by the relative incompetence of the available doctors and nurses.

It is the same with teaching. The issue is not about teacher quality, but about the quality of education. The teachers in our most disadvantaged schools are at least as good as those in our most advantaged schools; the issue is not their competence, skill or commitment. The issue is that their number, resources and support are unequal to the task.

There are some ineffective teachers, just as there are incompetent doctors, but they can be found in schools both effective and ineffective, and there are procedures for dealing with them. Research has shown that there is greater variation in teacher quality within schools than between schools. I believe there is no correlation between teacher quality and school performance in Australia.

But the quality of education in disadvantaged schools is – with very few, although notable, exceptions – greatly inferior to that in schools serving advantaged communities.

The schools at the lower end of both the scale of aggregated social disadvantage and the scale of educational performance are the emergency wards of Australian education. In a hospital emergency ward, a battery of medical specialists and intervention techniques is targeted at the recovery of the individual.

A typical Australian suburban school serving a migrant community – more than 80 per cent of its children with a language background other than English, from at least ten different language groups, having been in the country less than three years and unlikely to stay more than two years in the school – is an emergency ward in the same real sense.

So, too, is a small rural school or school in a regional centre, taking children from the long-term unemployed, some suffering from foetal alcohol syndrome, many of whom have never been read to, or even held a book, or know that the pages are turned from right to left.

Hospitals save lives. Schools save futures. That image is not in the public mind. Children entering schools from backgrounds of aggregated social disadvantage require immediate diagnosis of need, and immediate intensive care if they are to be saved. They need smaller class sizes, specialist personnel to deliver the appropriate tiered interventions, speech therapists, counsellors, school/family liaison officers including interpreters, and a range of other support.

And that support requires money. You can’t deliver education as a genuine public good without strategically differentiated public funding directed at areas of need. That’s what Gonski sought to achieve.

The second factor commonly raised is the curriculum. Do our disadvantaged and underperforming schools provide a poorer curriculum than other schools?

If we think of curriculum as the sum of all the experiences the school provides for a child, both formal and informal, planned and incidental, then the answer is yes. Disadvantaged schools sadly lack the capacity to offer experiences such as outdoor education, instrumental music, drama classes, after-school sport, inter-school competition, clubs and societies, and within-school counselling services, with all the activities of the school being conducted in first-class indoor and outdoor facilities. Some of that provision would, of course, involve capital rather than recurrent funding. The Gonski report made very significant recommendations on capital funding and infrastructure, but these received no response from the federal government and were ignored by the media.

If curriculum is defined solely in terms of the subject content to be covered, the answer is no. The state curriculum authorities and the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority have set a robust and appropriate curriculum. Processes are in place to monitor its ongoing effectiveness and to change it as necessary.

The issue is not the curriculum itself, but enabling children to access the curriculum by getting their feet on the lowest rungs of the ladder, and then assisting them to climb steadily. And that is far more difficult in schools serving disadvantaged communities than elsewhere. Teaching a child who arrives at school without breakfast, or has had insufficient sleep because she is the main carer for her siblings, or has learnt English only in the last two years, or has been physically abused at home, requires rather more preparation, effort and resources – and hence funding – than teaching in a large, wealthy independent school where the majority of children, thankfully, are likely to have had a much better start in life.

The third common explanation for low school achievement is lack of school autonomy. Is this why some schools are underperforming and others are doing much better?

I don’t believe so. In England my organisation was responsible for the school curriculum, for qualifications, and for examinations and tests. This covered all schools, both the independent schools and the grant-maintained schools funded by government, which encompass all other schools including faith-based schools of all religions. We were responsible, among other things, for reporting to government on school outcomes – that is, providing the data from which the British media then construct the notorious “league tables.”

Maintained schools in England receive a block grant. They are run by elected school boards that have the power to hire and fire the head teacher, who in turn hires and fires the staff. Schools have considerable autonomy in the use of resources and in school organisation, including discretion within broad guidelines over the structure of staffing and their remuneration.

During my time, there was also a steady move towards the establishment of academies – independent schools endowed and run by philanthropists, but with matching money from government. These academies, the independent schools and the grant-maintained schools have levels of autonomy far greater than any government or Catholic school in Australia.

This degree of autonomy had absolutely no impact on the socio-educational gradient in England. Year after year, the grant-maintained schools in the whole of the north of England, and in the depressed areas in Essex and the west perform poorly, except in the more affluent parts of the large cities and towns. Those schools in the Home Counties around London are the highest-performing in the country. Despite their autonomy, it is aggregated social disadvantage that determines the outcome.

Greater autonomy is not the reason some schools perform better than others in Australia. High-performing non-government schools generally have much greater management (if not curriculum) autonomy than high-performing government schools, but the key factor in both sets of high-performing schools is generally that they serve affluent and educated communities, and are selective either academically or financially.

More autonomy for government schools in Australia would have no impact on the impact of the aggregated social disadvantage on educational performance. It does, however, have some benefits, the most important being that it shifts accountability for school management from compliance with inputs to the achievement of outcomes.

The Gonski report proposed that any school in receipt of public funds should be publicly accountable for the outcomes it achieved. We floated the concept of an external audit process, such as the Ofsted inspection model in England, and referred to the use in Queensland of the Teaching and Learning School Improvement Framework, the external audit process developed by the Australian Council for Educational Research.

President Ronald Reagan’s dictum, “trust, but verify” is the key to managing increased autonomy for schools in receipt of public funds. An independent, external quality-assurance agency, composed of highly skilled and experienced professionals, would provide schools, parents and governments with authoritative and sound assessments of school achievement – in both the cognitive and affective domains of learning, not just test scores – and identify areas for attention. In my view, such an approach would be beneficial in assisting all schools in Australia to achieve improved outcomes, as it has been in England.

Follow the money

That brings me to the fifth belief of the bloke on the bikeway, that non-government schools save the government money that otherwise would have to be spent on teaching the children who attend Catholic and independent schools.

This seems intuitive and logical. The Productivity Commission has estimated the amount received from governments by government schools in 2014 at around $12,085 per student, and by non-government schools $9262 per student. Education minister Simon Birmingham has put the non-government student figure at about 60 per cent of the government amount. The saving to governments is variously claimed to be anything between $4 billion and $9 billion per year.

In some very important work, Chris Bonnor and Bernie Shepherd in two recent papers have given us the first evidence-based analysis of school recurrent income for all schools. From the My School website dataset for 2016, they took the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (or ICSEA, the mean value of which is around 1000) for each school, and the annual recurrent funding (which was for 2014, the latest available.) ICSEA is the best proxy currently available for the educational challenge facing each school.

With the advent of the My School website, we have access for the first time to disaggregated recurrent financial data for each individual school in the country, rather than averages and total figures for sectors and states. These data are on the public record, provided and authorised by the schools and the responsible authorities and systems.

Bonnor and Shepherd asked the question “What would be the recurrent funding cost to governments if they had to fully fund the education of all school students?” To answer this, they divided the My School dataset into nine ICSEA ranges from lowest to highest, totalled the government funding for government, Catholic and independent schools within each range, and calculated a funding rate per student. They thus had nine groupings of comparable schools serving similar communities, from which the funding for government, Catholic and independent schools could be compared.

This is shown in Figure 1. The brackets below the graph are the number of schools and students in each category. As expected under the National Education Reform Agreement, higher rates of funding apply to the more disadvantaged schools. This is why people say the current system is needs-based, although as we will see, the reality is very different.

1. Government recurrent funding, Commonwealth and state, by sector and school ICSEA range, 2014

Source: Chris Bonnor and Bernie Shepherd, “The Vanishing Private School.”

The distribution of the number of schools is important. The ICSEA range 950 to 1149 embraces 65 per cent of all schools, but 91 per cent of Catholic schools are within that range, and 79 per cent of independent schools.

You can see that the combined state and federal government dollars per student in each of the sub-ranges from 950 to 1149 are remarkably similar for each sector. The Catholic schools within this range receive between 90.8 per cent and 99.5 per cent of the public dollars going to public schools enrolling similar students, on top of which they charge fees. The 79 per cent of independent schools in this range receive between 79.5 per cent and 94.6 per cent of the amount for similar public schools, again before they impose fees.

On the basis of these data for all ICSEA categories, Bonnor and Shepherd conclude that if all students in the non-government sector were to transfer to the government sector, the recurrent cost to governments would be, at most, about $1.9 billion per year.

How can the large discrepancy between that figure and claims of up to $9 billion be explained? There are several factors.

The grossly inflated figure of up to $9 billion is what it would cost the governments to pick up the entire recurrent funding of non-government schools from all sources, including fees, which in some schools are more than $30,000 per annum. Clearly, this should not be factored into a calculation of what governments save by children attending non-government schools.

The Productivity Commission figures are averages. The use of averages in comparisons between government, Catholic and non-government schools assumes that each sector enrols identical students in terms of socio-educational background, and that they are distributed evenly along the ICSEA scale.

But they are not: they are students from measurably different backgrounds, and the three distributions are also very different. In Figure 2, the red, green and orange columns show student numbers in government, Catholic and independent schools; the grey area in the background illustrates the relative totals of students in each ICSEA range. The two columns of non-ICSEA schools on the right are there for the sake of completeness: they are special schools and remote schools, and are predominantly government schools.

2. Student numbers by ICSEA category

Source: Chris Bonnor and Bernie Shepherd, Uneven Playing Field: The State of Australia’s Schools.

On the basis of the data in the figure, it can be seen that government schools enrol 52 per cent of their students from below the ICSEA mean of 1000, Catholic schools 11 per cent of their students, and independent schools just under 5 per cent. Forty-eight per cent of government school enrolments are above ICSEA 1000, compared to 89 per cent of Catholic school enrolments and 95 per cent for independent schools. Government schools enrol students from all socioeconomic levels; Catholic and independent schools have only insignificant numbers below ICSEA 950. This reflects not only socioeconomic factors, but also enrolment practices: government schools (except for selective high schools in some states) are open to all local students, while non-government schools have a range of enrolment discriminators, the most important being the charging of fees.

Further, consistent with government requirements, the Productivity Commission methodology for calculating these averages includes data on user cost of capital, depreciation, payroll tax and school transport for government schools, which are not added to the non-government numbers. None of these items provide funds for day-to-day use in teaching and learning. The result is that – despite warnings and caveats against the misinterpretation of data contained in the Productivity Commission reports and national reports on schooling, which are more often than not overlooked by commentators in their search for a preferred rationale – the reported funding of government schools is overstated by almost $5 billion, or 15 per cent.

There is one other important factor: over the period since the Gonski panel began its review, government funding (state plus federal) to government schools increased by an average of just under 3 per cent per annum, which is comparable with inflation. In the same period, government funding to non-government schools increased by around 6 per cent per annum, twice the rate to government schools and a figure well above inflation.

Five years after Gonski reported, the recurrent costs of the majority of non-government schools are essentially funded by governments. Figure 3 shows total government funding in each sector across the ICSEA range.

3. Government-sourced funding by sector and ICSEA category, 2014
The grey area in the background illustrates the relative totals of students in each range (not to scale)

Source: Chris Bonnor and Bernie Shepherd, Uneven Playing Field: The State of Australia’s Schools.

In Figure 4, Bonnor and Shepherd show government-sourced funding by ICSEA category. Below 800 ICSEA, non-government school students attract considerably more government funding than government school students. In Catholic schools, this situation persists through to ICSEA 1000: it is only in the 1050 range and above that government funding of Catholic schools falls noticeably below that of government schools.

4. Government-sourced funding per student by ICSEA category, 2014
The grey area in the background illustrates the relative totals of students in each range (not to scale)

Source: Chris Bonnor and Bernie Shepherd, Uneven Playing Field: The State of Australia’s Schools.

With more than 91 per cent of Catholic schools receiving 90–99 per cent of the funding going to similar public schools, and 79 per cent of independent schools receiving 80–95 per cent of the public funding for similar government schools, the state and federal governments are close to funding the entire cost of the teaching workforce in non-government schools in Australia. Parental “capacity to pay” has become an irrelevance.

The bloke on the Brisbane bikeway can no longer be justified in the belief that the non-government sector provides a substantial saving for the taxpayer. That is not a criticism of Catholic and independent schools, which can be defended on other grounds, though cost-effectiveness for governments is not one of them.

The great political divide

Finally, the bloke on the bikeway is right in believing that the two sides of politics are poles part. But the government and the opposition are fluffing around the margins of the issue, and neither appears to understand the magnitude of the reform that is needed, or – if they do – to have the capacity to tackle it.

Equity and school outcomes have both deteriorated sharply since we wrote the Gonski report. Some stark realities now shape the context in which governments – state and federal – must make decisions two months from now about how Australian education might recover from its long-term continuing decline.

The present quasi-market system of schooling, the contours of which were shaped by the Hawke and Howard governments, has comprehensively failed. We are on a path to nowhere. The issue is profoundly deeper than argument about the last two years of Gonski funding, or changes to the governance of federal–state funding arrangements. If governments are to provide genuinely needs-based funding, the individual school must be the common unit for measuring need.

Neither side of politics has come to grips with what needs-based funding really means. No good will be achieved by allocating Commonwealth funding to states on some sort of equalising basis, as Senator Birmingham seems to envisage, unless each state allocation is the sum of the measured needs of each individual school within the state.

Nor would anything of lasting substance be achieved by severely reducing or removing the funding to the wealthiest non-government schools with an ICSEA value above 1150, which take fewer than 200,000 students or less than 5 per cent of the school population: it would be a handsome saving of $900 million per annum but still not get to the root cause of the problem.

The current arrangement for block funding of Catholic and government school systems, based on an average measure of their socioeconomic status rather than the aggregated socio-educational disadvantage of each individual Catholic and government school, must be replaced.

As several states have already shown, it is entirely achievable to use the individual school as the base unit for measurement: the elements of aggregated social disadvantage – low socioeconomic status, Indigeneity, English language proficiency, school size and remoteness – can readily be calculated from existing data for government schools and for Catholic systemic schools, and can be assembled from school data for independent schools.

New architecture is needed to bring state and Commonwealth funding together on the basis of the individual school. The current complexity of government, Catholic and independent sectors, each receiving recurrent and capital funding from two government jurisdictions but in different proportions from each level of government, and with two of the sectors charging fees, all within a framework of seven governments at different stages of three-year electoral cycles, is unworkable.

Further, the view that government schools are a state matter, and that fee-paying, government-funded non-government schools are a Commonwealth matter is outrageous: the federal government has a role in relation to the education of all young people in Australia, and every state minister for education has responsibilities for the education of all young people in the state, regardless of the schooling sector they attend.

The funding architecture should be greatly simplified by making the individual school the basis for funding. Each would receive a core component according to enrolment, and a supplementary component based on agreed national loadings for the elements of aggregated social disadvantage. The core component for fee-paying schools should continue to be adjusted according to parental capacity to pay, but on a much more realistic basis than at present. The allocations to the government and Catholic systems should be sum of the grants to the schools in those sectors; the individual independent schools should continue to be funded directly.

The cost of external systemic support, such as regional or diocesan consultancy and administration for government and Catholic schools, should be deducted from their total allocations determined as the sum of the needs of their schools, within guidelines agreed by governments, and should be public. The Association of Independent Schools, which provides similar support for independent schools, should be funded by the schools that choose to join it, on a user-pays basis.

The My School website should show the total grant for each school, the amount deducted by the system for consultancy and administration, and the external services being provided to the school on the basis of that deduction. That would be a significant step towards greater autonomy for schools, and a long overdue level of transparency. A workable alternative would be for the state governments and the Catholic Church to pick up the full costs of their bureaucracies from their own resources.

Federal and state funds would need to be pooled. Both state and federal governments have a responsibility to determine priorities for expenditure on education; the pooling of funds would mean that those priorities would need to be determined jointly by the ministerial council, and for fixed and longer periods, bringing greater stability and certainty for schools and system planning, and reducing the impact of seven staggered three-year electoral cycles on school planning, which necessarily has much longer horizons.

Increasing urgency

We are in the absurd situation where we virtually have two publicly funded systems. One system is government-funded, can’t charge fees, is inclusive in that it has a legal responsibility to enrol all students who wish to attend, and has a range of obligations and accountabilities to government. The other is government-funded to almost the same extent, sets and charges fees in addition to its government funding, is exclusive in that it has a selective enrolment process and can legally refuse admission, and has a statutory exemption from a range of anti-discrimination provisions.

