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.

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During those two weeks the Financial Review began a series on “the new middle class.” It opened with a long article analysing survey results that revealed how households on $140,000 a year — a lot of money in those days — didn’t consider themselves particularly well-off. Great, I thought — this’ll make for a solid ten or fifteen minutes. I hurried over to the presenter of the program and showed him the article. “Good God,” he exclaimed after reading the opening paragraphs. “How do people manage on that kind of money?”

Sociologists Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell open their new book, Uncomfortably Off, with an incident that makes a similar point in a slightly different way. In an episode of the BBC’s Question Time during the 2019 British election campaign, IT consultant Rob Barber accused a Labour MP of lying when he said the party’s plan to lift taxes on high earners would only affect people on the highest incomes. Labour wouldn’t be lifting taxes for the remaining 95 per cent, the MP promised.

“But you are!” Barber replied angrily. “Because I’ve read your policy!” The tax would apply to incomes above £80,000, and that meant he’d be among those who’d pay it. “I’m nowhere near the top 5 per cent, let me tell you. I’m not even in the top 50 per cent.”

Barber was wrong: a salary of £80,000-plus put him comfortably in the top 5 per cent of earners. (At around the same time, an Australian earning $180,000 would have snuck into the same bracket here.) His likely mistake, according to Hernando and Mitchell, was to habitually compare himself with people who earn as much as he does or, more importantly, those who earn much more.

As its title suggests, Uncomfortably Off attempts to explain why people on relatively high incomes don’t feel particularly affluent. (Hernando and Mitchell’s interviewees, all British, were drawn from the top 10 per cent of earners, though not the top 1 per cent.) Partly it’s because, like Barber, they compare themselves with people who earn more than they do. Partly it’s because their spending has increased as their incomes have risen and they have to find the money to cover increases in school fees, rising private healthcare costs and mounting lifestyle expectations.

These pressures contribute to what the authors call a fear of falling — the fear that they or their children will end up further down the income ladder. And those pressures have only worsened in recent years. The Conservative government’s austerity program of 2010–19 encouraged wealthier households to abandon overstretched public schools, healthcare and other publicly provided services, adding to the pressure on household finances, and the growing crisis in British schools, hospitals and community care has only added to the incentive to bail out.

But why would well-heeled earners look up rather than down when they’re assessing their own position? Increasingly segregated schooling and housing, more marriage within rather than between income groups, much less shared experience of healthcare and other social services, a greater focus on paid work and its monetary rewards — these are a large part of the explanation, say Hernando and Mitchell.

“All these tendencies,” they write, “mean that it’s increasingly rare for high earners to get to know people outside their usual interaction with friends, family, work and education, especially when other networks (such as those based on religion or hobbies) either dwindle or move online.” Asked to place themselves in the income hierarchy and feeling under pressure, they compare themselves with the relatively small segment of the population that seems typical to them.

This wouldn’t be quite such a problem if it weren’t for the fact that wealthy people have disproportionate political power. Once they withdraw from the spheres that most people inhabit — government-provided schools, healthcare or childcare, for instance — it’s no longer in their interest for those services to be adequately funded. This sets up a malign cycle: underfunded public services push people who can afford it into the hands of private providers. Their services cost more — often much more — and that puts pressure on their own finances, increasing their resistance to taxes and making them more likely to support government cutbacks.

Some of these trends are hard to reverse. We can’t do much about people marrying within their own milieu, for example. But we can begin the slow process of changing that milieu. The obvious place to start is in the school system, where private schools (generally the preserve of the wealthiest families) are reinforcing social segregation to an alarming degree.

Hernando and Mitchell conclude that cracks are opening up in the fearful barriers wealthy Britons have erected against an increasingly underresourced public sphere. “This book’s aim is to invite the top 10 per cent to consider a future in which, for the price of giving up the barriers through which they seek to distinguish themselves from the rest” — a price that would include higher taxes — “they could become less anxious, more secure and less isolated.”

Can Australia learn from Britain’s uncomfortable wealthy? While 7 per cent of British children are educated in private schools, the Australian figure is 35 per cent. Add in selective government schools, particularly in New South Wales, and our school system rates among the most segregated in the Western world. But the groundswell of support for the Gonski report (before it was fatally compromised by federal and state governments of both varieties) shows the soil is fertile. •

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care about Inequality
By Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell | Policy Press | £19.99 | 256 pages

The post Fear of falling 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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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

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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.

The post Unproductive schooling, counterproductive reform appeared first on Inside Story.

For example: Leigh tells of the Australian middle-distance runner Peter Norman, who once stood on the Olympic podium with two Black American placegetters as they raised their fists in protest against their country’s racism. Norman, white, a devout member of the Salvation Army, and wearing the badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, was in full support.

This was in 1968, when the White Australia policy still hadn’t been fully dismantled. On his return to Australia Norman copped sometimes vicious criticism, in the midst of which he was invited by a Methodist minister in suburban Melbourne to preach from his pulpit. The minister was Leigh’s grandfather. More than four decades on, in 2012, the minister’s grandson moved a parliamentary motion in posthumous apology to Peter Norman for the obloquy he had endured. The motion was carried, unanimously.

Along with a fluent pen, a family tradition of Christian socialism and gilt-edged training in economics, Leigh owes a debt to organised sport. He’s a self-confessed sports tragic who competes in triathlons, marathons and the like, and his latest book Fair Game: Lessons from Sport for a Fairer Society & a Stronger Economy pursues the nice idea that if Australian “business” were as well organised and competitive as Australian sport, the economy would be as productive as the field of dreams.

Where hyper-competitive and well-regulated sporting Australia has gone from one success to another, corporate Australia has been given an easy ride and grown fat, not very competitive, not very innovative, not very good at lifting productivity or wages, and very, very profitable. In other words, Australian capital has enjoyed a thirty-year romp on the back of a disempowered working class.

Leigh doesn’t use such dirty language, of course, and he refrains from mentioning that the romp really got going under a government led by a Labor prime minister trained in economics and a treasurer surrounded by staffers and financial journalists dazzled by the newly fashionable neoliberal version of economics. Leigh is constrained by his day job, and he is limited by his discipline, particularly when he uses its lens to examine things other than the economy. Education, for example.

Schooling was a particular interest of Leigh’s when he was a professor of economics at the ANU. His work found, among other things, that the productivity of schooling has been falling since the 1960s (more spending, worse outcomes), and that declining “teacher quality” (ie. lower entry standards) is associated with lower “teacher effectiveness” (ie. student scores in standardised tests). From there it is but a short distance to conclude that if we fix teacher quality, up will go effectiveness along with the productivity of schooling. In sport, he says, great coaching makes all the difference; so too teaching in schools. He even suggests that “attracting and retaining great teachers is perhaps the best single thing that we could do to create a more affluent and equitable society.”

How come? Well, careful studies by economists have shown that with more schooling comes increased self-control, reduced crime, more civic engagement, better health and higher incomes. So, QED, more great teachers make more happy, healthy, wealthy and wise citizens, and hence a more affluent and equitable society.

Well, it might look like that to economics, but it’s not necessarily like that at all. Coaching can change who wins, but it doesn’t make more medals. Income, health, civic-mindedness (and the lack of them) are less products of schooling than properties of the destinations, the lots in life to which schooling allocates. If we look inside the box of schooling, which economics doesn’t, we can see the workings of the machine made visible by ATAR, the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank, a tyranny of merit of just the kind Leigh admires in sport and, quite rightly,wants for business, but not what will provide twelve worthwhile years of schooling for all comers. More great teachers won’t change that game. •

Fair Game: Lessons from Sport for a Fairer Society & a Stronger Economy
By Andrew Leigh | Monash University Publishing | $19.95 | 96 pages

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

The post Field of dreams appeared first on Inside Story.

At my Catholic high school our science teacher drew images of fallopian tubes that looked like languid tropical flowers and sperm resembling frisky tadpoles. He said the words penis and vagina, the class erupted in giggles, and he muttered darkly about HIV and AIDS. Of course, I already knew about AIDS from the endless advertisements showing the Grim Reaper knocking down innocents in a bowling alley.

In short, sex education for my generation was not only seriously confusing and terrifying, it was also monolithically heterosexual, innocent of pleasure outside procreation and ignorant of violence, and only referenced queer sexuality to note the dangers attached.

Cut to 2019 and author Katrina Marson meets primary schoolchildren in Shropshire walking towards each other and learning to say when physical proximity makes them uncomfortable, children in the Netherlands touching feathers, sponges and other materials and expressing how these physical sensations make them feel, children in Yorkshire being shown slides of two girls hugging with the caption “Sometimes two girls will grow up to be women and love each other and that’s called lesbian,” and high-school students in Australia demanding better relationships and sexuality education to prevent sexual assault.

In her new book Legitimate Sexpectations Marson argues that a direct line exists between inadequate sex education and sexual assault. Encouraging children to be literate about their feelings, teaching them they are entitled to pleasure, and showing them how to inquire about, listen to and respect the emotions of their peers is, she says, crucial to their understanding of consent and to their sexual wellbeing as a whole.

Marson joins a panoply of feminist theorists in arguing that consent is a low threshold for sexual autonomy. What children need — and what they are entitled to as a matter of health, safety and human rights — is full sexual citizenship. Judged against this standard, Australian students are woefully disenfranchised. If we are serious about reducing rates of sexual violence in Australia, she says, then we need to begin not with the criminal justice system, which is little more than an “ambulance at the bottom of a cliff,” but with holistic sexual education. We need prevention and pleasure, not simply responses to coercion and crimes.

Marson’s book is ultimately an argument in favour of comprehensive sex education, but her background as a criminal prosecutor lends a fascinating dual perspective to her work, bringing courtroom and classroom into dialogue with each other. Tired of the grim “conveyor belt” that was dropping sexual assault files on to her desk each day, she set out in 2019 to investigate what could be done to stop the damage.

To do that, she revisited an argument she originally made in her honours thesis: that sex education was more effective than law in preventing sexual violence. Then, courtesy of a Churchill Fellowship, she met with teachers, sex-ed experts, researchers and public policymakers involved in innovative relationships and sexuality education programs in Europe, the United Kingdom and North America.

Part memoir, part fiction, part policy paper and part chat with a friend over cocktails, her book makes a compelling argument for Australian parents, schools and governments to adopt a form of sex education for children that goes beyond “don’t get raped” to teach children critical sexual literacy.

Each of Marson’s nine chapters begins with a fictional vignette taken from real situations she has encountered in her work. With ten years’ experience in the criminal justice system, she has an intimate understanding of sexual harms in their most banal and brutal forms, and of the inadequacy of law to redress them. She explains the violence underpinning what might once have been seen as a fumbling in a car or an unwanted romantic encounter at a party by imagining the internal monologues of each person: whether they believed they were entitled to pleasure, what their definitions of consent were, and the social scripts they had been given about masculinity and femininity or about heterosexuality and homosexuality. She showcases a vast spectrum of sexual harms, from cases where consent is clearly lacking to sex that may have been consensual but was ultimately unwanted, a product of social pressure.

I imagine most readers will find these vignettes uncomfortable reading, less because of the anatomical detail with which they are narrated than because of their familiarity. What for so many generations was passed off as bad sex reflects gendered asymmetries of power embedded in scripts about what sex should look like. From cinematic sex scenes entirely oblivious to the clitoris, to reality television shows where women worry more about how they are seen than how they feel, to compulsory heterosexuality, to parents telling a daughter to pull her skirt down or smiling that “boys will be boys,” we learn bad sex in a lot of places.

But what has been learned, Marson argues, can also be unlearned. The need for better communication — mutuality, literacy in knowing and expressing your own feelings and asking about and listening to your partner’s desires — runs through every story, as does the need to challenge binary notions of gender. Australian young people need critical literacy in sexuality that is best offered through relationships and sexuality education.

This is much more than sex education as most of us knew it. At its most comprehensive, it is a form of pedagogy that “aims to provide adolescents with knowledge, skills, attitudes and values.” It views sexuality “in a holistic manner, as an integral part of adolescents’ emotional and social development.” It dispenses with humanistic myths of childhood innocence and embraces young people’s right to sexual knowledge as a human and civil right that ensures sexual safety and wellbeing. It is also one of the most highly politicised and controversial areas of any national educational curriculum.

Remember Scott Morrison saying that a sex-ed program in Victoria made his “skin curl” or the furore that erupted around Safe Schools, an anti-bullying program designed to make schools inclusive for queer kids? At their heart, these moral panics reflect paternalistic notions that children, if given sexual knowledge, will indiscriminately leap on each other with lascivious intent. Like Adam and Eve eating the apple of knowledge, they will be cast out of the garden of childhood innocence, forever sinners, forever corrupted.

This reflects, at least partly, the role school plays in socialisation. Because it is the place where future citizens are moulded and shaped, the nation and the public have a stake in pedagogy, and any recognition of queer sexuality is immediately seen (in conservative columnist Miranda Devine’s words) as a “sexual indoctrination program.” It is why sex education has tended to envisage heterosexual, cis-gendered, married couples as the ideal.

Although data suggests that most parents are in favour of comprehensive sex education that includes recognition of sexual diversity, Australian schools are vulnerable to pressure from conservative and religious minorities because there is no national regulated standard of sex education, unlike in some European countries. Every Australian school in every state has the autonomy to determine sex-education content and delivery, with wildly varying standards of teaching.

Public schools have the additional problem of being vulnerable to the funding whims of governments at state and federal level. Marson contrasts this with Germany, where the Federal Centre for Health Education employs “qualified experts to conduct research, develop teaching packages and online platforms.” This government body then works with the education department in each state to deliver top-quality, standardised and well-resourced modules.

Unlike Australia, where sex-ed programs are framed in negative terms around risks of pregnancy, disease or sexual violence, German sex education is framed in positive terms. As Marson puts it, “They recognise the harm that comes from… failing to set a standard of holistic sexual wellbeing, from failing to paint a picture of what that looks like and what young people should expect: a picture of joy, fun, fulfilment and connection.” Germans start from this baseline and include violence prevention as a supplement. It’s a form of sex education that works with an affirmative model of consent, where consent is based less on a simple yes or no and more on ideas of pleasure and intimacy, where, as Marson puts it, “everyone present is really into it, wants to be there and is getting a lot out of the experience.”

It is the institutionalisation of sex education — as a matter of public policy rather than private values — that explains the title of the book. It’s a play on the administrative law notion of legitimate expectations, under which citizens can hold government to account for certain promises. If we promise children a life free of sexual violence then, as a community, we need to be responsible for funding and developing sex education. Reared in a culture of prudery, most teachers and parents are ill-equipped for the task. We need specialised teachers or qualified professionals if we are not to let our children down on this promise.

While I agree wholeheartedly with Marson’s linking of the institutional with the intimate, there is a certain paternalism to her tone throughout the book. “If anyone is at fault, it is us. As the village that raises you, we have let you down,” she self-lacerates. The rhetoric reflects a top-down model of sex education and is premised on an exaltation of childhood innocence. (We sexually literate adults need to teach you sexually innocent young people.)

Unlike scholarly literature in the field, particularly that of Kerry Robinson and Bronwyn Davies, Marson doesn’t address the myth of childhood innocence that underpins the moral panics around sex education, and in one instance claims that better education “protects” their innocence. This is not just a missed opportunity to examine the class- and race-based nature of a myth that emerged with the privatisation of the Christian middle-class home in the nineteenth century — excluding working-class and non-white children, who were seen as too sexually knowledgeable to be considered real children. It also explains why no young people were interviewed for the book.

At the level of policy, there is significant research, as Marson notes, that suggests the most effective sex education programs are those written alongside young people or indeed conducted by them. And given that adults are not particularly literate in the various forms of social media that are teaching adolescents about sex, it seems odd not to have included their voices and perspectives.

Equally troubling is the omission of any non-white interviewees. While I can accept that Marson decided to focus on North America and Europe, where the education systems are similar to Australia’s, I am baffled by why she would not have interviewed people of colour in the countries she visited, many of which are just as multicultural as Australia. Notions of childhood and sexuality differ across cultures and, as Marson herself notes, “shame around sex and sexuality… are colonial and patriarchal concepts.”

Marson confesses to this deficiency, which I think hints at the broader problem with books written as a “research journey.” As memoir, they can fall short of scholarly standards because the genre is personalised, intimate, vulnerable and confessional. Rather than organising more interviews to redress the problem, Marson simply admits her sin — “my research is the poorer for it” — and carries on. It’s not just a problem in terms of the book’s findings, but also makes me worry about the kinds of books currently being churned out in Australia, where sloppy research passes under the cloak of personal epiphany.

These reservations aside, Marson has written an important book that you will want to thrust into the hands of every parent and educator you know. It is a significant intervention into a field overly dominated by legal perspectives, and I have no doubt that comprehensive relationships and sex education can do far more to prevent sexual violence than changing the legal standard of consent. More than this, it will help raise a generation for which violence, disease or pregnancy is not the prompt for sex education but rather an essential element of a conversation about pleasure, intimacy, fun and desire. •

Legitimate Sexpectations: The Power of Sex-Ed
By Katrina Marson | Scribe | $32.99 | 258 pages

The post Pleasure and intimacy appeared first on Inside Story.

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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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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The project resonates with Moree’s history. Mention Moree to many, and one phrase crops up: the Freedom Ride. In 1965, inspired partly by civil rights campaigns in America, a busload of students from the University of Sydney spent a fortnight driving through northern New South Wales. The Student Action for Aborigines group included Charles Perkins, later a leading Aboriginal bureaucrat, and Jim Spigelman, later a chief justice of New South Wales.

The group set out to “publicise the appalling conditions under which our Aborigines live,” wrote journalist Fred Wells in the Canberra Times. The paper described those conditions as “shanty towns, where most blacks lived without sanitation, electricity and often water.”

Just seventeen years earlier, Australia had helped to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But the racial segregation the freedom riders found in far-flung towns was shocking. In Walgett, about 200 kilometres west of Moree, the RSL club banned Aboriginal patrons except on Anzac Day, including those who had fought two decades earlier in the second world war. Cinemas in Walgett, Bowraville and elsewhere treated Aboriginal people the way America’s Deep South treated black Americans, forcing them to enter by separate doors and to sit in separate seats from whites. When a sixteen-year-old Aboriginal girl tried to challenge the ban in Bowraville, the theatre’s owner reportedly declared that it had always been policy to segregate, “and he would continue to enforce it.”

In 1955, a decade before the Freedom Ride hit Moree, the local council had passed an ordinance banning Aboriginal children from the town’s swimming pool. Amid a stand-off with police and hundreds of angry white townsfolk, Charles Perkins took in a small group of Aboriginal kids, and joined them in the pool. The freedom riders faced anger on the road, too. After they left Walgett for Moree late one night, a truck overtook their bus and tried to force it off the road. Bill Packenham, their driver, later quit the tour because it had “become too dangerous.” Another driver flew in to replace him.

Nothing like the Freedom Ride had been attempted in Australia before. It became something of a turning point in exposing the scope of inequalities and racism in Australia. In an editorial, the Canberra Times called for change: “The people of Moree and Walgett are especially angry because they know in their hearts that what the students say is true. There is colour prejudice in these towns, and in practice a round and ready kind of apartheid is the rule.”

Some Kamilaroi people credit the Freedom Ride with helping to trigger the constitutional referendum two years later, in 1967, in which Australians voted overwhelmingly to transfer power over Aboriginal affairs from the states to the Commonwealth.

To many, though, old attitudes and hurdles remain. The growing support among Aboriginal people and many legal experts for an approach like justice reinvestment could help solve problems that governments have largely ignored since the days of the Freedom Ride.

My own drive from Walgett to Moree last month was more peaceful than back then. Three years earlier, in 2018, I had visited Bourke, about 440 kilometres west of Moree along the same outback highway. Bourke had embarked on what has become Australia’s most successful bid by its Aboriginal people to use a justice reinvestment approach.

The town once had the highest conviction rate for Aboriginal children and teenagers in New South Wales. The state government’s response was to build more prisons.

Alistair Ferguson, a prominent Aboriginal figure in the town, was inspired by a different idea from the Open Society Institute, a New York think tank: devote the money instead towards resolving underlying causes of crime, and try to keep people out of prisons. His community formed a partnership with Just Reinvest NSW, a Sydney-based body advocating this “justice reinvestment” approach as public policy.

Its logic has defied governments, but it has helped Bourke’s “Maranguka” exercise become something of a showcase. In late 2018, five years after it started, the accounting firm KPMG reported substantial falls in juvenile offences and domestic violence, and a sharp rise in year 12 student retention rates. The project, it estimated, had saved Bourke’s criminal justice system about $3 million a year.

About twenty other Aboriginal communities, keen to do similar work, had already approached Just Reinvest NSW. A small grant from the state’s justice department helped produce a Justice Reinvestment Toolkit to give communities a better idea of what it was about. But limited funds have confined work so far to just two communities, Mount Druitt, a sprawling suburb in western Sydney, and Moree.

Mount Druitt and its surrounds (rather than Redfern, as many think) is home to Sydney’s largest Aboriginal population, about 9000 people, making it a strong candidate to test how justice reinvestment could work in a big urban area. Julie Williams, an Aboriginal woman who grew up in Mount Druitt, joined Just Reinvest NSW last year. Poor relations with police and high fine rates for young black people are the biggest problems, she says. Working with Baabayn Aboriginal Corporation, a group of western Sydney Elders, she and grassroots colleagues in the Western Sydney Watch Committee have started meeting with police in a bid to “reset the relationship.”

Work in Moree is further advanced. Located on the Mehi River, the town is a big business centre for the Gwydir River valley. Drawn by the region’s rich black soil plains, white settlers started arriving in the 1830s and, for the most part, have never looked back. It’s been a different story for the Kamilaroi people, said to be the second-biggest Aboriginal nation in eastern Australia after the Wiradjuri.

Fifty-six years after the Freedom Ride, inequalities remain deplorable. According to the 2016 census, fewer than half of Moree’s Kamilaroi people aged between fifteen and nineteen were in schools, compared with over two-thirds of non-Kamilaroi teenagers; less than a fifth of Moree’s Kamilaroi adults had completed year 12, compared with over twice that proportion for non-Kamilaroi people; just a quarter of Kamilaroi households were buying or owned a home, compared with almost two-thirds of other residents; and fewer than half of Moree’s Kamilaroi households had internet connection, compared with almost three-quarters of non-Kamilaroi people.

After the 1965 Freedom Ride, Charles Perkins told the press its “most important” aspect had been the “surprising degree of active support from the local Aboriginal people themselves.” Communities had anticipated their arrival with “strong interest”: Aboriginal people near Nambucca Heads, on the NSW north coast, had stood lookout on a hill for two days, watching for the students to come.

These attitudes were harbingers of what justice reinvestment is trying to achieve now: Aboriginal people determining their own approaches to solving problems, free from the directives of governments in faraway capital cities.

For Just Reinvest NSW, Moree seemed a logical place to help the local community start pursuing such an approach in 2019. After the Freedom Ride, Kamilaroi people had helped to form bodies like the Aboriginal Legal Service. Yet problems like high crime rates and school suspensions among young people seemed intractable. In late 2019 the NSW ombudsman reported that over a third of Aboriginal students at one Moree primary school and over half of Aboriginal students at a secondary school received short suspensions in 2017, the second-highest rates in each case among fifteen state “Connected Communities Schools.”

Experts talk of a “school to prison pipeline,” suggesting that children having trouble at school are more likely to end up in the criminal justice system. The Australian Institute of Criminology calls it a “potential association between school experiences, including suspension, and later antisocial and violent behaviour resulting in incarceration.”

Similar problems plagued Bourke before justice reinvestment began to work. Moree faces the challenge of assembling a leadership group to pull together “a lot of moving parts,” as Alistair Ferguson also found in Bourke. And Moree’s overall population is about five times bigger than Bourke’s, making for a more complex task. So the Kamilaroi people are working out what they call a “Moree way” for justice reinvestment.

I arrived in time to hear how this is evolving. Among the several community leaders who had gathered for a meeting at the Dhiiyaan Aboriginal Centre in Moree’s main street were two local Kamilaroi women who now work for Just Reinvest NSW in Moree, Judy Duncan and Mekayla Cochrane. Duncan, “Moree born and bred,”  has worked in the area for almost forty years, “through education and government,” as she puts it, and has “done time in the criminal justice system.” Cochrane, her younger colleague, joined Just Reinvest NSW late last year. “As a way to provide a platform for Aboriginal people, it’s a no-brainer,” says Cochrane. Joining them at this meeting were Jenny Lovric and Nicole Mekler of Just Reinvest NSW in Sydney.

“We’re trying to work out what the ‘Moree way’ is,” says Just Reinvest NSW’s Judy Duncan. Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

The local participants have set up working groups to enable Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal figures, police, school officials and others to talk to each other more productively and come up with locally designed approaches to problems. Like their counterparts in Bourke, they’ve also started building data to help track the problems.

“School suspensions and other education issues are big underlying problems in Moree,” Judy Duncan tells me. “We’re trying to work out what the ‘Moree way’ is. It’ll be Moree looking out for Moree, not government looking out for Moree. A community leadership group is starting to emerge on this. I love my community. It’s time we got things right. If the Aboriginal community can get it right, the rest of the community will, too.”

Just Reinvest NSW and the Aboriginal Legal Service have initiated a project with the Moree police aimed at cutting the number of young people who wind up in prison simply for breaching bail; a similar project is planned in Mount Druitt. Too often, young people are arrested for breaching bail conditions that are too onerous or that they can’t meet. The police have agreed to take a fresh approach by notifying the Aboriginal Legal Service of bail conditions earlier than before, allowing it to request amendments in certain cases.

“So far, it’s working,” says Helen McWilliam, officer-in-charge of Moree police, who presides over a staff of about fifty. “The last thing we want to see is more kids in the juvenile justice system.” Roger Best, crime manager of the New England police district, which embraces Moree, says twelve-year-olds were among the most prolific juvenile offenders, and that reoffending had been common. “But you can’t arrest your way out of these problems,” he adds. “Instead, justice reinvestment is about spending the money to address causes, so you can avoid spending money elsewhere later.”

Opening dialogues with the town’s big players is showing positive signs here. But some people at the Dhiiyaan centre tell me of other things that seem stuck in the past. More than sixty state and federal government services are located in Moree, but Kamilaroi people complain of trouble accessing them. Many feel that racist attitudes persist in everyday town life.

The Moree pool, the town’s flashpoint during the Freedom Ride, remains contentious. Owned by the shire council and run by a separate board, it was added to the list of National Heritage Places in 2013. The citation notes that the baths were a “stark example of official segregation” in 1965.

Many Kamilaroi people believe the exclusion goes on, in the form of a $9 entry price per person, making it unaffordable to poorer families, especially women looking after grandchildren over hot summer months. A Guardian Australia survey of public swimming pool fees in 129 local government areas last year found the Moree pool to be one of the two most expensive in the state.

“In the sixties you were excluded if you were black,” Judy Duncan says. “Now you’re excluded unless you’re rich.” Some reckon the two forms of exclusion are connected. Lyall Munro tells me, “The attitude lingers from the local government by-law in the 1950s that allowed segregation in this town. Nothing has changed for equality and liberty in Moree. It’s as though the Freedom Ride never happened.”

There’s growing support among legal experts for justice reinvestment as a way of keeping people out of prison and saving the criminal justice system money. The Australian Human Rights Commission, the Australian Law Reform Commission and the Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee have all called on governments to promote the idea and to back it with funds. For the most part, governments have declined to do so.

Almost a decade after it started, Bourke’s Maranguka exercise recently received a federal grant awarded to community projects in far-flung places, although Bourke’s appears to have been the only grant for justice reinvestment. The funds were modest: $35 million shared among ten communities over five years.

The work in Moree and Mount Druitt relies almost entirely on the goodwill of private philanthropists. The backers comprise a diverse mix of family foundations, legal firms and finance firms. The Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation and the Bill and Patricia Ritchie Foundation are supporting work in both places. The Paul Ramsay Foundation is supporting Just Reinvest NSW and site-based work. The Charitable Foundation, a private fund chaired by Steve Killelea, is involved with Moree. Herbert Smith Freehills, a law firm, is funding the Bail Project in Moree and Mount Druitt. Other law firms help with pro bono work. IAG, an insurance company, is funding some work in Mount Druitt. The Dusseldorp Forum, another family foundation, and one of the first funders at Bourke, is still involved there.

Most philanthropists prefer to keep the amounts they’re giving confidential. At least two others have given in-kind support: Dell Computers, with help from the law firm King & Wood Mallesons, gave one hundred laptops to Moree so students could keep schoolwork going remotely when schools closed amid the pandemic.

After learning of the Bourke project three years ago, VivCourt Trading, a Sydney finance firm, met Sarah Hopkins, co-chair of Just Reinvest NSW, to learn more. “We were inspired,” says Rob Keldoulis, VivCourt’s founder. The firm now supports a community-led OzTag team for Aboriginal men in Mt Druitt and youth advocacy in relation to policing and the criminal justice system. It has also helped Just Reinvest NSW save on rent by extending the lease on premises in Potts Point, Sydney, that VivCourt was vacating. “They can create roots and it gives them certainty,” Keldoulis says. “If we can help scale justice reinvestment up this way, hopefully governments can get behind it.”

The Justice Reform Initiative, an advocacy group launched last year, is calling for similar reforms to the criminal justice system, but on a broader scale. Chaired by Robert Tickner, a former federal Aboriginal affairs minister, it argues that governments have long used imprisonment as a “default response to disadvantage.” In early May, the group launched their campaign in Tasmania where the state governor, Kate Warner, hosted a reception.

Tickner is impressed by work in Bourke, Moree and Mount Druitt: “The Aboriginal people have been forced to do the heavy lifting for criminal justice reform.” But, he says, the next crucial step is missing: government support.

To gauge local government support I visited the mayor of Moree Plains Shire Council, Katrina Humphries, at Fishabout, her seafood shop in East Moree. Humphries has a strong political pedigree: thirteen years as mayor, she is the daughter of the late Wal Murray, a former NSW National Party leader and deputy premier.

