Education in Australia 1973 to 2019
February 28th, 2019
Over the last 15 or so years I have posted on this website many essays about education, especially in Australia including as it concerns government policies. In four essays posted in the last few days I have returned to this topic and summarized two of the most important inquiries of the last several years and the responses to them, both by researchers and academics on the one hand and commentators on the other and the response of government.
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See related articles below
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The first inquiry on the funding of schools has been the subject of a large volume of commentary and argument and some of the recommendations from it have been incorporated in legislation. The second inquiry on teaching has attracted far less commentary
A consistent theme has been that the government response has been inadequate to the purpose whilst the research relevant to the inquiries has been increasingly of high quality: along with developments in other countries, the research has largely been ignored by government.
The first essay related to this post summarises developments from 1996 and the other three concern the two reports by the panels chaired by distinguished business man David Gonski AC.
Gonski, in a speech shortly after the publication of the first report commented on his experience visiting and talking with the people who were consulted in the preparation of the report. His comments contrast very strongly with the general tenor of the commentary in the public sphere, the assertions about teacher quality, union and government bureaucracy involvement.
It would be entirely appropriate for a lot less notice to be taken of much of the commentary in favour of much more attention to the wisdom and knowledge of those who have, through research and experience in the industry, contributed so much to what we now understand. And of course, most of all to the best understandings possible of what would bring the greatest gain to those who should benefit.
One of the most important factors contributing to educational achievement is equity, extra support for those having difficulty for whatever reason from socioeconomic background and health through disability of various kinds. IN the 1970s and the later 2000s under Labor governments, inquiries addressed this issue so far as school education was concerned. However, as we near the close of the second decade of the 2000s more funding is allocated to the more advantaged than ever before. Any attempt to reverse this will be an almost monumental task as those benefitting push back.
There is a parallel with the response to attempts to remove provisions which benefit the advantaged in superannuation, taxation and investment. Support for investment in early childhood has hardly advanced in 50 years, certainly not to the level found in several other countries, in Europe especially.
Australia has almost the most inequitable school education funding of any OECD country. Australia lags comparable OECD countries in terms of participation of younger children in early learning, especially of three-year-olds. The effect is greatest amongst lower socioeconomic status families.
Funding for schools, public and independent schools including Catholic schools, comes from both the Commonwealth and State and Territory Governments. State governments have for the most part reduced their funding though the Commonwealth has maintained they should take up the balance of funding for public schools. Several states claim to have made progress. Victoria promotes itself as the “Education State”; New South Wales has claimed benefits from application of the funding flowing from the agreements with the Gillard government as part of the National Plan.
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Whilst Australia ranks high as a place to live, it ranks low in areas like innovation and funding of scientific research. In business the level of oligopoly is high, one commentator reporting that Australia is referred to as “Treasure Island”. A disturbing example of how conservatism has affected the response to major challenges can be found in availability of digital communication, climate change and energy prices.
Australia is second in the world in delivery of online services, according to a UN survey. But in respect of internet speed Australia ranks 55th in the world.
Contribution to carbon emissions per capita is amongst the highest in the world.
It is true that there have been 27 years of annual economic growth (due principally to action taken by the Rudd government in response to the Global Financial Crisis) and Australia is the second most wealthy nation, after Switzerland, in terms of median wealth per person. In terms of GDP Australia ranks 13; however, GDP is increasingly recognised as an unsatisfactory indicator of actual wellbeing.
Much of the wealth is due to booming house prices: the huge household debt is overlooked. Much of Australia’s wealth is due to exports of resources and not to value created within the country! Comparisons with countries like South Korea and Vietnam, countries overrun by armed conflict in the last 70 years, as well as Scandinavian countries, are revealing!
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These essays review school education and related issues since 1970 and especially since 1996.
Several particularly important statements are below. Following those I list the previous essays which are most relevant to the present discussions.
The following three statements are amongst the most important pronouncements on education policy of the last 50 years. They are from the second report of the panel chaired by David Gonski, entitled “Through Growth to Achievement”, a panel comprising distinguished educators and others, a report drawing on extensive submissions and consultations and on some of the most important relevant research.