The charging of fees on top of being largely government-funded distorts enrolments between schools and sectors, which is the key factor causing our steepening socio-educational gradient. Given their level of fees, most of these schools don’t require government funding to provide a quality education. The high level of government funding is quite out of proportion to parental capacity to pay.

As non-government schools and systems are able to borrow money, the excess recurrent funding can be used to underwrite the servicing of loans on capital works. Unnecessary government funding is therefore fuelling competition between over-funded non-government schools on the one hand, and between government and non-government schools on the other. This situation is now common in suburbs and towns across Australia, where adjacent schools can receive similar levels of taxpayer support yet operate under quite different obligations to the taxpayer, in facilities of sharply differing standards, and with clientele deeply divided on the basis of class, ethnicity and income.

This is not where we want to be.

So, the Gonski report: vision or hallucination?

School funding is not a matter of optics, either real or imagined. The Gonski report was neither a prophetic revelation nor a deceiving illusion: it was a proposal for governments to make a coldly rational investment decision in order to achieve a specific return – the full realisation of our national stock of human capital – and this requires sweeping away the existing funding structure and replacing it with something entirely different and better.

Five years later, that has become a critically urgent imperative. •

The post Gonski at five: vision or hallucination? appeared first on Inside Story.

Gough Whitlam’s Australia? Yes, but also Norman Kirk’s New Zealand. That’s where the likeness ends, though, for the new educational epoch Kirk ushered in was quite different from the era created by Whitlam and his education adviser Peter Karmel. In Australia, church schools got what we called state aid, but they remained distinct from the state school system. In New Zealand, church schools became state schools, creating a single system of schools, some religious, most secular. It was “perhaps the most important educational measure passed by parliament in the twentieth century,” says Sir Patrick Lynch, chief executive of the New Zealand Catholic Education Office for more than two decades.

In both countries, the economics of Catholic education began slowly imploding after the second world war in the face of a perfect storm: the baby boom, the extension of compulsory education, and growing demands for better facilities and smaller classes.

New Zealand’s parliament passed the Private Schools Conditional Integration Act in October 1975. Like its Australian counterpart, Kirk’s Labour government fell just weeks later (though in much more conventional fashion). But the Integration Act came into force the following year, and by the end of 1984 every Catholic school in the country had become part of the state system. Today, 13 per cent of New Zealand’s schools are “state integrated” in this way. They are mostly Catholic, but also include Anglican, Nonconformist, Muslim, Jewish, Steiner and Montessori schools. Non-integrated private schools constitute just 3 per cent of New Zealand’s education sector.

The essence of the NZ compromise was that schools would be state-funded and state-run but would retain their religious ethos (or “special character”). Schools that integrated into the state system would continue providing religious education and services according to their own lights. An exemption to anti-discrimination legislation allowed them to favour co-religionists in employment decisions, and all but 5 to 10 per cent of enrolled students would come from among the faithful.

The proprietor of the newly integrated school – typically the Catholic Church – retained ownership of its (often substandard) buildings, was responsible for their maintenance, and was obliged, where necessary, to make improvements to ensure they met basic requirements. Because of these obligations, and because many of them entered the government system carrying significant debt, Catholic schools were permitted to charge “attendance dues.” But they could be used only for those circumscribed purposes, and only after the government had signed off on the quantum. Integrated schools were also subject to a “maximum roll,” a cap on enrolments designed to prevent state-funded schools from cannibalising each other. In other words, the systems on either side of the Tasman became very different indeed.

Before all this happened, New Zealand and Australian schooling had run on parallel tracks. The Australian colonies established public schools between 1851 and 1894, withdrawing funding from church schools at the same time. New Zealand created its system of free, secular and universal public education in 1877. Despite this, Catholics in both countries were determined to provide a church-run school in every parish, largely courtesy of the nuns and priests who worked as teachers for next to nothing.

In both countries, the economics of Catholic education began slowly imploding after the second world war in the face of a perfect storm: the baby boom, the extension of compulsory education, and growing demands for better facilities and smaller classes. Above all, the decline of the religious vocation meant that Catholic authorities were forced to hire teachers from outside their own ranks – teachers unwilling to wait until the next life for their just rewards. “The proportion of lay teachers in the Catholic system grew from 5 per cent in 1956 to 38 per cent in 1972 with resulting increases in salary costs,” Lynch writes of New Zealand’s experience. “By the end of the 1960s a looming financial crisis had brought the possibility of a total collapse of the system.”

Conservative governments in both countries were the first responders. In Australia, Menzies exploited the controversy sparked by a “strike” in Catholic schools in the NSW town of Goulburn by announcing state funding of science blocks. In New Zealand, the 1964 Education Act gave the minister discretion, for the first time, to make grants to private schools.

If state aid itself wasn’t a sufficiently seismic shift, then came the additional element of Labor/Labour support. Norman Kirk became opposition leader in December 1965, just over a year before Gough Whitlam replaced Labor leader Arthur Calwell. Like Whitlam, Kirk was determined to match the conservatives on state aid, if not outdo them. In the lead-up to the 1969 election, Kirk announced that a NZ Labour government would pay no less than half the salaries of teachers at private schools. Labour’s support for state aid could no longer be doubted. Like Whitlam, New Zealand’s modernising leader lost that year but retained the leadership, and his commitment to public assistance for church schools.

The integrator: Norman Kirk outside the Labour Party’s headquarters not long before the November 1972 NZ election. Horowhenua Historical Society Inc.

By the late 1960s, New Zealand’s Catholic system was on the verge of bankruptcy. The situation was hardly less acute in Australia. As George Pell recalled in 2007, “My first cousin, a Josephite nun, like many others once had to teach a primary class of over ninety children, some of them with English only as an imperfect second language. This was unsustainable. Without government money many Catholic schools would have been forced to close.”

And yet, for all the similarities between the two countries, profound differences shaped policy-making. Some were historical, like the split in the Australian Labor Party and the emergence of the Catholic-dominated Democratic Labor Party, which intensified the state aid debate. Others endure today. Catholics make up about a quarter of Australia’s population but less than a sixth of New Zealand’s. And getting things done can be easier in New Zealand’s unitary system of government. Just ask Julia Gillard about the task of persuading every Australian state government and state Catholic system to get on board for a big change.

Kirk and Whitlam faced the same problem: the Catholics couldn’t finance their own schools any longer but were as determined as ever that they remain open. But they encountered this problem in very different contexts. As a result, Whitlam’s 1969 election manifesto announced a neutral body, a Schools Commission, that would allocate funding according to a neutral criterion, need. Kirk’s equivalent policy document, A Fair and Just Solution, included for the first time a reference to a bolder idea: “integration.”

Rory Sweetman’s fascinating history of this bold idea takes its name from Kirk’s policy (with only the addition of a question mark). Sweetman describes how the idea of integration was germinated inside the education policy committee of the Labour Party. In the policy’s initial iteration, cooked up by two state school teachers-turned-MPs, Jonathan Hunt and Bob Tizard, private school “buildings would be ceded to the state” and “religious instruction would be given only outside school hours.” Funding to schools that chose not to integrate “would be progressively reduced over five years until no aid was received.”

The political hardheads inside the Labour Party wanted to woo the Catholic vote, not antagonise it. Accordingly, the Hunt–Tizard integration scheme was largely shelved. But the word stuck (and its place in Kirk’s policy manifesto went some way to mollifying his opponents, still reeling from Kirk’s election promise to pay at least 50 per cent of private school salaries). Kirk, Sweetman comments, “was assisted by the vagueness of the term.” Until a post-election conference actually convened, “integration was whatever the Labour leader said it was.”

When Labour finally came to power in December 1972, the conference had to be held and the word had to be defined. The conference took place in May 1973, the same month that, in Australia, Peter Karmel handed down his report on needs-based funding. The conference gave birth to a working party (with representation from the Catholics, the teacher unions and the education ministry) that toiled away for nearly two years. It didn’t hurt, according to Sweetman, that many of the negotiators on the working party shared experience serving in the war. “They didn’t have the entrenched suspicion and grievance and animosity that had been inherited from the previous generation,” he told me. “They had a lot more in common than they opposed.” The scheme ultimately hashed out by the working party formed the basis of the Integration Act and thus of New Zealand’s education system today.

If necessity was the mother of the Catholic commitment to integration, the courage and imagination of the church leadership shouldn’t be discounted. Perhaps the best illustration of their commitment to the ideals of integration was their refusal to walk away from the scheme when they could. Sweetman told me that “when the Conservative government got into power under Muldoon in [December] 1975, they basically said to the Catholic bishops, ‘Look, you don’t really need this integration – we’ll give you more and more state aid.’” The bishops stood by the deal and the Muldoon government duly implemented it.

New Zealand’s two major teacher unions, the New Zealand Education Institute, or NZEI, and the Post-Primary Teachers’ Association, had become advocates of integration, and were represented on the working party. The two unions had fought each and every increase in state aid during the 1960s, but when Labour joined the National Party in embracing state aid, they were clear-sighted about the consequences. In the wake of Kirk’s September 1969 state aid announcement, NZEI national secretary Ted Simmonds reflected that “there is now no political party with the will to restrain the flow of state money. Each party can now be expected to offer even more attractive propositions to the voters.” It was an unshrouded recognition that the state aid debate – as it had played out since free, secular and universal public education had been introduced almost a century before – was over.

In essence, New Zealand’s teacher unions decided to grasp one horn of a dilemma. They could insist that public schooling must be secular, and by corollary, that religious schools raise revenue, in part or whole, through charging fees. This would entail a continuation of what looked like an increasingly futile battle against state aid. Or they could cede the secular ground and attempt to shore up the free and universal nature of publicly funded schools.

“The integration of a private school is a costly exercise,” Simmonds conceded fifteen years later, “but with integration there is a measure of control. It could be argued that without the Integration Act, the money would still have been spent on the private schools, which would have remained completely independent. Without integration there would certainly have been a separate state-supported private school system.”

Meanwhile, Simmonds’s counterfactual had been playing out in Australia. “It wasn’t so much that the New Zealand system was attractive,” says Robert Bluer, who became secretary of the Australian Teachers’ Federation in 1982, “it was that the Australian system was becoming more and more unattractive. The process of funding from the Commonwealth to non-government schools was accelerating very quickly. People were fairly desperate to find a way through it.” Bluer was part of a Teachers’ Federation working group established in 1981 to consider the question of religious public schools. A delegation visited New Zealand to study the emerging results from its experiment in integration and developed a draft policy supporting “universal public education.”

That policy was put to the 1982 conference of the Teachers’ Federation. Arguably, it was ten years late – though, as we’ll see, it was much too early for some. The analysis was much like that of Simmonds in New Zealand a decade earlier. “It was a situation where simply opposing the funding for non-government schools seemed to be a complete waste of time,” says Bluer. According to his ally at the Victorian Secondary Teachers’ Association, Graham Marshall, the proposal “had the political advantage of bringing the Catholics into some sort of accommodation with the public system and stopping them lining up with the Independents [the major non-denominational private schools].”

Speaking at the Teachers’ Federation conference was the president of New Zealand’s Post-Primary Teachers’ Association, Des Hinch (Derryn’s brother, as it happens). By this point, both of New Zealand’s teacher unions had disowned the integration system they had helped to create. This was in no small part due to a group of dissidents, known as the Committee for the Defence of Secular Education, or CDSE, which had broken away before the Integration Act was passed. The dissidents championed an interpretation of events in which the Catholics had scored an outright victory. “After years of studying the Integration Act and its implementation,” wrote their leader Jack Mulheron, “I can find no concessions of any substance whatsoever made by the Catholic authorities.”

The CDSE didn’t manage to stem the tide of integration, but it did influence the unions’ thinking. At the Teachers’ Federation conference, as Graham Marshall recalls it, “what Hinch did was – like his brother – simply threw a big, stinking bomb in the middle by saying it was a terrible deal and basically the Catholics got everything they wanted in this integrated system and they didn’t have to give up anything.”

That intervention didn’t help, but it might not have been decisive. Even before the Perth conference it had become clear that some of the most powerful state unions were reluctant to abandon their traditional posture. And, as it turned out, the conference didn’t just reject universal public education, it passed an amendment reaffirming total opposition to all state aid. Thirty-five years later, Bluer describes it as “a complete lunatic position which got us nowhere.”

At the following year’s conference, the Federation – which was not an affiliate of the Labor Party – determined to actively support the party at the 1983 federal election. Labor, it need hardly be said, was not about to abolish state aid. Another Federation delegation visited New Zealand in 1990; although it considered the integration question, it was more focused on other matters. The Federation maintained its policy of opposition to all state aid to church schools. A discussion paper published a couple of years later by what had become the Australian Teachers’ Union (now the Australian Education Union) noted bluntly that “our policy is gaining no headway and few outside the ATU even want to listen to the arguments. In fact, any attempt to propagate the policy reduces the credibility of the ATU in all areas, even those beyond the funding issue.”

If blanket opposition to state aid in Australia was an abject failure, it can’t be said that the embrace of integration in New Zealand has been an unmitigated success. We might expect that integrated and traditional state schools would share equally in the responsibility of educating disadvantaged students. But that turns out not to be the case. New Zealand categorises schools into deciles that “indicate the extent [to which] the school draws their students from low socioeconomic communities.” Only 20.7 per cent of state-integrated schools are found in the bottom three deciles, but 33.7 per cent of state schools are.

The first problem is attendance dues. The Integration Act specified that these could not be used “to provide or improve the school buildings and associated facilities to a standard higher than that approved from time to time by the secretary [of the education ministry] as appropriate for a comparable state school.” What this means is that attendance dues at Catholic schools today are $300–$400 a year at primary level, $600–$800 at secondary schools.

But the story is different at Wanganui Collegiate School, one of New Zealand’s most exclusive private schools, which applied to integrate into the state system after running into financial difficulties. Today, the school enjoys the recurrent public funding that comes with integration, and yet its attendance dues are $2400 a year. Wanganui is not alone, either. Elim Christian College charges $2175 a year, and dues at Lindisfarne College Hastings are $1600. We’ll see how they justify that in a moment.

Compounding the attendance-dues loophole is the issue of “voluntary” donations. As a principal at a state-integrated Catholic school wrote in a letter to the education minister in 2009, “I work in a Catholic school and our fees are less than $1000 all up – $665 attendance dues and a real DONATION (not a phoney one) of $300 – total = $965. It is hard to compete with schools for whom the attendance dues and donation total anywhere between $4000–$6000 and more as they have an ability to service debts and build illustrious pavilions/performing arts suites etc.”

On top of enduring financial barriers to entry, critics argue that state-integrated schools have retained at least some of their power to pick and choose their clientele. “The original special character requirements have been so watered down over time that they now appear little different from a public school mission statement,” a Post-Primary Teachers’ Association position paper claimed. “When no particular religious denomination is required… the school may simply select its students on the basis of parental wealth.” The CDSE’s Jack Mulheron argued that the maximum rolls, intended to ensure all publicly funded schools functioned as a cohesive network, turned out to be worthless. “Integrated schools cheerfully ignored the agreements and enrolled pupils in excess of the maximum,” he claimed.

But if New Zealand’s model is far from perfect, it is also far superior to Australia’s. The case of Wanganui Collegiate illustrates this well. Wanganui’s attendance dues, the common defence goes, have to be approved by the education ministry – just like those of every state-integrated school. A ministry spokesperson offered the following justification: “Wanganui Collegiate currently has relatively high attendance dues because it is newly integrated and has high levels of debt servicing due to capital expenditure required to bring buildings up to an equivalent state standard. Over time, as debt servicing costs decline, attendance dues levels should also decline at the school.” No doubt Wanganui has much debt to service, but the idea that it reflects the expenditure required to bring buildings up to “a comparable state school” standard is hard to square with the virtual tour provided on the school’s website.

The specific adjudication may be unconvincing. But the fact that there is an adjudication at all reflects the shared agreement that government has a right to control the fees of the schools it funds. It is taken for granted that state-integrated schools must demonstrate a case for the fees they charge using precisely articulated criteria.

As with fees, debate in New Zealand about enrolment practices concerns the strength of regulations and the thoroughness of their application. Such regulation is non-existent in Australia, and lies outside the shared premises of political discourse. Surveying the Australian scene, Sweetman comments that “it is surprising that the CDSE did not ask whether integration had saved New Zealand’s state school system from a worse fate.” As the current president of the NZ Post-Primary Teachers’ Association, Angela Roberts, said to me, “We wouldn’t want to be where you guys are, that’s for sure.”