Fishabout seems to be Humphries’s unofficial office, making for more relaxed chats with visitors than a slightly intimidating council chamber. As I arrive, she’s finishing a meeting at a dining table with Craig Jenkins, director of the NSW government’s regional office for New England and the state’s northwest. Jenkins happens to be a Kamilaroi man who grew up in Moree, and is back in town to discuss two big projects.

“We want Australia to know how important it is for Aboriginal people to have a say about their own lives”: the Moree Local Aboriginal Land Council’s Lloyd Munro.

Moree will be the hub for one of six Special Activation Precincts the NSW government is planning across the state to encourage investment in regions. Some of these precincts, including Moree’s, also lie along the route of the proposed Inland Rail from Melbourne to Brisbane, one of Australia’s biggest infrastructure projects. Humphries expects the first freight train on this line to roll into Moree in 2024–25. The master plan for Moree’s precinct, launched in May, claims it will create jobs by supporting local industries in what it says is already the most productive grain region in Australia.

What are the prospects of its creating jobs for Kamilaroi people? “Enormous,” Humphries replies. Her council includes no Aboriginal members, but she says it aims for 20 per cent of its employees to be Aboriginal. I ask about disquiet that Moree pool’s high entry fee still makes many Kamilaroi people feel excluded. She explains that the shire’s three pools, including Moree’s, have combined “community service obligation” costs of about $700,000 a year. The $9 fee, she adds, is “not as expensive as a packet of cigarettes.”

Humphries doesn’t shy away from identifying Moree’s broader problems: petty crime; drugs, which she notes are not confined to the Aboriginal community; too few case workers for vulnerable young people; and too high rates of Aboriginal incarceration. Her response is straightforward. “I’m a capitalist,” she says. “I believe people need to work, earn their own money and be proud of that.”

It doesn’t sound like the sort of collegial approach that drives justice reinvestment, but Humphries supports that exercise nonetheless. She’s “very interested” by what’s happening in Bourke and says, “The way forward is that our Aboriginal community has to be run by Aboriginal people. We can’t keep doing things in a cycle that’s doomed.”

Craig Jenkins was unavailable for an interview, but people involved in Moree’s justice reinvestment project who met him in town say he seems “passionate” about the Aboriginal community’s benefiting from the Special Activation Precinct.

So far the signs look promising, according to Lloyd Munro, Lyall’s brother, who is vice-chairman of the Moree Local Aboriginal Land Council. The Munro family have played distinguished roles for at least two generations, fighting for Aboriginal rights in Moree and around Australia. Lloyd’s father, Lyall Munro Senior, received a state funeral in Moree last year to honour his work. As children, two of Lloyd’s brothers responded to the Freedom Ride. Lyall Munro Junior recalls joining a bus to town from the mission where they lived, “and the townspeople pelted us with stuff.”

Encouraged by Charles Perkins, Dan Munro was among the first Aboriginal children to get into the Moree pool. Noeline Briggs-Smith, a local Aboriginal researcher, has recorded Dan Munro’s account: “We were just nine-year-old kids and we were crying, we were upset, we didn’t know where we were going. But even when we got into the pool we were uncomfortable because we knew, as people, we weren’t supposed to be there. We were shamed, but the students took the shame away from us and let us know we were part of this world.”

Lloyd Munro wants justice reinvestment to be a further step in making Kamilaroi people “part of this world.” Through the Aboriginal lands council, he’s having regular talks with Inland Rail and Special Activation Precinct officials to make sure the Kamilaroi people are part of the story. About seven Kamilaroi people already work at a new village for Inland Rail workers built on Carmine Munro Avenue, a street named after his mother; it’s a small proportion of the 300-odd workers the village is designed to accommodate.

He agrees education is still a “key problem” for Kamilaroi teenagers. For this reason, he’s excited about a youth forum that Moree’s justice reinvestment participants are planning in November, followed by an education summit soon afterwards. “I don’t think Moree has ever had events like this. It will be a very significant chance to address underlying issues.”

Committees, boards and NGOs have long run young Aboriginal people’s lives, he says. Now “it’s time to get youth involved. They can come to these big gatherings. We want Australia to know how important it is for Aboriginal people to have a say about their own lives.” •

The publication of this article was supported by grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas and the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

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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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“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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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. •

The post Why do Canada’s schools outperform Australia’s? appeared first on Inside Story.

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.

The post When private schools go public appeared first on Inside Story.

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. •

The post Less choice, less affordability: the private school subsidy paradox appeared first on Inside Story.

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.

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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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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. •

The post Paying for class in Australia’s schools appeared first on Inside Story.

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.

Legitimate concern has been expressed at the government’s plan to cap redress at $150,000 per person rather than the commission’s recommended $200,000. The recommendation that priests be added to the list of those subject to mandatory reporting requirements has been supported by the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, though it was immediately rejected by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.

That there is division within the Catholic Church about how to respond to the commission’s final report is evident — as Joanne McCarthy, the journalist whose work helped spark the royal commission, writes — in the church’s unwillingness to make public the 1000-page report of its Truth, Justice and Healing Council, which it has had since March.

The ceiling on compensation and breaking the seal of confession are questions that spark debate if not outrage among the general public, but they are just two among the 409 recommendations made by the commission in its seventeen-volume report. In fact, the sheer scale of the royal commission’s work — even its executive summary runs to 220 pages — poses a challenge. How do we absorb and debate its many recommendations? Not only has it gathered vast amounts of information, evidence and testimony but the issues it covers are complex and the subject matter distressing.

In an earlier article for Inside Story, we asked how it was that so many children had been failed by so many institutions for so many years, and found illuminating answers in the fifty-two research reports produced by the commission. Given that it is impossible to deal with the royal commission’s work in a single article and that institutional failure was our previous focus, the need to create child-centred institutions will be our subject here.

It’s fair to say that when the royal commission began five years ago the community’s overall knowledge of how to identify, report and respond to child sexual abuse was as limited as the literature on the topic. As a report for the commission by Portland State University’s Keith Kaufman and British researcher Marcus Erooga concludes, “there was no existing empirical evidence or theoretical base on organisational culture and institutional child sexual abuse, beyond recognition that it was important.” An Adelaide research team, Michael Proeve, Catia Malvaso and Paul DelFabbro, found that the “overwhelming majority” of available research is based on known perpetrators, and there is not enough information to “make predictions about the likelihood of being a perpetrator.”

Researchers acknowledge the need for more work on sexual abuse by peers and abuse of children by women, given the large number of women working in education. The latter point was highlighted by the recent arrest of Malka Leifer, a former principal of an Orthodox Jewish school in Melbourne, on seventy-four counts of child sexual abuse. Those allegations are an outlier, however; the royal commission found that all but 6.2 per cent of the 6875 survivors who attended its private sessions were abused by a male.

It is important to remember that far more children are abused within families or by someone they know than they are in institutions, but this does not lessen the gravity of the fact that more than 4000 individual institutions were reported to the commission. Its final report declares that “the sexual abuse of children has occurred in almost every type of institution where children reside or attend,” with some institutions having multiple abusers.

The final report also found that many institutions did not have a culture of prioritising children’s interests; instead, “some leaders felt their primary responsibility was to protect the institution’s reputation, and the accused person.” On the information the royal commission received, “the greatest number of alleged perpetrators and abused children were in Catholic institutions.”

If we are much clearer now about the magnitude of abuse and the urgency of the task ahead, we must not squander the courage of the 8000-plus survivors who told their stories to the royal commission, nor negate the efforts of its 680-strong workforce. We now know that child sexual abuse has been occurring for generations and that to assume it will not continue in the future would be a tragic mistake.

The message from researchers is just as unequivocal: society must demand its institutions redefine what it means to exercise power over children in their care.

How might we achieve this? Some answers can be found in the research reports prepared for the royal commission by Kaufman and Erooga and by Donald Palmer. Each points to the seemingly simple conclusions of two researchers working separately, David Finkelhor and Edgar Schein. The fact that they published their findings more than thirty years ago underscores the need to build stronger bridges between academics, those who run institutions and the community.

In 1984 Finkelhor established four conditions that enable perpetrators to sexually abuse a child. First, of course, they have to be motivated to commit the abuse. Then they have to overcome “internal inhibitors” that they may have, such as thinking child sexual abuse harms the child. The next step is to overcome any external barriers between themselves and the child, such as adult supervision. Last, the abuser has to overcome the child’s own resistance.

This makes one point very clear. We need to make it harder for perpetrators to abuse — regardless of the institution they are in, whether that is a day-care centre, respite service for disabled children, church, school or youth detention centre — by increasing the risk of being caught and limiting the opportunities to offend. It also means — and this critical ingredient was absent in many cases reported to the royal commission — that institutions must ensure that they foster a child-focused culture “led by senior management and wholeheartedly endorsed and owned by staff at all levels,” in the words of Kaufman and Erooga.

The researchers argue that the current system reles too heavily on screening techniques. “The best way to reduce the risk of institutional child sexual abuse,” write Kaufman and Erooga, “is to avoid dangerous practice rather than attempt to screen out allegedly dangerous people.” Screening is important in employing staff and accepting volunteers in organisations that care for children, of course, but it is “far from guaranteed to deter or detect all individuals who might present a risk.”

A 2012 study by Erooga, Debra Allnock and Paula Telford found that only one person in a sample of twenty-one convicted institutional sex offenders had a previous conviction. Perpetrators told the researchers that they took advantage of the “policies, climate, culture and norms” of institutions to gain access to children. Again, research offers guidance, this time from Edgar Schein in 1984, whom Palmer credits with developing one of the “earliest and most authoritative analyses of organisational culture.”

Schein argues that leaders convey a sense of identity in five ways: by the people they hire and fire; by the behaviour they reward and punish; by the issues they choose to focus on; by how they handle crises; and by their own attitudes and behaviour. Palmer’s research shows that organisational leaders who “talk to staff members, parents and children about child sexual abuse outside the context of formal training sessions are conveying that the issue is important to them, and implying that it should be important to others as well.”

Strict screening techniques can be seen as a kind of fire hose wielded by authorities to keep a known threat at bay, but it is more important that the institution itself is fire-proofed, with employees from the ground up equipped to define, deter and report any attempt to abuse children. All those who deal with children should be a fire wardens, identifying themselves as protectors of the children in their care.

Schein says the first step is to “unfreeze” internalised attitudes that otherwise block an organisation’s training efforts. Second, the organisation needs to inculcate the ethic that there is zero tolerance for child sexual abuse. And finally, the new culture must be “refrozen,” which means reinforcing the new attitudes.

Palmer argues that Schein’s concept of “engineering artefacts and practices” could be yet another way for institutions to combat child sexual abuse. Sporting clubs, for instance, could give awards not only for winning races but to recognise children and coaches “for behaviour consistent with assumptions, values and beliefs, and norms that help prevent child sexual abuse.” Older, more accomplished athletes might be asked to serve as “big brothers” or “big sisters” to younger, less accomplished athletes.

The same report argues that there is a strong need to “combat the endorsement of grooming behaviour.” In the case of boarding schools, it suggests purging the organisation of the belief that teachers need to develop close personal relationships with students and instead emphasising strong boundaries and the development of “more professional relationships with students (in which the teacher is viewed as having expert knowledge and the student is viewed as their client).”

What the testimony of survivors to the royal commission laid bare was the fact that one of the greatest barriers to victims’ disclosing child sexual abuse is fear they will not be believed. A 2015 study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies cited by Erooga, Allnock and Telford says that children must be sent very clear messages that they will be believed when they report abuse. The research team recommended that legislation be created to strengthen victims’ rights to privacy, which would foster more humane treatment of victims and encourage reporting of abuse. The team also suggests setting up ways that victims could report from outside the institution, encouraging anonymous reporting and making the process less onerous.

Palmer’s research found that children are less likely to report their abuse when the institution has a “macho culture” that prizes stoicism in the face of harsh treatment by staff or peers. This should be replaced, he says, by the belief that reporting such treatment is a sign not of weakness but of strength, honesty and maturity. The research advocates a cultural shift whereby those working at a residential childcare facility would opt to accept children’s reports of abuse at face value and treat them as “true, until proven otherwise” rather than as untrustworthy.

How does the commission propose that these and other insights be translated into action? In its sixth recommendation the commission proposes that ten Child Safe Standards be adopted by all levels of government and by all institutions and organisations that care for children, regardless of size, duty or denomination.

According to the standards, child safety should be embedded in institutional leadership, governance and culture. Children should participate in decisions affecting them and be taken seriously, and families and communities should be informed and involved. Equity should be upheld and diverse needs taken into account. People working with children should be both suitable and supported. Processes to respond to complaints of child sexual abuse must be child-focused. Staff need to be equipped through regular training with the knowledge, skills and awareness to keep children safe. The physical and online environments must minimise the opportunity for abuse to occur. Built into the Child Safe Standards is a recognition of the need for continuous review and improvement. Policies and procedures must also document how the institution is child safe.

The commission has shown that children are too often terrified to speak out. We must learn to read their silence or at the least create an environment sufficiently open to encourage them to speak up without a fear of being ignored or dismissed. As vigilant and well intentioned as we might be as individuals and as members of organisations, the commission warns that there remain serious, systemic problems that will require a concerted national effort to overcome. We must develop a unified model of reporting child abuse across Australia while simultaneously removing the barriers to reporting. Beyond this, we need to improve the training, education and guidance that informs us what we should report and how we should go about it.

The news media performs a vital role in holding power to account and ensuring that vulnerable people’s stories are heard. In its final sitting day last December, the commission noted that many media outlets had provided extensive coverage of its work but the chief commissioner, Justice Peter McClellan, singled out the value of the ABC’s reporting on every one of its case studies on television, radio and online almost every sitting day.

As the commissioners write in their acknowledgment of the importance of each survivor’s testimony: “The survivors are remarkable people with a common concern to do what they can to ensure that other children are not abused. They deserve our nation’s thanks.” These remarkably heartfelt words from royal commissioners also serve as a stinging call for all of us to ensure such widespread tragedies do not occur again. •

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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. •

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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. ●

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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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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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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.

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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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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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“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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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. •

The post “We wouldn’t want to be where you guys are, that’s for sure” appeared first on Inside Story.

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. •

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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. •

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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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When I checked with the relevant authorities, I found that the boss who had given the instruction not to provide free immunisation was indeed implementing official policy. The Australian government’s program of free childhood vaccinations against a wide range of communicable diseases is restricted to citizens, permanent residents, and other people eligible to hold a Medicare card.

In early 2016, over another dinner, my midwife friend told me happily that policy at her workplace had been revised and that all children under ten were now to receive free vaccines, regardless of their visa status. A visit to the Victorian Health Department website confirmed the change. When I’d checked in 2013, the Victorian guidelines stated that you needed to be eligible for a Medicare card to get your children immunised for free, whereas in 2016, the Victorian rules were that all children under ten “can receive the National Immunisation Program vaccines.”

At the federal level, though, the policy had not changed. When I called the federal government’s Immunise Australia Information Line, the helpful young man who took my call assured me the rules were the same as when I originally inquired in 2013. Reading from a written document, he told me that you had to be “eligible to receive Medicare benefits” in order to get free vaccines, which means that the children of most 457 visa holders and international students miss out. So Victorian health authorities say one thing and federal health officials apply another. What is going on here? The answer, it appears, is that the Victorians are pushing definitional boundaries.

In 2015, the federal government was so concerned at the growing gaps in comprehensive childhood immunisation in Australia that it put in place a “no jab, no pay” policy, which means that parents who fail to fully immunise their children are no longer eligible for family assistance payments, including the childcare benefit, the childcare rebate and the family tax benefit part A. This stick was accompanied by a carrot: to encourage parents to fully immunise their children, the federal government introduced a “catch up” program for all states and territories to distribute “free National Immunisation Program vaccines for all children under the age of ten that require catch-up.”

In the Victorian government’s interpretation, any child under ten, including a newborn, who is not fully immunised requires “catch up,” regardless of their parents’ visa status. In short, Victoria has used the catch up program to extend the federal government’s free immunisation program to the children of all temporary visa holders.

The ingenuity of state public servants is admirable. In the field of immunisation, even a small percentage increase in population coverage produces very significant gains for public health. It is difficult to work out whether other states and territories are following Victoria’s lead or sticking to a narrower interpretation of the federal government’s rules because public resources like health department websites offer little, if any, detail on eligibility for vaccines by visa status.

But even if other states and territories do adopt Victoria’s more liberal interpretation of federal rules for under-tens, the teenage children of temporary visa holders are still ineligible for free vaccinations rolled out through schools. The overall result is a mess of different policies and approaches across the nation – hardly an ideal situation in a crucial area of public health policy.

According to the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, migrants and culturally and linguistically diverse communities are among the “special-risk and under-served populations” for immunisation. The National Health Performance Authority says tracking the percentage of children who are fully immunised is more difficult in areas with large immigrant populations.

While immunisation providers are expected to have a comprehensive understanding of the eligibility rules for access to free or subsidised vaccines, the Centre for Research Excellence in Population Health warns that “differences in eligibility by vaccine and visa class add complexity and act as a barrier to the provision of catch-up immunisation” in communities that are ‘particularly vulnerable to under-immunisation.” Excluding a proportion of that migration population from free mass immunisation schemes on the basis of their visa status serves to further complicate an already complex situation.

Like many other administrative and legal systems, immunisation programs have failed to keep pace with the shift from permanent to temporary migration. Policy and practice neglect the growing cohort of people who are not quite Australian, because of a flawed assumption that people are either citizens or permanent residents. This oversight could come at significant cost. As one public health official put it to me privately, “I don’t know too many infectious diseases that distinguish between who is a Medicare holder and who is not.” •

This is an edited extract from Not Quite Australian: How Temporary Migration is Changing the Nation, published this week by Text. Inside Story readers can order a copy for 15 per cent off using the promotion code MARES15.

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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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This school in southeast London was a little out of the ordinary, state-funded but subsidised by a foundation run by the Church of England. It was privileged, certainly, but there were no fees. The only price exacted was in the form of two religious assemblies a day, at which the choir sang an anthem or an a cappella four-part setting of the Lord’s Prayer. It was what you’d call a musical school.

The music master was a sour man with a sharp tongue. His classes were devoid of inspiration and enthusiasm, and I imagine in the course of his career he must have ruined music for hundreds of his pupils. Richard Gill he was not. Still, I liked him. Partly, I think, I felt sorry for him; but I was also fortunate enough to be in that choir, and there one saw a different side of the man. He was still sour and sharp-tongued, but when he raised his baton, his musicianship communicated itself instantly.

Fauré’s Requiem is not an obvious choice of repertoire to inculcate a life-long love of music in children. Its harmonic subtleties, you might think, would be lost on the average child. I was an average child – I’d never heard of Fauré and had no idea what a requiem was – yet this music swept me away. I remember relishing, as you’d expect, the boisterous central section of the “Libera me,” with its depiction of “that day of wrath” (it was as though Fauré had set the phrase “calamitatis et miseriae” with eleven-year-old boys in mind). But the delicate soprano solo “Pie Jesu,” which all the trebles sang in unison, was no less affecting, while the graceful viola melody at the start of the “Agnus Dei” still makes me catch my breath.

By the end of that first term when the concert came around I was hooked. It wasn’t that I was a natural chorister, or really any kind of chorister. After the concert, my mother commented that I hadn’t appeared to be singing at all. I suppose what I was doing, standing in the middle of that glorious noise, was soaking it all up, and before long – by which time I was actually singing and reading music – I had absorbed Handel’s Israel in Egypt, Samson and Messiah, Bach’s St John Passion, Christmas Oratorio and Magnificat, Schütz’s Christmas Story, Britten’s St Nicolas, and smaller works by Parry, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Holst and Delius. The experience was formative.

These days, when the debate is had (is it even a debate any more?) about the decline of interest in classical music, poor education is generally taken to be the culprit. Of course, there are those who believe that classical music is irrelevant and has no part in a modern education. I think we should dismiss out of hand any argument about education that posits relevance as an important criterion. Relevance is only an issue if you believe we educate children in order to fit them for careers. If we are educating for life, it is hard to see how anything might be irrelevant, least of all a body of work created by some of the great minds of Western civilisation.

You will also hear it said that teaching classical music is expensive. Well, not necessarily. It is not expensive to sing. Singing is the start of music, its most common manifestation and, arguably, its most sublime expression. By singing, we make ourselves physically part of music and music part of us. And singing is a very good way to learn how to read music, that skill which so many people mystify, but which, if you start young, is a simple matter that will unlock a treasure trove of further musical experience.

If all schools took the teaching of singing seriously – singing in all sorts of styles, singing in parts, singing by ear, singing from scores – we would have no crisis of music education. The trouble is that over little more than a generation we have failed to equip teachers to teach singing; we have failed to teach them to value music.

Way back in September, when George Brandis was arts minister and Christopher Pyne in charge of education, both men copped considerable flak for their policies on arts funding and university deregulation. But one thing they did absolutely right – and they did it together – was fund a pilot scheme under the direction of Richard Gill to put specialist music teaching back into the nation’s primary schools. The National Music Teachers Mentorship Pilot Programme (sic) is only a start, but sometimes a start is all that is needed. My own deeply flawed music education might serve as an example. Though the classroom teaching might have turned me and many of my fellow students against classical music, the chance to sing at a high level made the difference.

As we wait to see whether Mitch Fifield will return full funding to the Australia Council, and what Simon Birmingham might put in place of Pyne’s plan to deregulate university fees, I hope our new arts and education ministers will continue to pool resources in support of the National Music Teachers Mentorship Pilot Programme. They might even consider dropping the word “pilot.” •

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The story so far. Gonski’s inquiry was commissioned in 2010 and reported in 2012. It tackled three major problems in schooling: the dysfunctional arrangements for funding three sectors in three different ways by two levels of government; the consequently chronic antagonism between sectors and interest groups; and the failure of funding policies to address growing problems in schooling, including social and cultural segregation, a widening gap between the best and worst schools, a “long tail” of students leaving school without even the bare minimum of skills, and stalled performance.

Gonski’s plan was elegant in its simplicity: state and federal governments would agree on how much each would contribute to the cost of schools, and on how the total would be distributed to school systems and thence to schools. Each school would be guaranteed a minimum per student amount (the “schooling resource standard,” or SRS), plus loadings reflecting the school’s size, location and demographics. The same formula would apply across all schools and sectors on the advice of a “national schools resourcing body.” The new scheme would be national, sector-blind and, above all, needs-based.

Gonski’s proposals were widely applauded as an educational, political and policy breakthrough. But there were problems in the plan too, most of them exacerbated by the bungled, drawn-out implementation process initiated by Julia Gillard and conducted by schools minister Peter Garrett.

The national school resourcing body was dropped early in the process. That meant that there was no agency to carry the extensive research needed (as Gonski foresaw) to settle key questions such as the level of the SRS, ways of measuring each of five categories of “need” (socioeconomic status, language background, indigeneity, disability and school size/location), the proportion of total funds to go to basic resourcing as against the loadings, how many schools should receive loadings, and how extra resources could be most cost-effectively used. Nor was there an accountability mechanism.

Critics on the right (and in cabinet, apparently) claimed that school funding increases over the decades had done little or nothing to improve outcomes, which meant that Gonski’s $6.5 billion increase on an annual spend of around $40 billion was a case of throwing good money after bad.

Since most needy schools were government-run, that sector was Gonski’s main beneficiary. Some supporters of non-government schools were suspicious or hostile, and Gonski became identified in many minds with public schools and the teacher organisations that did so much to bring the review into being. As well, Gonski was often seen as a kind of consolation for schools doing the hardest educational yards rather than, as intended, the price paid for schools to deliver improved performance.

All this was in addition to the handicap given to Gonski at the outset, the requirement that “no school will be worse off,” which greatly complicated the calculation of school entitlements and pushed up costs (accounting for up to half of the $6.5 billion by some estimates).

But the resistance that really mattered came from Coalition-governed states, which stood on their constitutional dignity and refused to enter an agreement that would tell them how much to spend on schools and how to spend it. They were aided and abetted by the Abbott opposition, which attacked the scheme at every opportunity right up to the eve of the 2013 election, when it abruptly switched to a Gonski “unity ticket.” That, in turn, was abandoned as soon as the new government took office.

The upshot was that some states had signed up before the election for Gonski and its conditions through to 2017, others were told by the incoming government that they could have the money without any strings attached, and all were informed that from then on things would revert to the unfair, educationally counter-productive and administratively chaotic arrangements that confronted Gonski back in 2010.

Meanwhile, other arms of the Abbott government commissioned reviews – the Commission of Audit, the Competition Policy Review, and the Reform of the Federation process – that either directly tackled school funding or made recommendations bearing on it. None had Gonski’s breadth, and none linked resource distribution and use with national goals for schooling such as social cohesion and equality of opportunity.

Ironically enough, though, they might be just the thing that would allow Turnbull to give a Gonski. Together, they suggest that the Gonski approach should rely less on a single, prescriptive formula and more on an agreed framework for local implementation. It would thus be made more workable, and more acceptable to Coalition governments at both state and federal levels.

What might such an agreed framework for schools funding look like? It would need to include at least four components:

• A statement of purposes, making clear (as Gonski put it) that differences in educational outcomes must not be the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possession

• A statement of principles, specifying that funding should be, among other things, nationally consistent, sector-blind and needs-based

• A provision that all school jurisdictions, government and non-government, will report allocations made to each of its schools, and the methods and data used to determine them, publicly, promptly and in detail, using a common reporting template

• A provision that all jurisdictions should participate in an ongoing, national research effort to understand how best to allocate and use resources to achieve stated purposes.

A framework along those lines would address most of the problems in the original plan, and those arising from its stormy, aborted implementation.

No response to complex political and policy problems will be perfect, of course. In this case, there seems little prospect of removing the “no school worse off” provisions, for example. And there would be much devil in the detail of a devolved approach, including how much variation between jurisdictions should be permitted, and by whom. But that is detail. And after all, there’s not much to beat.

That’s the first reason why Turnbull should consider Gonski. The second is that – Abbott and Pyne rhetoric notwithstanding – there is nothing intrinsically Labor in Gonski. Indeed, its first and still most enthusiastic supporter is NSW education minister Adrian Piccoli, a National Party member in a government led by Liberal premiers. Piccoli is by no means a lone Coalition voice for Gonski, and has promised to lobby the new government in support.

The third reason might seem trivial to the point of irrelevance, but history sometimes turns on small things. Malcolm Turnbull and David Gonski are old friends. They went to school together (Sydney Grammar) and Turnbull recently launched Gonski’s book, I Gave a Gonski. They belong to very similar ideological and social worlds. What Gonski proposes is consistent with – and perhaps even essential to – the kind of forward-looking Australia Turnbull says he wants. It would be surprising if Gonski did not use his undoubted access to Turnbull to make out the case.

There are two further reasons why Turnbull might listen, both of them political.

Among the many areas in which the Abbott administration was gratuitously adversarial, and blatantly deceitful, was schools funding. It opposed Gonski, then supported it, then ditched it, the stance on each occasion dictated by party-political advantage seen in the shortest of terms. What better way for the new minister to distance himself from his predecessor, or for the new government to demonstrate that it is not the old one in drag, than to reverse the ill-judged and petty decision to dump Gonski?

Last, and perhaps the best reason of all from a Turnbull point of view: why go to the next election, less than a year away, with the electorally popular Gonski in Labor’s hands?

Labor still owns the Gonski brand, and despite its bungling of the implementation process, it deserves to. Gonski is, as shadow treasurer Chris Bowen has put it, “in our DNA.” But if Labor tries to run again on Plan A, vulnerable both states’ opposition and to sharp criticisms of design, it could find that it has handed one of its biggest political assets to its new opponent. •

The post Could Turnbull give a Gonski? appeared first on Inside Story.

Claims like these usually refer to average recurrent costs across the entire government, Catholic and Independent school sectors. In reality, the costs of schooling vary according to location and enrolments. Students with advantaged backgrounds and circumstances are less costly to educate; those coming from less well-off households need more support.

Using data on the My School website we can make a more illuminating comparison of the sectors by matching schools that enrol similar students. In other words, we can compare like with like across government and non-government schools. My School provides a consistent set of figures across those sectors – unlike some other data sources – and its financial data, just two years old, is the most up-to-date available.

What the data reveals is that – if recent trends continue – over 40 per cent of students in Catholic schools will receive at least as much public funding as their peers in similar government schools in 2016. Two years later, it’s likely that another 40 per cent of Catholic-educated students will join them. And by the end of the decade, half the students in the other non-government school sector, Independent schools, are on track to get as much as, if not more than, government school students.

So how much do federal, state and territory governments pay each year to run government and non-government schools? Or rather, how much did they pay in 2013, the most recent year for which finance data is available on My School?

In spite of their limitations, let’s start with the simple averages, since they have been used almost universally in the schools debate. According to figures from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, or ACARA, state and federal governments spent an average of around $11,865 in recurrent funding on each government school student in 2013. They spent around $9548 per Catholic school student, 80.5 per cent of the government student figure, and $7791 per Independent school student, around 66 per cent of the government student figure. On a simple gross average, government school students still get the most from governments.

But even these averaged figures don’t support the claims often made about “savings.” If the saving is taken to be the difference in recurrent cost to government of a child in an “average” private school ($8764) and the same child in an “average” public school ($11,865) it amounts to a difference of $3101 per child. If we extend this difference across the roughly 1.25 million non-government school students, the recurrent funding amount “saved” by governments by funding non-government schools in 2013 was closer to $3.9 billion than the often-claimed $9 billion. (Our detailed calculations for these and all other figures in this article are given in our recent report, Private School, Public Cost.)

But let’s set these spurious numbers aside and examine the situation more systematically. The actual funding amounts vary considerably, especially between students at the advantaged and disadvantaged ends of the spectrum. At the disadvantaged end, students in all school sectors received considerable public funding, well over the $20,000 mark in 2013. This is entirely appropriate: many of these students have high learning needs, live in remote places, or both, and their parents have few resources with which to assist them. At the advantaged end, government school students were usually funded at a rate below $10,000 from government sources in 2013, with those in non-government schools receiving public funding of between 50 per cent and 85 per cent of this amount.