“Australia has a strong educational heritage and committed educators. Since 2000, however, academic performance has declined when compared to other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, suggesting that Australian students and schools are not improving at the same rate and are falling short of achieving the full learning potential of which they are capable. As a nation, we need to act now to raise our aspirations and make a renewed effort to improve school education outcomes.
“As a nation, we need to act now to raise our aspirations and make a renewed effort to improve school education outcomes…”
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Enabling all Australian students to realise their full learning potential, and re-establishing Australia’s education system as world-leading, is an ambitious but achievable goal, which requires a commitment to sustained, long-term reform.
The strategy set out in this report, and articulated in the 23 recommendations, will transform Australian school education.
The Review Panel recognises that the scale of these reforms is ambitious, particularly given Australia’s federated education model. The challenges, however, cannot become an excuse for inaction. The evidence is clear; the reforms embedded in the strategy are necessary to achieve educational excellence in Australian schooling.
Taken together, and implemented in a sustained way, these reforms will reverse the decline in student outcomes in recent decades, and prepare current and future generations of school students to succeed in life and 21st century careers…
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“Australia needs to review and change its model for school education. Like many countries, Australia still has an industrial model of school education that reflects a 20th century aspiration to deliver mass education to all children. This model is 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. It is not designed to differentiate learning or stretch all students to ensure they achieve maximum learning growth every year, nor does it incentivise schools to innovate and continuously improve.
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“Although this problem is widely recognised by teachers and educators, schools’ attempts to address the issue are hampered by curriculum delivery, assessment, work practices and the structural environments in which they operate.
“The constraints include inflexibility in curriculum delivery, reporting and assessment regimes, and tools focussed on periodic judgements of performance, rather than continuous diagnosis of a student’s learning needs and progress. This is compounded by a lack of research-based evidence on what works best in education, the absence of classroom applications readily available for use by teachers, multiple calls on the time of teachers and school leaders, and a lack of support for school principals to develop their professional autonomy and prioritise instructional leadership.”
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The following statement is from a review of “Through Growth to Achievement”
“In a world where education defines opportunity, schooling must support every one of Australia’s 3.8 million school students to realise their full learning potential and achieve educational excellence.
“Australian students should receive a world-class school education, tailored to individual learning needs, and relevant to a fast-changing world. They should be challenged and supported to progress and excel in learning in every year of school, appropriate to each student’s starting point and capabilities.
“Schooling should enrich students’ lives, leaving them inspired to pursue new ideas and set ambitious goals throughout life.”
Chris Bonnor, “Gonski’s second coming”, in John Menadue – Pearls and Irritations 1 May 2018
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However, the following statements arguably have more bearing on policy than anything in either of the Gonski reports.
Developments in fake news and fake reality, facilitated by social media, artificial intelligence and complex algorithms, together with conditional ethics, have made the pursuit of rational decisions based on reviewed and agreed evidence very difficult. The proposition that whilst people are entitled to their own views but not to their own facts is not everywhere accepted, as evidence is counteracted merely by assertions of the opposite. We are possibly moving to the margin of the enlightenment, overturning some 400 years of the development of knowledge and understanding.
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It is a tragedy that government continues to see everything through the lens of funding, especially costs. Progress is not anywhere principally linked to money. It emerges from how people work together and how decisions get made, on innovation and creativity, on clear, agreed and supported understanding of what the intention of action is and who is supposed to benefit.
Government’s focus on money does no more than exit the stage by trying to spend as little as possible so that the citizenry and the corporate sector can pay as little in taxes as possible. It is based on the proposition that government creates very little value indeed and that its activities hinder other parts of the economy in creating value. Unfortunately, much of media commentary goes along with this together with an effort to identify potential conflict between players.
The pursuit of small government is an inevitable consequence and has left the community to be governed by people often lacking the necessary knowledge and skills.
The result is the pursuit of populism and a search for someone to blame.