The possibility of an integration-type model clawing its way onto Australia’s bitterly contested education policy agenda seems remote. Integration happened in New Zealand when the Catholic education system, close to bankruptcy, was open to discussing the terms and conditions on which the public purse might be opened. The equivalent moment in Australia was complicated by internal Labor Party politics and passed with the Karmel/Whitlam settlement. Today, Australia’s Catholic schools are not under any visible financial strain and there is tripartisan support for the very extensive government support they enjoy. Even erstwhile enemies of state aid have thrown their energy into a reform under which “no school loses a dollar.” Public money flows to church schools without obstacle or challenge.

And yet, so much has changed since the days when Catholic classrooms teemed with ninety children and the authorities couldn’t afford new toilet blocks. In their latest analysis of My School data, Chris Bonnor and Bernie Shepherd show that 93 per cent of Catholic schools have an “index of community socio-educational advantage” of between 950 and 1150. These schools receive “between 90.8 per cent and 99.5 per cent of the public dollars going to similar public schools.” Independent schools aren’t far behind: “they receive between 79.5 per cent and 94.6 per cent of what goes to similar public schools.” Bonnor and Shepherd aren’t talking about total funding from all sources. They’re referring to government funding alone. (In New Zealand, by contrast, private school students are currently funded by the government at levels of between one-sixth and one-third of their state and state-integrated counterparts.)

This fundamentally changes the equation. First, the additional government spend necessary for an integration-type model has fallen dramatically. Bonnor and Shepherd estimate that in 2014 it would have required governments to contribute an additional $1.9 billion (or 4.5 per cent of total recurrent government expenditure on schools) to fund non-government schools to the same level as similar government schools.

Two billion dollars is still a lot of money. And the lesson from New Zealand is that attendance dues have allowed the essential idea of integration to be corrupted. If you’re going to do it, government should pay for infrastructure as well – and that’s going to cost. Treasuries would resist handing the money over; public educators would grimace at whom it was being handed over to. But it’s a much smaller pot of money than it once would have been, and the pot gets even smaller when the accounting becomes more comprehensive. For instance, as Peter Martin reported in the Age, the GST exemption on private education cost the budget $4.5 billion this year.

The equation has changed for Catholic education too. As George Pell, then archbishop of Sydney, told the National Catholic Education Conference in 2006, “Catholic schools are not educating most of our poor.” On the contrary, he told his audience; 69 per cent of students from the poorest third of Catholic families attended public schools. That made poor Catholics almost two-and-a-half times more likely to attend public schools than their more privileged co-religionists. Only 21 per cent of poor Catholic kids attended Catholic schools.

As Dean Ashenden wrote recently in Inside Story, “a school system established to help the poor and the excluded has off-loaded much of that task to the government schools in favour of catering to those already in the mainstream.” Pell expressed the point differently: “Predominantly our schools now cater for the huge Australian middle class, which they helped create.” The cardinal’s is a more positive spin but he appears to be cognisant of essentially the same truth. And the challenge is not simply that Catholic schools exclude the poor but that a growing proportion of enrolees, more than one in five, aren’t even Catholic. If these schools face an existential threat today, it isn’t deregistration or overwhelming disadvantage but the dissolution of their essential character.

Most consequentially, it would now be a relatively small step for true believers in public education to accept that some public schools might have a religious ethos. Secularism may be an article of faith but public funding of religious schools is a fact (a fact that nobody is seriously trying to change). To be sure, when Ted Simmonds threw his support behind integration in New Zealand in the late 1960s, it was based on a hunch. His view – that with or without integration public funding to religious schools would continue to escalate anyway – had much going for it. But it was conjecture; contestable, possibly even alterable.

By the time of the 1982 Australian Teachers’ Federation debate, the insistence that the tide of state aid could be stopped was less credible. But the future was still unknown. Today, questions of principle evaporate in the face of an inescapable reality; publicly funded religious schools exist and they’re here to stay.

To accept that parents have the right to choose a religious school for their child within the public education system would alter the way we have thought and talked about schools for well over a century. Ever since it was decided that public education would be secular, we have taken it for granted that religious schools would be private. This assumption has been so deeply embedded that even when “private” schools became mostly publicly funded we continued to insist on using the misnomer.

Because we continue to insist that religious schools are “private,” we allow them to exempt themselves from the obligations associated with public schools. To deal with some of the effects of this distinction, the Gonski Review recommended that we should allocate more funding to schools where disadvantaged students are concentrated, regardless of whether they are public or “private.” But Gonski neither suggested (nor, it would appear, seriously considered) that publicly funded religious schools should be as accessible to disadvantaged students as publicly funded secular schools are.

Two logically distinct ideas have become historically entangled. The first is that public funding should entail public obligations as determined by the public’s agent, the government. The second, logically unrelated idea is that public education cannot accommodate a plurality of views about what role, if any, religion should have in education. Some careful disentangling could isolate what is really at stake and engender a more cooperative mood at the same time. If such a task were contemplated, the courage and imagination – and the mistakes – of the architects of New Zealand’s experiment in integration may be a good place to start. •

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For contemporary Australian politics, and for thinking about Australia’s place in the world, an inquiry into Australian exceptionalism is timely and pertinent. Political rebellions in Britain and the United States have raised questions about the inevitability of growing trade, migration and globalisation. Growth in the major advanced economies has slowed. Is Australia, gliding tranquilly into its twenty-sixth year of uninterrupted economic expansion, merely behind the trend? Is it possible that this country’s exceptionalism is an “indulgence of simplicity and fancy, made possible only by lenient economic circumstances,” as Coleman darkly asks, and that the “hour of severe depression” is “nigh”? Or is there something about Australia’s exceptions that contributes to its unusual success and might shield it from the rebellions evident in otherwise similar economies?

The debate with which the new book engages is about not only where we are now and where we are going, but where we have come from. Drawing on the historian Keith Hancock’s Australia, journalist Paul Kelly argued in his early Australian political chronicles that Australia was built on a Federation “settlement” of high tariffs, the White Australia policy, wage arbitration and “imperial benevolence.” According to Kelly, the settlement weighed on Australian development for decades, until it was undone by the Hawke and Keating government in the 1980s and early 1990s. In Kelly’s account, Australia had indeed been exceptional, but not in good ways. By the 1990s much of the exceptionalism had gone, permitting Australia’s long run of prosperity.

To this “Australian settlement” view of Australia’s peculiarities, Adelaide economic historian Ian McLean provided a compelling alternative in his 2013 book Why Australia Prospered. Much of what was said to have been agreed at Federation, he wrote, already existed in the colonies. And much of what was important in Australian economic history, especially the relentless rise of Commonwealth authority, wasn’t part of any Federation compact and only emerged through High Court decisions, two world wars, and big changes in the global economy.

Nor was it evident that tariffs, arbitration and racially restricted immigration weighed on Australia’s prosperity. In the quarter century following the end of the second world war, for example – a period in which Australia had high tariffs, wage arbitration and the White Australia policy – real GDP increased by 230 per cent, just short of twice the gain of the celebrated upswing of the past twenty-five years. Real income per person increased 157 per cent, well over twice the increase of the past twenty-five years. The productivity gain was around 150 per cent, nearly three times faster than in the upswing of the past twenty-five years.

It’s true that arbitration and high tariffs were proving poisonous by 1971, and White Australia had been largely abandoned. But it is surely hard to argue that Australia would be a better place if it had permitted entry of the cheap labour the squatters demanded, had accepted the low wages and racial apartheid that would inevitably have followed, and had remained dependent on mines and farms.

This is the debate William Coleman and his colleagues have entered. In his introductory chapter, Coleman appears to agree with Paul Kelly that a settlement was struck at Federation that set Australia on its peculiar path. But he disagrees with Kelly in arguing that the settlement described by Hancock in 1930, and revisited by Kelly more than half a century later, still exists. And he differs from McLean not only in assuming there was such a settlement but also in thinking – though here Coleman is not entirely clear – that it is a very bad thing.

Coleman’s central claim is that “Australia is the country that won’t move on, which is stuck in its way.” Australia’s character, he writes, remains “egalitarian, collectivist, dirigiste.” And while Australia is “stuck,” other countries are moving ahead. In the early twenty-first century, he writes, “Australia appears to be drifting from the tendency of the English-speaking world in matters of economic and social policy.” Australia is following a “special path… laid down more than a century ago.” Moreover, there is a “silence” on the subject that this book will “breach.”

Australian exceptionalism is evident, he writes, in a tightly regulated labour market, a tax–transfer system heavily reliant on direct taxation and means testing, a mere appearance of federalism that belies the reality of a unitary state, the lofty prominence of an “official family” of senior bureaucrats and independent statutory bodies, and certain electoral peculiarities. He challenges the view that Australia changed course when the Hawke and Keating governments deregulated the financial system, floated the dollar, scrapped tariffs and eventually switched from the arbitrated national wage increases of the Accord to enterprise-based bargains.

The “cited shifts,” Coleman argues, “are more a matter of form than nature.” The White Australia policy has gone but the “nature” of the White Australia policy “remains unchanged” because Australia regulates immigration on economic grounds. Tariffs have fallen but budgetary assistance has “ballooned.” And while enterprise bargaining may have replaced wage arbitration, “bargaining remains the legal monopoly of ‘registered’ trade unions.” He concludes that “it is Australia’s much-vaunted period of ‘microeconomic reform’ of the 1980s that has been temporary and passing,” while “Australian exceptionalism is better described as enduring.” By contrast, Sweden and Switzerland have made a deeper and more enduring shift to the market since 1980, as has New Zealand.

In a related contribution, Henry Ergas supports Coleman’s view, writing that by “echoing Hancock’s three pillars of the Australian settlement” Paul Kelly had “prematurely” declared it over in the 1980s and 1990s. On these points, Coleman is not entirely convincing. There is surely more than a cosmetic difference, for example, between a migration policy that rigidly excludes non-whites, skilled or not, and a policy that readily accepts people of all races if they are skilled.

In writing that “tariffs have fallen” but budgetary assistance has “ballooned,” Coleman implicitly suggests the fall of one has been compensated by the rise of the other. Not so, according to the Productivity Commission. It calculates the total effective rate of industry assistance as the sum of tariff protection, tax concessions and budgetary support, and finds that assistance to manufacturing has fallen from 35 per cent of value added in 1970–71 to 5 per cent on the most recent number, 2014–15. In agriculture, the proportion fell from 25 per cent to around 4 per cent. Since 1991, the effective rate of assistance has fallen by two-thirds. In recent years, according to the same report, budgetary assistance has declined.

In industrial relations, Coleman writes, the change is illusory because “bargaining remains the legal monopoly of ‘registered’ trade unions.” Again, not so. Provision for non-union agreements was legislated over twenty years ago. Under the current legislation, employees may choose the bargaining agent they please, including themselves.

I take it that Coleman’s contrasting of Sweden, Switzerland and New Zealand to Australia is intended to suggest that those countries have gone further in free-market principles than Australia has. Perhaps in some respects they have. But all of them have markedly higher ratios of tax to GDP than Australia’s, and markedly higher ratios of government spending to GDP. That would make them, I would have thought, more dirigiste and collectivist than Australia.

On World Bank numbers, tax in Australia in 2014 was 22.2 per cent of GDP, and government spending 26.5 per cent. In New Zealand, tax to GDP was 26.7 per cent, four percentage points higher, and government spending to GDP 32.6 per cent – very much higher. Sweden’s tax to GDP was 26.4 per cent, and spending 33 per cent. Calculating them a different way, the OECD gives bigger numbers for both tax and spending to GDP, but the order of countries remains the same. In the OECD numbers, Australian government spending to GDP is not only markedly below the rates in New Zealand and Britain but also below that of the United States.

Nor is Coleman completely persuasive on other aspects of Australia. In social policy, he contrasts Australian state-run public schools with charter schools in the US and academy schools in Britain. This difference is, he writes, the “best illustration” of Australia’s tendency to keep pressing along its path. But even there he has to contend with the fact that Australian schools score well above their counterparts in the US and Britain (and a bit better than in New Zealand) on the OECD’s PISA tests. One might understand why Americans would want to experiment with charter schools without agreeing that Australians should do the same.

There is a tone in his work that suggests Coleman thinks Australia’s path is errant or dead-ended, but he doesn’t pursue the argument. Instead, he says “the aim of this book is to get an understanding of this situation” rather than to inquire whether it has made Australia richer or poorer, or fairer or less fair. How one could get an “understanding” of Australian exceptionalism without inquiring about its economic and distributional effect is mysterious. It’s a major weakness in the book.

But if Coleman did go there, he would be presented with some problems. One of them is the uninterrupted prosperity of the past twenty-five years, despite Australia’s being stuck in the alleged rut of dirigiste collectivism. Growth has been markedly faster here than in either the US or Britain, the countries to which Australia is unfavourably compared.

Coleman’s is the plight of the Right. A sensible public policy argument is difficult unless participants recognise that Australia has done quite well, and in recent decades very well indeed, compared to other advanced economies. Once recognised, this changes the debate. If Australia is doing a lot better than Britain or the US, for example, it doesn’t follow that we should do as they do. If, indeed, we are “drifting from the tendency of the English-speaking world in matters of economic and social policy” and “following a special path,” that might be no bad thing. It would at least require that public policy arguments should be well informed by detailed and quite specific data.

Perhaps attempting to escape the plight of the Right, Coleman creates a new “long boom” that begins in 1979. This dates its origin to well before the float of the Australian dollar, the big tariff cuts or replacement of arbitration with bargaining. Happily, it also credits its initiation to Malcolm Fraser (or perhaps his then treasurer, John Howard) instead of Hawke or Keating. There is, however, some cost in plausibility. Coleman’s “long boom” includes the two worst recessions Australia has experienced since recovering from the Great Depression eighty years ago. It certainly could not, as he suggests, be based on favourable terms of trade, since for most of that time Australia’s terms of trade were flat or declining. Nor could it be based on a favourable world economy, since it would include not only the global financial crisis, the 2000 “tech wreck” and its aftermath, the 1997 Asia Crisis, and the 1994 bond sell-off, but also the global downturns of 1989–90 and 1979–80. And it could not be based on China, since for most of the time China was a relatively small (though fast-growing) economy and for three-quarters of the period Australia’s exports to China were quite modest.

Another strategy to deal with the plight of the Right is to claim Australia’s economic success is an illusion, one based on favourable export prices and China’s growth, and is about to vanish. “Looming over public discourse,” Coleman writes, “is the apprehension that Australian exceptionalism amounts to an indulgence of simplicity and fancy, made possible by lenient economic circumstances.” He asks, “Could the hour of severe depression be nigh?” Well, it could be. It is, after all, a world of infinite possibility. But it is difficult to engage an argument that doesn’t proceed beyond the question. I would call it an indulgence in simplicity and fancy.

Yet there are some strong pieces in the volume. Coleman’s own essay on “Theories of Australian Exceptionalism” is a thoughtful survey of some interpretations of Australian peculiarities (though in a very long list of references he omits Ian McLean’s book).

In a remarkably wide-ranging and clever contribution, Henry Ergas compares de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America with Keith Hancock’s 1930 Australia. As Ergas points out, Democracy in America is still published today and still widely discussed, while Australia has not been republished for decades and is rarely discussed. The reason, Ergas supposes, is that “Australia lacks a foundation myth that shapes political culture and political controversy,” so that discussion of the “Australian settlement” is less likely to turn up in an actual contemporary political discussion.

Another reason, Ergas supposes, is that Hancock criticises the Australian pursuit of “fairness,” which does not “sit easily” with the “dominant tendency” to “rehabilitate that ‘settlement’ and, with it, at least some elements of the radical-nationalist view of Australian history.” He writes that “the declining prominence of Australia reflects the renewed acceptance of the radical-leftist view of Australian history,” a view that “glorifies the continuing validity of the settlement’s underlying goals.”

Those two reasons seem to me to sit uneasily together – Hancock is forgotten because we have no foundation myth and don’t discuss the “settlement,” and Hancock is forgotten because he criticises that settlement and there is a “dominant tendency” to rehabilitate it. Ergas is at least aware of McLean’s work, instancing it as the (only) example of this “dominant tendency.”