Given that funding levels vary so substantially and for good reasons, the only way to understand the real differences in funding by sector is to analyse large numbers of schools enrolling similar students. Indeed, we should look at all of the schools for which usable data is available. But rather than aggregating them together, we should examine them in “educational advantage” groupings, from the lowest to the highest, and make a real effort to ensure that we are comparing like with like.

ACARA’s Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage, or ICSEA, enables us to sort schools into groupings that are approximately equivalent on the basis of the factors that go into ACARA’s calculations. The ICSEA values on My School use a scale with 1000 as its midpoint, with more educationally advantaged school communities attracting a higher figure and less advantaged communities a lower figure. ACARA is sufficiently confident of its index that much of My School is dedicated to enabling comparisons of individual school NAPLAN results on the strength of it.

The box below compares schools and their communities in two contrasting ranges of educational advantage: a group of schools in the low 900s of ICSEA and another similar-sized group in the high 1000s. (These analyses exclude special schools and schools for which relevant data was not reported on My School.) Although these two categories bring together a quite wide range of schools and communities, the disparities between them are very noticeable. Differences in socio-educational advantage do attract different levels of funding, and the differences in public funding between the sectors within each group tend to be smaller than for the overall sector averages.

In the less advantaged group, Catholic students received 94 per cent of the public funding received by the equivalent government schools. Independent school students fared less well, but still received 83 cents for every dollar that governments expended on a government school student. When parent contributions are added, the totals spent by each sector were comparable, with students in Catholic schools some 7 per cent ahead of the rest.

In the more advantaged group, government grants per student were lower overall, but Catholic students still received almost 90 per cent of the government school students’ funding, while Independent schools received 86 per cent. Of course, the parents in this case were able to more than compensate the difference, and in the end their students had the benefit of 118 per cent and 137 per cent respectively of the total amounts spent on their government school peers.

What these figures show is that the most realistic way of calculating how much governments “save” by funding private schools is to compare costs at similar levels of advantage. To do otherwise is to assume that the average (relatively advantaged) private school student should attract the same recurrent funding as the average (relatively disadvantaged) public school student. Using the 2013 data and dividing the nation’s schools into ten ICSEA groupings, we calculate the total difference between government recurrent grants to private schools and recurrent funding of ICSEA-equivalent government schools at around $2.2 billion, just 5.7 per cent of the $38.9 billion total of government spending reported on My School for 2013.

If this relatively low figure comes as a surprise, then a further surprise might be found in the fact that the difference has actually been getting smaller year by year.

We now have five years of finance data on the My School website, enough to start identifying not only differences between states and sectors, but also trends over time. In an earlier analysis we showed how increases in funding between 2009 and 2013 were favouring schools with advantaged students. There were also clear sectoral differences in the distribution of government funding: between those years public funding (per student) increased by 12.4 per cent to government schools, 23.5 per cent to Catholic and 23.8 per cent to Independent schools.

Many factors affect the direction and distribution of funding. Special deals are struck and decisions are made in the heat of election campaigns (as they were most recently in Victoria and New South Wales). States and territories are choosing to implement what has evolved out of the Gonski recommendations in different ways. The effect of these and other changes can be seen most clearly if we look at the public funding of private schools as a percentage of the funding of equivalent government school students in the same year.

We can look first at the percentages for Catholic schools. Data for the full ICSEA range is presented below, although (as the coloured curve in the background indicates) most Catholic students are in schools in an ICSEA range between 950 and 1150.

Chart 1. Government recurrent funding of Catholic schools as a percentage of recurrent funding of ICSEA-equivalent government schools, 2009–13

Source: Data from My School

This chart shows the recurrent public funding of ICSEA-grouped Catholic schools, with the amount in each year expressed as a percentage of the recurrent funding of government schools in the same year and ICSEA range (taken as 100 per cent within each range). In the ICSEA range 1000 to 1049 in 2009, for example, public funding for each Catholic school student was 82 per cent of public funding for each government school student. Four years later, in 2013, the figure had reached 94 per cent.

What this shows clearly is that the proportion of public funding to Catholic schools has risen in all ICSEA groupings over the years. It is easy to extrapolate the trend to conclude that within the next two to three years most students in Catholic schools will receive an average 100 per cent of government funding in several of the ICSEA groupings. Two of the groups (1000 to 1049 and 1050 to 1099) account for around 72 per cent of Catholic school students; on present trends, students in these groups will reach 100 per cent by the funding year of 2016–17.

Many individual Catholic schools are already at these levels. In another analysis, we surveyed recurrent funding of secondary schools in NSW and Victorian federal electorates for 2013 to discover that 30 per cent of Catholic schools in New South Wales and a substantial 60 per cent in Victoria were already funded by governments at higher levels per student than at least one similar or more disadvantaged government school in the same electorate.

Independent schools also show an upward trend in public funding. Half of the students in these schools are on track to be funded at or above the level for similar students in government schools by 2019–20. The direction and pace of growth is clearly evident in the chart below.

Chart 2. Government recurrent funding of Independent schools as a percentage of recurrent funding of ICSEA-equivalent government schools, 2009–13

Source: Data from My School

Rapidly increasing levels of government funding have implications for all schools and raise many issues that should have been resolved years ago. Gonski’s recommendations would have achieved a sector-blind solution to problems that are now becoming even more obvious. It was not to be, and we have to deal with the consequences. Governments and school sectors will have to rethink what their schools are and what they do – and how they should be funded.

In some ways, government, Catholic and Independent schools have much in common. Their teachers and curriculum are much the same and their students jump through the same hoops. When schools enrolling similar students are compared, student results are not significantly different. Our analysis shows that they also get – or will soon get – much the same public funding for their operation.

The difference lies in their obligations. One sector is a fully funded public system, obliged by legislation and regulations to be accessible and available to all students. They are public schools and operate at public cost. The average ICSEA for schools in this system was around 983 in 2014.

Non-government schools also operate substantially at a public cost, but in a legal and technical sense they are privately owned and operated. They have complete flexibility in relation to whom they serve and how much they charge for the service. Their fees alone ensure that non-government schools will serve a more advantaged segment of the population. The 2014 average ICSEA for Catholic schools was around 1040 and for Independent schools around 1071.

It would be difficult to come up with a better script to entrench and exacerbate socioeconomic differences between schools and between communities. Other countries have avoided this problem: church schools in most OECD countries are fully funded but are obliged to operate in the same way and meet the same obligations as state-funded secular schools. Governments in those countries wanted to avoid the very problems that now face Australia.

The increase in public funding for non-government schools in Australia has happened gradually, without any accompanying review of their status within the total framework of schools. They have taken on greater compliance and accountability in areas such as curriculum, accreditation, workplace health and safety, and child protection. But their exemption from key obligations sets them apart in ways that are ever more at odds with their ever-more-substantial public funding.

Critics will be quick to point to instances of private schools working with disadvantaged and disabled students. These examples, while laudable and in some cases heroic, are relatively few in number and far from the norm.

For as long as we can remember, school funding in Australia has been driven by the claimed need to catch up with other schools, other sectors or other countries. As class sizes reduce in one sector there come demands that the same policies apply, and are funded, in others. As some schools acquire a new technology it becomes essential for everyone. In this way, the funding of non-government schools has been linked to the costs of government schools, even where the sectors enrol different students.

If restrictions on public funding of schools are on any agenda for change then the question of funding from school fees and other private sources has to be there as well. What should the role and scale of public funding be when some schools are funded, from all sources, at twice the level of others? The fact that much of this money comes from parents doesn’t deflect the question. The current funding regime, quite unique to Australia, makes governments active and willing partners in arrangements that sustain and actually worsen inequality. There may well be an argument for making public funding conditional on an appropriate ceiling being placed on combined funding from all sources, if only to ensure that our total investment in schools goes to where it provides the best returns.

It’s possible that the greatly increased public funding of non-government schools will revive demands that they be fully integrated into government systems, with all schools subject to the same obligations and rules. This solution has already been raised – especially in relation to Catholic schools – and dismissed as being too expensive for governments. That barrier is certainly much lower now.

For a number of reasons, the creation of such an integrated system in Australia would be problematic. But it may not be the solution anyway: integration might have slowed, but it certainly hasn’t stopped, the social separation between school communities in England. And even in integrated systems the rules can be bent, as can be seen in the re-emergence of what amount to school fees in New Zealand’s Catholic schools.

One option would be to require non-government schools to accept a wider range of obligations as a condition of public funding. In its submission to the Gonski review, the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council raised the idea of a charter for use of public funding. The purpose of such a charter would be to express the public purpose of government in providing public funding for education in operational terms. It would include specific reference to such matters as:

Public obligation: In accepting public funding, a school would agree to act as an agent for the government in terms of delivering its public purpose in education and agree to operate the school in a manner consistent with legislation and regulations applying to government schools within the jurisdiction. This would include provisions related to enrolment policies and practices; curriculum delivery & assessment; annual reporting; employment practices; child protection, discrimination & other social legislation; school uniforms; discipline procedures, including suspension & expulsion; and complaints procedures.

Fees: Where a school provides particular resources or services above and beyond those related to the public purpose, the school may charge fees for the provision of those resources or services, however the imposition and level of fees will have the effect of reducing the school’s entitlement to public funding.

Right of access: While non-government schools in receipt of public funding may declare and provide education within a particular faith or ethos for their client community, they should not unreasonably restrict the access to the school of any child, through fees or other administrative mechanisms, or to those parts of their educational program provided from public funds.

Some aspects of the proposed charter have already become part of practice in non-government schools, but there is considerable scope to do much more.

When the My School website entered its second year – and its data became far more reliable – we began to investigate what it was telling us about our whole framework of schools. We have separately and jointly published analyses that confirmed significant social divisions between our schools, divisions the OECD has reported as being greater than those found in equivalent countries.

In the fifth and sixth years of My School we wanted to find out whether the data revealed changes over time in such areas as student achievement, funding and equity. We especially wanted to know whether the data confirmed the findings of the Gonski review. Our analysis, published in Gonski, My School and the Education Market, not only confirmed Gonski’s warnings but also raised new questions. School funding has long been riddled with inconsistencies, opaque formulas and elusive deals, but we are now heading into territory that has not been charted anywhere in the world.

The problems created by inequity won’t go away without needs-based funding; we know that targeted investment in struggling schools makes a difference. Instead, Australia has created an uncomfortable combination of overfunded and manifestly underfunded schools. We don’t have to look too far to find an answer to the age-old question “where will the money come from?”

Each inequity in our hybrid system of schools has posed a challenge. Will governments intervene to create improved student outcomes, greater equity, transparency and a sustainable balance between the sectors? Gonski is as close as we have ever gone to achieve this. Or will they encourage even more narratives to justify inertia and inequity – and to justify funding “private” schools at levels increasingly above their own? •

This article is based on a new report by Chris Bonnor and Bernie Shepherd, Private School, Public Cost: How School Funding Is Closing the Wrong Gaps, which includes the detailed tables on which the data included in this article are based.

The post Closing the wrong gaps appeared first on Inside Story.

Robinson makes two great contributions to this struggle. He grasps that something big is going on in and around schools, and he insists that the received way of conducting schooling is, at last, vulnerable. His account of what a “transformed” school does and can look like is incomplete but nonetheless inspiriting. There are, however, serious shortcomings in his understanding of present realities and future possibilities, and in his “theory of change.” It is possible to share his sense of urgency and possibility without subscribing to his understanding of how history works or his confidence that “time and tide are on the side of transformation.”

To begin with what Robinson is against. He is against what he calls the “industrial” approach to schooling, and he is against a “reform” agenda that derives from and reinforces that approach. “Industrial” schooling (he says) was installed to meet the social and economic needs of the nineteenth century, and is “wholly unsuited” to the twenty-first century. GERM – the rather tortured pun is intended – pushes schooling in exactly the wrong direction with “catastrophic consequences” for students and teachers, and compounds an “ever-widening skills gap between what schools are teaching and what the economy needs.” Standardised and standardising education crushes creativity and innovation, “the very qualities on which today’s economies depend.”

Moreover, and despite its reliance on a mass of research into “what works,” GERM itself doesn’t. Driven by “political and economic interests” including the OECD and its test-based league tables, national governments (remember Julia Gillard’s “top 5 by ’25”?), and giant testing corporations, the GERM prescription has delivered only modest, patchy and sometimes transient gains. The big problems of schooling – inequality, low student engagement and high attrition, teacher dissatisfaction – are as pervasive as ever.

And what is Robinson for? He is for a transformed system. That, he argues, is what really works. “The challenge is not to fix this system but to change it; not to reform it but to transform it.” That is required by both the emerging social and economic reality and by the very idea of “education.” The continuing cultural, social and development tasks of schools are central to his thinking, but so is the view that schools must prepare young people for a “profoundly” changed workplace by developing “twenty-first-century skills,” including flexibility, adaptability, initiative and self-direction, critical thinking and problem solving, and financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy.

All this is consistent, in Robinson’s view, with the incontestable fact that “children have a powerful, innate ability to learn.” The school’s job is not to push them through a one-size-fits-all program but to build on this “learning power.” Within a familiar structure (arts, humanities, maths, science and so on) curriculum should be enacted in a quite new way. Entrenched distinctions between the academic and the vocational, between the formal and the informal curriculum, and between disciplined learning and the development of “creativity,” must be overcome. Doing and making should be accorded as much time and respect as study. Learning must be “personalised” to match the learner’s age, stage, interests and capacities. Schools must give all students a red-hot chance to find out what they are good at and passionate about. Students must learn with and from each other, and take full advantage of the resources of the home, the community and, of course, digital technologies.

To these ends, assessment should focus on developing learning and the learner, generating feedback and guidance rather than mere comparison and grades. It must be as concerned with each individual’s growth in understanding, insight and capacity as with the acquisition of propositional knowledge, as much a form of learning as a support to it.

Most important of all is the teacher. “Great teachers are the heart of great schools.” The teacher’s core and irreplaceable responsibility is to create the conditions in which learning can be generated while accepting that he or she is “not always in control of these conditions.” Teachers must ignore the false distinction between “traditional” and “progressive” pedagogies to draw on a range of fit-for-purpose techniques and approaches. What matters is getting the right approach for the purpose and the learner. Contra GERM and the accountability agenda, teachers must be trusted, respected and rewarded as professionals.

Those acquainted with Robinson’s earlier work will be familiar with this “critique of the way things are” and his “vision of how they should be.” But to these Robinson now adds a “theory of change.” It is a bold undertaking.

At the heart of this theory is a switch in what he refers to as a metaphor but others might think of as a “paradigm.” “If you think of education as a mechanical process that’s just not working as well as it used to,” he argues, “it’s easy to make false assumptions about how it can be fixed; that if it can just be tweaked and standardised in the right way it will work efficiently in perpetuity.” But it won’t, “because it’s not that sort of process at all.” Schooling is an organic process.

“Education is really improved only when we understand that it… is a living system and that people thrive in certain conditions and not in others.” Schools are “complex adaptive systems” that by their nature offer far more scope for innovation than is generally realised – and, what’s more, they can only be changed in and through the daily activity of those who live it. The culture of any given school comprises habits and systems that people act out every day.

“Many of these habits are voluntary rather than mandated,” he says, “teaching by age groups, for example, or making every period the same length, using bells to signal the beginning and end of periods, having all of the students facing the same direction with the teacher in the front of them, teaching math only in math class and history only in history class, and so on.”

Robinson really homes in on – indeed his argument depends on – change “within the system as it is.” In his theory, “revolutions don’t wait for legislation… they emerge from what people do at ground level.” Like most revolutions, “this one has been brewing for a long time, and in many places it is already well under way. It is not coming from the top down; it is coming, as it must do, from the ground up.”

Yes, the revolutionary will encounter system-level obstacles including “the inherent conservatism of institutions [and] schools themselves,” conflicting views about the sorts of changes that are needed, differences in “culture and ideology,” and “political self-interest,” and must therefore “press for radical changes” in system-level policies. But history is with the activist and the innovator. “[T]ime and tide,” Robinson declares, “are on the side of transformation.”

Robinson’s book often reads like a self-help manual. PowerPoint lists, twenty-five of them by my count, range from the three elements of academic work, the four purposes of schooling and the eight core competencies to ten tips on how to make your school more inviting. Superlatives (“great” schools, “wonderful” teachers, “inspiring” leaders, “extraordinary” innovations, and so on) are in ready supply. But Robinson also covers a great deal of complicated ground in an enviably accessible fashion. Anecdotes, examples and eyewitness accounts abound, some featuring the usual suspects (High Tech High, for example), many not. Few of those who work in and around schools, including older students as well as parents and teachers, will fail to find Robinson engaging, illuminating and perhaps even inspiring.

There are several points at which Robinson’s case is obviously vulnerable. When he claims that the GERM agenda doesn’t work, and that we do know what actually works, his adversaries will compare his anecdotes and generalisations with their own stockpile of closely researched evidence, including the evidence that the improvement agenda can work, and is little by little lifting its own game as well as that of the schools.

The proposition that what the economy now needs corresponds neatly with what school reformers have long wanted is convenient, to say the least. His picture of the labour market and the workplace of the future is as romantic as it is hazy. The apparent assumption that “profound” and ever-accelerating change is uniquely characteristic of our times is questionable. Indeed it could be argued that the kind of change to which Robinson alludes is occurring within a frame of stability and burgeoning wealth peculiar to the West over the past two or three generations.

There is also a quarrel to be picked with Robinson’s insistence that schools are organic and are not mechanical. It makes much more sense to see them as both, and other things as well. My own view is that schools are best seen as sites of production; they have much in common with other workplaces and work processes but also quite distinctive characteristics and purposes as producers of learners and learning. One among a number of advantages of a “production perspective” is the realisation that schooling is not just a preparation for work. It is work – around a fifth of most people’s working lives, in fact. That provides a better starting point for thinking about what needs changing in schools than focusing on “preparation” for the workplaces presumed to await them in some distant future. Another advantage, to which we return, is that a production perspective provides a better basis for understanding how technology will change teaching and learning.

But the really crucial question for Robinson’s argument against GERM and “industrial” schooling, and for “creative schools” and “transformation,” is this: is genuinely transformative change in schooling possible?

This is where Robinson’s high sense of the purposes and possibilities of schools, and his admirable support for genuine grassroots movements over GERM’s carefully crafted enlistment, get him into trouble. They carry him from an absolutely correct intuitive judgement to a “theory” so misleading as to verge – given his prominence and influence – on the irresponsible.

Robinson is correct in sensing, contra GERM, that schooling’s future will not be continuous with its past, and in proclaiming that a sea change laden with great possibilities is now under way. But his theory of change does not see what “transformation” is up against, or what is driving change at this particular moment, or what will be required if change is to be shaped in a way that he and many others (including me) would like to see.

Robinson’s theory can’t see what transformation is up against.

In their seminal essay “The ‘Grammar’ of Schooling: Why Has It Been So Hard to Change?” American historians David Tyack and William Tobin draw heavily on the work of their colleague Larry Cuban to argue that schools, like languages, possess a grammar. Just as the grammar of language organises meaning, so does the grammar of schooling organise “the work of instruction.”

“Here we have in mind, for example, standardised organisational practices in dividing time and space, classifying students and allocating them to classrooms, and splintering knowledge into ‘subjects,’” Tyack and Tobin say, and go on to suggest that over time the internal coherence of this grammar acquires external support. “Neither the grammar of schooling nor the grammar of speech needs to be consciously understood to operate smoothly,” they note. “Indeed, much of the grammar of schooling has become so well established that it is typically taken for granted as just the way schools are. It is the departure from customary practice… that attracts attention.”

All of this is correct, in my view, but nonetheless understates the reality of what “transformation” of the Robinson kind must contend with. The taken-for-granted image of the “real” school is just one of the struts and stays that have grown up around the grammar of schooling, particularly during its massive postwar expansion. It includes: a credentialling system that transmits the demands of universities directly into the schools’ curriculum, and connects schooling to a society-wide competition for advancement (or to avoid relegation); a physical infrastructure devoted to the classroom; a workforce dominated by a single category of worker, “the teacher,” industrially organised, and tenured; industrially backed regulation of the terms and conditions of teachers’ work in ways derived from the grammar (class sizes, contact hours, and so on), and which also frame students’ work; budgets largely absorbed by the salaries of a tenured, closely defined and highly regulated workforce, with little capacity to link resources with “policy,” and a consequent cumulative incrementalism that fuels a tendency for costs and problems to pile up faster than solutions; and a range of interest groups, none of which has the capacity to drive an agenda for the whole, but many of which have the power to single-handedly frustrate such an agenda (vide Gonski).

This means that any theory of transformative change has something rather more on its plate than “the inherent conservatism of institutions [and] schools themselves.” It must cope with a grammar of schooling, and the industry in which that grammar is embedded. Yes, “the system” is complex and adaptive, a culture enacted by individuals in their daily work, and shaped by their outlook and decisions. But it is also a heavily reinforced structure, a form and instrument of power. It is just this combination of flexibility and structure that gives “the system” its capacity to resist, deflect and absorb efforts at “transformation,” as Tyack, Tobin and Cuban are at pains to emphasise.

Thus Cuban has documented the emergence of “hybrid” pedagogies which reflect both teachers’ attachment to progressivist ideas and the hard facts of their work within the frame of class, classroom, subject and lesson. Tyack and Tobin point to the ebb and flow of experimentation, innovation and “alternatives,” which are often driven by charismatic leaders within the overall dominance of a stable grammar. They see the system as a whole operating so that “changes in the basic structure and rules” of the grammar of schooling, like the grammar of language, “are so gradual that they do not jar.” It might even be said that these familiar exceptions to the rule belong to the system’s fundamental logic, functioning as its safety valve, repair shop, and legitimation device – until now.

Robinson’s theory doesn’t see what is driving change or what is distinctive in the present moment in schooling.

In Robinson’s theory, “transformation” will come from grassroots innovation required by a shifting social, economic and technological context, and fuelled by idealism and hot gospelling. Well, yes, and no. Not really grasped in this account is the ever-expanding force of technology, and not around schooling so much as right in the heart of it, in quite unprecedented combinations of hardware and software that will increasingly embody and orchestrate teaching and learning.

It’s not that Robinson is unaware of that fact. The spread of the digital technologies, he writes, is “already transforming teaching and learning in many schools.” He includes “new technologies that make it possible to personalise education in wholly new ways” among the three distinctive features of the present moment in schooling, and Sugata Mitra, the Kahn Academy and the “flipped classroom” all make guest appearances.

But being aware of these developments is not the same as really understanding their weight and impact. The nomination of technology as one of the three “different this time” factors arrives in the book’s penultimate paragraph. The formal discussion of the new technologies is allocated just over a page, where it is treated as just one among “an abundance of emergent features” of schooling. Teachers, assessment, leaders and home influences, meanwhile, get whole chapters to themselves. The discussion of technology is, in short, a retrofit, glued onto an argument which took its essential shape decades ago.

Although Robinson refers over and again to the pervasiveness of technological change, and although he senses that the ground is moving under our feet, his working view of technology within schools is not all that different from that adopted by the industry: learning comes from teaching and teaching comes from the teacher, whose work will be supported and perhaps even empowered by the new technologies but isn’t replaced or even seriously disrupted. Technology does indeed seem to be supplementary if we look at it within the history of schooling. But what if we see both schooling and technology in the larger history of production? From that standpoint it appears that schooling is just now arriving at a point previously reached by one industry after another since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, the point at which technology becomes capable of not just supplementing human labour but substituting for some forms of that labour, and demanding the reorganisation of the rest.

Specifically, technology increasingly offers a distinct source and form of teaching labour. And that implies a quite different way of organising the work of teaching and learning, as can be seen in a preliminary way in “blended” schools, “virtual” educational programs such as the Kahn Academy, and indeed entirely “virtual” secondary schools. “Teaching” no longer comes from just “the teacher,” and therein lies the real threat to the received grammar.

That Robinson’s theory sees neither what transformation is up against, nor what is driving the big change, betrays a cast of mind that comes almost completely intact from the 1960s. The sixties are, if I may say so, an excellent place to start thinking about schooling, but as a place to finish, not so much. It would be unfair to suggest that Robinson, like the Bourbons, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing, but it is fair to say that he has remembered more of the world in which his outlook was formed than he has learned about technology and its inexorable movement from the margins to the centre of schooling.

Creative Schools is dedicated to Bretton Hall College, where as a young working-class trainee teacher he was exhilarated by the ideas of Alec Clegg and other luminaries of British progressivism. His picture of a “transformed” school, although given a contemporary gloss and rationale, belongs essentially to that era. It is to sixties progressivism that Robinson also owes his habitual dichotomies – creative versus industrial schooling; perfidious systems versus idealism at the grassroots; bottom-up change versus top-down; transformation versus mere improvement; the selfless workers in the vineyard versus the self-interested interlopers of “business” and “politics.”

The binary most central to Robinson’s case is his assumption that transformation/revolution means out with the old and in with the new. In fact, it’s more a case of the old colliding with the new – the immovable object of schooling versus the irresistible force of technology – with who knows what upshot.

We can be sure that getting change won’t be the problem, but that getting desirable change will be. We can be confident that schools will not be obliterated in the way of newspapers, for example – they perform irreducible functions including childcare and bringing children and young people together to grow up. We can also be sure that change, of whatever kind, will not obliterate the incumbent grammar and install another. Rather than talking about a “transformation,” therefore, we should talk about a transition,probably from a single dominant grammar to several competing grammars, including both the one Robinson doesn’t like and the one he does. In that transition GERM’s theory and practice of “school improvement” may have as much to offer as the ideal of “transformation.”

In this scenario, what will be up for grabs is mix and balance, and that will vary over time and place. Within schools, and secondary schools particularly, the trick will be in mastering a kind of meta-grammar, finding optimal combinations of several educational forms, with various attempts at “blending” being obvious examples. Within systems the problem will be to make that possible.

Robinson’s theory doesn’t see how change can be shaped.

If Robinson’s or other transformed grammars are to survive and flourish it will only be by combining top-down strategy with bottom-up movement.

Getting the right relationship between systemic and local action has proved elusive in most Western school systems most of the time. That is one reason why GERM, with its over-reliance on top-down engineering, has failed more often than not. The same will be true of the transformation idea if it can’t solve what is essentially the same problem. When they are pushed from the top, as the Gillard “revolution” found, the grammar and industry of schooling lock together and seize up like compressed cornflour. But as was so clearly demonstrated in the decades following the 1960s, grassroots, advocacy-driven efforts can thrive all over the place for a while, burning up huge quantities of energy, hope and idealism, and then dwindle.

If there is a way out of this conundrum in tepid political times such as these, it may be in making politics with the industry’s interest groups, the most powerful of which are not the “outsiders” that so worry Robinson but the industry’s employers and employees.

As things now stand, their power is contained by the industrial and regulatory regime they constructed and within which they conduct their relations. Is it possible that they might abandon this adversarial stasis to collaborate in pursuit of their joint and several long-term objectives?

These insiders confront together the irresistible force of technology-enabled and technology-magnified change. The clear lesson of history is that those affected by such disruptions will do a lot better for themselves (and, in this case, for their ideals and sense of professionalism) by using disruption rather than resisting it. Employers and employees could set out on a long march through the grammar’s legacy orgware, and particularly its regulation of teachers’ (and therefore students’) work and workplaces, the currently lopsided composition of the workforce, and the inflexible disposition of budgets and associated habits of thinking in terms of “effectiveness” rather than cost-effectiveness and opportunity cost. The industry might change itself in ways that permit and encourage new grammars to emerge.

This or something like it may offer a way of shaping the irresistible. There are precedents in Australia’s recent industrial history. There may not be a coherent way of shaping change. For Robinson’s efforts to set out an alternative to GERM’s Gradgrind theory of change we should be grateful, but a more successful attempt will reflect a much more developed sense of structure and power, of politics and history, and of technology and production, and be made of much tougher stuff. •

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The report is exceptionally clear and cogent, and mercifully succinct, thanks in part to its narrowed gaze. It proposes that the best current model of university-based teacher education – and it is a very good one – be installed across the system, with those providers who can’t or won’t “shape up” (as the review’s chair, Professor Greg Craven put it) being required to “ship out.”

In not considering a different strategy, strong on exit standards but encouraging of different ways of reaching them, the reviewers have missed an opportunity. Alternative approaches are not quite excluded from the report, but the two most radical and promising of them, Britain’s “school-led” programs, and Teach for America (and its Australian franchise), are not even mentioned. The review has not comprehended what technology can do, in schools or in teacher education, let alone what it will soon be able to do.

At a time when extra funding is hard or impossible to find, the advisory group has recommended an expensive model of pre-service and early-service education and development without saying how the money should be found. It has not considered whether existing resources could be reallocated to its priorities.

Whatever the merits or otherwise of the proposed scheme, it is a nice irony that a government that likes to represent itself as supporting the market and its power to disrupt entrenched interests has endorsed what many of its supporters might regard as government-backed and regulated provider capture.

Over the decades in which the universities have had the field to themselves they have built an empire, and treated the inhabitants as empires do. Just about every university offers teacher education; for some it is core business. Together, they enrol most of Australia’s 80,000 teacher education students and offer most of its 460-odd courses. Some of these programs are very good, some very bad, most in between, a fact that the reviewers’ necessary circumspection barely conceals. It found “a high degree of variability in the quality of practice” with “significant pockets of objectively poor practice.” It concluded that “the standard across all initial teacher education programs must be lifted.” (Emphasis in the original.)

The evidence on which these judgements rest (reported in more detail previously in Inside Story) tells a plainer story. One survey found that three-quarters of new teachers declined to say that they felt “very well” or even “well” prepared for “the reality of teaching.” Another found that between 20 and 40 per cent felt unprepared in a number of areas of practice. Yet more surveys have found over and again that new teachers complain about the weak links between theory and practice in their pre-service courses, the lack of relevance of much of the “theory,” and poor or no liaison between school and campus. Principals agree with them. Asked much the same questions, they give new teachers even lower ratings than the new teachers give themselves. International comparisons are likewise disheartening.