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The following statement, an extract from a response to a proposed health policy initiative by Jennifer Doggett, “Labor’s big-ticket risk-minimisation strategy” (Inside Story 15 February 2019) is pertinent:
Progress … is so slow not because of a lack of mechanisms but because of fundamental differences in the interests of the two levels of government. They have different constituencies, political roles and constitutional responsibilities, and a new federally funded and run health commission won’t change that.
“The real problem is not a lack of independent … policy advice. Governments and oppositions have access to numerous sources, both within the public sector (not only from relevant departments but also through processes such as Productivity Commission inquiries) and outside it … The problem is that this advice is routinely ignored.”
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One of the most important statements about school education is from a study of a school in San Francisco whose 950 students with passports from more than 40 different countries. Despite its test scores putting it at one of the lowest-performing schools in the nation, 84 per cent of its students were accepted to college.
Diane Ravitch, education historian and former administrator wrote in the New York Review of Books March 24 2016, “What [Kristina] Rizga [author of “Mission High: One School, How Experts Tried to Fail It, and the Students and Teachers Who Made It Triumph” (Nation Books)] learned is worth sharing. For one, she discovered that “there are too many politicians, powerful bureaucrats, management and business experts, economists, and philanthropists making decisions about the best solutions for schools.”
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In the last few months,
- A comprehensive review has found overwhelming evidence of a strong causal relationship between increased school funding and student outcomes
- a parliamentary audit committee has criticised the Commonwealth Government for failing to account for the way it has distributed funds to schools in accordance with the legislation
- the secretary of the NSW Department of Education has emphasised one of the most important outcomes of school education: it should equip students to think
- former NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli endorsed a plan by the ALP to fund two years of early learning and supported a campaign by the Early Learning and Care Council calling on all political parties to commit to funding two years of age-appropriate, play-based quality learning for all children. The plan to expand access to pre-school education has been called the next great social policy reform, one that the Morrison Government ignores at its peril
- Chris Bonnor and colleagues have addressed the disturbing trends in funding of schools and the consequent concentration of disadvantage.
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Continue to the four essays:
- Australian Education Policy 2019
- Education Policy in Australia: The fifty years from Whitlam to Morrison
- The First Gonski Report
- The Second Gonski Report – Through Growth to Achievement”, a “Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools
Related articles
These are among the earlier essays most relevant to the present series of four essays
School Leadership and School Autonomy: The outcome of any change in the management structure of schools must be improvement of student outcomes. That school principals might become responsible for budgets and staffing does little more than turn them into glorified administrators. Much of the financial and staffing area is no more than instrumental.
Tests, League Tables and Accountability: A Democratic Right to Know?: … the demand for accountability and transparency, is common. So is the demand for quantitative data to achieve accountability. This is true of transport, hospitals, government services and activities generally. That quantitative data are not always indicators of the most critical aspects of the actions and performance of an enterprise, any more than they are of a person, is ignored in this. There is also the implicit assumption that the people responsible for the enterprise’s activities cannot be trusted.
Public or Private: Marketisation, Parental Choice and Competition: … average educational achievement levels are significantly influenced by the performance of those children who come from less advantaged backgrounds. The debate about the “education gap” is a debate about the distribution of resources within society. Establishing independent schools does not address the education gap in any way. Surveys of achievement internationally show no gain from independent schools when the data is controlled for student’s socio-economic background.
Teaching and School Performance: Amongst recent studies those about Finland are particularly interesting to many. Pasi Sahlberg lists three fallacies of teacher effectiveness common in the US:
- teachers work mostly independently, in fact they mostly work in teams
- the teacher is the single most important factor in improving quality education, in fact this ignores family background and peer influences
- a succession of great teachers in a row would lead to very significant educational improvement of students, arguably judging capability of teachers at recruitment is difficult and superior competence takes time to develop.
The School Education Bunfight or how Populism, Ideology and Political Cowardice distorts Policy: a link is asserted between educational attainment as measured by test scores and economic growth as if all that is needed is to improve educational achievement. The social determinants of education are ignored.