Political scientist John Nethercote writes on Australia’s “talent for bureaucracy” and “the atrophy of federalism.” A “quest for equality” comes at “the expense of federalism,” he says, and encourages Australia’s “talent for bureaucracy” and thus “uniformity and standardisation.” He critically notes the recent Australian government green paper on federalism, which poses the question, “what is the problem we are trying to solve?” but doesn’t answer it. I’m not sure Nethercote does either. At the end of his interesting and well-written account I was left wondering what exactly he objects to, and why.

Similarly, another of Coleman’s contributions may well become the classic account of Australia’s “electoral idiosyncrasies,” especially compulsory voting, preferential voting, and the persistence of a distinct country party. But it is not at all evident how the puzzles and curiosities he describes support his conclusions that “the Australian sense of democracy is undeveloped,” that there is “poverty of the democratic spirit in Australia” and (most severely) that “Australian democracy smacks too much of the polling booth and not enough of the parliamentary chamber.”

Adelaide economist J.J. Pincus contributes a sensible piece about the state and railways. Canberra academic Phil Lewis takes us through the Australian industrial relations framework, asserting without explanation that the system is today “more regulated” than it was following the Keating government reforms. The industrial relations system “has now gone into reverse and is falling behind other countries.” Without example or amplification, it’s difficult to discuss.

While Coleman might not be persuasive in his argument that Australia didn’t really change in the 1980s, I think he is quite right in arguing that some aspects of Australian exceptionalism remain, and some of them have a long history. Industrial disputes might no longer be arbitrated, and we no longer attempt to calculate a “basic wage” or “margins,” but Australia still has high and legally enforceable minimum wages, especially compared to the United States. It is still possible for workers to unionise relatively easily if they wish, and to strike collective bargains with their employers. In practice, most workers are paid either at or over the award, with no formal enterprise bargain, but the existence of a right to unionise, to strike during a bargaining period, and to reach enterprise agreements is a useful check on the boss.

Coleman is also right to see a passing resemblance between today’s skilled migration program and the old White Australia policy. Quite a few White Australia proponents were outright racists, but many more thought of it as a policy to keep out cheap, unskilled labour. A skilled labour migration policy achieves the same effect, without the racism.

And while they are not so much historical remnants as more modern creations, Coleman is also right to detect some other exceptions to the trend in other English-speaking economies. Australia does rely more heavily on a progressive personal income tax than many other advanced economies, its value-added taxes are certainly lower than those in Europe, Britain or New Zealand (but not the US), and it does means test government benefits more than most countries. The result is a progressive tax and transfer system with a reasonably high level of benefit payments, but smaller shares of tax and government spending to GDP than the countries to which Coleman compares us.

There is a sense in Only in Australia that these exceptions are not only at odds with trends elsewhere but also inimical to Australia’s success. In a recent Lowy Institute analysis, How to Be Exceptional: Australia in the Slowing Global Economy, I argue the contrary. Many of Australia’s peculiarities are entirely consistent with and facilitate Australia’s engagement in the global economy. In the US, the median income has only just climbed back to the level it last reached seventeen years ago. In Britain, income inequality has dramatically widened. Little wonder rust-belt states swung to Trump, who promised to cut migration and cheap manufactured imports. Little wonder the old and the poorly educated in Britain voted against an open European labour market.

By contrast, even households in the lowest income quintile in Australia have experienced an increase of nearly 60 per cent in their real disposable income over the past twenty years. The twenty-five-year upswing explains some of that, but the relatively fairer income distribution also depends precisely on those elements to which Coleman and his colleagues are most hostile. The combination of high minimum wages, skilled migration, and a progressive tax-and-benefit structure help ensure a less unequal society than the US. Australia has been able to run a far larger migration relative to its size, has a larger trade share, and is quite as engaged in the global economy as the US, without the political fractures now evident there and in Britain.

For the coming decades Australia has an immense demographic advantage that can underpin stronger growth in living standards than is likely in most other advanced economies. Realising this advantage depends on a continuing large immigration program, which in turn depends on sustaining political consent through a reasonably fair spread of prosperity. In Australia today, there is plenty of distress, plenty of rural annoyance with Chinese investment, and widespread objection to rorting 457 visas, but no rebellion against the openness to trade and migration which has supported Australian development for well over 200 years. That is another aspect of the plight of the Right: what we have retained of Australian exceptionalism works. •

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Yes, and no. Over the past decade or two, as a proportion of GDP or relative to other countries, not really. Compared to other education sectors (vocational education and training and, by some measures, higher education), yes. As an amount spent per-student per-year, over the long term, yes. The best available estimate is that between 1963–64 and 2003–04 spending (in 2003–04 dollars) rose from $4575 per student to $8297. Recent increases, alleged to have been spectacular, almost certainly weren’t. These overall figures conceal substantial differences in spending between states, sectors and schools.

2. So, Australian schools are well funded?

Yes, and no. Australian spending is at about the OECD average, but that’s the total spend, not the particular. Some secondary schools (for example) have around $30,000 to spend on each student each year; most others have around half that. Big spending sometimes reflects need (schools in some remote Aboriginal communities, for example), but mostly doesn’t.

To the contrary. Thanks to the workings of the real estate market and of choice (by families) and selection/exclusion (by schools), most high-revenue schools cater to high-income clienteles. That also gets them more than their fair share of that most valuable of all educational resources, students who are good at schoolwork. Other schools with much less money thereby get to do a harder educational job.

On top of this systemic inequality is simple unfairness. A primary school on one side of the NSW–Victoria border (for example) gets $9672 per student per year, while a very similar school on the other side gets $7732. The money problem is not in the amount spent, but in how it is distributed, and used.

3. Is the money used as well as it could be?

Not really. Over the long term, more money has helped to make schools more congenial and humane places than they once were, which is no small thing. But much spending has been driven by politics rather than purpose. For two or three decades from the 1960s, most extra funding went on the high-cost, low-effectiveness strategy of across-the-board reduction in class sizes. Since then, funding increases have been soaked up by rising costs (salaries mainly), as the Baumol Effect predicts. Any genuinely “new” money (over and above cost increases) has typically gone to meet special needs (of children with disabilities particularly) and to repair damage done in the mainstream (low student engagement in secondary schools, for example), rather than to change the mainstream.

Only rarely has new money been used to free up the “old” money locked up in the “grammar of schooling” (one teacher, one class, one lesson of forty-five minutes in one subject, and so on).  That “grammar,” in turn, is locked into place by industrial agreements that set limits on the size of every class (rather than maximum student–staff ratios), enforce a strict division of labour between teachers and “support staff,” and prohibit “person–technology swaps.”

In short, each school should be doing its own Gonski, matching effort to need, but can’t. And, in sum, we have a cumulative incrementalism in which problems and costs increase faster than solutions can be provided.

4. So schools have more money but haven’t lifted their game?

No, and yes. The obvious but simple-minded conclusion, favoured by some economists, federal ministers of education, and pundits, is that spending more doesn’t work. The argument is that PISA, NAPLAN and other standardised tests show that attainment has plateaued while funding hasn’t. Leaving to one side the vexed question of how well standardised tests measure some aspects of some areas of the academic curriculum, and the fact that the academic curriculum is not the whole school story by any means, it remains true (as per point 3, above) that money has been spent where it is not needed and not where it is, and on more of the same rather than repurposed.

But these are failures of the system, not of schools. So is the tidal movement of families who can choose away from those who can’t, making it more and more difficult for many schools to lift attainment. On top of which, schools are endlessly expected to do more things (sex ed, life skills, twenty-first-century skills, careers ed…) and harder things (handle kids who for a range of reasons aren’t easy to handle and/or come from an ever-expanding range of language and cultural backgrounds). Perhaps not going backwards is an achievement? Perhaps the test scores would have been worse if spending hadn’t increased?

5. Why the endless brawling over money?

It’s the structure, stupid: three sectors, each funded in different ways from three different sources; two levels of government involved, one with the responsibility, the other with the money; some schools charging fees, others free (well, nominally anyway); some schools (including some government schools) selecting or ejecting students on academic and/or financial and/or religious grounds, others required by law to take all comers. These arrangements are international worst practice, a recipe for gaming the system and for conflict.

Everyone has been given a legitimate basis for grievance. The fee-payers argue that they need more government support to keep fees down and because they are taxpayers after all. The non-fee-payers point out that their schools are open to all and do the hard educational yards, and therefore deserve first claim on the public purse. The selective public schools (government-funded private schools, really) keep their heads down. The system creates a large space, and rewards, for politics, and minimises the role of evidence and expertise. Interest groups form around different categories of school, and ideologies form around them. Brawls over the second-order question of funding displace debate over the first-order question of the character and direction of schooling as a whole.

6. Where did these problems come from?

The Whitlam government, in the first instance. It was Whitlam’s famous Karmel Report of 1973 that determined that some schools would be funded and others merely “aided”; that therefore some parents who couldn’t afford it would pay and that many who could, wouldn’t; that parents would therefore have the right but not necessarily the capacity to choose; that some schools would select but others wouldn’t; that there would be, in short, three sectors funded in different ways, governed in different ways, with very different rights and obligations.

Of course, Whitlam (and Karmel) didn’t just dream it up. They made the best politics they could from the furious “state aid” debates of the 1950s and 1960s, which stemmed from the movements in the second half of the nineteenth century to end the decades-old system of public support for private schools, which stemmed from fundamental demographic and political facts the Europeans brought with them… Whitlam’s biographer called it Australia’s “oldest, deepest, most poisonous debate” – and that was 1977.

7. Did Gonski have the fix?

Yes, and no. Gonski’s proposals included: a fair and rational way of deciding what funding each school needed, irrespective of sector, location or clientele; a national authority to run the detail, and thereby shift the balance of funding decisions away from politics and towards evidence and expertise; a way of making the states “maintain effort” rather than use federal money to substitute for their own; and a way of putting money behind an educational strategy centred on need.

Not bad. But it is a measure of the depth of the trouble we’re in that this left five substantial problems still to be tackled: some parents paying fees and others not, irrespective of capacity to pay; some schools (and families) still able to outspend others by as much as they like; some schools able to select or exclude on grounds of income, academic ability or religion; two levels of government with coordinated funding but no clear division of labour and responsibility in other areas; and no encouragement to use new money to free up old, for each school to do its own Gonski. Even this less-than-complete program required five or six billion dollars a year in new money to lubricate the wheels of change – a tacit acknowledgement of the power of sectoral lobby groups. Gonski’s limitations, it should be emphasised, came not from the panel but from its riding instructions.

8. Was Gonski trashed by Bill Shorten, as alleged by federal education minister Simon Birmingham?

Hardly. Shorten played a late and minor role in doing on-the-fly deals with states and territories. These were mere nails in the coffin. It was Peter Garrett, Shorten’s predecessor in the education portfolio, who did most of that part of the damage, and he did so at the behest of his prime minister, Julia Gillard. Gillard deserves much of the blame for not driving Gonski home when she had the chance, thus giving the usual interest groups time and opportunity to bowdlerise a singularly bold and coherent plan. On the other hand, Gillard also deserves much of the credit for getting Gonski under way, as education minister and then as prime minister.

As for Mr Birmingham’s Coalition predecessors, what can we say? They were duplicitous spoilers from the outset: first bad-mouthing the whole idea; then egging on Coalition-governed states to reject it; then promising (at the eleventh electoral hour) a “unity ticket” on Gonski; then (nano-seconds after the election) junking it; and now, having found themselves wrong-footed by Gonski’s wide and deep support (not least inside the conservatives’ own ranks), having the gall to claim that it was Labor all along that has been the villain of the piece.

9. Will the Birmingham plan do the needful?

It’s too soon to tell if there is a plan or, if there is, whether it is any good, but early signs are less than promising. On Friday last week the minister took his proposals to a meeting with his highly sceptical state counterparts. It is difficult to be optimistic about the likely outcome. On the positive side, Birmingham made constant references to “need” and “needs-based funding,” a victory for Gonski. He also made the entirely accurate observation that Gonski has been trashed. And he hinted at a willingness to redistribute money away from those who don’t need it and towards those who do. But the usual suspects have already fired warning shots, and the minister has squibbed on fixing the big differences in spending between states. He refers to Gonski as a “funding formula,” which forgets essential elements, including a comprehensive agreement between states and sectors and the machinery needed to make it work (a national schools resources body, and state-level coordination of planning for new schools). There is little or no new money to secure state and sector buy-in.

10. Is there a way out?

In the short term, perhaps. In the longer run? Learn from the AFL. Use funding and regulation to make sure that no “team” gets too far ahead or too far behind, that all are equipped, encouraged and required to provide an educationally engaging program to a diverse clientele. That wouldn’t involve abolishing existing authorities (government, Catholic, and so on), practices (including choice) or rights (including to religion-based schooling), but it would mean constructing an overall framework within which all could operate more fairly, efficiently and productively. The prerequisite to success in reforming practice (“teaching quality” and the like) and lifting performance is fixing the unfair, inequitable, politics-sodden, inflexible and counterproductive combination of funding and regulation within which schools work.

The key is to level up the playing field. That would mean putting all families on the same basis, either none paying fees (not necessarily as big a hit to the public purse as might be thought) or, much less desirably, all required to pay (or be eligible for subsidy) according to taxation status. It would mean putting a ceiling on funding as well as a floor under it, and making school choice more widely and fairly available, in all three sectors. That is, of course, a bold program, minister. It raises a host of technically and politically difficult questions. It would demand leadership of the kind showed by John Dawkins in higher education in the 1980s, Paul Keating on land rights in the 1990s, or John Howard on gun control not long after. Too hard? Probably. In which case Australia’s “oldest, deepest, most poisonous debate” and the schooling system that comes with it can look forward to a few decades yet. •

The post Money, schools and politics: some FAQs appeared first on Inside Story.

Close to the border on the NSW side is Albury Public School, with its 600 students. Not far over the other side is Wodonga Primary School, enrolling students who are measurably less advantaged, according to the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage, or ICSEA. In the world that could have been after the Gonski report was released, each less-advantaged student at Wodonga Primary would have been supported by governments at higher levels than those at Albury Public. But the reality is the reverse. In 2014, the Victorian government funded each student at Wodonga Primary to the tune of $6173. The NSW government provided $8110 for each of its students at Albury Public.

Between 2009 and 2014, the NSW school received an increase in state government recurrent funding of $1373 per student. The Victorian school received less than one-third of that increase from its government. Federal funding added something extra for each school, but the public-funding gap between the two remained unchanged.

NAMING SCHOOLS

This article names specific schools that illustrate serious deficiencies in the way we fund education. Comparisons are mainly made between primary schools, as these tend to be structured in similar ways, regardless of location or sector. Naming schools is not about attributing blame: the schools didn’t create the problems described.

What about other local schools? Albury North Public School is publicly funded, per student, at 26 per cent more than the equally disadvantaged Wodonga West Primary School. Xavier High School, a Catholic school on the NSW side, gets more public funding per student than the more disadvantaged Catholic College in Wodonga. Some non-government schools are funded by governments ahead of similar government schools: Baranduda, near Wodonga, has a Catholic, an Anglican and a government school, all within walking distance, all enrolling similar students. In public funding terms, the government school comes third.

Can similar differences be found across other borders? St Joseph’s College at Banora Point on the far north coast of New South Wales gets more public funding per student than does the very similar St Michael’s College across the border in Queensland. Lindisfarne Anglican School in New South Wales is publicly funded well ahead of two similar independent schools in Queensland. How do the two Queanbeyan primary schools (Queanbeyan Public and Queanbeyan West Public) compare with similar schools in the Australian Capital Territory? Successive federal ministers might know; they have long used Queanbeyan schools as backdrops for the announcement of new policies. Nine schools with similar students in the ACT receive, on average, 30 per cent more in public funding than the two primary schools on the NSW side.

There is nothing unusual about these schools near state borders – it’s just that their proximity to each other means the contrasts are more easily noticed. Any national sample shows similar problems. There are, for example, forty-eight medium-size metropolitan primary schools in Australia with an ICSEA value between 1000 and 1009. It is a small sample, but the schools are all very similar in terms of their educational challenges. Among the government schools, the highest-funded dozen average $12,300 per student, 43 per cent more than the lowest-funded dozen at $8566. Eight of the thirteen Catholic schools receive more public funding than the lowest-funded half dozen government schools.

Almost all of these schools have at least one thing in common: the differences in the way they are supported by governments make little educational sense.

How much money is enough?