Action Now points out that this baleful performance has continued despite dozens of reviews of teacher education at national and at state levels, dating back to the early 1970s. As the report’s title suggests, these reviewers, to their great credit and by contrast with most of their predecessors, have picked the main point and kept it front and centre: teacher education is there to teach people to teach. Although the advisory group has made recommendations on selection procedures, training for maths and literacy specialists in primary schools, and an inane test of trainees’ literacy and numeracy, it is the demonstrated capacity to teach in the typical circumstances of the school – the class, the classroom and the lesson – that dominates the report and its recommendations.

To this end the advisory group wants less time on campus, more in schools; stronger relationships between universities and practicum-providing schools to be formalised in quasi-contracts; the development of a cadre of go-betweens and in-school supervisors and mentors; and training in the theory and practice of a “clinical” and “evidence-based” approach in which teaching is matched to diagnostic assessment, and the effectiveness of that teaching is constantly evaluated. In all but name, this model of teaching and teacher preparation is the two-year MTeach course pioneered with great success and well-deserved acclaim by the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, or MGSE.

The advisory group’s recommendations on how this model would be implemented around the country are just as clearcut. The essential idea is standards plus enforcement. The standards developed over recent years by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership “provide a strong foundation for quality assurance and improvement to initial teacher education,” the review finds, but “they are not being effectively applied.” There will be standards for just about everything: entry to programs and exit from them; accreditation of those programs; school–university partnerships; and beginning teacher induction. Adjectives – “rigorous,” “evidence-based,” “transparent,” “world-class,” and so on – are liberally applied. The institute, hitherto responsible for the development of standards, would be charged with enforcing them as well.

There are plenty of reasons to wonder whether things would happen in such an orderly, comprehensive way. Scaling-up a good program sounds like a surefire approach to reform, but it depends on the model of scaling-up being as well thought out and tested as the model itself. Leaving to one side the fact that implementation depends on a politically wounded and unpopular minister to enlist the support of the universities and employers of teachers (state and territory governments, that is), there is the problem of driving substantial change through teacher education itself. At least two kinds of reality have been underestimated.

First, the report implies that the problem with universities is attitudinal and cultural, but that passes too lightly over both the goodwill and educational idealism of many teacher education academics, and the power of the structures, incentives and sanctions within which they work. Many teacher educators were teachers before they moved into academe, but are now physically and mentally far removed from their former world. Research, not teaching, is what defines success or failure, and the most rewarded research hardly equips academics for the kind of role the review proposes for them.

Second is the money problem. Staff deployment and cultural change of the kind required by the proposed relationship between schools and universities is expensive, as the MGSE found when it set up the MTeach. The MGSE estimates that a “clinically based” program costs around $5000 per student per year over and above the cost of a standard campus-based program. Without examining ways of reallocating resources, it appears, the review has concluded that someone will have to pay.

Christopher Pyne has made clear that it won’t be him. “Australian government funding provided to universities for the training of teachers includes the delivery of practical experience,” the government’s response says. “As this is a shared cost between universities and schools, it is important for universities to work collaboratively with school systems and schools to make sure this funding is used to support effective practical experience programs.” It is hard to see either the universities or Pyne’s state counterparts agreeing that the money can be conjured up by “collaboration.”

Presumably one option would be to convert teaching/research positions to teaching-only postings in schools or school liaison. Another is suggested by a quick look at the website of Coursera, the Stanford-based MOOC provider. It has just released “Foundations of Teaching and Learning,” a series of twelve courses concluding with a “capstone project” covering “the professional roles and responsibilities of a teacher… how to become more effective, what research tells us about how students think and behave… how we can apply this understanding in your approach to teaching, and how to design instruction, activities and assessments around learning goals, and defining teacher and student success.” All that is free, and available to anyone anywhere in the world who has a computer and broadband. Certification is an optional extra – a total of US$281 for the twelve modules plus the capstone project.

MOOCs are not The Answer, but they do suggest where part of an answer could be found. Rather than have the same course developed dozens of times over, why not offer three or four online versions of it from which providers (and students) could choose, and choose whether to offer it hands-free or as part of a blended learning program? Possibilities of this kind are not entertained by the advisory group. It views technology as a supplement to the usual business rather than a substitute for some of it.

Nor does the report alert its readers to particularly promising alternatives to the MTeach model. It does make passing reference to “employment-based programs,” but doesn’t examine radical alternatives developed in Britain and the United States. In Britain, groups of schools have combined to offer apparently very successful workplace-based teacher preparation. A recent report from the UK Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills found that of twenty-one teacher education programs reviewed within a toughened-up framework, only five were “outstanding for the overall effectiveness of training and outcomes for trainees.” All five were “small employment-based partnerships with schools centrally involved.” None were university-based.

In the United States an even more radical departure, Teach for America, or TFA, takes bright young graduates from just about any field of study through an intensive up-front induction program then places them in disadvantaged schools where they take on closely supervised teaching responsibilities from day one. By combining work and further study TFA “associates” can earn a graduate teaching qualification. A Teach for Australia program was established in 2010, and has an impressive brag sheet, including strong feedback from principals, 100 per cent of associates placed in disadvantaged schools, 40 per cent of them in non-metro areas and the same proportion maths and science specialists, a 50:50 gender split, very high demand for entry (only 6 per cent of applications accepted), and an impressive average ATAR of 95. An evaluation by the Australian Council for Educational Research found that costs were high but effectiveness might be as well. “The perception schools have of Associates is very positive,” it concluded, “and, thus far [2013] every school that has participated in the program would like to continue that association.”

Within Teach for Australia is concealed the really big question: if the standards developed by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership are as good as the review advisory group says they are (and they do seem to be), then why have courses of fixed length? The advisory group endorses both muscular standards and the requirement that the great majority of teacher education students must complete four years or more of study in an approved higher education course.

If people come into teacher education with very different kinds and amounts of experience and knowledge (and they do), and if they learn at very different rates (as is particularly the case in learning to teach), and if you are confident that careful assessments made against well-designed standards will be able to tell when they’ve got it – then why make them start at the same point, proceed at the same rate, and keep going for the same period? Why, for that matter, insist that they do so via that nineteenth-century creature, “the course”?

The question could be asked of any higher education program – engineering, philosophy, food science, medicine, whatever – but it is a particularly awkward one for teacher education. An unusually high proportion of the knowledge required by teaching – not the whole, by any means, but a relatively large fraction – is in the form of embodied capacities, easily recognised, hard to define, deployed in a rapid, reflex, intuitive way, and to do with complicated elements of personality, bearing, ways of interacting with others, emotional capabilities and needs. For that reason, some people get it very quickly while others never do, no matter how hard they try or how much help they are given.

All this suggests that the process of becoming a teacher can be organised and conducted in ways very different from the familiar. Just how it could and should be done is a question for professional judgement, personal preference and logistics. The overall framework should be, in my view, of the kind captured in the old idea of an “apprenticeship” or the newer notion of “career and training paths.” That is, programs, standards and assessments linked to different kinds and levels of responsibility in the school, from roustabout to tutoring to teaching assistant to beginning teacher to managing teacher.

Gains in educational quality might come with other benefits. Prospective entrants to the profession might see whether schools really are for them before wasting too much of their own and other people’s time. They could earn at least a modest living right from the start. That in turn could do a lot more for the “quality” of entrants than the kind of fiddling with selection processes proposed by the advisory group. Workplace-based programs could do much for the intellectual, professional and educational life of schools. If universities can be given the right incentives to participate, workplace-based programs could also see more research of the R&D kind and less of the currently dominant scientistic scholasticism.

The universities may well feel themselves to be the Advisory Group’s (and the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership’s) whipping boys, and with some justice. Yet despite a long history of doing a very ordinary job and of sustained resistance to reform, the universities as a category have emerged with their budgets, research practices, staff deployments and control of qualifications – in short, their power – largely intact, and with their rivals, actual and potential, sidelined. No doubt that outcome owes something to the direct exercise of that power (chair of the advisory group and half of its membership) and to the control of what is talked about in what terms. In this case the universities are indebted to the particular world view that gave the report its focus, clarity and cogency.

Just about every element of the review’s analysis and recommendations depends on the “effectiveness” paradigm. That is where it got the idea that “student outcomes” should be the focus of teaching and therefore of teacher education; that the outcomes that really matter are cognitive, in the basics; that “teaching” comes from the teacher in the form of lessons conducted in the familiar setting of the class and the classroom; that the measure of the “quality” of that teaching is to be found in assessed “student performance”; and that teacher education providers can not only lift the “quality” of teaching but also generate “evidence” that will accurately represent the quality of their own work.

The effectiveness paradigm has been a powerful force for the good in schooling. It developed as a response to the let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom era of the 1960s and 1970s when anything “innovative” was by definition better than something that wasn’t. Effectiveness researchers asked the hard question: which of dozens of approaches and innovations actually works? And it insisted that by “work” we should mean that it does what schools are there to do, which is to help kids learn the fundamentals and to use that learning to learn other things. Against a cacophony of educanto, the effectiveness movement demanded evidence, and focused on the main game.

All this is crucial, and should not be lost. But the effectiveness idea also has some big limitations. One is the notion that the problem and the solution both lie in the skills of the teacher, to the relative neglect of the organisation of the teaching and learning process. Another is the over-emphasis on some kinds and areas of learning, and the lack of interest in the social and emotional welfare of students and teachers. But those are issues for another day. More directly relevant here are two further shortcomings.

First, educational work, like any other, has costs as well as effects. About costs the effectiveness paradigm has nothing to say, and it is therefore a stranger to that most subversive of concepts, opportunity cost. Teacher education in Australia consumes hundreds of millions of dollars a year ($600 million a year from the main funder, the Commonwealth). The advisory group has tried to wring more out of the inherited pattern of spending (then asked for more) rather than ask whether those dollars could be spent in other and better ways.

Second, the underlying question of “what works” is actually “what has worked in the past” to the exclusion of what is emerging and becoming possible. The assumption is that the future of both schools and teacher education will be in all essential features continuous with the past. In this way, in a time of rapid technology-enabled change the effectiveness paradigm becomes, without necessarily intending to, a defence of arrangements and institutions with a poor track record in both performance and reform. Prospective thinking and experimentation should not, of course, displace the lessons hard won by the effectiveness paradigm. Or vice versa. •

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Both Yong Zhao and Ravitch address an American audience, but for reasons indigenous and imperial what they have to say is as instructive here as it is in the United States, although not necessarily in ways intended.

While most of Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? is devoted to describing and explaining China’s schooling and Western perceptions of it, the bullseye in Zhao’s target is the OECD’s hugely influential PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and its tests of reading, maths and science. It is PISA that put Shanghai’s school system at the very top of the top international league table; it is PISA that relegated the United States to the middle of the ruck; and it is PISA that supplied the Gillard government with its loftiest ambition for our schools (“top 5 by ’25”!).

In Zhao’s view, the OECD’s league tables and the tests on which they rest are dangerous nonsense that has suckered credulous Western audiences into thinking that PISA reflects the realities of China’s schools (and ours), and persuaded them that the Chinese way is the way of the educational future. He argues that pseudo-science has disguised and excused a Chinese chamber of educational horrors – a system of deadening conformity, of rote learning and routine, of competition carried to the point of cruelty, and riddled with cheating, bribery and fraud. In Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, it has had the perverse effect of promoting a destructive “reform” agenda involving narrow measures of a narrow curriculum in the misanthropic causes of accountability, “performance,” and competition between schools and school systems.

Zhao is well placed to make the case, and some of the case is very well made. Born and schooled in China, he went to the United States as a graduate student in the early 1990s, and flourished. He is a prolific writer, software designer, and commentator in America and elsewhere, including Australia.

Zhao is correct to argue that PISA and its findings are abused by their sponsor, among many others. PISA is often taken as a proxy measure of “quality” – indeed of the quality of an entire school system. Hence, for example, the Grattan Institute’s 2012 report, Catching Up, and its portentous opening sentence: “Today’s centre of high performance in school education is East Asia.”

As Zhao points out, PISA reports on just three areas of the curriculum (plus, in the most recent round, “problem-solving”), and on only some aspects of those three areas. It concentrates heavily on “cognitive” to the exclusion of “non-cognitive” learning (collaboration, listening, communication, time-management, impulse control and so on). There is clear evidence to support Zhao’s contention that, in the United States at least, standardised testing is both narrow and narrowing.

Zhao raises some very awkward questions about the OECD’s assumption that one test can assess the same thing in the same way across very different cultures in dozens of national school systems. And he is right to attack the OECD’s use of league tables that make the implicit claim that #1 is “better” than #2 even if #2 is just microns away from #1 according to an instrument that would be lucky to measure in metres.

But Zhao’s debunking needs some debunking too. He (rightly) attacks the OECD and others for conflating “test results” with “quality,” but proceeds to do some conflating of his own. He routinely refers to “China’s schools” and “Chinese students” when PISA and the OECD focus on Shanghai, a city containing around 2 per cent of China’s population, and product of a distinctive history of commerce and contact with the West.

Zhao dismisses PISA’s results as meaningless, but doesn’t mention that they are broadly consistent with the findings of other international and national testing regimes, nor notice that his explanation of Chinese students’ success tacitly accepts the legitimacy of PISA’s results. He attributes that success to endless drill and coaching, competition, and the authoritarian culture of China’s classrooms, schools and systems, but doesn’t mention a significant body of research which suggests that at least some Chinese maths teachers (for example) take an approach that, in some key respects, is more “progressive” than their Western counterparts.

Nor is there discussion of arguments that high levels of student performance are associated with an organisation of teachers’ work and professional development superior to those found in the United States (and in Australia). And the most interesting phenomenon of all, the extraordinary rates of improvement in East Asian performance in PISA and other international comparisons, likewise goes unremarked.

While Zhao points out that PISA addresses only three of seven or eight key areas of the curriculum, he doesn’t acknowledge that those three areas – reading, maths and science – provide the tools of learning in other areas. He draws on the work of eminent US scholar Henry M. Levin to suggest that the “non-cognitive” skills ignored by PISA are increasingly valued and valuable in the workplace. But Zhao – who wants to get rid of standardised testing altogether – doesn’t report Levin’s recommendation that PISA-style tests be retained, complemented by tests of non-cognitive learning.

The problem underlying all these problems is a cast of mind that presumably owes something to the trajectory of Zhao’s life. His readers are asked to choose between “authoritarianism” and creativity, cognitive and non-cognitive learning, employee- or entrepreneur-focused schooling, standards and tests or none at all. The book sometimes reads as a settling of scores with Zhao’s own schooling (and who wouldn’t want to do that with such verve and venom!), and a romanticising of the circumstances of his own emancipation. He argues that American schooling has made “a Faustian bargain” with “the devil of authoritarianism.” The “tragedy” is in the “loss of values traditionally celebrated by American education” in favour of “one of the perfect incarnations of authoritarian education.”

Of these and other problems in Zhao’s case, Diane Ravitch’s NYRB readers will learn nothing at all. Indeed, Zhao’s dichotomies are replicated and amplified.

Ravitch’s review falls into two halves, the first recording The Fall, the second announcing hope of Salvation. In the early 1980s (Ravitch contends) forces outside and hostile to public schooling inflicted an agenda of accountability, competition for “performance” within a narrow curriculum, centralised standards and, above all, high-stakes testing. Despite ever-increasing evidence of its failure, that agenda has been adopted and pursued by administrations up to and including Obama’s. “At this juncture,” Ravitch announces, “comes the book that Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, members of Congress, and the nation’s governors and legislators need to read.” This fanfare is followed by an extended and wholly uncritical précis of the book, concluding with the declaration that Zhao’s vision of schools “where the highest value is creativity” will remain out of reach “until we break free of standardised testing.”

This Manichaean approach to history, common in American political discourse, seems to be finding its way to Australia. The national president of the Australian College of Educators, Professor Stephen Dinham, has borrowed heavily from Ravitch to argue that “a plethora of vested interests has moved into the education space for ideological, political and financial reasons.” In the process, Dinham argues, “educational research and other evidence has been distorted, discounted or disregarded in favour of deregulation, privatisation, corporatisation and quick-fix solutions to the supposed problems of teaching and the ‘crisis’ in schooling. Educators have been either silent or silenced in debates and discussions about education.”

This way of understanding what is going on in and around schools leads to a whole series of problems in both analysis and policy. It turns the clash of ideas, values and interests into tribal warfare. It reduces a formidable mind like Ravitch’s to playing the crudest form of politics – an enemy of my enemies is a friend of mine. Fixing its gaze on the adversary, it is blind to itself. “Outsiders” have vested ideological, political and financial interests. Insiders, by implication, have only disinterested expertise in the service of the purest of motives. The deformities of public schooling, even in its heyday, are forgotten. Remember Karmel’s 1973 strictures on the rigid centralisation of the government systems, the widespread “antipathy towards and apathy about direct community participation,” and the persistent failure to match resources to need? The fact that deformities of this kind gave the “outsiders” their entrée is likewise ignored.

The agenda attacked by Professors Zhao, Ravitch and Dinham certainly needs and deserves attack. But it now has deep roots in schooling in both the United States and Australia. The clock can’t be turned back. Choice, tests, standards and data-based “accountability” will be here in some form or another into the indefinite future. Nor are they wholly misguided in all forms and circumstances. The problem is not to find satisfying pejoratives for them but to constrain them, and to turn them to better purposes.

What is to be preferred, imperfect test results or perfect ignorance? Where would Gonski have got to without systematic, comprehensive evidence as to differences in the educational attainments of the most and least successful students? Where would teachers be without some basis for judgements about how their students are doing, compared not just with each other, but with students in other schools?

Might it be that the best way to combat the narrowing impact of standardised testing is to attack the misuse of test results rather than testing as such, and to measure and count learning in other subjects and (as Levin suggests) in “non-cognitive” skills? To construct indicators of other things that really matter in schooling, including how students and teachers are treated by and feel about their schools?

Ravitch sees standards as hurdles that many students will fail to jump. But they can also be way-points that help every student understand where he or she is up to and where to go next. “Choice” can be very destructive, as Australian schooling has demonstrated more conclusively than perhaps any other system in the industrialised world. But so can uniformity, and rules made by distant bureaucrats in ignorance of particular needs and circumstances.

Do Chinese maths teachers perhaps have something to offer their Western colleagues? Could it be true to say (as Grattan’s Catching Up report says) that Shanghai and other East Asian systems “focus on things that are known to matter in the classroom, including a relentless, practical focus on learning and the creation of a strong culture of teacher education, research, collaboration, mentoring and feedback and sustained professional development”? And can we learn from these systems how to drive sustained improvement, even if it is improvement in only one kind of learning? If we took Zhao’s advice, seconded by Ravitch, we would never find out.

Defence and opposition are part and parcel of any brand of politics, and particularly the politics of an embattled left. But a hard lesson of the past several decades (and I write with feeling) is that when undisciplined by proposition, by the tough question of what is to be done, defence and opposition can become ends in themselves. In their pursuit, a nominally progressive politics finds itself with less and less to defend, more and more to oppose. •

The post A fight or a feed? Making progressive politics in schooling appeared first on Inside Story.

This orthodoxy derives from the “effectiveness” paradigm and its epic quest to pin down “what works,” a quest which, by John Hattie’s celebrated estimate, has launched more than 50,000 separate studies and 800 meta-studies. This research and the agenda that sprang from it take as their focus student attainment, particularly in the foundational subjects and in the formative years. The key instrument of reform is the teacher. “Teaching quality,” which research finds as making more difference to outcomes than any other “school variable,” is to be lifted by better selection, training and rewards and through the collaborative, workplace-based development of the existing workforce. The method is whole-school improvement led by the principal, whose task it is to build a consensus in the school’s leadership group about educational priorities and directions, get buy-in from staff and parents, and then lead the step-by-step construction of a consistent, school-wide approach to teaching and learning.

There are differences in emphasis in this formulation, of course, and disagreements over such matters as the balance between “outcomes” in “the basics” and the rest of the curriculum, or about the uses and abuses of standardised testing. The paradigm has been refined over the ten or fifteen years since it first crystallised, particularly in its understanding of learning as cumulative growth that proceeds in different ways and speeds. “Personalisation” or “individualisation” of the curriculum has moved to the centre of the agenda. But differences, disagreements and refinements notwithstanding, the broad direction is set. For the first time schooling has a coherent, evidence-based theory of educational improvement that empowers the teaching profession and endorses its claim to be the very heart of the schooling enterprise. It can be shown to deliver at the level of the school, of groups of schools, and even of entire school systems.

Against this formidable orthodoxy, the Rocketship of Richard Whitmire’s title advances a series of counter-propositions. Where the orthodoxy assumes a workforce dominated by the single category of “the teacher,” trained and credentialled by mainstream university-based courses to work within the isolated microcosm of the classroom, many Rocketship teachers are products of intensive TFA (Teach for America) programs, and operate as members of multi-level, multi-skilled, closely managed teams, often teaching students grouped according to need rather than in standard batches of twenty or so. Rocketship changes the organisation of teaching and learning as well as the practice of teaching, and with that what has long been the fundamental building block of schooling, the class and the classroom.

The orthodoxy’s lodestar is effectiveness, a concept shaped and articulated within the mental universe of education. Rocketship is influenced by business methods and the discipline of economics that underlies them, and appeals to cost-effectiveness and productivity. Where the orthodoxy relies on organic, evolutionary change in each school, Rocketship’s schools are designed from the ground up. To the orthodoxy’s cultural change, Rocketship adds structural engineering.

Technology, peripheral in the orthodoxy, is central to the Rocketship model. It suggests that schooling’s future will not be continuous with its past, that schooling has now arrived at a point reached by one industry after another ever since the industrial revolution got under way late in the eighteenth century, the point at which machines begin to displace some labour and demand the reorganisation of the rest. Rocketship implies that “what works” is actually what has worked in the past, not what will work in the future.

Rocketship is a chain of quasi-independent “charter” schools. It opened its first school in California’s Silicon Valley only seven years ago, to almost instant prominence and controversy. It quickly became a lightning rod for intersecting conflicts over the charters versus the established public school systems, over competition versus regulation, over technology and the future of the teaching profession, and over the proper nature and purposes of schooling. Hence Whitmire’s book.

Rocketship departs from the orthodoxy, but not before learning from it. As the orthodoxy would urge, Rocketship has an almost missionary zeal to “close the gap” between the educational attainments of the children of the poor and the affluent. Rocketship’s first schools were not for Silicon Valley’s Porsche-driving geeks, venture capitalists and startup entrepreneurs but for the Latinos who cook and clean for, deliver to, and wait on the Valley’s elect. As it expands eastwards, Rocketship is targeting other disadvantaged groups including African Americans.

Again as the orthodoxy would want, Rocketship’s educational focus is on student attainment, in the foundational areas of language arts, maths, science, and social studies, in the early years (K–5). Teaching is student-centred in a way that makes most such talk seem merely rhetorical. Rocketship teachers know where each student is up to in each key area of learning, and deploy student grouping, adaptive software and supplementary tutoring accordingly.

Much of the Rocketship recipe comes directly from the “teacher quality” agenda. It pays its teachers up to 30 per cent above standard rates. It pours the effort into school-based teacher induction and development. As well, it is heavily committed to parent and “community” involvement, including annual teacher visits to every home.

Then come the differences. Most obviously, Rocketship embraces technology in a way rare in schooling but common in business. It has little interest in technology as “enrichment,” or as “preparation for the twenty-first-century workplace,” or because “we’re living in the digital age” or because the kids like it. Its productivity-focused approach rests on a truth often missed or fudged in a growing research literature which finds that technology “doesn’t work”: technology can, among many other things, substitute for some of the labour of teaching, if you use the right software in the right way.

Rocketship was an early adopter of “blended” learning, which combines technology-delivered with conventional instruction. It was a very early adopter of “adaptive software,” designed around the growing understanding of the intimate relationship between student, task, assessment and feedback, and qualitatively different from the old lockstep textbook-on-a-screen instructional programs.

Blended learning both makes possible and requires the reorganisation of the teaching and learning process, of space and of staffing mix. The last of these is the most incendiary. Rocketship schools employ fewer teachers than the mainstream, sixteen for an elementary (primary) school of average size against the typical twenty-plus, and relatively more support and paraprofessional staff. It makes “time-technology swaps,” as the euphemism has it.

Rocketship’s use of software reflects its origins as the brainchild of John Danner, a cashed-up Silicon Valley entrepreneur. It also reflects a businessman’s habitual search for greater productivity rather than merely improved effectiveness, although it would be a mistake to see Danner as just another in the growing band of American business types (with Bill Gates as the alpha male) who want to use their money and methods to “fix” schooling.

Danner spent three years teaching in a hard-yards public school after he’d made his millions, and more years helping set up the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter network and then designing his own. At which point he did what startup entrepreneurs do. He sat down with his spreadsheets to develop “the proposition.” What configuration of effort, what kind of educational workplaces, would generate most learning from the resources available?

Not, Danner decided, the old low-tech, one-teacher-one-classroom model, as taken for granted by most educators (and by most effectiveness research). But what? Eventually Danner opted for a mix of adaptive software (the long search for which provides Whitmire with one of the most entertaining of his many anecdotes); fewer but better-paid teachers; a student working day divided between learning lab and classroom; better coordination of teaching effort; and shifting resources from buildings and land to equipment and staff and staff development. All that, Danner decided, would generate more learning from the by-no-means-generous funding available to charters than any alternative configuration.

Does it?

Whitmire reports with obvious relish the results that shot Rocketship to instant fame. Its first school opened with scores on statewide tests around the 900 mark on 200–1000 scale. That is a very high number by any standards, let alone for a brand-new school starting with a full complement of kids, 85 per cent of whom qualified for free lunches and 68 per cent of whom came from families in which English was a second language. When Rocketship opened another school in the same area it began with an enrolment of 426, scored 872, filled its quota of 640 students, and soon had a waiting list of 400.

By way of emphasis Whitmire records the performance of two district schools operating in the same area and serving much the same clientele. One scored 654, below the “basic” 700 level, with only 23 per cent of students proficient in reading and 40 per cent in maths, while the other managed only 16 per cent proficient in reading and 30 per cent in maths.

These are numbers and examples that show Rocketship to advantage, of course. There are claims that Rocketship’s scores overall have declined steadily since inception, but even if that is the case it leaves open the question of how Rocketship’s scores compare with those of other schools with a similar clientele, not to mention the question of how the productivity equation pans out.

Rocketship’s apparently remarkable performance, Whitmire argues, was accomplished on rations. Rocketship builds its schools at $180 per square foot, around half the cost of district schools. While the 654-point mainstream school referred to above “floats in a luxurious island of land, fifty-seven thousand square feet of buildings on 6.4 acres,” its Rocketship competitor “clings to an acre lot with only twenty-two thousand square feet under roof.” The former had twenty-nine teachers (and a counsellor), the latter just sixteen teachers.

By the standards set for them and just about every other American school, Rocketship schools do seem to produce more from less. Whether it is the right “more,” and whether it is achieved at a greater cost to a broad and broadening educational experience, neither Whitmire nor the evidence seem able to say.

So many charter schools have failed at least as badly as mainstream public schools that apparent success poses a problem of explanation. Some of Rocketship’s critics argue that its apparent gains are “selection effects.” Rocketship’s students come from families actively seeking high achievement in “the basics,” the critics argue, while established public schools are left with the rest and with a broader educational remit.

Other and related “effects” may apply. For example, Rocketship’s students have so far come predominantly from immigrant families and are beneficiaries of their parents’ desire to find a better life. Rocketship teachers are young, many of them highly motivated TFA graduates working in newly established schools, perfect conditions for the “observer effect” to do its work. Teachers work long hours, and spend an average of less than three years teaching, although that is consistent with the TFA idea, and some of those who leave teaching stay with Rocketship in management and leadership positions. Whether Rocketship can sustain its “sense of urgency” (as Danner’s co-founder puts it) remains to be seen. Its cost structure is likely to change for the worse if expansion creates the need to pay more to retain longer-serving teachers.

On the other hand, Rocketship has proved to be remarkably willing to learn and to change. Danner’s “rotational” blended model is being phased out in favour of a “flex” system, which combines the two kinds of space into a single large area, making it easier for teachers to put the right students in the right groups for the right support at the right time. Whitmire argues that even more fundamental to Rocketship’s success than blended learning is its deep commitment to productivity and an acceptance of its organisational imperatives. Rocketship really, really understands that any failure to wring the maximum educational value from every dollar is not money wasted, but learning lost.

Just how good Rocketship is, and just how much of that is owed to its particular way of assembling the many atoms that make up the complicated molecule of schooling, is yet to be determined. But in the meantime we must take seriously the likelihood that it is Rocketship and not the orthodoxy that has glimpsed the future of schooling.

This is not to suggest that Rocketship is a template for the “next” model of schooling. It is not. Its rethinking starts from teaching rather than from learning. It implicitly sees students as the objects and recipients of instruction rather than as producers of learning. There is clearly much further to go, particularly in the redesign of the student labour process as “adaptive” software gives way to fully interactive programs, and in exploiting students’ capacity not just to “learn to learn” but to learn to help each other learn. Rocketship is a Model T, at best. But it is definitely not a horse and buggy.

Rocketship’s first heresy concerns models of schooling; its second, the process of reform.

The charter movement, of which Rocketship is a prominent part, asserts that established school systems can’t do “comprehensive, integrated and sustained” change. The orthodoxy is a recipe in search of a cook. In the usual metaphor, the old systems lack “drivers” powerful enough to override the tangle of institutionalised interests attached to massively expanded school systems. Hobbled by “legacy orgware” developed over centuries of evolution – infrastructure dominated by the classroom box, a tenured workforce dominated by a single category of worker, locked-in budgets dependent on increments to sponsor any reform, and habits of mind shared by everyone from researchers to parents, teachers to students – the old systems are cumbersome, immobilised, disempowered.