There’s no shortage of commentary about how much funding is needed to lift student achievement – along with assertions that current levels aren’t doing it. Our expenditure on schools is substantial, but it is not effectively linked to goals and is poorly directed, with little coordination between levels of government.

The problem is about much more than dollars. The way we resource our schools doesn’t sufficiently reflect the task faced by each school in improving the achievement of its students – and the future prospects of the whole nation. Despite all the apparent commitment to funding schools on the basis of need, we are not doing that in any systematic way. We aren’t focusing on the schools where the money will make the greatest difference. Indeed, much school funding goes to schools whose students are already advantaged, where the additional funding certainly makes very little difference.

If were serious about funding schools according to their needs, the dollar figures for schools such as these would look quite different. To put this to the test, we have applied to the schools mentioned above a funding formula based on components of need, including school type, enrolment, location, and the proportion of students in known disadvantaged groups and in the lowest two quarters of the ICSEA. All the required data comes from the My School website.

The figures for the likely needs-based funding level, along with the amounts above or below existing levels, are shown in the final two columns of this table. What matters is not so much the dollar amounts but the relative difference, for each school, between the needs-based projections and the actual funding levels.

Likely needs-based funding for selected Albury–Wodonga schools, 2014.

Our needs-based calculations show that a number of schools might be entitled to higher per-student funding than they currently receive, while others might be entitled to less. The less advantaged Wodonga Primary, for instance, would receive more per student than Albury (although on these numbers, students at both schools would actually receive more). Using needs-based funding, the three Baranduda schools would be funded in closer relationship to their ICSEA values than is currently the case.

These figures were calculated using the funding formula embedded in the Australian Education Act 2013 – the closest the Gillard government got to implementing the Gonski recommendations. We have used a My School proxy field for the English proficiency loading in the Act, though this is a relatively minor factor for the schools mentioned above. The My School data doesn’t contain another of Gonski’s needs categories, the percentage of students with a disability, for which we haven’t been able to compensate.

In relative terms, our needs-based figures approximate the amounts that would have been calculated for those schools under the 2013 Act. They show what a different distribution of funds might look like, rather than laying down definitive amounts for each school, and better reflect the task faced by each school in improving student outcomes.

None of this denies the importance of investing in specific, high-quality programs in schools; implementing evidence-driven reforms; improving the capacity of teachers and school leaders; and ensuring authentic and properly resourced school accountability. None of that goes away. What would largely go away, or at least substantially decrease, is the large element of chance in how we currently fund schools.

The chances we lost

What did Gonski want? The review recommended that the resource level for each school should be expressed as a school resourcing standard, or SRS, set at a level at which it has been shown – in schools with minimal levels of educational disadvantage – that high performance is achievable over time. As Gonski panellist Ken Boston reminds us:

We took as our benchmark those schools in which at least 80 per cent of students were above national minimum standard for their year level in reading and numeracy in the most recent three years. This was highly aspirational: it was, and still is, about 16 per cent of schools. We saw the SRS not as a funding mechanism, but as the “price” that had to be paid to bring all schools to standard.

To that end, the panel recommended for all schools a system of funding based upon a fixed, evidence-based amount for each primary or secondary student – the SRS – plus additional amounts for various elements of need (“loadings”).

We proposed a change from a funding allocation system that for forty years has been top-down, politically driven, sector-based and needs-blind, to one that is built from the bottom up, educationally-driven, sector-blind and needs-based.

Gonski and his colleagues recommended that funding consistency and equity across Australia should be driven by a National Schools Resourcing Body, jointly owned by all governments. It didn’t happen. Separate funding deals were done with the states and non-government sectors, and we were left with what we’ve had for decades: school funding that’s still essentially a political settlement, sector-based and needs-blind. New South Wales has proven to be an exception, as Boston describes, demonstrating the feasibility of building school funding from the bottom up as envisaged by Gonski.

The heated discussions about school funding have rarely touched on the local impacts of this negligence. It isn’t a remote problem; it plays out in the schools we see each and every day. It’s easiest to see on the state borders, where schools that are treated differently are so close to each other. But all schools are affected: we now have vastly different levels of provision for students, a provision based on the state, sector and community in which they are located – and the families into which they are born.

States of chaos

We’ve seen what school funding looks like on the ground and how it could be different.What does the broader picture reveal, especially about our two levels of government?

For a variety of reasons, the federal government has become a large source of school funding. Between 2009 and 2014, its recurrent funding expenditure on all schools increased by 34.5 per cent, around three times the percentage increase in state and territory expenditure per student. Federal education minister Simon Birmingham is right to complain about the states not pulling their weight – even if they are responding, in part, to mixed messages from his government.

In one respect there is consistency in federal government funding: it is consistently biased towards non-government schools and has consistently responded to pressure from that sector. As former senior education official Jim McMorrow observes, the Turnbull government has decided to index grants annually by 3.56 per cent after 2017, and will include school fees as a direct measure of inflation.

If lack of logic and consistency is an indication of policy failure, then the funding of schools by state and territory governments ticks all the boxes. Some state funding of government schools, for example in New South Wales, rose between 2009 and 2014; in other states, the pattern resembles a roller-coaster track. Meanwhile, state government funding of non-government schools rose almost everywhere, especially in both Victoria and Western Australia, where it increased at four times the rate of increases to government schools. If the states are run – as one federal minister asserted – by “adult” governments, then they have certainly neglected most of their own children.

It is hard to believe that the government schools in Albury and Wodonga, Queanbeyan and the Australian Capital Territory, and on either side of the NSW–Queensland border exist in the same country. And these aren’t the most extreme examples. The ACT, for instance, provides 50 per cent more public funding to its public schools than does Victoria. Is anyone casting an eye across Australia and between sectors to see if the system is fair and consistent, and reflects any considered and agreed rationale?

Accumulating problems

The shift in government funding priorities and directions over the past few years, measurable using My School data, has both exposed and worsened a raft of other problems. We expand on these in two recent reports, School Daze: What My School Really Says about Our Schools and Uneven Playing Field: The State of Australia’s Schools, published by the Centre for Policy Development.

The relative neglect of low ICSEA schools: Under the Gonski recommendations, the investment in these schools would have risen considerably. But public funding for low and high ICSEA schools has actually increased at much the same rate.Recurrent government funding for public schools, which enrol students with the greatest needs, has increased at just half the rate of increases to the non-government sector.

Rising inequity: The educational outcomes of schools should be created by the things schools do, by the effort and expertise of teachers and by school leadership – all supported by the right policies. But recent outcomes are increasingly the result, in the well-known words of the Gonski review, of “differences in wealth, income, power or possessions.” Inequity is rising.

Enrolment shifts that highlight a divide: There is aslow but consistent movement of students out of lower, and into higher, ICSEA schools. The students who are moving tend to be more advantaged than the ones they leave behind. This compounds disadvantage in low ICSEA schools, a problem that was strongly emphasised in Gonski’s findings.

Diverging student achievement: Much is written about trends in our NAPLAN results, which are currently reported to be plateauing. But student achievement in high and low ICSEA schools has consistently diverged over six years and this trend will almost certainly continue. That goes a long way to explaining our drift.

Poor allocation of apparently scarce funding: We overinvest, in both public and private schools, in students who are already advantaged, without any improvement in student outcomes. Meanwhile, these high levels of investment would make a considerable difference in less-advantaged schools in all sectors.

The gap between schools and their local community: For two-thirds of Australia’s schools, the local community is increasingly not the community of the local school. Both push and pull factors have driven students to more distant schools. Schools are increasingly detached from, and less representative of, their local communities.

The vanishing “non-government” school: Government funding to private schools has increased to the point where it is meeting and sometimes exceeding the funding going to public schools with similar ICSEA ratings. The public funding of the two sectors is now at odds with the reality that one is a public system and the other, in a legal and technical sense, is privately owned and operated, and has significantly different accountabilities and obligations.

The mounting costs of inequity and disadvantage: The costs of failing to close the gaps are increasingly well-known and increasing. Young people who are not fully engaged in education or employment (or a combination of both) are at greater risk of unemployment, and of low pay and insecure employment.

What all these developments have in common is not that they are new, but that they have worsened since 2009 in ways that can now be measured. And the evidence is compelling and mounting. More important, most are developments that would be having much less of a negative impact if Gonski’s recommendations had been implemented.

THE VANISHING “NON-GOVERNMENT” SCHOOL

A pressing problem challenges our very framework of schools. Governments fund two quite different sectors: the public, or government, sector is fully funded; and the private, or non-government, sector is almost fully funded. In terms of funding, “public” and “private” are becoming meaningless.

The extent of public funding is buried behind commonly touted average funding figures for each sector. Federal education minister Simon Birmingham tells us that private schools get just 60 per cent of the public funding going to government schools. But Xavier High School gets almost 95 per cent, not 60 per cent, of the public funding going to the quite similar Albury High School. In the far north of NSW, St James’ Primary School and St Joseph’s Primary school each get not 60 per cent, but around 106 per cent, of the public funding that goes to the otherwise similar Kingscliff and Terranora Public Schools.

The bigger picture emerges when we compare the funding of large numbers of schools that enrol students with similar educational needs. Most Australian schools fall into the 950–1150 ICSEA range. In this ICSEA range, governments fund Catholic schools at between 90.8 per cent and 99.5 per cent of the dollars going to public schools. The figures for Independent schools range from 79.5 per cent to 94.6 per cent. Catholic schools in Queensland in this range get 89.0 per cent of government school public funding, NSW schools 93.1 per cent and Victorian schools 104.8 per cent. The corresponding figures for Independent schools are Queensland 78.3 per cent, NSW 84.0 per cent and Victoria 91.5 per cent.

Average funding figures don’t tell this story because the sectors are quite different. The sector that must be available to every child from every family in every place and circumstance inevitably enrols students with higher needs and hence faces higher costs. Comparing average funding across whole sectors creates yet another half-truth. Whether it be student achievement or school funding, My School enables us to compare schools enrolling similar students.

Why should any of this matter?

On 23 September, the COAG Education Council, made up of the nation’s education ministers, will meet once again to coordinate strategic policy on school education and to collaboratively address issues of national significance. Or that is what its website says.

It is highly unlikely that the ministers will make any serious attempt to inject logic, transparency and efficacy into the way schools are funded, especially to ensure that the greatest support consistently goes to the students and schools with the greatest need. They will also avoid dealing with a potential crisis that may emerge from the burgeoning public funding of non-government schools – with all that this means for those schools’ identity and obligations, and the nature of their relationship with public schools.

It is possible that the ministers will walk out of the room trumpeting the same patch-ups we have seen in the past. The trumpeting that won’t be heeded will come from the elephants in the room.

Perhaps the escalating consequences of the failure to implement Gonski aren’t “national” enough or don’t warrant a “strategic policy.” After all, there have always been differences between the way different states provide and fund various services. Why put school education on a pedestal for greater consistency?

There are three good reasons why. First, education is an essential foundation for personal livelihood, civic and social life, and economic growth. More than ever, we need assurance that our investment is properly targeted. The unequal distribution of resources to students and schools on the basis of accidents of geography seems, at best, a quaint hangover from the nineteenth century.

Second, education has assumed much greater national significance. The federal government is now active in over three dozen school programs, from A (agriculture) to almost Z (vocational pathways). It sets standards and mandates, provides resources and creates policy initiatives, and it pulls just about every policy lever available to it. Time for it to show leadership where it really matters.

Third, education funding is a mess, and it’s everyone’s mess. Gonski described school funding as complex, confusing, opaque and inconsistent among jurisdictions. He was probably being nice. The panel recommended that governments join forces to make sure that resources go to where they were most needed. Back then it was too hard. It is now even harder, but much more urgent.

If all schools had similar obligations and accountabilities, the convergence of public funding might not matter. But they don’t. One sector is required to be available to all students from all families in all locations and circumstances. The other has no such obligation. Differences in requirements for legislative compliance, staff recruitment and school reporting; student enrolment discriminators; student management practices – all these make little sense when when public funding to most schools in each sector is not too different.

Where to now?

The effective withdrawal of the federal government from Gonski funding, combined with the lack of agreed funding priorities and coordination means that current problems won’t be dealt with for years. Indexing a reduced commitment will ensure that current arrangements will last well beyond the terms of the governments sitting around the COAG table. In the longer term, the deficits created by the way we provide and resource schools will continue to accumulate. The costs of repair in the future will dwarf Gonski’s price tag.

We might get to the point where our institutionalised farce will become too great to ignore. Perhaps it will be when the parents at Wodonga Primary School, having looked across the border, hammer on the door of the Victorian government. When the teachers at one non-government school compare their balance sheet with that of another. When the principal at the public school asks out loud why its rules and obligations shouldn’t apply to the publicly funded non-government school down the road. When voters demand that the money spent on schools be used to target need and hence lift overall achievement. When governments join the dots and join forces to create something better. So far, there’sno sign on the horizon. •

The post Institutionalised inequality appeared first on Inside Story.

It is timely to revisit that history: what we as a panel were asked to do; what we found; what we recommended; what the government did with the report; what happened as a result; and the current situation.

What we were asked to do

For the past four decades – most notably in the last two – public funding for school education has increased steadily, yet our national performance has declined in absolute terms, and relatively in comparison with the other thirty-eight OECD countries. We have never spent more on education, yet our achievement continues to deteriorate.

In that context, the Gonski panel was asked to develop a funding system that is fair, transparent, financially sustainable and effective in promoting excellent outcomes for all Australian students, in order to achieve two things:

• First, to ensure that every young Australian has a fair go. We took this to mean, for example, that every child – regardless of language background, or family income and employment status, or ethnicity, or location and so on – should be given whatever support it takes to be, say, reading at minimum national standard by Year 3 (age eight).

• Second, in doing so, to maximise Australia’s national stock of human capital by giving each child the opportunity to reach his or her full potential.

What we found

We found a clear relationship between aggregated social disadvantage and poor educational outcomes, which the funding arrangements for the past forty years have exacerbated.

We found that real equality of opportunity demands the strategic targeting of resources and support, which necessarily means the unequal distribution of resources and support in favour of need.

We found no evidence to suggest that teachers in our most disadvantaged and low-performing government, Catholic and independent schools are not as skilled as those in the most advantaged schools.

We concluded that the issue in low-performing schools is not the quality of teachers in these schools but the magnitude of the task they are facing. These teachers work in the emergency wards of Australian education, yet they lack the battery of specialist support typical of an emergency ward in a hospital. Their numbers are inadequate for the job at hand, and funding is not available for the necessary support from fully qualified personnel such as counsellors, speech therapists, interpreters and school–family liaison officers.

For that reason, it seemed to us that the quality of education – as distinct from the quality of teachers – in our most disadvantaged and underperforming schools is clearly and unacceptably inferior.

We concluded that education should be regarded as a strategic investment rather than a cost. It is in our national interest that every child – whether from a fourth-generation Australian family with an income three times the national average, or from a family that has been unemployed for three generations, or from a newly arrived refugee family speaking no English – should be given the kind and amount of individual support necessary to ensure a fair go.

This means diverting funding from low priorities to high priorities. By not doing so, we are consigning thousands of children from disadvantaged backgrounds to the dustbin of underachievement, preventing them from realising their full potential and ensuring that our national performance in education will continue to decline.

What we recommended

It was our view that the funding allocations for each of the three school sectors – government school systems, non-government school systems (Catholic, Lutheran and so on) and independent schools – should be built from the bottom up, on the basis of the measured educational needs of each individual school. Allocations should no longer be determined top-down by a political process of Commonwealth negotiation with state governments, independent school organisations, church leaders, teacher unions and others. To date, school funding has been essentially a political settlement, sector-based and needs-blind.

We recommended that add-on equity programs, the most recent of which was the New Partnerships program, should be incorporated into the total needs-based funding.

We recommended that the loading of funding for non-government schools as a proportion of the AGSRC (average government school recurrent costs) should cease. This is the mechanism that ensures that funding of the non-government systemic and independent sectors increases with increasing costs in the government sector, without measurement of need.

We proposed a minimum level of public funding for all schools regardless of sector.

On top of that, we proposed loadings for the different elements of aggregated social disadvantage – English-language proficiency, socioeconomic status, school size and location, Indigeneity, and children with disability.

We proposed that all government schools, and a small number of non-government schools in areas where there is no government provision, should receive full public funding.

We proposed that any additional public funding for other non-government schools should be on a scale relating to parental capacity to pay.

All this was quite radical. Gonski was a fundamental reimagining of Australian education. We proposed a change from a funding allocation system that for forty years has been top-down, politically driven, sector-based and needs-blind, to one that is built from the bottom up, educationally driven, sector-blind and needs-based.

There were two other critically important recommendations.

First, we recommended that each school should have a school resourcing standard, set at a level at which it has been shown – in schools with minimal levels of educational disadvantage – that high performance is achievable over time.

We took as our benchmark those schools in which at least 80 per cent of students were above national minimum standard for their year level in reading and numeracy in the most recent three years. This was highly aspirational: it was, and still is, about 16 per cent of schools. We saw the school resourcing standard not as a funding mechanism, but as the “price” for bringing all schools to standard.

The second recommendation was this. As a Commonwealth inquiry, we had developed a model, or concept, that needed to be fully tested and refined with the states and the non-government sectors before implementation. We had proposed certain boundaries for the loadings for disadvantage, but recognised that these had to be tested against hard data that the states and non-government sectors alone held.

We therefore proposed that a National Schools Resourcing Body should be established immediately to proceed with this necessary work. It would be similar in concept to the former Schools Commission, owned jointly by all the ministers rather than the Commonwealth alone, and supported by an advisory group from all three sectors.

What the Labor government did

The federal government immediately buried the concept of a National Schools Resourcing Body, ruling out any possibility of a jointly owned roundtable to test and develop the Gonski model.

It drew up a National Education Reform Agreement, or NERA, to be agreed by the Council of Australian Governments, under which government school systems would receive funding, while non-government systems and schools would be funded under a National Plan for School Improvement, or NPSI.

This model provided additional funding to all schools, providing that the state governments (under the NERA) and non-government schools and systems (under the NPSI) would undertake to apply the funding to projects approved under certain headings: quality teaching, quality learning, empowered school leadership, greater transparency and accountability to school communities, and meeting need within the sector.

Now, this was not what the Gonski review recommended. It was not sector-blind, needs-based funding. It continued to discriminate between government and non-government schools. It maintained the AGSRC, under which public funding for new places for children in disadvantaged government schools automatically generates public funding for non-government schools, without any consideration of disadvantage. And although empowered school leadership, greater accountability, greater transparency and so on and are all worthy objectives, Gonski was about funding for what happens in the classrooms of each individual school – about money going through the school gate.

The NERA and NPSI contain needs-based loadings, but they were pulled out of the thin Canberra air and negotiated in a hard-ball, top-down fashion with the independent schools, the Catholic Education Commission, the Australian Education Union, and state treasuries. They are not founded on rigorous national, evidence-based testing of the school resourcing standard or the loadings and indexation arrangements, to the extent envisaged by the Gonski panel.

And yet this response to Gonski – which was far from implementing Gonski – was packaged as “Gonski agreements” and “Gonski funding.” These terms are now widely accepted by the public, the media, and even the Australian Education Union as meaning that Labor (now in opposition) is committed to implementing the Gonski reforms.

It is not. The Labor government provided additional and very welcome funding for schools; in opposition, it has been an advocate for further funding (the so-called “last two years of Gonski funding”); and it declares a commitment to needs-based funding. But the Labor Party has not committed to sector-blind funding; it has retained the principle of the AGSRC; and it has not committed to total school funding being built from the bottom up according to measured need.

In the run-up to the 2013 election, prime minister Kevin Rudd and education minister Bill Shorten hawked this corruption of the Gonski report around the country, doing deals with premiers, bishops and the various education lobbies. These bilateral negotiations were not a public and open process, as would have been achieved by the National Schools Resourcing Body; they dragged on for twenty-one months up to the September 2013 election; and they led to a thoroughly unsatisfactory situation: agreements with some states and not with others, and – among participating states – different agreements and indexation arrangements.

Labor delivered more money for education, and that has been beneficial. But like the federal Liberal–National Coalition, Labor ducked the fundamental issue of addressing the relationship between aggregated social disadvantage and poor educational outcomes, and turned its back on the development of an enduring funding system that is fair, transparent, financially sustainable and effective in promoting excellent outcomes for all Australian students.

What happened as a result

New South Wales is different from the rest of the country. It has not only put all the NERA funding through the school gate, but it has also applied loadings for disadvantage through the Resource Allocation Model. Funding for government schools is being distributed on a measured needs basis. It has demonstrated, in the largest school system in the country, the feasibility of building school funding from the bottom up as envisaged by the Gonski panel. All the indicators are showing encouraging signs of real improvement.

No other state has done this to anywhere near the same extent. Some are using NERA funding not to pursue the Gonski objectives, but for purposes that normally would be funded by state treasuries and state education departments. In Tasmania, for example, which had $20 million in NERA funding for 2014–15, only $3.8 million went through the school gate, with $2 million spent on special education, $1 million on VET in schools, $2.5 million on IT bandwidth and servers, $3 million on workforce development, and $7.5 million on K–12 curriculum development. These are all good things to do, but they are the ongoing business of state governments, and none of them addresses the problem Gonski was set up to solve.

The Australian Education Union’s “I Give a Gonski” campaign, which was important in keeping the reforms alive, has now become identified with the defence of public schools rather than the promotion of needs-based funding across the independent, non-government and government school sectors. Much has been lost as a result.

The current situation

There is now no prospect of the Gonski report’s being implemented as recommended. That became clear as early as 2012, when the government set aside the proposal for a National Schools Resourcing Body.

We have lost the Gonski vision of the school resourcing standard being an efficient and effective price required to deliver agreed outcomes, and now regard it as no more than a resourcing mechanism.

Welcome though it has been, the so-called “Gonski funding” has bought us no more than time. It will be temporarily beneficial for so long as it lasts, but it is strategically irrelevant for the longer term. The problem Gonski was seeking to address not only remains, but is yearly becoming more acute.

Given that the principle of the AGSRC has not been abandoned, the current increased funding for government schools will be taken as the cost of government schooling. Funding for the non-government sector will therefore continue to grow, regardless of need. The total cost of education will spiral needlessly even higher.

The solution to Australia’s education problem is not pouring more public money into education, but redistributing the existing funding strategically, to address the things that matter in the schools that need it. Far too much is spent in wealthy independent schools, where recurrent funding can be used to service loans on capital works, not necessarily to provide a better education, but to provide facilities to make the school more attractive than its other high-fee competitors.

It is surely unacceptable that the twenty most expensive independent schools in New South Wales receive more than $111 million per annum in public funding, when the gap in reading performance between the top 20 per cent and bottom 20 per cent of our fifteen-year-olds is equivalent to five years of schooling.

Australian education will not recover until we have a government prepared to establish an entirely new basis for our school funding. We need an educationally driven, sector-blind, needs-based school resourcing standard for all schools: based on hard evidence; designed to achieve specified and measurable outcomes; applied to all school sectors; agreed by the states, territories and Commonwealth; and accepted nationally as the affordable, efficient and effective price of building our national stock of human capital. •

This article is extracted from a recent speech to the NSW Branch of the Australian Council for Educational Leaders, on the award of a Medal in memory of the late Dr Paul Brock AM.

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By 1966 Labor governments had been dispensing state aid for a decade or more. One state (Queensland) had been doing so ever since 1899, and another (New South Wales) since 1912. Labor had gone to two federal elections (1961 and 1963) with significant offers of aid. And while it is true that the 1966 decision led directly to the famous Karmel report of 1973, with its new deal for schooling, it also led to serious deformities in the structure of the schooling system – deformities that generated significant educational and social difficulties, and frustrated their solution.

Much in this ambiguous legacy was defined by the Byzantine politics within and between the Catholic Church and the Labor Party, institutions so similar in many respects, and so deeply entwined, that politics often took on the character of a civil war, much of it fought on the battlefields of state aid.

The Catholic–Protestant sectarianism that had riven schooling for a century or more was about to disappear, but not the acrimonious division and controversy that accompanied it. That was simply transposed to a new, secular ground.

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the end of the decades-old system of public support for religious schools, and the creation of a government school system. But the Catholic Church was no hapless victim of the campaigns that brought this change. It did every bit as much as the most ardent exponents of “free, compulsory and secular” education to split Australian schooling into what became three “sectors”: government, Catholic, and “independent” or “private.” It was angrily determined to go it alone, un-aided. And, by combining modest fees with the low-cost labour of nuns and brothers shipped in from Ireland and elsewhere, it did.

Some Catholics hankered after a restoration of state aid, but others did not. With aid would come conditions and controls, and the risk of secular pollution. In any event, right up until the eve of the second world war, the question – leaving aside the small bursary schemes in New South Wales and Queensland – was hypothetical. Governments weren’t going to stir up sectarianism all over again, even if they wanted to help, which most didn’t, and the bishops weren’t going to ask for aid, for the same reason.

The war had scarcely ended before aid became both possible and necessary. Numbers of students rose as rapidly as the supply of nuns and brothers fell. Classes swelled to sixty or even seventy or more, often taught by poorly educated teachers in schools that, as demonstrated by a famous and farcical incident to which we’ll return, could not even provide enough toilets.

What could be done? State governments had trouble enough finding money for their own bulging institutions. Federation had left them with the responsibility for schools, but wartime legislation had taken away the taxation powers they needed to pay for them. The Church needed the money, though, and politicians needed the votes.

The solution was an under-the-counter trade conducted within boundaries well understood by both sides. Aid to meet educational expenses, yes; for staffing or building costs, no. To families and students, yes; to schools or school authorities, no. “Indirect” and covert aid, yes; “direct” and explicit aid, no. From state governments, yes; from the federal government, no.

A patchwork of arrangements made within these distinctions gave Australia in the mid 1950s something reminiscent of pre-abolition reality combined with post-abolition appearance. Aid ranged from the relatively straightforward (scholarships, bursaries and allowances, tax deductions, free milk, stationery and bus passes) to the truly ingenious and obscure, such as grants for Catholic parent associations to match those given to their state school equivalents, and subsidies for school pianos.

At first the management of aid-that-wasn’t proceeded smoothly enough, particularly with Labor governments. Labor was almost as Catholic as the Church itself. Most Catholics were Irish and therefore working class and therefore Labor, and Labor governments – particularly in the two big states of Victoria and New South Wales – were often dominated by Catholics. On the Church side, all was in the hands of the hierarchy. Neither the laity nor the teaching orders had any say or role in the matter (nor, it followed, did women). As Michael Hogan put it in his definitive history, the bishops set out not to change public opinion but to go around it, and they succeeded. This cosy arrangement was blown to smithereens by three explosions, one after another.

The Labor Split, 1955: Victorian anti-communist Catholics, abetted by archbishop Daniel Mannix and his protégé Bob Santamaria, marched out of the Labor Party to form what would become the Democratic Labor Party, or DLP. Hogan likens the post-Split relationship to a soured romance, but that was in New South Wales. In Victoria it was a vicious divorce.

One of many consequences was the revival in the Labor Party of the old battle cry of free, compulsory and secular. In Victoria particularly, and in the national machinery of the party, anti–state aid feeling and forces mobilised. Long-serving federal powerbroker Joe Chamberlain, hitherto content to leave backroom deals to the state branches, became a ferocious opponent of state aid in any form, determined to choke off supply to the treacherous Catholics. That was, of course, directly contrary to what was needed to get the Catholic vote back from the DLP.

The politics of the Church, the Labor Party and their relationship in the decade that followed was dominated by the state aid question. They were rancorous, perverse, doctrinaire and extraordinarily complex. Labor was a tangle of cross-cutting divisions – between left and right, pro- and anti-aid, and Catholic and Protestant; between the states (again, New South Wales and Victoria especially), the state party machines and governments, and the federal office; and between an old guard led by Arthur Calwell and a new guard dominated by Gough Whitlam, twenty years younger than Calwell and a rising star.

As for the Church, differences among the bishops, particularly those from Victoria and New South Wales, were greatly complicated by rising agitation among the laity, and especially among those who had the thankless task of running schools and a school system careening towards collapse, who were fed up with the ineffectual bishops and their backroom manoeuvres. But the laity, too, was divided, between militants and gradualists, and between those loyal to Labor and those whose loyalties lay elsewhere.

Goulburn, 1962: In July 1957 the NSW education department issued a “certificate of efficiency” to Our Lady of Mercy Preparatory School in Goulburn, in south-central New South Wales, conditional upon the installation of another seat in the boys’ toilet. (Accounts differ on this and other details. It was just one seat according to Hogan, three according to political historian Jenny Hocking, and an entire toilet block according to the Bulletin’s man on the spot, Peter Kelly.)

The parish was beyond broke; its expenditure on schools had sent it into heavy debt. It temporised and fudged. The government authorities turned a blind eye for as long as they could, but then registration inspections came around again. The department told the parish that there would be no registration this time without the toilet upgrade. The local bishop, recently installed in office at the unusually early age of forty-two, got his back up. After consultation with a small group of (male) laity, he decided to go public. In the course of a speech on St Pat’s Day, and in the presence of the local (Labor) member of the state (Labor) government, he said that the school might have to be closed. The certificate was promptly issued, pending advice that toilet facilities met requirements.

The Goulburn Catholics now asked to see the minister. The minister said no, he wouldn’t see them. The bishop said that if the government wanted the school to stay open it could always pay for its requirements to be met. More fudges and deals were attempted, without success. The bishop then wrote to the minister, inviting him to attend a public meeting arranged for four days hence. Seven hundred people – not including the minister – turned up, and voted 500 to 120 to close not just Our Lady but Goulburn’s five other Catholic schools as well. Two thousand children would be instructed to seek enrolment at their local state school. The next day, the “Goulburn Strike” (or “Lockout”) was on front pages around the country.

Turning up the heat: the bishop’s lockout hits the front pages in 1962.

The strike moved state aid from the backrooms to the middle of the political agenda. Initial media hostility soon turned to consensus that “something had to be done.” The Catholic schools could not be allowed to collapse. Goulburn’s state schools were stretched to accommodate even the one-third (or a half – reports vary) of the 2000 applicants they were able to enrol, leaving the rest with nowhere to go. Imagine that scenario across the country! Governments were getting exactly the intended message. Perhaps most significant but least noticed was that the Catholic parents and students of Goulburn had made their requests for enrolment courteously, and the state schools responded in that same spirit. Some of those enrolled in state schools stayed there after the strike was over. Sectarianism was dying.

The strike put almost as much heat on the bishops as on the government. They had lost control to the laity, and their sotto voce requests for bits and pieces of aid were increasingly seen as craven as well as ineffectual. On the government side, the NSW premier, R.J. Heffron, made a great show of refusing to be bullied and then let it be known that he would be open to representations from the Church. The Church rolled out its heavy artillery, a delegation headed by the cardinal himself, and made a list of its requirements available to the media. The list comprised more scholarships, help with teacher training and salaries for lay teachers, and support for capital works including science labs in particular.

Heffron had the advantage of a (Protestant-dominated) conservative opposition, unfriendly to Catholics and to aid, plus more than two years to the next election, plenty of time to get the party onside. His optimism was misplaced. The state conference endorsed aid of the science laboratory kind, only to be slapped down by its federal counterpart, urged on by the man Whitlam’s speechwriter Graham Freudenberg called the “self-appointed keeper of the conscience on this matter,” Joe Chamberlain. The NSW government was instructed to “recast” its plans. New South Wales resisted, and met with an even more stinging rebuke. It was required to submit all decisions on state aid to the federal secretary (aka Joe Chamberlain) “for consideration and advice.” The lesson for the Church was that Labor could not be trusted to deliver.

Menzies – Protestant, no enthusiast for state aid, firm opponent of any federal involvement in schools – saw his chance. Two weeks after Chamberlain’s diktat, Menzies called an early federal election with a centrepiece policy of providing science laboratories to all schools, government and non-government alike.

The Liberal leader had scraped home by just one seat in 1961, and Calwell believed that this time he would be prime minister. Instead, he lost ten more seats, seven of them in New South Wales. Then it was the state party’s turn to be hammered. In May 1965, the NSW Labor government fell. It had been in office since 1941. The shift in the Catholic vote, and the Church’s allegiance, away from Labor and towards the conservatives, which had commenced with the 1955 Split, was accelerating. First the Church found that it couldn’t trust Labor, then it discovered that it no longer had to.

The writing was on the wall, or two lots of writing actually, one about state aid, the other about the control and leadership of the Labor Party. Calwell couldn’t or wouldn’t read either. Whitlam could read both.