In this view, only the hot breath of competition from schools formed outside the legacy orgware will get real reform under way. Reform will be driven into the systems, not by them. Rocketship has its own way of emphasising the point. Unlike some charters, its schools are greenfield sites, in both literal and metaphorical senses of the term. Think Aldi. Rocketship buys land, builds buildings, recruits staff, enlists parents and then, like a vehicle at the end of the production line, another Rocketship school lifts off. Each new school is a replica of the last and an incubator for the next, developing the nucleus of its leadership and staff.

If one side of the Rocketship model of change is expansion through replication, the other is competition. Like most charters, Rocketship “takes” students (as many would have it) from long-established mainstream public schools. But of course students can’t be “taken” unless parents choose to go. Here is the big driver (the charters claim) that the established systems lack: parent power, enabled by competition, legitimated by choice.

All this is straight from the neolib playbook, of course, but it would be both incorrect and foolish to explain the charter phenomenon in those terms alone. Insofar as standardised testing reveals what is going on, American schooling is in much more trouble than Australia’s, in both overall “performance” and its social distribution. At fifteen times the size of the Australian system, and with control divided between three levels of government rather than Australia’s two, it is even more unwieldy. What the charters tap into is a sense shared by many parents that they are being dudded by “the system,” a conclusion amply supported by a mass of research evidence.

The Australian situation differs in degree rather than kind. The preconditions for a charter insurgency are present in Australia: a deep and deepening failure of schools to educate the poor; increasing anxiety within systems and frustration without at ever-increasing funding and flat-lining performance indicators; the apparent inability of the big government systems – with the possible and contingent exception of the NSW system under its remarkable minister Adrian Piccoli – to mobilise; little to show for the almost frantic efforts of the Rudd and Gillard governments at the national level; the fragmentation of the old command economies, most recently in Western Australia’s “independent” government schools policies; and of course acceptance in Australia of “choice” of school as something close to a basic human right wrapped up in an irrefutable economic truth. The charters have expanded across the United States and into England and Sweden. If, as seems at least possible, they turn up in Australia, is that a bad thing?

It depends, first, on what kind of charters. Some operators specialise in “restarts,” taking over failing schools or even whole school districts. Most, however, depend on “choice.” It must be acknowledged that the “choice” offered by the US charters is not the same as “choice” in Australia, and is in several respects less toxic. There is no equivalent of Australia’s free-versus-fee, secular-versus-religious choice. Rocketship, like most charters, is a not-for-profit organisation and its schools are part of the secular public system. Choice is exercised not by those with advantages of location and/or income, but by those who typically lack both. In the not-uncommon circumstance of over-subscription, the choice is made by lottery.

Most fundamentally, the choice is not between educational flavours, often reflective of socioeducational pecking orders, but between different educational models and different levels of educational performance. This is, in Whitmire’s view, what makes Rocketship and some other charters so important. Choice, in and of itself, as in voucher schemes (or in Australia, we might add), is worse than useless. The key thing, Whitmire argues, is what’s available to choose from.

On the other side of the ledger, however, charters by their nature threaten the viability of incumbent public schools. Some schools (including some new charter schools) die. That kind of take-no-prisoners attitude, fed into schooling from the world of business, has spread through the US system up to and including campaigns for elections to school boards and other regulatory authorities. The ensuing arguments about the educational merits of the two kinds of school tangle with debates over the ethics and consequences of competition, as well as industrial and ideological conflicts between the mostly unionised districts and the mostly non-union charters. The charter wars, which form the second of Whitmire’s two big themes, are in content, alignments and temperature not unlike the chronic Australian conflict between government and non-government schools.

Nor is it at all clear that the charters are working, or ever will, at a system level anyway. More than twenty years after the first charter schools opened in Minnesota there are almost as many students in home schooling (3 per cent of the US total) as in charters (around 4 per cent). While “top charter schools” are indeed “pushing the envelope,” as Whitmire’s title has it, many are doing no better than the mainstream schools, and doing it in much the same way. Some are even worse.

Is there an alternative to the Gullivers, on the one hand, and competition red in tooth and claw on the other? Rather than pressing on with yet more cumulative incrementalism, or trying to blast away at schooling from the outside, is there a third way? There is, but it must be admitted that it is easier to imagine than to expect. A third approach would go right to the regulatory core of the legacy orgware: the relationship between employees and employers in the heavily institutionalised form of “industrial relations.”

Industrial relations as we now know it came into being in the 1950s and 1960s, when the pressure of soaring enrolments and retention rates transformed genteel “professional associations” into blue-collar unions, and transferred control of terms and conditions from employers to a semi-judicial arena of contest. There was no other option at the time, and big gains were registered in working conditions (elimination of impossibly sized classes particularly) and in terms of employment (especially for women).

These gains came at a cost, however, and not just to the public purse. Relations between employers and employees became adversarial. Oppositionism entrenched itself in the culture of the profession and in the identity of some teachers as well as in the behaviour of some governments. Cyclical, almost ritualised bargaining became the ratchet of “conditions” and costs. Consideration of the “externalities” of teachers’ work (pay, hours, workplace rights) was separated from its educational purposes and content. Negotiations depended upon, and agreements were struck in terms of, a way of organising educational work taken for granted in the 1960s (one teacher, one class, one lesson and so on), increasingly found to be problematic, and now on the verge of obsolescence. The status and material rewards of teaching are much as they were fifty years ago. Over the course of half a century industrial relations passed from solution to problem, becoming a central component and basic guarantor of the legacy orgware, counterproductive from systemic, professional, industrial and educational points of view.

What may be worth considering is whether the missing “driver” of “comprehensive, integrated and sustained” reform can be found in a shift in relations between employers and employees as substantial as what occurred in the 1950s and 1960s: from adversarial to collaborative; from an exclusive focus on the terms and conditions of employment to include the nature and organisation of educational work and the composition of the educational workforce; and from cyclical tactics to long-term strategy.

A rethink on that scale might not amount to a Pauline conversion but it is a big ask nonetheless. Alternatives of the Rocketship kind, and modes of thought often rejected or even reviled by educationists would need to be inspected, not to find fault but to see what can be learned. Both parties would need to acknowledge that, in the circumstances now emerging, their joint and several interests are best served by pursuing a strategy that makes sense on budgetary, professional, industrial and, above all, educational fronts. They would need to collaborate to map out a long march through the legacy orgware, from what has worked to what will work. Whitmire’s book provides food for thought for those willing to entertain such heresies, and a warning for those who are not. •

Thanks to three moving spirits of school reform, Graham Marshall, Chris Wardlaw and Vic Zbar. The views expressed are, of course, my own responsibility.

Comments

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Tom Greenwell writes:

Thanks for another stimulating article Dean. The call for a collaborative focus on optimising and, where necessary re-imagining, the organisation of educational work and workers is thought-provoking.

It also provokes a range of questions which you don’t appear to address, or even acknowledge.

Is it really accurate to characterise technology as ‘peripheral’ in the ‘orthodoxy’?

Aren’t blended learning environments common, if not ubiquitous?

Are challenges to ‘the old low-tech, one-teacher-one-classroom model’ happening in any places beyond US charter schools, including Australian public schools (the ones you imply are constrained by industrial arrangements)?

Are Enterprise Agreements between State and Territory Governments and their teaching workforces really negotiated without reference to ‘the nature and organisation of educational work and the composition of the educational workforce’ or education’s purpose and content?

Is it accurate to characterise relations between education employers and employee groups as exclusively adversarial, driven by entrenched ‘teacher oppositionism’? Aren’t they ever collaborative in nature?

Is it useful to assume, with David Gillespie, that education unions must either be in the ‘genteel professional association’ category or the ‘militant blue-collar trade union’ (ie. they take industrial action) category? Conversely, is it possible education unions tend to evince qualities from both these categories?

If a radical re-organisation of educational work is desirable, isn’t it crucial that the workers concerned play a decisive role in that process, both because they have unique professional and organisational knowledge and because they’re the people who will implement it? If yes, won’t such a decisive role only be enabled by something like the current industrial practices you so readily dismiss?

Dean Ashenden writes:

And thanks for another stimulating comment, Tom! To begin with your concluding question: having ‘the workers concerned play a decisive role’ in a ‘re-organisation of educational work’ is exactly what I suggested, exactly. (In fact, you seem to acknowledge the point in your opening remarks re my ‘call for a collaborative focus’?) Perhaps where we part company is in my further suggestion that if this is to happen, a form of relationship between education workers and employers constituted in the 1950s and 1960s would have to change, substantially?

On your other questions: I do think that industrial agreements as currently struck entrench a form of educational work which many of those involved, wearing their educationists’ hats, would question. Those agreements do frustrate efforts to really figure out what the new technologies bring to the party. They are particularly restrictive with regard to both ‘time-technology swaps’ and the re-allocation and re-organisation of the work of teaching. ‘Blended learning’ generally operates within the received allocation of resources and organisation of time, space, and labour. That is accepted (in my view) by even such tech-savvy proponents of the orthodox agenda as Michael Fullan.

There are schools, as you suggest, which get around the rules, perhaps particularly in Victoria, which has the least restrictive of the government-system agreements. But this is typically in result of outstanding leadership. The exceptional schools are person- and/or circumstance-dependent. In at least some cases tacit ‘permission to proceed’ is given on condition that a low profile is maintained. My suggestion is that the exceptional and contingent nature of these schools is a function of ‘legacy orgware’ which is much more extensive than the industrial relations system and agreements, but in which they play a crucial role. And, to repeat, my suggestion is that IR just might play a key role in transforming itself and the legacy orgware, rather than conserving it. For teacher organisations to lead or collaborate in such a process would represent, in my view, an act of enlightened self-interest.

Again, thanks for taking issue, and for going so directly to the nub of the matter.

The post Orthodoxy and heresy in school reform appeared first on Inside Story.

But something else happened in the year the government commissioned Gonski: My School was launched with great fanfare, considerable hyperbole and the promise of useful information about schools. Although My School version 1 had significant flaws, it was quickly and substantially improved. The data underpinning the site, now in its fifth iteration, tells a compelling story, not so much about individual schools, but collectively about our framework of schools – what it delivers and, more importantly, what it doesn’t.

In effect, the most substantial review of schooling ever conducted in Australia was accompanied by a goldmine of information which, over time, would tell us if the reviewers had got it right. My School has become Our Schools: it tells of the consequences for all schools if we fail to act on what Gonski found and recommended.

Have the problems revealed by Gonski diminished over those three years? With the most notable exception of New South Wales, most state and territory governments, and certainly the federal government, don’t seem to think that what were agreed to be serious issues in 2011 deserve any urgent attention. Education didn’t even make the agenda of two successive COAG meetings in 2014. But the problems didn’t go away. Many just got worse.

So let’s look at seven key findings of the twenty-six in the Gonski review, grouped under three headings: schooling performance and outcomes, current funding arrangements, and equity and disadvantage.

Particular reference is made to whether the original findings remain relevant and the extent to which the circumstances that led to the findings may have changed in recent years. The information is derived from My School data and little reference is made to other sources, including specific research. This analysis is a brief and preliminary report, issued without graphics. The work is ongoing and will eventually be published.

Schooling performance and outcomes

Finding 1: Australian schooling needs to lift the performance of students at all levels of achievement, particularly the lowest performers. Australia must also improve its international standing by arresting the decline that has been witnessed over the past decade. For Australian students to take their rightful place in a globalised world, socially, culturally and economically, they will need to have levels of education that equip them for this opportunity and challenge.

Data from My School can be analysed to track changes in student performance, in particular to find out whether performance, especially that of the lowest performers, has been lifted.

My School reports student performance in the four NAPLAN aspects: reading, writing, language conventions and numeracy. Test scores in these domains need to be interpreted cautiously; the nature of the NAPLAN writing test, for example, has changed over this time. Even on a national level, changes in test scores from year to year can have many explanations. In the search for possible trends we have considered test scores for two groups representing two distinct stages of schooling: Year 5 and Year 9.

Over five years of NAPLAN testing, 2009 to 2013:

• Year 5 reading scores rose by about 1.7 per cent (from 494 to 502.2)
• Year 5 writing scores are not all directly comparable owing to changes in the skills tested, but it would appear more likely that performance has declined rather than improved
• Year 5 numeracy scores were essentially static (from 486.8 to 485.9)
• Year 9 reading scores were static (at 580.4)
• Year 9 writing scores are not directly comparable but again, looking at the published numbers it would appear more likely that performance has declined rather than improved
• Year 9 numeracy scores fell by 0.8 per cent (from 588.5 to 583.7)

Most of these changes are not significant in statistical terms, but the sense we have on examining them is that performance overall has been more inclined to stagnate or fall rather than to improve, with trends in Year 9 of particular concern. What is certain is that there is no substantial evidence of any performance lift: the Gonski review panel had every right to be concerned.

What about the lowest-performing students? We grouped schools according to their Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage, or ICSEA, and tracked the performance of schools in high, medium and low ICSEA ranges. In some cases, for example in Year 5 reading, test scores rose for schools in all three ICSEA ranges. But the more noticeable trend was for achievement scores to diverge between high ICSEA schools, where scores tended to increase, and lower ICSEA schools where scores most commonly fell. This diverging trend was most noticeable in Year 9. The differences were least noticeable in reading, but more noticeable for writing and numeracy.

We can only conclude that student performance didn’t lift over this time and, if anything, the achievement levels of our lowest performers declined.

Finding 2: The challenge for the review is to design a funding model that adequately reflects the different needs of students to enable resources to be directed to where they are needed most. All Australian students should be allowed to achieve their very best regardless of their background or circumstances.

Data from My School can be analysed to track how resources to schools have been allocated in recent years and whether resources have been directed to where they are needed most.

It is important to identify where the greatest need exists. While many factors affect student performance, My School data for each year since 2010 shows a strong and continuing association between the socio-educational status of school enrolments and the level of student achievement as measured by aggregated NAPLAN scores. This strong association is found across all sectors and in all localities: higher or lower school ICSEA values are routinely accompanied by higher or lower NAPLAN scores.

The association between socio-educational status and student achievement is often illustrated – for example in reports from the Programme of International Student Assessment, or PISA – by “social gradients.” The slope of the gradient shows the strength of this association. In our comments on Finding 17 (below), we show that the social gradients constructed from data on school ICSEA and student NAPLAN achievement have become steeper over four years. To use Gonski’s wording, it seems that “background or circumstances” have had an increasing impact on student achievement.

This means that the need for resources to be “directed to where they are needed most” has increased in recent years. Has this happened to any significant extent? How have resources been directed?

We can investigate the allocation of resources for three groups of schools with demonstrably different needs.

The aggregated NAPLAN scores of students in schools around the 900 ICSEA level (at the more disadvantaged end of the scale) are quite low at an average of 460 on an aggregated measure. On average, $13,870 was spent on each student in these schools in 2013. Almost all this money, regardless of school sector, came from governments.

The aggregated NAPLAN scores of students in schools around ICSEA 1000 were higher, at 495. On average, $11,265 was spent on each student in these schools in 2013, less than that available to the more disadvantaged students. Most of this funding – between 84 per cent and 100 per cent – is also provided by governments.

Considering just these two examples, we can say that resources are being directed to where they are needed most. The resources may or may not be sufficient to substantially improve student outcomes, but for the moment that’s another matter.

The situation changes at around ICSEA 1162. At this level students are funded at higher levels ($14,263 per student) than the disadvantaged students in the ICSEA 900 schools. Between 65 per cent (Independent schools) and 82 per cent (Catholic schools) of their funding still comes from government sources. Above ICSEA 1162 the funding increasingly comes from school fees in addition to that provided by governments – and the total expenditure per student continues to increase as the ICSEA level rises.

Gonski accepted the arguments for some public funding for students regardless of their levels of advantage. But if all sources of funding are considered – as was Gonski’s brief – we have made no progress towards directing resources towards the greatest need.

Current funding arrangements

Finding 6: Australia lacks a logical, consistent and publicly transparent approach to funding schooling.

There are a number of ways to test the current school funding regime on the basis of logic, consistency and transparency. My School data makes a useful contribution by enabling a closer look at where the funding ends up. There are many reasons why schools are funded at different levels and why some schools are funded at higher levels (per student) than more needy schools. Costs per student are always higher in smaller schools, for example, and funding will reflect this. School location will also explain differences in funding levels.

But other differences are harder to explain, as we discovered in our preliminary analysis of government funding of larger schools with secondary enrolments, located in a random sample of fifty Australian federal electorates. Large numbers of schools seem to be funded, by governments out of proportion to the educational challenges the schools face.

In the electorates surveyed, a number of government schools receive amounts per student in excess of the funding received by lower ICSEA government schools in the same electorate, which suggests anomalies in the way government funding is directed to some government schools.

In those same electorates, fifty non-government schools are more generously funded by governments than are less advantaged non-government schools in the same electorate. These differences between non-government schools are likely to reflect the assigned status of those schools under the opaque, decade-old federal government funding arrangements.

But the differences in government funding of government and non-government schools has proven to be the greater surprise, given that one of these sectors is a fully funded public system and the other is, at least in a legal and technical sense, privately owned and operated. There have long been examples of non-government schools receiving higher government funding than similar government schools. But there are sixty-two non-government schools in the fifty sample electorates receiving government funding in excess of what needy government schools in the same electorate receive.

Across the fifty electorates there are 131 less-advantaged government schools that somehow receive less government funding than at least one more-advantaged nearby non-government school. If scaled up to all Australian electorates, around 25 per cent of government schools with secondary enrolments face greater educational challenges, but receive less government funding, than a non-government school in the same electorate. This is more than an anomaly – it is an absurdity.

It should be stressed that this is a preliminary analysis, but it seems that Gonski’s conclusion about the lack of logic and consistency in how we fund schools remains as accurate today as it was when the review was conducted. It is hardly surprising that the lack of transparency in the existing, complex system is a big part of the problem.

Finding 7: There is an imbalance in the provision of funding to government and non-government schools by the Australian and state and territory governments. In particular, the Australian Government could play a greater role in supporting state and territory governments to meet the needs of disadvantaged students in both government and non-government schools.

Data from My School can be analysed to see whether government funding in recent years has continued to lack balance, and whether the Australian government has assumed a greater role in funding disadvantaged students.

The pattern of expenditure on schools between 2009 and 2012 (the most recent year for financial data) by various governments might reflect a number of priorities, but it appears that creating greater balance isn’t one of them.

My School provides information about both federal and state/territory government funding. Much has been written in various places about federal government funding. This analysis focuses on the states and territories and analyses changes in state/territory government recurrent and capital funding. Unless otherwise stated, the funding amounts cited are dollars per student.

State and territory recurrent funding goes mainly to government schools, but there are considerable differences between jurisdictions. On average across Australia, state and territory funding to government schools increased between 2009 and 2012, but with large variations. The largest increases (around 5 per cent) went to students in Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory, Tasmania and South Australia. Funding increases in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia were far more modest at around 2 per cent, and recurrent funding per Northern Territory student actually went down.

The differences among the states and territories are even more evident when it comes to funding non-government schools. Funding for Catholic schools tended to rise by around 5–6 per cent across Australia, but rose by 11.4 per cent per student in Victoria and by 2.4 per cent in New South Wales. Independent schools received more consistently high increases, with the greatest increases again in Victoria. In all states except Queensland funding per student in non-government schools increased at a higher rate than for government schools.

State and territory governments also direct most capital expenditure to government schools, but again there is little evidence of any balance. In round figures the capital expenditure figure was $700 per Australian student in 2009 and also in 2010, and closer to $900 in 2011 and 2012 – but there were great variations among the states.

Annual capital expenditure per government school student in New South Wales and Victoria averaged around $500, but generally declined over the four years. In contrast, capital expenditure per student in Queensland government schools almost trebled, to around $1700 per student in 2012. Capital expenditure increased in South Australia. It also increased in Tasmania to 2011, yet all but disappeared in 2012. Western Australia showed the reverse pattern: a three-year decline followed by a substantial boost in 2012.

States and territories did not provide significant capital funding to non-government schools, with the exception of the Northern Territory and Queensland. On average, Queensland provided almost as much capital funding to non-government school students as South Australia provided to government school students.

The pattern of funding by state governments shows that Gonski was certainly justified in expressing concern. It seems that nothing has changed.

On the second aspect of the finding: do figures from My School indicate that the Australian federal government is assuming a greater role in funding disadvantaged students? To find the answer, we conducted a brief analysis of Australian government recurrent funding in 2010 and 2012 for all schools with complete data in the ICSEA range 900 to 999, and all schools with complete data in the ICSEA range 1100 to 1199.

In total, Australian government expenditure on the first group of schools amounted to $2.39 billion in 2010 and $2.81 billion in 2012 – a 17.5 per cent increase. Australian government expenditure on the second group of schools amounted to $1.77 billion in 2010 and $2.00 billion in 2012 – a 12.9 per cent increase. In terms of dollars per student the increase for the lower ICSEA group of schools was around 16.3 per cent and for the higher ICSEA group of schools 7.7 per cent.

These figures indicate that the Australian government did, between 2010 and 2012, assume a greater role in funding more disadvantaged students. This may reflect National Partnership funding in this period. The funding per student in the higher ICSEA range is $3157, against $2498 in the lower range, reflecting the ongoing greater direction of Australian government funding to non-government schools.

Finding 10: Public funding arrangements need to reflect the nature of the educational challenges faced by a system or school given its characteristics and student population, regardless of whether it is in the government or non-government sector.

Data from My School reveals the extent to which funding reflects the nature of the educational challenges faced by systems and schools. The Gonski review stressed the need to fund schools on an equal per student basis if they serve similar populations with similar levels of need. In this way schools would be resourced appropriately regardless of sector.

Our response to Finding 6 provides many examples of how this does not sufficiently happen for particular schools. In this analysis, we refer to differences by school location and by sector.

It is well-known that schools in non-metropolitan areas incur higher costs, if only because of their location. Regardless of a school’s enrolment, remoteness creates a considerable educational challenge. To meet this challenge, combined government funding, at $21,400 per student, in remote and very remote schools is over double that available to students in metropolitan schools. Regardless of whether such an investment is sufficient it appears that, on the basis of school location, the distribution of funding does reflect the different educational challenges and costs created by school location.

By way of contrast, a sector-based analysis of recurrent funding reveals an increasing disconnect between the educational challenges faced by schools and the funding they receive from governments. We have long known, and My School readily shows, that government schools enrol students with greater needs. While averages don’t tell the whole story, the median government school student is in the upper third of Q2 (the second-lowest ICSEA quarter. The median Catholic school student is in the lower third of Q3 and the median Independent school student is around the top of Q3 (almost into Q4). In metropolitan schools, attended by three-quarters of students, average ICSEA values are 1019 for government schools, 1061 for Catholic schools and 1090 for Independent schools.

Such figures illustrate a hierarchy of needs that should, in no small measure, determine the ongoing distribution of public funding. But in the years 2009–12 increases in funding certainly did not reflect relative needs. The combined per student recurrent funding from all governments increased by just 10.9 per cent for students attending government schools. The increase for students attending Catholic schools was 19.8 per cent, and it was 20 per cent for students in Independent schools. It is possible that within each sector the funding is directed towards the greatest need, but the overall pattern certainly is the inverse of what would reasonably be expected – with almost no difference between Independent and Catholic schools despite the greater demonstrable level of student need in the latter.

In summary, government funding continues to favour remote and very remote schools. In general it also favours lower ICSEA schools as illustrated in our response to Finding 2. But changes in government recurrent funding over the last few years heavily favour non-government over government schools, in contrast to the relative challenges faced by the two sectors.

Equity and disadvantage

Finding 17: New funding arrangements for schooling should aim to ensure that: • differences in educational outcomes are not the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possessions • all students have access to a high standard of education regardless of their background or circumstances.

This finding focuses on the Gonski and OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) definitions of equity. In its landmark report, the Gonski panel explored the influence of student background on educational outcomes, best illustrated by what are known as “social gradient” measures. These can be derived by measuring the slope of a graph of educational outcomes against some social or socio-economic indicator. The report described how Australia has a steeper social gradient compared with many higher-achieving countries. A steeper slope indicates a greater impact of social factors – as distinct from school factors – on student achievement.

The Gonski panel concluded that greater equity and improvements in student outcomes could be achieved through efforts to reduce the influence of student background on achievement – in effect to reduce the social gradient.

My School data provides the opportunity to examine a kind of social gradient if we plot schools’ average NAPLAN scores against their ICSEA values. Since ICSEA is a socio-educational advantage measure, we might call it a socio-educational gradient.

Typical values for the slope of these NAPLAN/ICSEA plots are around 0.35, or 35 per cent. By graphing socio-educational gradients for various groups of schools we are able to compare the equity of schooling in different places and for different levels of schooling. My School data shows that gradients are very much steeper (40–44 per cent) among secondary schools than among either combined or primary schools. In addition, gradients are higher among metropolitan schools generally – and the change over time is greater – than among non-metropolitan schools.

Most significantly, My School shows that Australia’s socio-educational gradient has progressively steepened from 32 per cent in 2010 to 37 per cent in 2013. Socio-educational advantage has had an increasing impact on student achievement in just three years. More than before, differences in educational outcomes are the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possessions.

Finding 21: Increased concentration of disadvantaged students in certain schools is having a significant impact on educational outcomes, particularly, but not only, in the government sector. Concentrations of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and Indigenous students have the most significant impact on educational outcomes.

This finding confirms what has been increasingly researched and reported in recent years. Even the most cursory examination of data from My School confirms that a concentration of disadvantaged students exists in many schools and is strongly associated with low educational outcomes.

My School not only includes an ICSEA value for each school but also shows the percentage of each school’s enrolment in each of the four ICSEA quarters. The proportion of each school’s enrolment in the lowest quarter, Q1, indicates the concentration of disadvantaged students. Analysis of student outcomes, represented on My School by NAPLAN, shows a strong association between student outcomes by school and the proportion of school enrolments in the lowest quarter.

The more important question is whether concentration of disadvantage is increasing – in effect, whether what Gonski found to be bad is getting worse.

Our comments on the first Gonski finding indicate that NAPLAN achievement scores have tended to diverge over time between high ICSEA schools, where scores tended to increase, and lower ICSEA schools, where scores more commonly fell. Has anything else happened in these schools over the last few years which might explain this divergence?

Declining NAPLAN scores in lower ICSEA schools could have a number of explanations. It could be due to an enrolment shift of more able students out of these schools. School enrolment data certainly shows that enrolment has fallen in lower ICSEA schools, in the order of 1–2 per cent in schools below ICSEA 900. This change in school size may also reflect demographic changes, particularly in provincial and remote areas. However, even low ICSEA metropolitan schools more commonly experienced declining or static enrolments.

Other data suggests that the social profile of enrolments is changing in low ICSEA schools. Gonski clearly referred to Indigenous students as a disadvantaged group. Between 2011 and 2013 there was a small but noticeable increase in the percentage of Indigenous students in lower ICSEA schools, with almost no change in higher ICSEA schools – illustrating an increasing concentration of a key disadvantaged group in lower ICSEA schools. Again the reasons are a matter of hypotheses: it might be due to student movement or to changing local demographics.

Another possible explanation of concentrating disadvantage and the associated decline in student performance might be found in changes in teacher qualifications and experience in lower ICSEA schools over three years. My School data can’t provide any indication of whether these changes have occurred.

What is surprising and disturbing is that concentration of disadvantage, together with its impact, has been able to be measured over such a short period.

From our appraisal of these seven key Gonski findings we can conclude that Gonski got it right and that the years since the review have seen its findings become more relevant than ever.

The review found that Australian schooling needs to lift the performance of students, particularly the lowest performers. Information available in My School shows that we have not achieved this and that the gap between our higher and lower performers, especially in the secondary years, shows every evidence of widening.

The review found that a funding model should enable resources to be directed to where they are needed most. My School shows that government funding, whether sufficient or not, is generally directed in this way – but the combination of public and private funding increasingly goes to students who already achieve at quite high levels.

The review found that Australia lacks a logical, consistent and publicly transparent approach to funding schooling. My School reveals hundreds of examples of schools which are funded in ways that seem to defy logic and consistency, especially in light of the educational challenges they face.

The review referred to imbalance in the provision of funding to government and non-government schools. Analysis of state and territory recurrent and capital funding provides continuing and inexplicable – to the point of absurd – examples of this imbalance.

The review found that public funding arrangements need to reflect the nature of the educational challenges faced by a system or school. My School shows that the distribution of funding does reflect educational challenges created by school location; but also shows that increases in recurrent funding across the different sectors in recent years does not reflect any notion that funding should pay attention to need.

The review found that funding should aim to ensure that differences in educational outcomes are not the result of non-school factors. By constructing socio-educational gradients from My School data we show that our “equity slope” is worsening in most locations and for different levels of schooling. We are simply heading in the wrong direction.

The review found that increased concentration of disadvantaged students in certain schools is having a significant impact on educational outcomes. The evidence from My School suggests that this concentration has increased in recent years and may explain the increasing gap between high and low ICSEA schools.

The changes we have been able to illustrate using My School data have not taken place over decades. They have occurred across the very same years during which the Gonski review proceeded and reported, then was variously ignored, cherry-picked, partially implemented, and in relative terms largely abandoned.

What the Gonski review panel found to be bad about our framework of schools, we find to be worse. •

A second paper – available here – provides more background on what My School shows about Australia's steepening equity gradient.

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A report from this minister, in this government, that tries to accommodate a range of views? That endorses Labor’s idea of a single national curriculum? Perhaps it is just that the critics were so fixed on Pyne’s sheer gall in appointing Donnelly that they failed to notice that he also appointed a minder, that wily operator of the machinery of influence, Professor Kenneth Wiltshire? Or perhaps Pyne has at last grasped the difference between opposition and government, and decided to box smart? On this interpretation, Donnelly and Wiltshire are sappers, preparing bridgework for a long assault on that bastion of the “cultural left,” the school system. The most satisfying construction is that Pyne’s antics on Gonski plus a mounting electoral backlash against his higher education “reforms” caused the PM’s office to put Pyne on notice and his reviewers on a very short lead.

Whatever the explanation, the final report of the Review of the Australian Curriculum is certainly not as bad as many expected, and is in some respects useful.

The reviewers were asked to examine the curriculum’s “robustness, independence and balance,” with the apparent implication that it was unbalanced, soft, and a creature of special interests. Its three “cross-curriculum priorities” – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and culture, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and sustainability – seemed especially vulnerable to attack from this angle. Few observers would have been surprised to see it replaced by the Coalition’s preferred trinity, Judeo-Christian values, British heritage, and our free-enterprise economic system. That, after all, seemed to be what John Howard himself had urged back in the opposition years.

On these dire expectations the reviewers declined to deliver. They did find the national curriculum to be “monolithic, inflexible and unwieldy,” and pooh-poohed its claims to be “world class,” but they also accepted that it was basically a good idea. They conceded that the curriculum is in fact “robust” in some if not all learning areas; that threats to its “independence” came less from ideology or interest groups than from the demands of states and school systems; and that while more needed to be said about our Judeo-Christian heritage and so forth, the three priorities installed under Labor should be relocated rather than abandoned. The review did propose changes in the Labor-installed ACARA (the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority) but not, as some expected, its abolition.

Many of the review’s other recommendations address non-incendiary matters such as the overloading of the primary years, the need to adapt the curriculum for students with disabilities, and the need for more parent-friendly development processes and documentation.

For several decades from the 1960s debate over schooling in general and curriculum in particular was split along ideological lines on just about every conceivable issue: how to teach reading (phonics versus whole-word), teacher-centred versus student-centred pedagogy, fields of study versus the great disciplines, content versus process, direct instruction versus constructivism, reading the classics versus understanding genres, rigour versus inclusiveness, knowledge versus learning to learn, excellence versus equality, reward for merit versus success for all, and, of course, choice versus the common school.

Polarisation often prevented participants from acknowledging that many of these oppositions are little more than coded rallying cries in the great struggle of us against them. Donnelly, like a number of his ideological companions, is has moved from one side of these false dichotomies to the other, and perhaps in consequence has been a particularly divisive belligerent right up to his appointment by Pyne in January of this year. Until just a few months ago he cast himself as the scourge of the “cultural left,” an entity which never was as monocular, monolithic or influential in reality as in his imagination, and which has not existed at all for the past decade at least. Ironically enough, several of those previously tarred by the “cultural left” brush (and notably the late Jean Blackburn) are relied on by the review.

Thanks particularly to the “teaching effectiveness” movement, the curriculum debate has moved on from grand abstractions to questions of method – questions about how to boost outcomes in the fundamentals of literacy, numeracy and science. The key to boosting “performance,” in this view, is the “quality of teaching,” and better teaching can be achieved through systematic whole-school improvement. The relatively low ideological temperature of the Donnelly–Wiltshire report is an artefact of this consensus. Indeed, Pyne’s “four pillars” (teacher quality, school autonomy, engagement with parents, and stronger curriculum) are an attempt to capture it.

Whether that consensus can succeed even in its own limited terms is another question. The chaotic, riven curriculum debates of decades following the 1960s (rehearsed in the report’s first chapter) can be understood as an effort to come to terms with a problem presented to rather than sought by the teaching profession: what is the purpose of twelve years of schooling, for all? Even harder: how is it to be done?

The reviewers acknowledge these problems. They suggest that the “missing step” in the development of the national curriculum was the failure to construct an “overarching framework,” and that this led to the curriculum’s problems of coherence and bulk. But having made those useful observations, the reviewers join the long list of pundits who have ducked, adding only the suggestion that further work is “urgent.” They also avoid most of the “how” questions, preferring to lean in the general direction of the teacher’s authority while also acknowledging that “all good teachers use a variety of pedagogical approaches.”

Conspicuously absent from this formulation and from the report as a whole is any reference to a central question for the future of teaching and learning (or what some refer to as “curriculum delivery”): what will and should be the role of the digital technologies? The teacher-quality paradigm on which the reviewers tacitly depend is undoubtedly the best option for most schools in the short-to-medium term, but beyond that? Often seen as a new dawn (to borrow Debussy’s aphorism at Wagner’s expense), the focus on the teacher and teaching will prove, in my view, to be more like a glorious sunset.

In the meantime, it is by no means clear that the undoubted potential of the effectiveness approach will be fulfilled. While a blurring of ideological boundaries in talk about curriculum does reduce one obstacle to its implementation, curriculum is only one site of the ideological conflict, and that in turn is only one of the faultlines of Australian schooling. Others include confusion over state and federal government responsibilities; chronic conflict between governments and various schooling agencies and interest groups; and, of course, the sector system and its division between fee and free.

This fractured arrangement of responsibility and authority is what has made the system incapable of lifting its performance in an increasingly international competition, the almost frantic efforts of the Rudd and Gillard governments notwithstanding. The present government has lower ambitions. Will it have more success?

On the mostly positive side of the ledger are suggestions made by the Commission of Audit about a different division of labour between levels of government. On the wholly negative side are the recent solecisms of the Review of Competition Policy. Where the Donnelly–Wiltshire review can be placed is to be determined. As the reviewers themselves note, the fate of their report depends not on their minister but on what he can get past the state and non-government systems. Suggesting, as the reviewers do, that the systems have too much say in ACARA may not be a good start. Every jurisdiction is wary of yet more change, and the NSW minister in particular is hostile to any sign of federal interference. All will want to know what the Abbott government proposes to do about money.

The Donnelly–Wiltshire report opens with the observation that “there is little as controversial in education as determining what it is that young people should be able to know, understand and be able to do following their time at school.” Their review attracted 1600 submissions. Gonski’s funding review received 5700. •

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Schooling makes only a cameo appearance in the review’s interim report. It is relegated to Chapter 10 (on “human services”) along with aged care, health, disability support, employment services and the like. Each of these “services” is examined according to the precepts of competition theory. Is it a natural monopoly? How complex is it, and what is the nature of transactions between consumer and provider? Are there capacity constraints? Or problems in switching from one provider to another? What are the consequences of provider failure? What degree of regulation should or might governments impose?

Schooling, the panel concedes, illustrates some of the problems that may arise when markets are extended into human services. It notes the OECD’s conclusion that school systems with low levels of competition often have high levels of “inclusion,” and, conversely, high-competition systems often have markedly unequal educational outcomes. It cites evidence from Sweden’s excursion into a more competitive system which suggests that it is the advantaged who do the choosing, with “increasing social segregation” as the result.

But, says the panel, inequality is often worse without choice, and choice (in Sweden for example) can stimulate innovation and improve performance. Even if not everyone can choose, does it follow that no one should? And anyway, choice is unavoidable. It’s only a question of who makes it, the consumer or the government.

What could be more even-handed, more reasonable, than that?

In fact the report is entering false claims for both theory and policy. To say so is not to suggest that mainstream economic theory sheds no useful light on schooling – to the contrary, economics has much more to offer than the schooling industry is generally willing to acknowledge.

It is to suggest, however, that the review has been unable and apparently unwilling to see that there are things it can’t see. What can be picked out from a high conceptual altitude is not necessarily what things look like down on the ground. Conspicuously missing from the report’s citations are two recent and substantial studies of how choice and competition actually work in the real world of Australian schooling.

The Grattan Institute’s 2013 study of schooling in the large and broadly representative region of southeast Queensland found (with the help of an economic perspective, by the way) that apparently high levels of competition between schools did little or nothing for educational performance. The 2011 Nous report for the Gonski review concluded (also with help from economics) that, from a social point of view, policies encouraging “choice and diversity” have been a disaster. Behind the realities recorded by these two studies lie many others, including a couple of centuries’ sectarian, sectoral, class and intergovernmental division and conflict. Using competition theory to understand all this is like trying to capture a car crash with a satnav screen dump.

The review’s Olympian gaze is as unhelpful to policy as it is to analysis. Its default position, given by the federal government’s terms of reference and the panel’s acceptance of them, is that the market is the natural order and therefore more competition is prima facie a good thing.

I am no shyer about markets and competition than I am about economics. As co-founder of the Good Universities Guides I was part of an attempt to increase choice and competition in higher education. It is my view that in specific circumstances, such as those obtaining in some localities in the United States, competition between two forms of public schooling (charter and district) appears to be crucial in lifting educational outcomes for those most in need of them – but not, I emphasise, all by itself.

There is no such thing as a one-punch fix for schooling – not more “independence” for public schools, not more accountability, not more testing, not improved “teacher quality,” not more funding, not better leadership programs, and definitely not more competition. It all depends on what competition (or any other nostrum) is combined with, and the circumstances in which that combination is deployed. That is why school reform is such a slow and difficult business.

Consider the constellation of things that would need to be changed in the specific circumstances of Australian schooling for competition to really deliver the educational goods. There would need to be a level playing field, including a Gonski-like needs-based funding floor and a per student expenditure ceiling; a universal no-fee or means-tested fee regime; a focus on competition for performance rather than for students, including regulation or some other way of managing exclusions, cherry-picking, body snatching and dumping; and agreed educational objectives combined with a common set of benchmarks and indicators.

As the Nous report and the small mountain of evidence on which it rests have demonstrated, in the absence of measures such as these the choice and diversity policies initiated in Australia in the 1970s have moved us steadily towards a school system with gated communities at one end of a spectrum and educational ghettos at the other. Unless the competition policy review panel is willing to at least note such realities and the immense difficulty of even getting a decent conversation about them – which would require it to move a long way outside the abstractions of competition theory – support for a more competitive schooling system is merely a free kick for an approach that works for those who don’t need it and against those who do. It would be better if the review’s final report said nothing at all on the subject. •

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Pariah Colleges can crop up anywhere. They are the schools that miss out when parents make their choices – of secondary schools especially but also of primary schools. Private schools and selective public schools are the top choices. After that, public opinion shuffles the rest into good and bad. The biggest losers are usually categorised as disadvantaged, but even in poor areas where every school is officially disadvantaged there will be Pariahs.

I know some people who have chosen Pariah College for their kids. When their friends express puzzlement or even disapproval they say they looked at other schools, because the education department says they should, but local and public best fitted their idea of school. They are very satisfied with their kids’ academic outcomes. They get annoyed by the resistance of teachers to parents’ ideas but concede that change happens, if rather slowly. They have a low opinion of the maths teaching, but from what they hear, things are not much better anywhere else. They know that by all the comparative measures of enrolments and performance Pariah College remains a “disadvantaged” school, but their experience of it has been positive. Even so, they accept that Pariah College, along with other disadvantaged schools, is under pressure to improve itself.

Maxine McKew’s Class Act focuses on disadvantage – especially on the “shameful” link in Australia between school performance and low socioeconomic status. The former broadcaster and politician (the one who unseated John Howard in Bennelong), now an academic, interviews five schools with similar profiles to Pariah College but a determination to be good schools rather than simply disadvantaged ones. None is quite in the same fix as Pariah College – their enrolments match their catchment areas more closely than Pariah’s does – but their solutions readily apply.

Essentially McKew’s class acts have followed the current widely promoted blueprint for school improvement: tighter discipline, a rigorous curriculum, consistent administration and, above all else, a team of teachers united by an unshakeable belief that their students can achieve high goals. They put a lot of time, effort and staff into improving literacy. They introduce serious studies, including creative studies, into the curriculum. They respect research. They analyse their performance collaboratively. They seek out student opinion and try to find ways to act on it. “Progressive” is a dirty word these days, but I can’t resist noting how many of these improvements derive from the progressive tradition of educational reform.

For its part, Pariah College has stressed order via school uniform and a code of conduct. It has brought some order into its homework regime. The curriculum has been enriched by several solid academic options. It has attractive excursions and out-of-school programs. The introduction of advanced streams and groups in maths and English, though questionable in my view, indicates rising expectations for school performance. My friends feel that some of the staff are cruising in the shallow waters of early retirement, but generally esteem the teachers they meet as confident in their subject and ambitious for their students. Not the complete blueprint, but it’s on the way. Teamwork, clarity of goals and student participation could still be much enhanced. Gonski money would also help.

Class Act is introduced by David Gonski himself, and one of his Review’s panel, Ken Boston, features among eight “Thought Leaders” in part two. Both advocate forcefully for education as a public good and point to the disastrous consequences for our future of the great social divide in our school systems. Advocacy to redress this historical disgrace is the great strength of Class Act but equally strong, I think, is McKew’s decision to give as much honour to the thought of teachers as to that of Leaders. Teaching has had and will continue to have a long struggle to be recognised as a true profession, so showing respect for teachers’ thought is important.

Of the Thought Leaders, those like John Hattie, who have synthesised and researched best practice, are necessary complements to the accounts of school practice. Their common theme, which these days can be used as much against as for teachers, is that teaching is what matters. They preach school improvement and, closer to home, reform of teacher training on the model of the Melbourne Graduate School’s Master of Teaching, which recruits students with good academic degrees and trains them with loads of practice. Ultimately they think practicum should extend to internship for as long as it takes to know that the intern really can teach.

Elsewhere among the Leaders, Dean Ashenden argues for greater student control of their work and Misty Adoniou, from a distinguished background in second-language teaching, argues for the value of teaching grammar through writing, using both good literature and the students’ own writing.

Class Act’s subtitle promises an end to “the education wars.” This might have been the publisher’s idea, for there is no hint anywhere in the text of what these wars are that will be ended. I cannot imagine an ending of the class war that engulfs Pariah College. The best it can hope for is a dugout the enemy won’t bother to destroy. Nor will anything imaginable change the war of Public vs Private. Once the public forces met their Waterloo in the 1970s, that conflict became a cold war, with the total collapse of the public forces the only way for it to end.

What other wars are there? Pyne and Abbott’s Culture War games? Colonel Blimp would laugh at them. The Literacy War? Misty Adoniou dismisses phonics-is-all fanaticism but it’s a case of yet again – the literacy wars are education’s one hundred years’ war.

If the federal government’s offensives of the past decade or so can be seen as a new attack on mediocrity, it doesn’t find allies among the teachers and leaders in Class Act. References to mass testing, as in NAPLAN, and its use to hold schools and teachers to account are lukewarm or dismissive. The idea of a national curriculum is at odds with many of the endorsements of school change via curriculum. It can be argued, of course, that innovation in curriculum and assessment is great for the Leaders but the mob still needs stuff to cling to, but it’s an odd view of the kind of school improvement advocated in Class Act.

Despite its many good points, Class Act has little to say on a couple of issues it sees as important, and nothing to say about what I consider a central issue in the reform of schooling. It gives routine acknowledgement of the importance of numeracy but does not tackle the deficiencies of maths teaching beyond noting that too many maths teachers are not fully qualified. Several of its Leaders talk about the place of technology in the world facing students but none of the exemplary schools seems to have made a feature of technology. A year or so ago I toured a Catholic regional college that took technology very seriously – requiring expertise of its staff and daily use by its students. A profile of such a school (marginally more “disadvantaged” than Pariah) would have been useful, given the prominence accorded the issue among commentators.

The most significant gap for me was the absence of an analysis of competition either within or among schools.

Just on fifty years ago I helped write and publish on behalf of the director of secondary education in Victoria, R. A. Reed, a set of five principles for curriculum and assessment. One of them said there was “no place for competitive assessment” (class grading by letters or percentages) in Victorian schools. The result was that other ways of recounting students’ performance – by description or by the mastery or completion of targets – spread. A descendant of those assessment methods still operates in the Victorian Certificate of Education in the final two years of secondary school, but it has been lost in the pursuit of finely graded tertiary entrance scores derived from certificate performances. Grades have become the goal of learning.

Competition among students cannot of course be avoided and it can be useful. But it has to be managed. If it creates categories of success and failure, alarm bells should ring. If it builds in these categories as virtually permanent judgements of individuals it has gone too far. Graded assessments reward the As and Bs, comfort the Cs and maybe some Ds but fail the Es. If they are interpreted essentially as a measure of effort, they offer some hope of recovery. If they are seen as measures of ability, we are indulging in the questionable moral practice of compelling young people to fail. A new offensive against built-in failure could turn out to be our most significant education war.

Pariah College is the loser in another misuse of competition, this time between schools. In the official mind, competition pushes schools to lift their game. But the playing field is anything but level. Pariah’s catchment area, its effective zone, is prosperous and gentrifying. On the My School website Pariah College’s two obvious feeder primary schools, one virtually next door, the other within a short stroll, look pretty posh: 64 and 78 per cent are in the upper half of socioeconomic status measures. Pariah has 31 per cent in the top half. My School does not draw attention to this class bias, but then its purpose is to encourage choice not to analyse it.

Clearly, Pariah College enrols much of its intake from pockets of public housing and immigrant settlements. Under a strict local zoning system, Pariah College would resemble its upmarket surrounding schools. But there is no zoning. The government maintains a fiction that there are school zones at the same time as it actively encourages parents to choose among schools, both primary and secondary, within a wide catchment area. It is true that zones are hard to control – determined parents and schools will get around them somehow. It is also true that social stratification will grow when school choice is promoted. Pariah College is disadvantaged not so much by the part of the community that patronises it as by the part that shuns it.

There is a solution to Pariah’s predicament. If the public schools in the catchment area agreed to collaborate rather than compete, if Pariah became a campus of a larger administrative unit run in the interests of the whole district, it would cease to be the pariah of the district, the only school listed in the stats as disadvantaged. It would soon become the local school for a much more upmarket enrolment, indistinguishable from, or even part of, its feeders. Whatever choice operated in the larger district it would not be between good or bad public schooling. And if choice of some other kind got out of hand, the schools would have the means to collectively redress it – something neither they nor the education department think worth doing at the moment.

In a collaborative arrangement across schools, My School would categorise Pariah as similar to the others around it, and no longer disadvantaged. Sounds good but what would change? Can it stop working at school improvement now that its enrolment has improved? Should it rest on the laurels conferred by NAPLAN and other national data? Or should it turn its attention to the international data that suggests our top-of-the-market schools aren’t adding enough value? Should it stop thinking about teamwork, student participation, enriched curricula, positive assessment, or should it work even harder at the same things?

In short, it might have to stop thinking about attracting a better class of student and join in thinking about how to stop rejecting students. It might have to become a Leader of Thought about the ill effects of poaching, selection and failure.

One of the schools profiled in Class Act differs from the rest in that it is located in a socially (hence educationally) advantaged area: Garran in Canberra. Garran’s approach makes a good guide for our imagined collaborative district school. It goes for good literature, analysis of writing, promotion of the twenty-first-century skills of critical and creative thinking, staff teamwork and ever-rising expectations for all students. “What’s avoided,” it says, “is any suggestion of performing to the NAPLAN standard.” International tests of performance put Garran up with the very best.

Pariah or Garran, the issues and solutions look very alike. Yet for many, schools like these are engaged on opposite sides in a class war, which is unending. •

The post The war that doesn’t end appeared first on Inside Story.

David Gonski is a famously cool customer, but surely even his sangfroid was tested as he rose to speak on Wednesday evening at Melbourne University’s Wilson Hall. This was his first substantial public statement since the release of the eponymous report on schools funding more than two years ago, years of incessant headlines, of hopes raised and dashed, and of bitter political brawling. He was entering dangerous territory.

The “Gonski” review was launched by the Rudd/Gillard governments at the point of intersection of three of the most enduring conflicts of Australian political life: between federal and state governments, between left and right, and between the free, secular government school sector and religion-based, fee-charging non-government schools. All ride on the tectonic plates of class and class relations, slow-moving but fundamental.

“Gonski” argued that these divisions have allowed the school system to drift steadily towards greater social segmentation, and have prevented it from tackling persistent problems of inequality. Overcoming these problems, the review suggested, demanded overcoming these divisions. All public funding for schooling, federal and state alike, should go into a single national bucket from which each school would be funded according to the difficulty of its educational task, irrespective of its location or sector.

The divisions declined to be overcome, however. “Gonski” was first hung out to dry by its sponsor, the Gillard government, then passionately embraced; watered down before being accepted by some states and rejected by others; rejected then embraced then tolerated for the moment by the federal Coalition in the person of Christopher Pyne; and, most recently, confronted by a counter-proposal.

The National Commission of Audit, after finding arrangements left in the wake of Gonski to be “complex, inconsistent and lack(ing) transparency,” has recently urged the new government to abandon the national bucket in favour of a devolved approach – give the money to the states, that is, for their use and distribution within a broad national framework.

What, in the light of all that, would this courteous, quietly spoken master of the backrooms of power, this chairman of everything, choose to say? He had promised to define “the essence of the findings of the review,” to consider whether and how these findings had been understood and implemented, and to close with some remarks on what he learned from being involved in the review. Plenty of scope there.

Would he play the statesman, perhaps? Accept that the end of greater fairness in schooling might be served by means other than those that he and his panel devised? Some version of the Audit Commission’s model, for example? That would alienate Labor as well as making it seem that he had reverted to corporate type, not a man of principle at all, just another player in the cynical game.

Or fight fire with fire? The temptation was certainly there, in Pyne’s brazen opportunism, and in the Commission of Audit’s arch interpretation of “Gonski” as just another funding mechanism. A payback killing might keep faith with Gonski’s many supporters and his Labor’s sponsors, but it would also enrage a federal government with a long memory. It would obliterate any hope of influencing the Abbott government’s eventual solution.

Or might he, just might he say what he really had “learned from being involved in the review”? That Australian schooling is squandering its patrimony, becoming more socially divided and less able to deliver on the promise of “equal opportunity” by the minute? An ungovernable mess, buzzing with activity but making scarcely any headway? That its world’s-worst-practice three-sector system is a divisive relic of the nineteenth century? That the blame-shifting involvement of two levels of government in every school in the country is counterproductive? That having governments on three-year electoral cycles run a business that needs big strategies pursued over decades is a recipe for muddle, frustration and waste?

No, he didn’t say those things. But nor did he say anything to the contrary. He is a subtle man, used to saying things with silence.

What he did say, out loud, was that he apologises for nothing and regrets nothing – well, one small thing perhaps. It might have been better, in the light of experience, not to have mentioned the price tag. “Major media outlets,” he observed, naming no names, “talked of further billions for education and no doubt those who had to find the amount were very bluntly reminded of what was involved.”

The shame of that was that it distracted from the real point and purpose of the report, the breadth and complexity of problems it took on: big differences in funding amounts and methods between states and sectors; the fact that those least in need had most, and vice versa; the opaque, complex and various ways of measuring and allowing for disadvantage; the lack of clear statements of “aspirations” for schooling. “Two years on… our analysis has stood up to scrutiny,” said Gonski. “Some may disagree with aspects and conclusions but I’m not aware of any major holes that have been found.”

Gonski was warmly welcomed by a big crowd and even more warmly farewelled – he made it clear that this was his “postscript” – but was only once interrupted by applause, and that was when he insisted that the purpose of a funding system was to “ensure that differences in educational outcomes are not the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possession.”

At that and many other points Gonski took tacit issue with Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum that there is no such thing as society. He reported his own family’s debt to schooling. He talked about the “enormous” difference between “well-endowed schools and those in the lower socioeconomic areas.” He insisted that many of his peers in the world of big business shared his “feeling for society.” He encouraged people to work outside their home territory. “It is good for the individual [and] good for the society” because it builds “trust and cooperation” between sectors.

He attacked as well as endorsed and defended. His chief target was the Commission of Audit. Its alternative scheme might be clear and simple, but “like a lot that is simple it is not adequate.” States could not be both custodians of their own schools and responsible for funding competitors. In any event, leaving things to the states could lead to different systems and different aspirations in different parts of the nation. The Commission’s argument for winding back spending increases planned for 2017 and beyond was to be regretted. If money had to be saved, why hadn’t the Commission revisited the previous government’s decision that “no school will be worse off”?

Gonski told his audience that the review presented him with an “opportunity to make a stand.” His speech was another, and he took it.

Is that entirely a good thing? Gonski’s speech, like his report, reflects rising concern around the Western world that the surge of wealth to the already-wealthy over the long postwar boom has become a threat to social cohesion and to the legitimating claim that “opportunity” is “equal.” Social cohesion and legitimacy are core business for schooling. We should certainly be grateful that Gonski called for a national approach to schooling in the social as well as the geographic and political sense.

It is an approach that should have national appeal, especially coming as it did from the big end of town. There is nothing inherently sectional or party-political about it. A conservative government could find as many reasons to go along with it as a Labor administration, and as Gonski himself pointed out, the most enthusiastic “Gonski” supporter has been the Coalition government in New South Wales.

Its federal counterpart, however, is of a very different mind, and not merely in the service of Christopher Pyne’s ever-changing political needs. The underlying dynamic is that members of privileged groups often use privilege to pursue immediate individual interests at the expense of the long-term stability of the social order on which their privilege depends.

That is exactly what the high-fee independent schools have been encouraging their clients to do in the golden decades since Gough Whitlam launched an education spending bonanza in response to Peter Karmel’s Schools in Australia report. Burgeoning wealth has allowed them to just about guarantee the transmission of cultural capital from one generation to the next, partly through success in academic competition, partly via what would in other circumstances be called social engineering – using fees and academic selection to cherry-pick students and families, and to constitute networks, outlooks and codes. In the process, these schools and their selective companions in the government sector have performed something like the inverse of that service for excluded social groups and their schools.

In this perspective, Gonski (Shore old scholar) and fellow panellist Kathryn Greiner (chair of high-end Loreto Kirribilli) can be seen as reminding their peers that schooling has tasks and responsibilities that go beyond privileging their own offspring. And Pyne can be understood as saying: you gotta be kidding – enjoy!

Pyne has prevailed, thus far at least, because problems of social cohesion and legitimacy are not (yet) as marked in Australia as in some other societies, notably Britain and the United States, and because he and his Coalition colleagues are blinkered to Gonski-like concerns by their own experience of privilege and by an ideology that reflects it. They find it easier to see individuals as masters of their fate, and markets as the arena of their fair and bracing competition, than to see that both depend on a coherent social order accepted by its citizens as fair and legitimate.

In these circumstances it is not hard to see why David Gonski’s expression of a fundamentally different way of thinking about society and schooling would receive such a warm reception from his Wilson Hall audience. But there is a big distance between the impulse and its full articulation as policy and translation into practice.

“Gonski” was only ever one part of the jigsaw of a fully national approach to schooling. It was never even allowed to be a full review of funding. Its terms of reference took as given Australia’s unique and uniquely dysfunctional three-sector system – some pay, some don’t, and so on ad infinitum. “Gonski” recommended funding floors, but no ceiling, leaving those who can to pay whatever it takes to thwart equal opportunity. “Gonski” had much more to say about the distribution of funding than its effective use. It is now, after two years as a political football, weaker in all these respects.

One of the central obstacles to a fully national approach is the so-called “residualisation” process, alluded to above. As the Gonski review and one of its commissioned reports show in close detail,  well-positioned schools – in all three sectors – do whatever they can to attract the “best” students and their families, thereby both excluding the rest and undermining the schools that they do have access to. Levelling-up the funding field is a part of the answer, but so is doing something about the rules and conventions of the game. On these, Gonski’s terms of reference were silent.

Problems of design are compounded by problems of political engineering. The hard fact is that “Gonski” did not get up. The Gillard and Rudd governments tried to get nine governments to pull in the same direction, and Gonski’s proposals depended on their being able to do so. They couldn’t. That failure follows the failure of Whitlam’s Schools Commission, established in 1973 to prosecute a national approach but dead within a decade, victim of states and non-government systems jealous of their prerogatives.

The apparently paradoxical lesson may well be that the Commission of Audit’s devolution scheme, muscled-up to include targets for and monitoring of schools’ social composition, income and expenditure, value-add, and quality of learning experience as well as the “outcomes” nominated by the Commission, is more likely to achieve Gonski’s objectives than the mechanisms proposed by the review.

The great danger now, particularly for the Labor Party, is that it will venture once more unto the Gonski breach. Unfortunately, Gonski’s remarks did little to encourage Labor to think twice, and Bill Shorten probably wouldn’t be listening anyway. His budget-in-reply speech suggests that he can scarcely believe his political luck. He can go to the next election as the man who will deliver Gonski.

For those with long enough memories there is an awful feeling of déjà vu all over again. Gonski’s oration was in honour of Jean Blackburn, the philosopher queen of Australian schooling for two decades or more. Blackburn was a highly influential member of Whitlam’s Karmel Committee. It, too, wanted a “national” approach in the social as well as the geographic and political sense, a schooling system that honoured the social contract. It, too, was the hope of the side.

As some of Jean’s intimates know, she was worried sick, right from the start, that the alignment of political forces was such that “Karmel,” despite having the right impulse, was constructing the wrong machinery. Far from settling the “state aid” question, as Whitlam boasted, she feared that it was being put on a new, complicated, inherently unstable and heavily defended basis. As a prominent figure in Australian education with important work to do as the Schools Commission’s guiding intellectual light, she was hardly in a position to say so. Later, she was.

“There were no rules about student selection and exclusion, no fee limitations, no shared governance, no public education accountability, no common curriculum requirements below the upper secondary level,” Blackburn wrote in 1991. “We have now become a kind of wonder at which people [in other countries] gape. The reaction is always, ‘What an extraordinary situation.’”

The resulting mess is what, forty years later, Gonski was asked to deal with. Unless we are very lucky, and in particular unless Labor is prepared to do some difficult and rapid thinking, someone will be saying something very like that about Gonski in another forty years’ time. •

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THREE new books about schooling, the first a polemic, the second a polemic disguised as a guide for parents, and the third a scholarly history – all dwell on that uniquely Australian mistake, the three-sector system of government, Catholic and independent schools. In doing so they (and this review) illustrate one of the reasons for regarding it as a mistake. We spend so much time and political energy talking about this second-order problem, from irreconcilable points of view, that we can neither concentrate on nor agree about matters of genuinely educational importance.