Showdown at Surfers, 1966: The sharp end of the Menzies wedge fell first on Labor’s federal MPs. Come the next election, would they promise to cancel the science labs? In May 1965 caucus decided, albeit by a narrow margin, that no, it wouldn’t. It would not undo “existing arrangements.”

The wedge now pointed at the federal conference of the party, held a few months later. Calwell supported a move to dodge the question by having it referred to a national advisory committee on education.

The committee was dominated by Chamberlain, with Calwell in support. Its majority report to the federal executive six months later proposed that there would be no aid for school buildings or staff and that Labor’s federal members could support existing federal aid, including, of course, Menzies’s science labs. But on the very day of the report’s presentation, Calwell announced that he had had an epiphany. He would withdraw his opposition to direct state aid. He had been much moved by a letter from his old friend (and friend of Labor) James Carroll, auxiliary bishop of Sydney, which documented the parlous conditions for students and teachers in Catholic schools, and protested against the iniquity of denying them financial support on the ground of their religion.

Chamberlain wasn’t going to have it. Calwell was prevailed on to change his mind, again, and the Labor executive did a U-turn of its own. Not only would parliamentary members be bound to oppose state aid but, even more startling, the possibility of a High Court challenge to its constitutionality would also be investigated.

Whitlam had been a member of the advisory committee on education, and was scathing about the majority report’s internal contradictions. Now he was apoplectic. He famously determined to “crash or crash through,” labelling the federal executive “extremists,” then (on national TV) declaring them to be “twelve witless men.” Calwell was jubilant. The upstart Whitlam had signed his own death warrant.

Calwell’s move to have Whitlam expelled by a meeting of the national executive; a desperate phone call from Queensland MP Rex Patterson (beneficiary of Whitlam’s phenomenally successful campaigning in a recent by-election) to state secretary Tom Burns; an equally desperate call by Burns to the two Queensland delegates at the meeting of the executive; the last-minute switch by those delegates as the noose was being placed around Whitlam’s neck; and Whitlam’s consequent escape by the narrowest of margins (seven votes to five) – all these are the stuff of Labor legend.

As important to history as the decision to let Whitlam off with a reprimand was the accompanying decision to send the whole business back whence it had come, to federal conference. Even that took two goes, one in March, and another in July, at Surfers Paradise. There came a denouement less dramatic than the events that had led up to it. Joe Chamberlain was out of the game for once, laid up in hospital, and anyway, delegates’ minds were concentrated by a looming federal election. It was agreed that Labor would not oppose existing aid, a crucial vote coming from Calwell, who had changed his mind yet again.

One view of that decision is that it was a volte-face, a reversal of a long-held policy. Another view, not quite the opposite but close, is that Labor had merely abandoned an old policy without deciding on a new one. A third view is that 1966 was not a reversal; it was another step down a long and tortuous path. And while 1966 didn’t decide on a new policy, it very nearly arrived at one by default. To mix the metaphors, since the early 1950s Labor had been the frog in the pan, and by 1966 it was too late to jump. It would have to live with what a tangled history had provided, which included Menzies’s “direct” federal aid as well as the many and varied devices of the states.

By 1966 Whitlam was (as he himself had pointed out) Labor’s leader in waiting, and it was his conceit that he knew how to rise above this history. What had long been seen as a question of religious versus secular schooling he had reconfigured as a question of meeting need in the interests of equal opportunity for all Australians. In place of a dog’s breakfast of measures, he would put aid on a systematic basis across the nation. Against the push by a conservative–Catholic alliance for per capita grants, his aid would be according to need in government as well as non-government schools (which meant that expensive private schools would have to fend for themselves). All this would be worked out in detail and carried into practice by a grand new edifice, the Australian Schools Commission.

It is not hard to see why Whitlam believed that his plan changed everything. Amid an increasingly heated, confused and intractable debate, his proposal had cut through. It seemed lucid, sensible and practical, as well as bold. But it also changed much less than Whitlam imagined.

The “needs” approach apart, Whitlam was effectively tagging along behind Menzies and the policy of direct aid, to be provided to all schools, by the Commonwealth. With that came a number of fundamental, structural realities: non-government schools would be “aided,” not funded. They would therefore continue to charge fees. Parents would have the right to choose between free and secular state schools or fee-charging religious schools. There would still be three school sectors, each run and funded in its own way, plus the additional complication of the involvement of a second layer of government. Implicit in the decision and the non-decisions of 1966 was the extension of an unfortunate history.

Among the very first actions of the Whitlam government was the appointment of an interim committee of the Australian Schools Commission, to be chaired by economist Peter Karmel. It handed down its report less than six months later (in May 1973). The report earned a rapturous reception for its trenchant support for equal opportunity, its encouragement of new approaches to teaching and curriculum, its preference for “community participation” over authoritarian and centralised decision-making, and its special programs for disadvantaged schools, innovation, special education and the like. A generation of teachers, academics and administrators came to see the report, the Schools Commission and the Commonwealth as sources of inspiration, salvation even.

The interim committee was serious in its advocacy of a more equal, humane and enlightening schooling for all, but that was not its core business. It was charged by Whitlam with working out the detail of his plan to bring the state aid question to a close, once and for all.

No part of Karmel’s recommendations on implementation would have surprised Whitlam or, for that matter, many of the delegates to the 1966 conference in Surfers Paradise. The three school sectors would continue to operate in their familiar form; all would get support from both state and federal governments, one sector fully funded, the other two aided and therefore fee-charging; levels of funding and aid would be determined by need, which would in turn be tied to capacity to pay; distribution of those funds within the government and Catholic systems would be the responsibility of system authorities; parents would have the right to choose and, thanks to government subvention, choice would be more widely available.

The committee was clearly uneasy with the task it had been set and, by implication, with its own proposals. It was unhappy at being required to make recommendations “in terms of structures which exist and which it has little direct power to modify [and which] may not be equally relevant for all time.” It fretted about how to ensure “maintenance of effort” by both the states and the non-government schools in receipt of substantial new funding, about the “role of fees in the financing of schools,” and about the likelihood of a “changed relationship” between government and non-government schooling. But there was no time to turn these and other concerns into proposals, and anyway they were scarcely heard in the clamour of approval. The state aid problem had been resolved, at last!

That illusion didn’t last long. Less than two years on, an economic downturn restricted the massive outflow of federal funds needed to keep the many parties happy, leaving the realpolitik of the Karmel/Whitlam settlement exposed like coastal rocks after a storm.

One problem was inordinate complexity combined with confusion of roles and responsibilities: three sectors, each funded and controlled in its own way, two of them getting funds from three different sources including fees, a total of seven governments at different stages of three-year electoral cycles and of differing political persuasions. This was the genesis of a funding system described forty years later by David Gonski and his colleagues as uncoordinated, divisive and unnecessarily complex; containing overlapping responsibilities leading to duplication and inefficiency; and lacking any coherence, transparency, or connection to educational objectives.

A related problem lay in the interaction of “need,” “capacity to pay” and arguments about reducing fees in the interests of “broadening access.” The new system was an invitation to gaming and, on occasion, rorting. State education departments and Catholic school authorities both resisted Commonwealth efforts to attach conditions and purposes to its funds.

Moreover, almost everyone had a legitimate basis for complaint. One side could insist: we are open to all, and cater to most disadvantaged students and their families, so fairness requires that our schools have priority over schools that exclude. The other side could counter: it is not fair that those who choose a religion-based education should have to pay for that choice; parents who pay taxes and then make an additional contribution to the funding of schooling, year in, year out, are entitled to public support; and the lower the public support to non-government schools, the less able we are to enrol all comers.

For all these reasons, conflict over funding returned in full spate. The Schools Commission, attempting to arbitrate between lobby groups constituted or empowered by the Karmel–Whitlam settlement, was the first major victim of policies it was charged with administering. It was downgraded, and eventually (1988) scrapped. Other victims, in whole or in part, included a federal minister (Susan Ryan, author of the putative “Ryan hit list”), a federal leader of the opposition (Mark Latham, of “Latham hit list” fame), and the Gonski proposals, Julia Gillard’s pre-emptive buckle (“no school will be worse off”) notwithstanding.

More important than any of these disturbances in the corridors of power and in public forums were the consequences down on the ground. With three sectors funded and administered in different ways came very different levels of funding and very different regulation of rights and obligations. The Karmel/Whitlam settlement gave Australia both free and publicly subsidised fee-charging schools; schools lavishly funded and schools relatively impoverished; schools permitted to select on grounds of capacity to pay and/or religious affiliation and/or academic performance and schools prohibited from doing any of those things; parents who are required to pay when often they can’t afford it and parents who aren’t and can; and parents who are offered the full menu and others who must take whatever is put on their plate.

Unfairness is one part of the problem. The other is exacerbation of social and educational division. Parents in a position to choose have typically chosen schools where their children will find others just like themselves. In the doing, they make a choice for those who can’t choose, for reasons of income and/or location, and/or because their child doesn’t have what the choosy schools are looking for. Thus the non-choosers, like the choosers, increasingly find themselves among their own kind.

Australia now has an unusually high concentration of students at both ends of the spectrum, and a relatively small proportion of schools with socially mixed enrolments. One consequence of the massive sifting and sorting of the forty years since the Karmel/Whitlam settlement is a transformation of the Catholic sector. A school system established to help the poor and the excluded has off-loaded much of that task to the government schools in favour of catering to those already in the mainstream. One quarter of students in Catholic schools are not Catholic, and half of all Catholic students – and almost certainly a relatively poorer half – are enrolled in government schools.

There is clear evidence to suggest that this segmentation, amounting in some respects and areas to segregation, has a depressing effect on the academic attainment of many, perhaps even most students. Its social and cultural effects go unmeasured and unreported.

What went wrong? In his celebrated denunciation of the 1919 Versailles peace conference, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, J.M. Keynes said of its protagonists that “the future life of Europe was not their concern; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety.” Their anxiety was territorial settlement and reparations, with, Keynes correctly predicted, dire consequences to follow.

The analogy with the Karmel/Whitlam settlement is not exact in kind or, of course, in scale, but it is illuminating. Whitlam did have a concern for “the future life of Europe” but it played very little part in shaping his thinking about the nature and terms of a state aid treaty, most of which had taken its final shape by 1966.

In 1991 Jean Blackburn, like Keynes a key player in the proceedings concerned (she was deputy chair of the interim committee and subsequently an important voice in the Schools Commission), looked back in anger. “We created a situation unique in the democratic world,” she said. “It is very important to realise this. There were no rules about student selection and exclusion, no fee limitations, no shared governance, no common curriculum requirements below the upper secondary level… We have now become a kind of wonder at which people [in other countries] gape. The reaction is always, ‘What an extraordinary situation.’”

Some of the omissions listed by Blackburn, to do with curriculum and accountability, have since been addressed, if not resolved, but others have not been addressed at all.

Both sides of politics are aware of structural problems in the school system. The Coalition has focused on dysfunctional governance arising from the involvement of two levels of government. Labor’s concerns, larger in scope and spirit, concentrate on the (closely related) problem of complex and counterproductive distribution and use of funding. Neither seems aware of the importance of student selection and exclusion, of the consequences of the fee/free distinction, or of the relationship of all of the elements identified by Blackburn to each other. Neither has grasped how these dynamics are in turn related to Australian schooling’s persistent inability to “lift performance,” and to the social and cultural effects of schooling. Neither has been able to escape the power of interest groups formed in the 1960s to block structural change, and neither has been willing to confront some of those groups on the reduction of decisions about “the future life of Europe” to grabs for cash. Each seems to understand only parts of a big, complicated problem; each, like Labor in 1966, canvasses remedies which, if seen as solutions rather than steps towards a solution, will perpetuate more than they change. •

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But what about the many significant problems that are being furiously avoided during these weeks?

Let’s start with school funding. If we’d been smart, school funding would not be front and centre; we had the chance to put this issue to bed and get on with educational priorities five years ago. But we didn’t, and now have to deal with the consequences.

Last year we produced an analysis, Private School, Public Cost, that showed how non-government schools were on track to be funded – using public funds – ahead of government schools enrolling similar students.

The denials came thick and fast. On average, we were told, public schools get this much and private schools get less. But the average student in one sector is different from the average in another. Expenditure in the public sector will always be higher because it enrols a disproportionate number of high-cost students in high-cost locations. Hence the need to compare schools enrolling similar students – to compare apples with apples. These days it’s not that hard to do.

Then we were told that past trends don’t indicate future patterns. That’s possible, so we marked time for another six months – but then we found that the trends revealed this year were not only continuing, they were even accelerating. Non-government schools are becoming government(-funded) schools.

But becoming a government school is not the same as becoming a public school. Only the latter – or most of them – must be open to all children from all families in all places and under all circumstances. Other schools aren’t, if only because they charge fees. The big increase in their public funding means that governments now have to reshape the accountabilities and obligations of private schools to better align with their level of public funding.

If the title “private” in relation to schools is to have any meaning, the funding flow has to be put on hold and an urgent review conducted into how public and private schools can operate on an even playing field. In other words, we must do what we have avoided for four decades.

Politics and the lack of a mechanism to coordinate funding means it won’t happen. But doing nothing has to be accompanied by some narrative that explains the inexplicable. What form of words will placate public school parents who will increasingly see students in the private school down the road getting funded ahead of their own children?

We have briefed representatives of two of the main three political parties about this looming debacle. Our lasting impression is that they just wish it would go away. It won’t. As Peter Martin suggested in the Fairfax media two weeks ago, “Unless one of the parties develops a policy that’s actually thought through, we’re likely to drift into the next election with private schools more heavily government-funded than government schools and no one thinking it’s at all unusual.”

A school snapshot

The revelations about school funding in our previous reports on Australian schools came from the data behind the federal government’s My School website. And My School, now in its seventh year, keeps delivering and evolving. This week we report on what the website is revealing, and how it’s changed, in a new Centre for Policy Development report, Uneven Playing Field: The State of Australian Schools.

Some of our findings cover familiar ground, and we are certainly not alone in drawing attention to serious problems that won’t see the light of day during this election campaign. Here is a snapshot of the more significant of them.

Equity in schooling: Improving equity requires increasing the impact of schools, relative to the impact of family background, on student achievement. Australia’s “equity slope” is steeper than in similar countries. Using the socio-educational indices and NAPLAN data on My School, we have created equity slopes for Australian schools, and these slopes have steepened in the few years since Gonski reported. School outcomes are increasingly created not by what schools do but by whom they enrol. Inequity is greatest in metropolitan areas and for secondary schools – the places and level of schooling where choice is greatest.

Shifting enrolments: We are also witnessing a shift in student enrolments, commonly described as a drift to private schools but better described as a shift from lower–socio-educational advantage, or SEA, schools to higher-SEA schools. On average, higher-SEA schools are growing bigger and faster. And, just as Gonski warned, the evidence shows an increased concentration of disadvantaged students in the lower-SEA schools. This makes the task of lifting the strugglers, and lifting the nation, much harder than it should be.

Student achievement: The gap in student achievement between advantaged and disadvantaged schools has been well-documented in recent times. It has been slowly but consistently widening since 2008. What is significant is that the trend is measurable over just a few years. Conventional explanations point to the quality of teachers and school leadership, but improving these things alone won’t be enough.

A socio-educational hierarchy of schools: Student achievement aside, the qualitative and quantitative shifts in student enrolment have other consequences. The socio-educational hierarchy of schools we’re developing reveals a multi-tiered rather than two-tiered arrangement, both within and between school sectors. In loose terms, the same hierarchy emerges if schools are ranked by levels of school fees or by NAPLAN scores. This raises questions about matters as wide-ranging as community development, social inclusion and, once again, equity and student achievement.

The vanishing school community: For two-thirds of Australia’s schools, the local community is increasingly not the school community. More than ever before, students go elsewhere to school, or the local school’s enrolled students come from somewhere else. It is very noticeable that disadvantaged schools have an enrolment even less advantaged than the people who live nearby. Again, many questions need to be answered, including about the development of social and cultural capital in each community.

Funding follies: Gonski’s finding that we don’t have a logical, consistent and publicly transparent approach to funding schooling was spot on. Inexplicable differences in the funding roles of state and federal governments continue. The distribution and rate of increase of school funding varies considerably between the states. With some exceptions, such as New South Wales, increases in government funding have been no greater for lower-SEA schools. Increases in funding by sector are the reverse of what the pattern would be if funding were based on need.