Marion Maddox’s Taking God to School is the starkest illustration of the point. A senior academic and a team of researchers have spent much high-quality intellectual effort in exposing what everyone already knows, sort-of: that governments have aided and abetted the rise of fee-charging religion-based schools and hence the decline of free and secular state schools, and have smoothed the path of religion into the state schools as well.

This is not to suggest that Maddox’s excellent efforts are beside the point. Unfortunately the reality constructed by the sector system makes them very well directed indeed. The most startling and troubling of Maddox’s exhaustively documented revelations concern the dark and fringy kind of religion which suffuses some small independent schools and (as a recent incident in Victoria illustrates) some federally supported programs in government schools. Governments allow and subsidise schools that teach creationism as a legitimate alternative to evolution (and obligatory for the truly faithful) and advertise as their first priority the training of “soldiers” to “do battle for the Lord in a world which rejects his laws and dominion.” Such content and objectives are conspicuously absent from the National Goals for Schooling on which all Australian governments have agreed. Less egregiously, but still unacceptably, church-based schools work the angles, including using religious exemptions to implement discriminatory employment and enrolment practices.

Almost as offensive, to Maddox’s mind, is the use of public funds to help create and expand church-based schools that charge as much to let a child through the gate for a year as some people can earn over the same period.

Maddox is particularly well placed and qualified to rage against these iniquities. She has research degrees in both politics and theology, is a practising Christian, and is a product of both state and independent schools. Her independent alma mater, she reports with eloquent fury, boasts an indoor eight-lane fifty-metre heated pool (with a learn-to-swim area, an “international water-polo field” and both one- and three-metre diving boards), a drama theatre with red-carpeted steps deep enough to either lounge on or place chairs, and a “free-standing two-storey music block, home to the music curriculum that takes over the Sydney Opera House for its biennial concert” – all subsidised by state and federal governments via capital grants, recurrent funding and tax-deductible donations from prosperous old scholars.

Maddox argues that these nominally Christian schools have become instruments of intimidation, a means by which parents are convinced that if they’re not paying till it hurts they’re not doing the best by their children. In the name of “choice” these schools contribute to the wasteful and socially undesirable duplication and triplication of provision. These are matters to which we will return.

Maddox notes that as Australia has become less religious, its schooling has become more so, a paradox fuelled, she suggests, by governments’ love affair with outsourcing. It is also a dialectic: schools are a key site of “blowback” against rising irreligion. More consequential for Maddox’s argument and conclusions is her focus on exposé, and on religion rather than on who has used it, and what for. That focus leads Maddox to pass lightly over the workings of selection in government schools (some of which are in effect fee-free private schools), and to urge a return to “free, compulsory and secular” schooling – a return, that is, to an age that never was, and in which “secular” was in part a sectarian weapon in the struggle between the Catholics and the rest. Maddox closes with the injunction, “Let us reclaim the secular.” Secularism, she insists, is not a rival to religion, as some advocates of religion like to say, but “a way of going about things that enables people with as many different voices as possible to participate in public life.” Even with that crucial caveat, Maddox’s battle cry could, for reasons discussed below, easily lead us deeper into the cul-de-sac in which the politics of schooling has been trapped for much of the past couple of centuries.

DAVID GILLESPIE is, if anything, even better placed to make his pitch than Maddox is hers. A father of six children, with no educational interests or doctrines to defend, his declared purpose is to show other parents how he and his wife managed to find great schools for their brood without going broke. To that end, Gillespie speeds with amazing dexterity across a vast body of research about what makes for successful schooling – research which, he points out, is frequently esoteric, of questionable quality and needlessly replicated as well as inconclusive or downright contradictory. Gillespie’s cool, sceptical eye (he was a corporate lawyer) allows him to see more clearly than most of us who have spent a lifetime trying to figure out how schooling does and should work, although it should also be noted that he was much aided and influenced by research commissioned by the Gonski review and conducted by a consortium led by the Nous consulting group.

Gillespie’s conclusions, in no particular order, are as follows. Teacher unions can take much of the blame for ever-decreasing class sizes which have inflated costs without improving outcomes, for protecting bad teaching, and for declining parental trust in state schools. A good school system should be able to overcome any disadvantage irrespective of home environment. There are good and bad big schools and small schools, single-sex and co-ed schools, and high-fee, low-fee and government schools. Raw scores don’t matter, value-add does. “Charter” schools, aka “independent state schools,” might fix some schools under some circumstances but they can’t fix the system and may actually make it worse. Teachers make all the difference to kids, and principals make all the difference to schools. Teacher qualifications don’t matter, teacher skill does. Teachers need less contact time, a culture of mentorship, and encouragement to continuous improvement. They should gather and give constant feedback on student performance. Learning to learn is important, and so are extracurricular activities (music especially). Languages other than English should form part of every kid’s diet, and phonics is essential to learning to read. Technology can make a real difference but often doesn’t. Homework policy doesn’t matter much, but effective communication with parents does. Streaming is bad for all concerned (but “acceleration” for kids in areas where they are exceptionally able isn’t). Don’t hothouse your preschool kids, and don’t waste money on tutoring when they’re older. Once your kids are in a primary or secondary school don’t move them unless you absolutely have to.

It is a mark of Gillespie’s independence of mind that no reader will agree – or disagree – with everything in that list. I would quibble with quite a bit of it (more on the grounds of what isn’t there than what is), but it’s the best short summary of do’s and don’ts (most derived from the “effective schools” literature) that I’ve seen. It should be compulsory reading for every teacher education student. In fact Free Schools could replace large slabs of many teacher ed reading lists, not least because Gillespie’s ultra-egalitarian prose means that prospective teachers would actually read and understand it.

Gillespie’s tour d’horizon does indeed provide a lot of useful and extraordinarily well-supported advice for parents. But there are several catches to his claim that if they take that advice and put in a bit of leg-work all will be well. For one thing, there may be a lot of schools on the map but that doesn’t mean that the kids can be got to them and/or that mum and dad can afford fees where applicable and/or that the school will or can enrol them, a set of realities established by a recent Grattan Institute study of a typical suburban milieu (a study not referred to by Gillespie, by the way). For another, even those whose location and/or means permit “choice” don’t necessarily buy and read books, or otherwise acquire the skill and tenacity to get it right – or, as I can testify from personal experience, they do, and still get it wrong. At least some of those who can “choose” don’t really care about the things Gillespie really cares about. A third problem: to the extent that Gillespie’s advice plus the federal government’s MySchool website plus hundreds of thousands of dinner party and barbie conversations do their work, the problem which “choosing” is meant to address is thereby exacerbated.

That, to his great credit, is a reality Gillespie is willing to confront. He reports that he has been a student in the Australian education system for most of his life, but until doing the research for the book “had no real understanding of how the different components of that system work or how profoundly broken it is.” Parents shouldn’t be in the choosing position in the first place, he insists. They’re victims of “a chain of unique events in our educational history” which has issued in a “self-fulfilling, rolling disaster” in which everyone is forced to look out for themselves, often at the expense of everyone else. “I want everyone who reads this,” he says, “to know who is pulling the levers and why.”

Gillespie can be accused of heroic and hyperbolic generalisation, and as discussed further below he hasn’t really grasped who is pulling the levers and why, but he has nailed the big and often fudged workings of a complicated, opaque system. What we are really doing, he says, is “streaming our entire education system… creating a multi-tiered system that not only entrenches disadvantage at the bottom but weakens the entire system.” In the upshot we have “high levels of inequity, social division... and worse outcomes for everybody.” The evidence from around the world, Gillespie argues, leads to a simple conclusion which we have so far been unable to act upon: a good system raises all boats and a bad one lowers them.

The story of “a chain of unique events in our educational history” is told in greater detail and at a much lower temperature by Craig Campbell and Helen Proctor in A History of Australian Schooling. With its plain title, plain prose, and a design unfortunately evocative of a 1960s school textbook (lots of headers in large font, low-res photos of static subjects) this looks and in many respects is a conventional history, document-based, organised horizontally by periods, vertically by theme, subdued in tone, cautious in explanation, slow to judgement. It is also unprecedentedly broad in scope, a model of compression and synthesis, and invaluable.

There is much more between these covers than was dreamed of in the philosophy of the educational historians of a generation or two ago: daily life in the classroom as well as the big politics of funding and governance; a history of childhood and adolescence (and of these two categories) as well as the experience of teachers and teaching; the rise of kindergartens and early childhood education as well as primary and secondary schooling; the intentions (announced and otherwise) of governments and policy-makers but also the actual and often very different consequences; local and particular realities as well as state and national events. The authors even attempt an account of the education of the young in pre-European Australia.

For all that breadth, and for all their scrupulous detachment, Campbell and Proctor are obliged to provide a detailed account of the construction of various mechanisms of “differential provision for different populations” from the earliest days of settlement to the present market-like arrangement. On this last they venture a carefully guarded conclusion. “It is difficult to see how a consumer-driven allocation of enrolments can operate without creating hierarchies of schools, children and youth,” they say, adding that the attempt to do so represents “a major challenge facing those policy-makers… concerned with both equity and choice.”

I WOULD like to close by trying to shed further light on the origins and nature of the “self-fulfilling, rolling disaster” and on where a solution, or a less damaging system, might eventually be found.

The Karmel/Whitlam scheme, which inaugurated the current market-like form of the “rolling disaster,” was a deal, a compact. It was obviously a settlement between church and state, and between Labor and the Catholics, but it was also a deal between classes. It allied that large section of the working class which is of Irish origin, alienated by a long experience of dreadful treatment at British hands, with groups at the other end of the social and economic spectrum. The pivotal moment came late in the struggle over the Karmel proposals when Whitlam bowed to the demand, advanced through an obstructive Senate, that all non-government schools should get the new largesse, the toffs and the impoverished parish schools alike. The historic objective, supported and perhaps engineered by the bishops, was to have both state aid and religion-based schooling seen as a right, not a privilege.

Karmel’s complex design for that settlement – funds from three different sources distributed in three different mixes to three differently run sectors – put the sectors and schools in a zero-sum competition with each other for customers and money. Naturally enough, in this new scheme of things, those best placed to compete competed best, and vice versa. An unforeseen consequence was that schools for the non-Catholic working class, the government schools, were stuck with bureaucracies, made slow and clumsy by decades of quasi-monopoly. Teacher unions, as much victims as villains, were thereby dealt a poor hand, which they proceeded to play badly.

It was Marx, I think, who observed that an endemic problem for what he called the ruling class in capitalist societies is that members of that class pursue their own interests at the expense of the long-term interests of the class as a whole. These latter include maintaining a legitimate, coherent and stable social order, a task in which, as Campbell and Proctor show, schooling has come to play a large part. Australian elites, permitted by Karmel and encouraged by so-called neoliberal ideas that arrived in Australia at about the same time, have pursued their individual interests at the expense of the collective with an élan documented in each of the volumes noted here.

Gonski, in this view, can be seen as an effort to repair the consequent damage by reminding Australia’s elites (of which he is a prominent and constructive member) that schooling has tasks and responsibilities which go beyond privileging their own offspring. To that end he proposed a new class compact to replace Whitlam’s. Its failure reveals several things. First, that there is widespread support for an approach of the Gonski kind; neither the problem nor the hope of a solution will go away. Second, that the elites among whom Gonski moves will need some more bad report cards from the OECD before they will agree to a shift in strategy. And third, that the compact itself, and particularly its regulatory content, needs more thought by all concerned – teacher organisations, the Catholic Church and the Coalition party room, among others.

Some starting points. Teacher organisations, long identified with the defence of one sector (including its indefensible aspects), could shift their focus to advocating a universal public system (or as near to universal as can be got) in which some schools will be secular, others not. That would press the Australian branch of the Catholic Church to accept that things have moved on, and that it should agree to guarantees accepted elsewhere, including (as Maddox records) in New Zealand. It would permit an end to the invidious circumstance in which some parents pay fees and others in the same or similar circumstances don’t. Either all pay on the same means-tested basis, or none do – or at least none who patronise a school willing to play by rules limiting how much can be spent and how much they can cherry-pick students at the expense of other students and schools. Too hard? Vide the AFL.

The Karmel funding maze, which does much to make the sector system opaque and intractable, could be simplified by shifting to Gonski’s “national schools resourcing body” or to a quite different division of labour between the Commonwealth and states, perhaps along lines suggested by the Grattan Institute.

A new narrative for schooling would accept both diversity and competition – but competition for achievement rather than for students or money, and on a level playing field, within common rules. It would pay more attention to education, less to machinery. It would see schooling’s economic contribution as indirect, social and supportive rather than instrumental and individual, as the means by which the social cohesion and legitimacy necessary to prosperity is achieved through universal access to a rich scientific, artistic, material and intellectual culture. It would offer a less snakes-and-ladders interpretation of “equality of opportunity” and “ability” than was provided by Karmel or Gonski, and more emphasis on “educability.” Equality, which has carried much of the load in the struggle with unrestrained liberty, would get more help from fraternity.

Nothing would put hopes such as these more quickly to rest than a suggestion that we “reclaim the secular” root and branch – that is, tell the Catholic Church that it has to get out of the schooling business – although lurks and loopholes exposed by Maddox should be closed, and, forewarned by developments in the United States, marginalising the cranks should be a priority. •

The post A “self-fulfilling, rolling disaster”? appeared first on Inside Story.

WHEN Australia’s federal education minister Christopher Pyne claimed that independent public schools are always better than those run by public authorities, he was only repeating what successive education secretaries in Britain have been saying for years.

His plan to spend a lot of public money enticing public schools to become independent, while light on detail, has been British government policy since 2000, when Tony Blair’s education secretary David Blunkett introduced privately run academies. The momentum was briefly lost during Gordon Brown’s prime ministership because Brown and his education secretary Ed Balls were not wholly convinced that private is always better, though they dared not speak the heresy in public.

But since David Cameron’s Conservative-dominated coalition government took office in 2010, the education secretary has been Michael Gove, for whom it is an article of faith that the best schools are private schools. Gove has invented a new sort of privatised education which he calls free schools.

So does Britain’s experience bear out Pyne’s theory? Sadly not. The policy has not resulted in improved standards, and it has not lowered the incidence of failing schools. Turning children’s education into another consumer commodity has, however, made several people seriously rich, and thereby created a powerful pressure group which will fight to keep every gain that privatised schooling has made.

It has also greatly strengthened the power of organised religions. Principally Anglicans and Catholics, but to a lesser extent Muslims and Orthodox Jews, now control far more publicly financed schools than before, and can decide who teaches in them and who gains admittance to learn in them. Prior to this scheme, there was a careful compromise between church and state, constructed by the 1944 Education Act, which gave organised religions a few schools but ensured that there were generally non-denominational schools available to parents who wanted them. The academies program blew this apart, and in some areas there are now only Christian schools.

Academies, Blunkett told us in 2000, were to be independent schools for which a sponsor – a business, a church, a charity or a very rich individual – was expected to find a fifth of the capital costs, which could be up to £2 million. This requirement disappeared very quickly, as business explained forcibly to Blunkett that it was not there to give money to the state education system, but to take money from it.

The government was to pay running costs, far more generously than for other schools. But the sponsors’ modest share in the investment gave them a level of freedom in how they ran the schools which no state school in Britain had ever had. Democratic elements – teachers, parents and local council representatives on the governing body – were stripped out. National pay scales could be ignored, and if they were taking over an existing school, academies could fire any of the existing staff they didn’t want.

They could also expel pupils more easily than other schools, and could select up to 10 per cent of their intake on the basis of aptitude for the school’s specialism. The pupils they did not want were dumped on neighbouring state schools.

Despite all these inbuilt advantages, academies never proved that they were better than conventional state schools – although the government set about denigrating the efforts of teachers in the schools replaced by academies, in order to suggest they were. Dozens of embittered teachers saw their life’s work belittled to suit the new political agenda.

One of them was Gordon Potter, former deputy head at Coulby Newham School in Middlesbrough, closed in 2003 to make way for a city academy. He became sick of reading about what a rotten school he used to run. Despite having a much more deprived intake than other local schools, they had excellent results. The academy that replaced Potter’s school, sponsored and run by a construction company, expelled ten times as many pupils as the national average and still did not get anywhere near to meeting its public examination targets. By 2005 it was in serious trouble. It was not the only one.

The government appointed a businessman, Cyril Taylor (soon to be Sir Cyril, knighted for services to education) to sell the idea of sponsoring schools to businesses. I once asked him what a businessman added to a school. He had once, he replied, been given a lift to his office early one morning by Lord Harris, the carpet millionaire, who runs a chain of academies. From the back of his Rolls Royce, Lord Harris first phoned round his stores asking for yesterday’s sales figures; then he phoned round his schools, asking for today’s attendance figures. And that, said Sir Cyril, is what a successful businessman can bring to education.

The Christian churches, with falling attendances, grabbed the chance to increase their importance in British education massively. Of the forty-six academies open by October 2006, fourteen – just under a third of the total – were entirely in the control of Christian organisations or evangelical Christians. Three others had Christian organisations as one half of the sponsorship team. All said that the faith was a central part of their academy. These organisations had the power to decide what is taught and how it is taught.

Of these sponsors, the two most disturbing were the evangelical Christians Sir Peter Vardy and Robert Edmiston. Sir Peter is a creationist. He believes that the Bible is telling the literal truth when it says that the universe was created by God in six days; and he believes that this event occurred in 4004 BC.

“Schools should teach the creation theory as literally depicted in Genesis,” said Nigel McQuoid when he was head of Sir Peter’s Kings Academy. “The Bible says clearly that homosexual activity is against God’s design. I would indicate that to young folk.”

The Bexley Academy, run by a businessman, had a mock stock exchange dealing room, to show pupils what really matters, which is of course making loads of money.

After a parliamentary committee examined the academies program in 2005, it told the government: “We fail to understand why the DfES [Britain’s education department] is putting such substantial resources into academies when it has not produced the evidence on which to base the expansion of this program… What evidence there is paints a mixed picture. Despite the paucity of evidence, the government is enthusiastically pushing forward with the program and with new academies. We caution against this approach and urge the DfES to monitor carefully the performance of academies and adjust its policies accordingly.”

NOTHING has changed, except that more time has passed and the program ought by now to be proving its worth. It isn’t, but it has become a matter of dogma.

In 2010, within days of taking office, the new Conservative education secretary gave all schools the right to become academies if they wanted to. Not long after, the Times Educational Supplement looked at all the areas that were likely to have new academies, and found that most of them were affluent middle-class areas. Instead of driving up standards in the most deprived areas, academies were six times less likely to be set up in those communities. By then, the Church of England was by far the biggest academy sponsor.

In the same year, free schools were introduced, to provide another avenue for privatising state schools. Free schools are new schools set up and controlled by parents, teachers, charities or businesses. The first twenty-four free schools opened in autumn 2011.

Scandals persist in the academies, as they are bound to do when businesses are given more or less unlimited access to public money. As I write, it’s just been revealed that Grace Academy, which runs three schools in the Midlands and was set up by the Evangelical Christian Robert Edmiston – now, naturally, Lord Edmiston – has paid more than £1 million to or through companies owned or controlled by Edmiston, members of the board of trustees and trustees’ relatives. All of this public money comes from the state education budget and not one penny directly benefits the children in these schools.

Last summer, Britain’s school standards watchdog, Ofsted, compared the most recent reports for converted academies with the last full Ofsted report for their predecessor schools. Thirty-eight per cent were deemed to be worse than they were before conversion. Only 13 per cent showed a higher grading post-conversion, and 48 per cent had the same grading.

Meanwhile, the free school program has been producing its own rash of problems and scandals. The government has been forced to close a Muslim free school in Derby after Ofsted described it as “dysfunctional, inadequate and in chaos.” And an old academies problem has surfaced with a new edge. Free schools are being founded in well-off areas that already have a surplus of school places – drawing funds away from poor areas with a shortage of school places.

Gove has promised to make state-funded schools more like fee-charging schools, and the way to do that, he believes, is to subject them to the same market forces. But there is a wrenching irony in all this. Back in the sixties and seventies, we now know, the private fee-charging schools controlled by the Catholic order of the Salesians in Britain was partly staffed by child-abusing priests. Today, its five schools are all state-funded. •

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I NEVER thought I’d say this, but I’ve become a fan of the My School website. You’ll remember My School: the federal government launched it with great hype in 2010, promising greater school transparency and responsiveness, and it garnered millions of hits from the public. Alas, the first website was almost fraudulent in its claims, but recent versions show real promise – and it could get even better if it begins to use a greater variety of school achievement measures.

The winning feature of My School is not so much the way it enables accurate comparisons between individual schools – it doesn’t. But the data behind the site, covering such things as school size, funding, enrolment composition and student attendance, really do allow us to see how groups of schools compare, and how they may be changing over time. The most valuable feature is the measure of the socio-educational make-up of each school’s enrolment, the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage, or ICSEA. When we need to track the way our schools are progressing, or regressing, this measure is gold.

This year we’ll see the launch of My School version 5.0, which will allow us to track changes over time on measures including enrolments, social make-up and funding. But we can already use data from My School alongside other long-run information to find out more about schools, test hypotheses, track trends and paint future scenarios.

Here’s one example. For some time I’ve pointed with alarm to the growing social and academic divides between schools. There’s nothing new in that observation, and I’m in good and growing company – though my concern might be more keenly felt because it is derived from decades of working in, and leading, schools. To restate the problem: the concentration of advantaged kids in some schools – kids whose backgrounds mean they tend to be higher-achievers too – and disadvantaged kids in others is leaving the less-advantaged with fewer role models, diminished opportunities and poorer school results, and these are affecting student engagement, retention and achievement. We pile achievers together in some schools that are seen to succeed, and we leave other schools to bleed.

This underpinning equity problem that blights our schools was well documented in research completed for the Gonski review, and was prominent among the review’s findings. “Increased concentration of disadvantaged students in certain schools is having a significant impact on educational outcomes, particularly, but not only, in the government sector,” said Gonski. “Concentrations of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and Indigenous students have the most significant impact on educational outcomes.”

The discussion of inequality in education often focuses on the differences between public schools and independent (non-Catholic) schools. But a closer look at the changing academic profile of government and Catholic schools suggests that growing inequality is occurring within all categories of schools.

On this point, the data isn’t as easy to find. NAPLAN data has only been published for a few years and inevitably tells us as much about home background as it does about what schools achieve. Higher School Certificate results might tell a story about school achievement, but consistent long-term information from the HSC and its equivalents in various states is not readily available.

The best information seems to come from Victoria, where for some years the Age has published comprehensive Victorian Certificate of Education, or VCE, results. The data spanning 2003–11 shows the school-by-school distribution of high-end academic results, represented by VCE study scores over forty.

How have Victorian secondary schools fared since 2003, grouped according to My School’s ICSEA measure and tracked using the Age data? Across the state, 368 larger secondary schools ran VCE classes in both 2003 and 2013, a span of eleven years. (Additional schools opened and a handful closed over this time, but we’ll focus here on schools with VCE candidates across the entire period.) To reduce the impact of year-by-year fluctuations, I haven’t included schools with an enrolment of fewer than 250 students in this analysis. I’ve divided the schools into four groups, based on their 2012 ICSEA values, and made the reasonably safe assumption that the socioeconomic profile of each school’s enrolment won’t have changed significantly over the previous eight years.

As the chart shows, only the highest ICSEA schools, the ones with the most advantaged students, increased their percentage of high scores – by just under two per cent – over the eleven years 2003 to 2013. In the other three groups of schools, the percentage of high scores fell between those years, with the larger falls experienced in the lower ICSEA schools. The percentage of high VCE scores in the lowest ICSEA schools, already low in 2003, fell by around 30 per cent over this period.

When measured year-by-year across these schools, some of these changes might seem small, but they are certainly noticeable and consistent over eleven years. There is not only a strong association between socioeconomic status and school achievement – nothing new in that – but it’s also the case that the higher achievers are increasingly found in the higher socioeconomic status schools. It seems the students have moved and taken their scores with them. The hollowing out effect on lower ICSEA schools is very obvious over time.

Where are Victoria’s Year 12 high achievers?

* Applies only to schools with over 250 students which existed in 2003 and 2013.
Sources: My School 3.0 and the Age.

Extra complexity becomes evident when the changes are considered in two stages, 2003–08 and 2009–13. The third-highest ICSEA group of schools lost some ground in the first period but the decline rapidly increased in the second. These schools may have initially held ground by picking up achievers from lower socioeconomic status schools, but such gains have apparently been fewer in recent years. The schools with the lowest ICSEA substantially lost their share of high achievers in the earlier period. That trend continued in recent years, but at a lower rate. Perhaps they had fewer aspirant and mobile students left to lose.

Can such trends be explained in terms of public–private drift? Not if the performance of Catholic schools, again evident on the chart, are any guide. The sample is smaller (eighty schools divided into four ICSEA groups) but these schools mirror the general trend. The higher ICSEA Catholic schools increased their share of high achievers and the lower ICSEA Catholic schools show an even sharper decline than all schools.

Independent schools are not shown on the chart. The bulk of independent schools are in the higher ICSEA ranges and they gained a slightly higher academic profile over the whole period. But the number of lower ICSEA independent schools in Victoria is too small to allow meaningful conclusions, beyond the fact that advantaged students have gravitated to these schools as a whole. My School shows this for almost every community in which independent schools are located.

On average, government schools lost more ground than did other sectors, but there were and are many more government schools in the lower ICSEA ranges. With some exceptions, they are the only schools obliged to enrol all students, regardless of family background and level of prior achievement. As My School shows, even in poor communities the more advantaged students are rarely numerous in government schools.

The figures also reveal several other trends:

• The decline in high VCE scores was much more noticeable among the provincial schools than among the metropolitan schools in the period 2003–13. This might be because the growth of non-government secondary schools, and their impact on existing schools, has been more recent in provincial areas.

• Smaller schools tended to lose more high scores over the whole period.

• The percentage of Indigenous students in school enrolments, a measure of disadvantage, was greater in schools with lower ICSEA values and a falling share of high VCE scores.

WE HAVE long known that more advantaged students have drifted away from schools faced with higher levels of disadvantage. Richard Teese and Stephen Lamb have described how this movement typically reduces the number of students attending individual low-ICSEA schools, increasing their proportion of disadvantaged students. It is hardly surprising that test scores such as NAPLAN, VCE or HSC are continuing to reveal the impact of this movement. From other evidence, we also know which students have shifted to non-government schools, most recently amply illustrated in research by Barbara Preston.

Less is written about the shift of enrolments from lower to higher ICSEA government schools, something which has almost certainly contributed to size differences between the schools. My School shows that high-disadvantage schools with Year 12 students in Victoria are typically 20 per cent smaller than high-advantage schools. A decline in the size of low socioeconomic status schools is also evident in New South Wales.

There are certainly exceptions to the trends. Governments, education systems and media often point to lower ICSEA schools that seem to defy the odds. Some exceptions may be explained by school improvement but many other factors are at work. Enrolment selection practices can be applied very subtly by schools, including high-demand public schools. Other schools might be able to hang on to their higher-achieving students because students have few alternatives: in a previous article for Inside Story I showed how around half of the higher-achieving public schools in provincial Victoria fall into this category. They may be good schools, but their great advantage is that they aren’t losing too great a number of high achievers to competing schools. Many schools in rural Australia have been fortunate to escape the claimed benefits of school competition.

These figures highlight once again the fact that we have created a very significant problem in our schools. If the trend in Victoria is representative, more than 400,000 students attend around 700 low-ICSEA secondary schools across Australia, students who are struggling in increasingly marginalised schools. Some people might find comfort in evidence that the loss of high achievers from low ICSEA schools might be slowing, but it is a small comfort: after cutting, even bleeding doesn’t go on forever.

Many of these 400,000 begin school already far behind. They may sit in classrooms devoid of the student role models found in the schools of their parents’ era. In worrying numbers they drift away from school before the end of Year 12. Overwhelmingly, their teachers are committed, but they tend to be inexperienced, and turnover is high. Their schools are usually close to the bottom of any achievement rank, and often cop criticism or pious but ineffectual handwringing. Their communities have lost much of the cultural capital essential to the future success of their children.

So do we continue to dabble in superficial solutions for our fractured and hierarchical arrangement of schools? Or do we try to improve opportunities for our poorest students and families by boosting their schools – and national achievement levels?

The first option is no solution at all, yet it is likely that we’ll continue with decades-old policies that have made little, if any, difference: centralising curriculum with more mandates, running manic testing regimes, comparing schools and shaming those labelled as poorly performing. We’ll combine this with the occasional distraction, such as Julia Gillard’s short-lived infatuation with performance pay and Christopher Pyne’s recycling of the curriculum culture wars. Other policy initiatives, such as creating independent public schools, will worsen equity by hanging the less powerful schools out to dry.

What could happen in the immediate future is that the Abbott government, under the banner of saving money, might try to truncate the My School website. After all, there is less of a problem if it can’t be measured.

Then again, who knows? After another decade of mounting personal and community costs created by a growing underclass of low achievers, perhaps someone will suggest a wide-ranging review to discover and recommend what should be done to resolve this equity and achievement crisis. The review could recommend policies on how to establish, fund and sustain quality schools for all students. It could initiate an inclusive and exhaustive consultation process and commission groundbreaking research. It could produce findings and recommendations that would be accepted and applauded by the whole education community. And it could receive bipartisan political support and an agreed commitment to action.

But that is what we have done, of course, except for the very last step. As time passes, the potential for the recommendations of the Gonski review to slow and even reverse the depressing trends described in this article are rapidly fading. The funding that could have lifted our lowest ICSEA schools won’t be found beyond the first four years and won’t go to the schools in greatest need. The states, ever willing to cut school funding, won’t be required to contribute their share for public and low-ICSEA schools.

As we head into a new school year it is becoming increasingly obvious that once again we’ll have to gather and publicise the evidence of a problem that is not going away, while campaigning for the solutions that came so tantalisingly close. •

The post My school and yours: the disappearing achievers appeared first on Inside Story.