Money and student achievement: My School data gives some insight into claims about the complex relationship between money and student achievement. Our highest investment is in schools at both ends of the disadvantage–advantage spectrum. Schools at the former end are serving high-cost students in high-cost locations. At the advantaged end we are pouring money – from both public and private sources – into schools whose students do no better than students attending equally advantaged, though less generously funded, schools.

Sleepwalking to disaster

If we had a dollar for every time “the future” has been mentioned in this election, we’d give up our day jobs – such as writing these reports (though admittedly this is unpaid work). But for school education the reality is that much of what lies ahead is not going to feature in this election.

Australia is sleepwalking into a schools disaster. Steepening equity gradients will show even more clearly that differences in wealth, income, power and possessions, to use Gonski’s wording, will continue to pile up challenges for schools. Those who can will go on abandoning lower-SEA schools, further compounding the disadvantage. While changes won’t be dramatic, we can foresee a further widening of the achievement gap.

Increasingly, schools will not resemble their communities; they’ll instead cement a hierarchy that mocks the Australian egalitarian myth. We’ll continue to see disproportionate funding going to where it isn’t needed – rather than to students for whom it can make a difference. State and federal funding will continue to weave its inexplicable path.

On the plus side there is persistent public support for the funding elements of Gonski’s recommendations, even if other, equally important recommendations have been ignored. We are seeing more concern from mainstream educators, and new ideas from various think tanks, even if these still avoid the fundamental structural problems created by our hybrid public–private framework.

A range of possible solutions exists. School choice should be shifted from one that provides a socio-educational advantage to some, at the expense of others, to choice that provides opportunities for all young people, many of whom are abandoning cookie-cutter mainstream schools to find that the others are much the same. The funding of needs has to be increased and far better coordinated to reflect the priorities arising out of the Gonski review. If the money can’t be found, then redistribution of existing public funding of schools will be back on the agenda.

Back to the future?

Australia’s current quasi-market framework of public and private schools, our fourth era of schooling in 200-plus years, is reaching its use-by date. Earlier eras ended when our arrangement of schooling fell short of meeting changing expectations. The first schools were primarily church schools. In the main these gave way to the public schools that were introduced in the later nineteenth century. Public schools evolved and expanded for a century – until they were challenged, from the 1960s, by a growing number of private schools.

This new era created a quasi-market of schools. Competition and choice, we were told, would create quality for all. Instead it just created winners and losers, which is what markets do. The Gonski review confirmed that Australia’s schools were not delivering the twin goals of excellence and equity. The My School website has churned out a mass of data which essentially shows we have been immersed in an experiment that failed.

It is hard to believe that the market will retain its grip on how we currently provide and resource schools into the future. The financial and socio-economic costs – and opportunity costs – now and in the future will prove to be just too high. We are already feeling the downstream costs of lost opportunities for young people as they drift from school to an uncertain future. We clearly must invest now, or pay more later.

But it is going to take us much more than this election to set us in the right direction. •

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One of the most telling moments in The Big Short, the film of Michael Lewis’s tale of the subprime mortgage boom and spectacular bust of 2007, is a small note at the bottom of the screen before the credits. It reads: “Michael Burry is focusing all of his trading on one commodity: water.” Burry is the genius who in 2005 saw the inevitability of the collapse. He is not alone in realising that water will be the most precious commodity of the twenty-first century. The problem of water, along with carbon emissions, is driving the conception of a new category of wealth: natural capital.

Speaking to Leigh Sales on the ABC’s 7.30 in December 2015 following the release of his $1.1 billion innovation statement, prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said, “We are in a world where the most valuable capital is human capital and that’s why it’s very important to be able to retain our best brains, to create an environment where they can grow businesses and try things out, use their imagination and innovation.” This “human capital” is another category of wealth critical for the twenty-first century.

The French economist Yann Moulier Boutang, whose book Cognitive Capitalism addresses our epochal transition from the industrial era to the information age, writes of the profound impact this shift is having on business and value: “What a company is worth is now determined outside its walls: its innovative potential, its organisation, its intellectual capital, its human resources overflow and leak in all directions.” “Intellectual capital” – which captures the productivity of knowledge workers, the attention, intensity, creativity, innovation and connectivity of their minds – is a third new category of wealth brought by the information age.

Natural capital, human capital, intellectual capital – along with social capital – are the components of a new language of economics and accounting that’s emerging to value the wealth brought by the information age addressed by Turnbull’s innovation statement, and the wealth being destroyed by the ecological crises, which mainstream economics is at a loss to grapple with. In Cognitive Capitalism, Moulier Boutang calls for a new ecological economics, and “in particular a new accounting system.” He recognised that any new ecological economics must be founded on an accounting system that can both capture the value of the information age and the newly appreciated ecological wealth of the planet, and relate this to the financial and industrial worth our current accounting system evolved to measure.

Such a system is already on the horizon, emerging simultaneously in several places from South Africa and Brazil to Scandinavia and Canada early in the new millennium. The first attempt to codify the new system, known as “integrated reporting,” was made by the International Integrated Reporting Council, or IIRC, and published in December 2013. Integrated reporting brings together information that has never been considered by financial reporting before, including the intangible value of the information age and the value of nature and society. For the first time, accountants and businesses are attempting to understand how their pursuit of profits affects the world around them, and how that world affects their ability to make profits.

At its simplest, integrated reporting is about getting businesses to tell their story, which they do by addressing six different capitals, or stores of value, they use to produce goods or services, and which their activities either enhance or deplete. The six capitals are financial, manufactured, intellectual, human, social and natural.

The urgent need for a new approach to accounting becomes apparent when you consider that our current system emerged in medieval Italy around 1300 to deal with an economic boom brought by the Crusades. This system, now known as double-entry bookkeeping, was codified by the Franciscan monk and mathematician Luca Pacioli, who published a treatise on Venetian bookkeeping in 1494. It’s worth remembering that the word capital itself was first used in its modern sense by the merchants of medieval Genoa, Florence and Venice to describe their worldly goods, which they recorded in their capital account.

The calculation of capital and its fluctuations (profits and losses) is central to the double-entry system. As Pacioli said, from the capital account “you may always learn what your fortune is.” For a typical Venetian merchant in November 1493 this fortune included papal florins; cash in gold and coin from Venice, Hungary and Florence; ginger, pepper, cinnamon and cloves; fox and chamois skins; and a large house over the canal. For the first time in history, merchants could measure their profits and losses, which they increasingly expressed in a language long banned by both the Church and the guilds: Hindu-Arabic mathematics.

Because he was writing at a time when the idea of profit-making and the tools to measure it were so brand new, Pacioli makes it clear in his treatise that the purpose of every merchant is “to make a lawful and reasonable profit so as to keep up his business.” This system made possible the measurement of financial capital.

Courtesy of Pacioli’s printed treatise, the double-entry system spread from Italy to the Netherlands and England, where the next great advance in accounting was made. In 1769, in the north of England, Her Majesty’s potter Josiah Wedgwood applied this double-entry system to solve a problem: despite the enormous popularity of his vases, he had a cash-flow problem and an accumulation of stock. So he asked himself, should he cut prices or cut production?

To answer this question, Wedgwood did something unprecedented: he turned to his double-entry accounts. Because they showed him the distinction between fixed and variable costs, his accounts told him to produce as many vases as possible. By studying his books, Wedgwood realised that his greatest costs were fixed costs, like moulds, rent, fuel and wages, and because these fixed costs remained the same regardless of how much was produced, the more his factory produced the cheaper these fixed costs would be per unit of production. As Wedgwood said to his partner, “You will see the vast consequence in most manufactures of making the greatest quantity possible in a given time.” And so the era of mass production and consumption was inaugurated and the second of the six capitals came into being: manufactured capital.

The industrial era also saw the rise of a new business form, the corporation, which was used to raise the unprecedented sums required to finance the titanic ventures of the industrial age, such as railways and canals. From 1844 in Britain and subsequently elsewhere, corporations were legally required to report to their capital providers what had been done with their money in the past year, and whether it had made a profit or a loss. To do this they used double-entry bookkeeping.

We still use this medieval bookkeeping system adapted for the industrial age to account for our wealth today – and yet, as you can see from the wealth of the Venetian merchant that included the treasures of pepper, ginger and papal florins, and Wedgwood’s treasure of manufactured vases, the things we consider valuable and that make up our wealth change over time. In our twenty-first-century world, so vastly different from Pacioli’s Renaissance Italy and Wedgwood’s agrarian England, two broad new forms of wealth have emerged. Brought by the networked computer and the various ecological crises from environmental degradation and resource depletion to extreme weather events and climate change, this wealth lies beyond the conceptual bounds of our current accounting and therefore economic systems.

The first new form of wealth has given rise to the idea of intangible or immaterial value, which comprises the products of the information age; the second to the wealth of nature and society, the concerns of sustainability. It is these new forms of wealth, conceived as capitals, that the new accounting paradigm seeks to consider and to integrate with financial information.

The first two new capitals, intellectual capital and human capital, came to the attention of accountants in the 1990s with the dotcom boom. Their invisible presence is best seen when information-age companies such as Twitter are listed on stock exchanges: their shares trade for astronomical amounts despite the fact these companies have nothing on their balance sheets. In traditional financial accounting terms, they are worthless. But that’s because the value of these companies can’t be seen in traditional financial reports, which measure only financial and manufactured capital, the tangible assets of the industrial era. Instead it’s in geeks and their software – or, in accounting terms, in human capital and intellectual capital, such as software, data, knowledge, networks and patents for new drugs.

The rise of intangible wealth is shown by a study published in 2010, which found that in 1975 a company’s balance sheet showed a sound 83 per cent of its value, with only 17 per cent in intangibles. This reflects the fact that its value was deeply rooted in industrial-age tangible assets, like cars, jeans and washing machines. Thirty-four years later, in 2009, intangible value spiked to 81 per cent of market value. This meant that a company’s financial accounts captured only 19 per cent of its value. A huge 81 per cent of its value was in its people and the products of their minds. This shift from tangible to intangible prompted management guru Peter Drucker to say in 1999, “The most valuable assets of a twentieth-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable asset of a twenty-first-century institution… will be its knowledge workers and their productivity.”

The second great force that has expanded concepts of wealth and value can be dated to the late 1980s. When the Exxon Valdez oil tanker ran aground in Prince William Sound and contaminated 2500 kilometres of coast with crude oil in 1989, the environmental cost of doing business was made shockingly clear.

In response to this catastrophe, US investment analyst Joan Bavaria brought together a group of environmental activists and social investors to ask companies to practise what she termed an “environmental ethic.” This required going beyond the profit-focused principle of US case law established in a case brought by the Dodge brothers against Henry Ford. In 1919 the Ford Motor Company was taken to court by two of its shareholders, John and Horace Dodge, when Ford decided to spend some of his enormous profits on employees and factories rather than paying dividends to his shareholders. But John and Horace wanted their money.

At the trial, Ford described his vision for his company in terms of social good, calling his business “an instrument of service rather than a machine for making money.” The Michigan Supreme Court rejected Ford’s reasoning and found in favour of the Dodge brothers. It ruled that the Ford Motor Company could not be run as a charity and held that a corporation is organised primarily for the profit of its shareholders. Ford was ordered to pay US$19 million to the brothers.

This landmark case created a culture in which profit maximisation became the sole purpose of commercial activity, epitomised by the influential economics of Milton Friedman and summed up in his 1970 essay emphatically titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.”

The group Bavaria founded in 1989 to think beyond this profit imperative was called Ceres. In 1997 the head of Ceres, Bob Massie, and his colleague Allen White decided to create a global framework to report the environmental, social and economic impacts of corporations, which they called the Global Reporting Initiative, or GRI. Their aim was to transform the global accounting system. Since 2000 the GRI’s guidelines have led efforts to measure the last two of the new capitals: social capital and natural capital.

One person who understands the crucial importance of this new approach and the need to connect it meaningfully with financial information is British accountant Michael Peat. Peat believes accountants have a crucial role to play in introducing sustainability into business behaviour because they can provide the practical tools businesses need to respond to such massive issues as global warming, water shortages and deforestation. As he says, accountants can develop the information, methodologies and systems to move “being green” from “being trendy and fashionable to being core and mainstream.” It was Peat and the then chair of the GRI, Mervyn King, who founded the IIRC to create “a globally accepted framework for accounting for sustainability,” which they call integrated reporting.

The adoption of integrated reporting and thinking by companies and governments is being driven by the rapid rise of natural capital. In 2012 the United Nations gave natural capital equal status to the GDP when it adopted a new statistical standard to account for natural capital. The same year, forty financial institutions, including the National Australia Bank, signed the Natural Capital Declaration to promote the private sector’s use of natural capital. In November 2015, at the second World Forum on Natural Capital in Edinburgh, the Natural Capital Protocol was launched for consultation.

The new accounting system is the logical outcome of this long history. While it is still embryonic, it is the future. Its importance lies in the fact that it diagnoses from within the business community the big problem of our age: the fact that the daily operations of businesses are destroying the planet and human societies because they are governed by a sole legal obligation – profit maximisation. Integrated reporting creates a language that connects commercial activities with the natural and social world within which they so evidently operate. In this way, it begins to take account of the many “non-financial” values we must consider in the twenty-first century, and that increasing numbers of people now want to consider when doing business, working, shopping, investing, building, travelling and electing political representatives.

It was their desire to consider these non-financial values that prompted three friends and entrepreneurs in Philadelphia to reimagine the corporation for the twenty-first century. Jay Coen Gilbert, Bart Houlahan and Andrew Kassoy believe that business is the most powerful human-made force on the planet, and in 2006 they decided to harness its potential. They realised there was a growing number of entrepreneurs like themselves who were trying to address enormous social and environmental problems but struggling to do so because business structures don’t make it legally possible to pursue purposes other than profits. So they invented a for-profit company that is also legally obliged to make a material contribution to society and the environment. They called it the B Corporation, where “B” stands for “benefit” to workers, the community and the planet.

Ten years later, thirty-one US states have passed benefit corporation legislation to make this evolution in corporate purpose legally possible. Speaking at the public ceremony for the passing of benefit legislation in Delaware, the leading US state for incorporation, New York investment analyst Albert Wenger acknowledged the significance of the new corporate form. “The critical challenge for capitalism today,” he said, “is not to make more stuff but to work out how we can live in harmony with the environment, and what we can do about disappearing jobs, income inequality and providing better access to affordable good-quality healthcare and education.”

Benefit corporations address these urgent social and environmental issues, and if they’d been around in 1919 the Dodge brothers would have lost their case against Henry Ford. B Corporations are spreading around the world. In August 2014 B Lab Australia & New Zealand was launched in Melbourne and eighty-two B Corporations are now operating in the region, ranging from professional service firms and media organisations to producers of consumer goods, builders and property developers. B Lab ANZ is currently working to make the legislative changes Australia requires to enshrine the B Corp in statute.

The implications of this evolution in accounting and business are profound for the material world and its cultures, including economics and the way it’s framed. Economics must now include within its ambit entities previously considered to be outside its bounds, such as “society” and “nature.”

Kate Raworth is rethinking economics for the twenty-first century by envisioning its new bounds as two circles shaped like a ring. The ring is made from two sets of boundaries: the outer circle, or “environmental ceiling,” is the boundary beyond which the earth’s ecological systems cannot be pushed if it is to continue to sustain human life; and the inner circle, or “social foundation,” is the boundary below which lie many dimensions of human deprivation. “Between the two boundaries lies an area – shaped like a doughnut – which represents an environmentally safe and socially just space for humanity to thrive in,” Raworth explains. “It is also the space in which inclusive and sustainable economic development takes place.”

Raworth’s reimagining is a powerful new way of understanding economic activity in a planetary framework that considers ecological and social systems and limits. Analogously, at a community level the idea of a circular economy is taking hold around the world. In Australia the Cowra Low Emissions Action Network, or CLEAN, is working to create a circular economy in which all waste is recycled and reused through alternative energy generation, resource efficiency and remanufactured value-added products for the benefit of the community.

These new economic and accounting languages and frames, which consider wealth beyond the financial with material limits and social and ecological purposes, are the beginnings of a new economic and accounting imaginary for the twenty-first century. •

This essay appears in Griffith Review 52: Imagining the Future, edited by Julianne Schultz and the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute’s Brendan Gleeson.

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