IN THE unlikely setting of Perth in the early 1990s three colleagues and I set ourselves up as software developers. None of us had any significant experience or expertise in computing or business, but we did have a hot idea. School systems in Australia and elsewhere had at long last decided to introduce an outcomes-based curriculum, designed to allow each student to move at his or her own speed from the “mastery” of one outcome to the next. Our software would make the new curriculum work.

The problem in teaching to outcomes lay in keeping track of where each student is up to in each subject, and then finding “stage-appropriate” work for each of them to do. That’s where our software would come in. We called it KIDMAP to evoke the goal of giving the teacher a detailed record of each student’s latitude and longitude in every area of learning, and in case anyone missed the point we called our startup Mercator.

With the wisdom of hindsight I wish I had paid more careful attention to an American historian by the name of Larry Cuban. Cuban was the most prominent of a small group of scholars who had documented and explained what he called “constancy and change in the classroom.” From a Cuban perspective, outcomes and computers were merely the most recent in a long series of educational and technological fixes for the troubles of the classroom. Each had changed things somewhat, without really changing the way teachers (and therefore students) actually did their work. The brutal fact is that twenty or twenty-five students constitute a crowd, so teachers have to control and teach to the crowd. Teacher-centred instruction, Cuban argued, “is a hardy adaptation to the organisational facts of life.”

But that’s hindsight. At the time, we were on a roll. Within two or three years we had sold KIDMAP to the two biggest education departments in the country, a fact suggesting that their leadership hadn’t been reading Cuban either. On the strength of that improbable triumph – nearly half the schools in the country! – KIDMAP crossed the Pacific and landed in two “pilot” American school districts, one on the west coast, one in the east. We made enough of a ripple to find ourselves in Cupertino presenting our product to a significant fraction of Apple’s upper echelons (Apple was a niche outfit in those days). Should we bring in Steve, they wondered?

No, it soon emerged, we should not. Several of those gathered around the boardroom table gently informed us that we weren’t the first or only ones to have this bright idea, and that our version had all the limitations of its competitors. The content wasn’t there, teachers didn’t know how to do it, getting “outcomes-based” assessments into the software took too much time and effort, and school systems, for all their talk about “mastery learning” and “standards-referenced curriculum,” had little comprehension of what they wished for. Sure, there were problems of a software and hardware kind, but the real stopper was the orgware. This was the geeks’ version of the Cuban thesis.

It was one of those moments when the heart sinks. Our psychological strategy, naturally enough, was to talk about “teething problems,” including teachers who didn’t know how to open Word, classrooms with no computer or a machine that couldn’t run KIDMAP and Adobe Acrobat at the same time, and the odd bug in the software. (“Not a bug, madam, that’s a feature,” as our gallows humour had it.)

But the real problem was that when we asked system authorities to send us “outcomes-based” curriculum to load into KIDMAP they sent “outcome statements” so broad as to be meaningless, or so detailed as to be incomprehensible, and at either extreme cast in Educanto at its most opaque. When we asked for resources to link to each outcome statement so that teachers would have “stage-appropriate” stuff to give each student as he or she moved from one outcome to the next, we got a few PDFs, if anything at all. Every teacher-training workshop veered off into questions of educational philosophy and classroom management before we even got to morning coffee.

It was not just us developers of software for teachers who were in trouble. Software for students wasn’t doing so well either, a fact in which Cuban took fiendish delight. “Computers Meet Classroom: Classroom Wins,” he wrote in 1993, following it up with “Computers Make Kids Smarter – Right?” (1998); “Techno-Promoter Dreams, Student Realities” (2002); “Laptops Transforming Classrooms: Yeah, Sure” (2006); and, most recently, his book Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom (2009).

Cuban’s thesis is supported by the findings of a recent meta-study of forty-five investigations into the extent to which digital technologies have made any difference to the “effectiveness” of schools and classrooms. In The Impact of Digital Technology on Learning, Steven Higgins and his colleagues survey the many forms of digital instruction and the difficulties of pinning down cause and effect in the ecology of schooling. They report that these technologies may bring an increase in effectiveness in some cases, but that increase may also be explained by the energy of the innovators rather than the innovation itself, or by the fact that the more effective schools are the first and best users of technology. For these and other reasons, they conclude, technology “enthusiasts” confront a “growing critical voice from the sceptics.”

Growing scepticism from the inside contrasts sharply with growing enthusiasm on the outside. In June of this year the Economist magazine made a bold and much-reported prediction: “New technology,” it declared, “is poised to disrupt America’s schools, and then the world’s.” The Economist would pack a punch even if it stood alone, but it doesn’t. Similar propositions have been advanced in influential US publications including the New York Times, Forbes magazine, the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post.

Once bitten I should be twice shy, but nonetheless it is my view that the Economist is much more likely to be right than the sceptics, not in consequence of “new technology” alone, but when those technologies are combined with educational ideas and techniques, financial imperatives, and political pressures. Indeed, a long, slow shift from one mode of educational production to another has already begun. Technology is going to drive the first revolution in schooling since the invention of the printing press nearly 600 years ago.

THE enabling factor is the machinery itself, different in three important ways from what KIDMAP depended on. First to arrive was the internet, a means by which any individual or group can reach any other as well as roam at will in the contemporary library of Alexandria. Second is a fusion of speed, portability, cheapness and ease of use exemplified by the touchscreen tablet. And third is the cloud, making all things digital more affordable and usable, particularly for organisations like schools.

The software is not as capable as the hardware, and its development is necessarily slower and more erratic. If we leave to one side applications that support administrative operations, software for schools has developed in two streams, “instructional” and “management,” the former designed for student use in the hope that more can learn more quickly, the latter directed towards much the same objectives, but via the teacher.

Both kinds of software have been transformed. On the instructional side, the old drill-and-practice routines of “computer-assisted instruction” and language labs have been joined by tutorials and mini-lessons of the kind popularised by the free, non-profit Khan Academy; by full-scale virtual courses of study that integrate video lessons, film clips, reading and exercises with assessment and feedback; and most recently by packages that deliver and manage extended sequences of complex learning.

The last of these combine “edware” – the educationists’ “developmental continua” – with “gamification,” the quasi-science of getting kids hooked and keeping them in “the zone of proximal development” as they advance from basic to competent to mastery. At its most sophisticated, gamification combines a carefully planned escalation of tasks and activity, guided and motivated by assessment, feedback and reward, with the capacity to switch students from one learning track to another depending on how well and how quickly they learn. It is “adaptive.” It is also social, again taking from the gaming industry its techniques of organising “players” into groups and teams to collaborate and compete.

The two streams of development, instructional and management, are now merging into “next generation learning platforms” or “learning ecologies,” to be deployed by a teacher operating, as one much-used analogy has it, less like a pilot than an air-traffic controller. The idea is that powered-up teachers will have “the curriculum” at their fingertips in digital form, together with a detailed profile of each student’s progress. The curriculum sets out the work to be done, standards to be reached, ground to be covered, or tasks to be completed, all linked to a wealth of “resources” for the student (everything from books to be read to semester-length courses of study) and for the teacher (lesson plans, teaching hints, assessment tools, guidance and the like).

Student profiles will be compiled not by the teacher after school but with data gathered from the students as they work, their every step forward, their every mistake and their every detour recorded effortlessly. (Coming soon: gaze tracking and pupil-

dilation measurement to indicate attention and comprehension.) These millions of pieces of information can be turned into insight with the help of the new sub-discipline of learning analytics, and made intelligible by 3D graphic displays. The idea is not so different from KIDMAP’s. The execution is light years away.

The traffic-controller image implies a clear division of labour between the controller and the pilots, but in practice the student will be powered-up too. So farsighted were we that KIDMAP allowed students to view their own record – with the teacher’s permission, of course. Soon students will be equipped by “personalised learning environments” to “manage their own learning,” as teachers have long wanted them to do. The lines between teaching and learning, between teacher and taught, will blur. To a degree not previously possible, students will be able to teach themselves, and each other. Learning can be crowdsourced.

Techno-sceptics sometimes forget that these are still very early days in the development of both software and content. Major educational publishers including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have only recently swung their full attention to the digital future. They have been joined by industry giants such as Apple and outsiders like News Corp to take integration to its logical conclusion, tablets bundled with instructional and management software and proprietary content. Investment in educational technology almost disappeared after the global financial crisis but is now growing so rapidly that there is talk of a bubble. The Economist reports venture capital prowling around record numbers of startups (often based in Cupertino) with dinky names like Mathalicious, Chegg (homework help), Sharemylesson and Edmodo (share sites for teachers and others), Badgeville (gamification), Quizlet, Curriki (portal for free courseware) and DimensionU (interactive maths and science games). Apex predators including the big publishers and News Corp have swallowed specialists like Schoolnet (personalised learning), Wireless Generation (ditto), ALEKS (adaptive learning), and Bookette (online performance measurement). School-sector spending on ed tech in the United States is high ($17 billion per annum, equivalent to more than a third of Australia’s schooling budget) and rising. The inevitable hype and snake oil are finding their inevitable victims. Things will go on going wrong, and the current bubble may burst, but the surge is unstoppable.

MOST of this frenetic technological development is happening in the United States, and so is the most intense effort by schools and school systems to figure out what to do with it.

At one end of the spectrum is doing the same old thing in a brand new way: “projects” on PowerPoint instead of cardboard, googling instead of reaching for an encyclopaedia, using a keyboard instead of a pen, or an electronic whiteboard to do what could be done a century ago on a blackboard. Here the new technologies are not the least bit disruptive. They replace little and change less, except costs, which increase.

At the other end of the spectrum are “virtual schools,” which deliver a digital curriculum to students wherever they happen to be, sometimes supplemented by online tutors. Since most of the work of teaching is done in one time and place, the work of learning in another, a given amount of teaching effort can be made available to very large numbers of students (most spectacularly in the example of “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, enrolling as many as 160,000 students at a time in university courses). In consequence, virtual schools spend relatively less on staff and buildings and more on technology and content; and less of the staffing budget goes to paying teachers, and more goes to online tutors and technical and administrative support. In the upshot, the per-student costs of virtual schools are typically much lower than those of conventional schooling. The catch is that virtual schools – or at least many in the largely unregulated US environment – seem to be less effective as well as less expensive, and are really suited only to upper secondary students or to home-schoolers.

At various points in between these two extremes are myriad approaches, the most prominent of which are the “flipped classroom,” “personalisation,” and “blending.” The flipped classroom gives students “virtual” material for homework so that class time can be used for higher-order review, discussion and extension. Personalisation uses digital technology to provide each student with stage-appropriate work, something only the most exceptionally capable teachers could hitherto do.

In both approaches Larry Cuban’s resilient class has once again found a way to combine constancy with change. They retain the familiar infrastructure (the classroom), the usual personnel (one adult, twenty-five or so students), the standard routines (the lesson), and the established regulatory regime (numbers of students per teacher and numbers of lessons per day). They are an important step forward in addressing the other side of the coin of teacher-centred instruction, the problem of the baffled student, and to the extent that they succeed they will lift “effectiveness.” The trouble is that new costs are added to old. Digital technologies may be a lot cheaper per unit but in the aggregate they’re not. Even after offsets from BYOD (bring your own device) and savings from cloud computing, digital technology is expensive – expensive to maintain and update as well as to buy.

At this early stage, blended schools seem to get the best of both worlds. “Blending” can refer to anything from using online tutorials or courses within a largely conventional curriculum to systematically planned combinations of virtual and conventional instruction. One version of “rotational” blending sees students spend some of their working day in conventional groups in classrooms, and the rest in learning labs where much larger groups of students work on personalised programs under the supervision of a relatively smaller number of staff, perhaps including lab monitors or tutors working to a “leading teacher.” Another variation on the theme has students go through two or three rotations per day, each comprising a period of virtual instruction followed by class time for consolidation.

Early evidence suggests that at least some blended schools may be improving “effectiveness,” particularly for disadvantaged students, while keeping costs lower. As in virtual schools, both staffing and budgets are differently arranged, with more money spent on digital technology and content, less on staffing, and greater differentiation in responsibilities and terms and conditions for staff. One much-reported case is Rocketship, a group of publicly funded charter schools. Blending in a 450-student Rocketship school saves around half a million dollars a year, the savings “repurposed” in ways including professional development, and 20 or 30 per cent higher pay for leading teachers.

Rocketship and some other blended schools are extending rotational blending into “flex.” The classroom and the lab are traded in on something more like a workshop or studio (or a Qantas Club lounge), a linked series of spaces allowing easy movement, and equipped for work by individuals and groups of students and adults formed according to task, need and capacity. A quite different mode of educational production is beginning to take visible form. We might borrow from Cuban to say: classroom versus computer, computer wins.

OF COURSE, it’s not really the computer that wins. A combine harvester will not make medieval strip-field agriculture more productive, yet an assumption of just that kind can be found in many ways of using (and researching) technology in schooling. When computers are added to classrooms and nothing changes the conclusion is that technology doesn’t work. In fact, it is schooling’s strip-field system that is not working.

Learning can usefully be thought of as a form of production through the work of young people and adults. The digital technologies are now capable of doing in schooling what technology has been doing elsewhere for centuries: they can reallocate, amplify and, above all, substitute for labour. Machines can now do some of the work that once required a teacher, and they can allocate other aspects of that work to students. They cannot substitute for the labour of learning, but they can change how that work is done, and they can help improve its organisation so that more of it is done in an optimal way at an optimal time.

That will happen only if and to the extent that labour is actually reallocated, reorganised and replaced. That is what blended and, more dramatically, virtual schools are doing. These schools are exploring ways of combining time, space, effort and tools both different from and disruptive of the class and the classroom.

It is significant that most of these explorations are being made in schools and groups of schools started from scratch. Another effort of the imagination is needed to change what already is into what can now be. That will include dismantling what Cuban calls the “organisational facts of life,” a dense lacework of struts and stays, many installed during the long boom of schooling, which holds the class and the classroom in place: ways of framing and sequencing work (“the curriculum”); the habits of mind and expectations of parents, students and teachers; physical infrastructure; budgets committed to paying a largely undifferentiated and tenured workforce; and the close regulation of the daily work of teachers and students via industrial negotiations and agreements.

There is little evidence to suggest that those responsible for steering Australian schooling have yet grasped the scale and interconnectedness of policy needed to exploit rather than merely “adopt” the digital technologies. A recent investigation into investment in learning technologies in one state found that considerable sums had been wasted because the government, lacking a “clear plan or framework,” had left departmental staff and school leaders with “little guidance on how future learning technologies initiatives can be appropriately planned and integrated.” The recently departed federal government sprayed $2.1 billion on the naive idea that the “digital revolution” could be prosecuted by putting more computers into schools. The incoming federal government has eschewed any talk of “revolution,” digital or otherwise, and has reasserted the traditional role and authority of the teacher in the classroom. Many of those actually responsible for running schools know that there’s more to it than buying computers or depending on the good old teacher, but tend to think of “technology” as just another item in a long to-do list, mainly a question of infrastructure and digital content.

Techno-enthusiasts make equal and opposite mistakes, illustrated by Beyond the Classroom, a report commissioned by Peter Garrett when he was federal education minister. The report is valuable in its sense that something very big is at hand, but troubling in its enthusiasm for any and all things digital and in its inability to be clear about the purposes or limits of the new technology, or about the priorities and sequence of its implementation.

A prerequisite to effective policy is getting clear about what the digital technologies are for. They are to some extent for themselves; like cars, they are something young people need to learn to drive. They are a boon to school administration and a school’s interaction with its community. And since the digital technologies are the ocean in which our fingerlings swim, they are of value in making schools seem less out-of-touch. But these are second- or third-order educational considerations.

The “twenty-first-century skills” case is more compelling, but easily overstated. The argument put in Beyond the Classroom is that skills or capabilities such as “creativity and imagination, critical thinking, problem solving and decision making, ICT literacy, and personal and social responsibility,” are central to the “twenty-first-century workplace,” and schools must therefore “harness the transformative potential of digital technology.”

With the partial exception of ICT literacy, however, the skills listed are cognitive and social, not technical. The digital technologies are an important new means of acquiring these skills and a new context of their use, but the skills or capabilities are not new in and of themselves, and they are certainly not new to schools. For at least fifty years teachers have tried to teach what are variously called “cross-curricular,” “generic” and “meta-cognitive” skills, most of them very like what are now referred to as twenty-first-century skills. In any event, skills or general capabilities can’t be learned in the abstract, and they are by no means the only things that schools are there to teach. “Skills” can only be acquired in and through learning “content” of intrinsic value. In the digital as in the pre-digital world, students must wrestle with, acquire and think about facts, events, formulae, theories, people, stories, poems, equations, and realities of many kinds.

Contrary to much digital advocacy, the digital technologies are tools to be used rather than instruments to be played. The main point of getting them into schools is not to prepare students for the twenty-first-century workplace but rather to exploit their potential as new and more productive means to the old educational end of getting young people, irrespective of postcode or genetic inheritance, to emerge after twelve years of schooling well on the way to being paid-up members of a rich intellectual, artistic and material culture.

And, contrary to much digital scepticism, these are seriously new means. Digital technology has no precedent in schooling except, perhaps, the invention of the printing press and the development of writing millennia before that.

The sheer novelty of technology-enabled change in schooling leaves the movement around it poorly equipped to work out what to do. Its language can win most arguments about ends, but it is practically clueless about the new means. It simply doesn’t notice the necessary things, or looks in the wrong direction altogether.

The currently dominant idea of “effectiveness,” for example, pays no attention to costs or to the relationship between cost and effectiveness, and its “what works” doctrine assumes that what has worked in the past will work into the indefinite future. In a similar way schooling’s focus on lifting “teacher quality” assumes that “the class” is here to stay, and that the only road to improvement is through the skills of just one of its twenty-six members rather than re-engineering the work of the other twenty-five.

Schooling could usefully borrow at least two ideas developed over centuries of experience of technological change in other areas of human activity. The first is the idea of workplace reform. That reform should start not with the work of teachers, as is so often assumed but with the work of the real producers, the students who comprise well over 90 per cent of schooling’s workforce. “Workplace reform” is an embracing concept, and a strategic one. Beginning from a view of how students can best be enabled to produce learning of the most valued kinds, it takes in everything from the content and organisation of the curriculum to workplace architecture to staffing structures and industrial relations to budgets. It makes possible thinking about an orderly, coordinated and sequenced process of change – big plans, small steps.

That process should be guided by a second conceptual borrowing, the idea of “productivity.” Often used as a euphemism for cuts or for working harder, productivity should be understood in educational as well as budgetary and industrial terms. It can require technology to earn its educational keep. “Productivity” insists that there is no intrinsic virtue in technology. It presses systems and schools to ask the question: which of the combinations of time, space, effort and tools available to us at this particular point in time is most likely to do the best educational job? Often, particularly in the near-term, the answer will be the relatively low-tech option of “blending,” using online tutorials, lessons and courses to provide students with more doable work and to free up teachers.

WORKPLACE reform directed at exploiting digital technology is likely to be both more and less disruptive in schooling than in other industries. More, because the classroom is so heavily entrenched and extensively defended, and because technology- enabled change is foreign to almost all involved. And less than in, say, agriculture, or higher education, because schooling is necessarily custodial, and social. Kids need to be looked after, and they need to be with other kids and with adults to grow up.

Technology-enabled workplace change will be resisted by at least some of the interests and institutions that prospered in the long boom of schooling as well as by schooling’s structures and culture. But sooner or later, well or badly, in ways that address need or reflect advantage, it will happen. It will be driven by governments looking to get off the treadmill of spending more and more in order to stay in much the same place; by the discrediting of the class-size reduction strategy and, in due course, the teacher-quality agenda; by big business; by competition between schools, systems and nations for “performance”; by the mysterious infection of every sphere of life with the digital virus; by the educational ideals of policy-makers and teachers; and by teachers’ long-thwarted professional ambitions. What is open for determination is the extent to which “policy” can use these complex vectors to do what my Perth colleagues and I, and many, many others have tried to do so that schooling is less inclined to purchase the success of some learners with the failure of others. •

I would like to thank Bill Hannan, Mal Lee and Sandra Milligan for their help in the preparation of this article. Needless to say, responsibility for it is mine alone. Thanks also to my KIDMAP colleagues, Russell Docking, Sandra Milligan and Paul Williams.

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GONSKI’s survival to this point and its reluctant endorsement by the federal opposition represent a considerable political achievement on the part of the government, and of Julia Gillard in particular, against many expectations and predictions, including mine.

There is much to be grateful for in this win, particularly if we remember the disreputable scheme that awaited defeat. Against the status quo, Gonski proposed that schools doing the most difficult educational work should get more money to help them do it better; that this rule should apply in a common way to any such school, government, Catholic systemic or independent, in every state and territory; and that by these means “residualisation,” the steady drift of “good” students to “good” schools at the expense of “disadvantaged” ones, might be reduced.

Gonski has come to symbolise a sense of social decency (honourably defended, it should be noted, by a conservative NSW government in the persons of education minister Adrian Piccoli and premier Barry O’Farrell). It advances the important principle that all schools, government and non-government alike, must serve public purposes. If implemented, Gonski will cheer up those working in and dependent on the most disadvantaged schools (most of them government schools), and perhaps the government sector in general.

All this granted, it must still be said that Gonski has become the bearer of hopes and fears out of all proportion to its practical import. That it has attracted such passions of support and opposition and has consumed so much of the political oxygen available to education over several years suggests that there is something wrong with both the conduct of Australian schooling and our capacity to imagine its future.

GONSKI had important things to say about the distribution of resources, but little about where they should come from, or about their use. In the Gonski scheme the money still comes from both state and federal governments and (for non-government schools) from parents. It blurs the boundaries of the sector system, but leaves intact different forms of governance and regulation as well as divisions between “fee and free,” secular and religious. Rules and practices that allow student “creaming” and exclusion are unchallenged. Funding floors are proposed, but not funding ceilings.

As to use, Gonski endorsed the “effective schools” approach to getting value for money, but was unable to require or enforce it. It is true that Gonski proposed a new “schools resourcing body,” but that too was a relatively modest proposal, for a national (not federal government) agency not all that different from other bodies that operate now or have done in the past. Even in matters of distribution Gonski was bold without being revolutionary. The basic distributional principle of “need” has long been supported in various ways and degrees in most school jurisdictions.

In short, the passions surrounding Gonski have more to do with its threat to change power over schooling rather than schooling itself. For just that reason we must wonder whether it will make a significant difference to those on whom Gonski rightly focuses attention, and particularly to the half a million or so students in the system at any one time who will leave school lacking even the minimal literacy and numeracy needed to get and hold down a job, mostly the sons and daughters of poor, Indigenous, remote, and non-English-speaking families.

Any answer is complicated by the fact that the Rudd and Gillard governments have introduced other changes, ranging from infrastructure and equipment upgrades through teacher education to the collection and publication of information about the income and performance of every school in the country. Encouraged by national and international comparisons of “student performance,” the mood in all sectors and systems is to home in on, measure and lift outcomes in key areas of learning. As well, recently installed Coalition governments in the four most populous states have introduced reforms of their own devising, in one case (New South Wales) in explicit support of Gonski, in others not. Catholic systems and other non-government schools have their own reform programs too. Prediction is further complicated by the ecological character of school systems. The effects of change are almost as hard to anticipate as they are to control.

But, with bets thus hedged, my guess is that if there is any improvement it will be slower and patchier than in a number of other OECD systems.

For one thing, “Gonski” now is not what Gonski proposed. The national schools resourcing body was soon ditched. So was Gonski’s recommendation that the new needs-based loadings be confined to just one in four schools; the money is now proposed to be spread much more thinly. Gonski’s common national funding formula has been replaced by assurances that each “jurisdiction” will be free to determine its own way of turning principle into practice.

If, as seems likely, Gonski’s career from this point depends on an Abbott government, further attrition can be expected. The Coalition’s heart is in subsidising “choice” rather than reducing the need for it. LINK ABBOTT FEB 2012 It has said that it will drop the conditions on funding and simply hand the money over. The Coalition’s promises extend only for the period of the forward estimates, during which time funding commitments are still relatively low. Besides, any federal government of the coming period will be strapped for cash, its state and territory funding partners even more so. Anything Labor says about the later years is indicative at best.

THE sums currently promised are not as large at either aggregate or school level as is often assumed. Informed estimates suggest that funding increases under the Gonski scheme will fall below the growth trend-line of the past decade or so, and that loadings for need will attract less than one dollar in five. Whatever the exact amounts, it is clear that by the time the funds arrive in schools they will permit improvement rather than transformation of the kind persuasively advocated by Bill Hannan in his picture of “Pariah College.” It is hard to see Gonski money stemming the steady flow of “aspirational” families into schools catering to families just like them. It will not be sufficient to compensate for big differences in schools’ social, political, cultural and educational capital.

If not transformation, then improvement? Providing money to make improvement possible is not the same as making it happen. Gonski’s hopes are pinned on the “effective schools” paradigm and its focus on lifting measurable outcomes by the steady application of “what works,” particularly improved “teacher quality.”

The “effectiveness” idea is certainly a big advance on the formless “innovation” that consumed so much reforming energy in schools, and thanks to Australia’s particularly maladroit ways of deploying and developing teachers provides plenty of scope for improving “teacher effectiveness.” But there is an important caveat to the effectiveness prescription: it must be applied, as one of Gonski’s key advisers put it, in a “comprehensive, integrated and sustained” way.

That cannot happen on a national scale. The Gillard government made several attempts to install the effectiveness paradigm as the official national doctrine of school reform, most recently through the “school development plans” tacked onto Gonski. This proposal was already the subject of hot resistance from the states and sectors when the Coalition announced its intention to drop the whole idea. The current division of functions and responsibilities between federal and state governments, and between government and non-government sectors, generates so much confusion and conflict that there can be no “comprehensive, integrated and sustained” national strategy for schooling.

It may well be that there can’t be state-level strategies either. One problem is that the sector system exists in microcosm in each of the states and territories, but more important is the politicisation of schooling that accompanied the long decline of once-mighty state education departments. State-level decisions about the large-scale, long-lead-time enterprise of schooling are acutely vulnerable to short electoral cycles and hence to powerful interest groups formed around the sectors and the teaching workforce.

In short, the approach to school reform reflected in and endorsed by Gonski is probably beyond the capacities of the Australian system of governance. And it may not be the right one anyway.

BOTH Gonski and the “effective schools” prescription are refinements of an agenda formed during the overcrowding and funding crisis of the 1950s and 1960s. That agenda placed a big bet on more: more money for better-trained and qualified teachers working in much smaller classes, it assumed, would deliver more, better and more equal education for all.

On balance, it must be concluded that the bet has been lost. More students did get more years at school; the girls did catch up with and surpass the boys; and schools and classrooms did become much less forbidding and more congenial places. But in most circumstances smaller classes turned out to be more manageable and informal but no more productive than larger ones. Comparisons of “outcomes” over time, such as they are, suggest limited or no gains. The pay, standing and standards of entry to the teaching profession are much as they were, or worse. Although class sizes have tumbled by 40 per cent or more, problems of social and regional inequality, engagement and purpose persist. Gains, however calculated, have not been commensurate with costs. The best available estimate is that each student year now costs two-and-a-half times as much as it did in the early 1960s.

It seems increasingly likely that “the problem” is less one of scale than of kind, less in the level of resources than in the way they are turned into time and effort, and less in the things Gonski and the effectiveness paradigm have attended to than in what they took as given – or what might be called a mode of educational production.

Postwar reform metastasised a cottage industry. The fundamental unit of production, “the class” – one teacher in control of a fixed maximum number of students of the same age but of widely differing learning stages, speeds and styles, working in five or six forty-five-minute bursts per day on a single topic in a single subject – reproduced itself again and again as more and more students stayed longer and longer at school in ever-smaller classes. This vastly multiplied cellular organism entrenched itself in the practices and expectations of teachers, students, researchers and parents, as well as in regulations, budgets and infrastructure.

The problem with “the class” is that it organises the work of students in a way that makes it difficult for many of them to learn, and therefore makes it difficult for teachers to teach. Differences in stage, speed and style of learning are so marked, even in the early years, that only a small minority of exceptionally able teachers (“highly effective” teachers, as the effectiveness paradigm calls them) can keep most students “on task” and making progress most of the time.

Despite the endless experimentation with student grouping, assessment and curriculum thus provoked, it was until recently difficult to imagine what a better organisation of student work might look like. For this reason, “effectiveness” researchers (like just about everyone else) took “the class” as a given. Their focus was on extracting marginal improvement from “the class,” mainly by developing marginally more effective teachers.

Two revolutions, one internal to schooling, the other external, are bringing “the class” into focus, and they may have brought us to the cusp of a quite different way of organising student work. The first of these revolutions is the fruit of teacher experimentation as well as investigation by researchers (many of them former teachers). The foundational idea, given many different names, is “educability” rather than “ability,” the view that all students can learn if ways can be found to keep them in “the zone of proximal development,” working on tasks not too easy, not too hard within a “developmental continuum” that will see them moving in their own way, at or near their own maximum speed, from first days at school to a successful conclusion twelve years later.

The second revolution is in digital technologies that promise to reduce problems in management arising from the first. New and emerging combinations of hardware, software and content make it possible to “personalise” each student’s program of work and to track progress through it. In the doing, these new technologies perform some of the tasks hitherto undertaken by teachers, or hand them over to the students themselves.

One implication is that the hopes of reformers should be placed less in “teacher quality” than in the quality of the student labour process. Another is that schooling will require a different division of labour between and among students and the adults who work with them, and therefore different career and training paths and reward structures. A third is that at least as much attention must be given to redeploying resources as to quantities and shares of them. A fourth is that much of the work of the next reform agenda will lie in dismantling the legacies of the last one – its knotted combination of infrastructure, expectations and habits of mind, regulation of the daily work of students and teachers backed by industrial and political muscle, and budgets mostly consumed by the salaries of very large numbers of a single kind of education worker, “the teacher.” A last is that Gonski and the effective schools paradigm may come to seem, as Debussy is supposed to have said of Wagner, less like a new dawn than a glorious sunset. •

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