Archive for the 'Funding' Category
Education in Australia 1973 to 2019
Thursday, 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.
The Myth of School Choice and the Distortion of Education Policy
Sunday, April 24th, 2016
At the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai in March Education Director for the OECD Andreas Schleicher criticised the Australian education system for falling behind global standards. He pointed to the very significant drop in the results of students at the top of the PISA test rankings in the past year. He said “[Australia] more or less defines teachers by the number of hours that [they] teach in front of students. That is part of the problem. We treat teachers as interchangeable widgets on the frontline – they are just there to implement prefabricated knowledge.” Schleicher said many countries were struggling to keep the best teachers in the profession because of curriculums that restrict creativity.
The OECD through its PISA program which explores literacy in 15 year olds in writing, math and science every three years has been criticised very heavily in some countries as driving the education agenda. Countries determine their own policies but unfortunately the ideology which underlies PISA – standardised testing, along with performance pay and independent schooling – has been adopted too vigorously by some countries. The important findings about effective school education policies and practices brought out in the comprehensive reports of PISA and Education at a Glance are ignored or even deliberately misinterpreted.
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In Australia parents are moving their kids in ever larger numbers to schools they perceive to be better based mainly on scores in standardised tests – NAPLAN – published on the MySchool website. What is happening is a drift of students from advantaged backgrounds away from public schools, which generally have large numbers of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, to independent schools. As a result learning gaps between children from different backgrounds are widening. Parents are responding to test scores and to other factors. That should have been anticipated by those deciding to privilege standardised testing and support extra funding for independent schools.
The Myth of School Choice: Government support for Independent Schools and Standardised Tests traverses the recent report from the Grattan Institute which illuminates important outcomes of the Howard Government’s support of independent schools and the reactions of parents to that. The focus on NAPLAN has problems drawn out in a report by Chris Bonner and Bernie Shepherd for the Centre for Policy Development and a study by David Zyngier of Monash University. That independent schools do not contribute to better educational achievement when socioeconomic background is taken into account is shown by a sophisticated report by researchers from the University of Queensland and colleagues. As it has been by many previous analyses!
Study after study has shown no significant educational gain by the much better resourced independent schools. The extra funds would have been better spent supporting those children with greatest needs, those from disadvantaged backgrounds having trouble with the learning program.
The Turnbull Coalition Government, like the Abbott Government before it, has refused to fund the last two years of the National Plan for School Improvement framed in response to the Gonski Panel’s recommendations: it maintains there are insufficient funds. However, there is substantial evidence to the effect that funds are available by addressing the substantial tax expenditures – tax concessions – introduced in recent years; Australia is a relatively low tax country and a major contribution to debt is private debt funding purchase of houses and apartments.
The response by the Turnbull Government to the States’ refusal to consider operating their own income tax systems has left unresolved the funding of schools (and hospitals) through agreements between the former government and the states, with the Prime Minister maintaining that the states have no grounds on which to ask the Commonwealth to raise taxes and claiming the previous agreements were made in “barely credible circumstances”. The Myth of School Choice: the Economics of Independent Schools and Australian Government Policy shows just how wrong this is and how billions of taxpayer funds have been wasted. A report by Lyndsay Connors and Jim McMorrow and detailed analysis by Trevor Cobbold illuminate the situation.
Proposals to have the Commonwealth fund independent schools and the States fund public schools were strongly criticised and are not supported by the Government’s own Green Paper on the Future of the Federation. In Victoria a review by former Premier Steve Bracks recommends policies reinforcing the Gonski reforms.
Despite adoption of policies in the US and UK based mainly on neoclassical economics which privilege private sector participation in generating public goods like education, favour competition and choice and deploy financial incentives to drive change, there are examples in those countries, as in Australia, of exciting outcomes from schools which do address the main features of effective learning in schools.
The Myth of School Choice: Genuine improvement happens when everyone collaborates for the benefit of the children summarises an important review by education historian Diane Ravitch of two very interesting books on schools in the United States. It isn’t simply quality teachers or the administrative independence of school principals and it certainly isn’t standardised testing which make the difference! Kristina Rizga, author of Mission High: One School, How Experts Tried to Fail It, and the Students and Teachers Who Made It Triumph, about a high school in San Francisco with an enrolment of students from a wide cultural diversity, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, points out, “too many politicians, powerful bureaucrats, management and business experts, economists, and philanthropists are making decisions about the best solutions for schools. In short, the people in charge don’t know nearly as much about schooling as the students and teachers they are trying to “fix.””
Despite everything, at Mission High in San Francisco great gains were made by students through the intense enthusiasm of their teachers.
Rizga says, “What matters in quality education – critical thinking, intrinsic motivation, resilience, self-management, resourcefulness, and relationship skills – exist in realms that can’t be easily measured by statistical measures and computer algorithms, but can be detected by teachers using human judgment. America’s business-inspired obsession with prioritizing “metrics” in a complex world that deals with the development of individual minds has become the primary cause of mediocrity in American schools.”
Diane Ravitch points out “grand ideas cannot be imposed on people without their assent. Money and power are not sufficient to improve schools. Genuine improvement happens when students, teachers, principals, parents, and the local community collaborate for the benefit of the children.”
And education does not by itself fix poverty.
Pyne’s Curriculum Mess
Tuesday, February 25th, 2014
The Minister for Education in the Abbott Government, the Hon Christopher Pyne, continued his destruction of the former government’s education policies in early January of this year when he announced a review of the National Curriculum developed over the last five or so years and about to be implemented in all states. The announcement is a further step in the dismantling of the entire education policies of the former Labor Government.
The latest decision is the undermining of the Gonski reforms by allowing that the states need not contribute any increased funding to implement the National Plan for School Improvement. As Trevor Cobbold points out that is fundamentally destructive of the basis of the National Plan. In other words the Coalition by supporting states’ rights has sabotaged the Plan. This is a breach of the commitment given by Mr Abbott before the election and also goes against the policies of the Howard Government.
As Cobbold points out not only did the Howard Government subject state and territory government to conditions for federal funding, but it went so far as to circumvent state and territory government control over their own schools by funding schools directly, subject to conditions.
Predictably, in announcing the curriculum review, Pyne claimed the government had a mandate for the review, justified it by claiming it would be robust and that it should not be a partisan issue. His two reviewers, consultant Dr Kevin Donnelly and Professor of Public Administration at the University of Queensland Ken Wiltshire were immediately identified as well-known opponents of the new curriculum.
There are particular reasons why all this fuss by the Minister about the curriculum is a waste of people’s time and based on no understanding whatsoever of education, learning and schooling.
The curriculum is useful when it forms a strong basis for discussion in the classroom and encourages understanding and further inquiry. And more importantly, if our aim is to have young people emerge from school able to reach their potential and be productive members of the community in the brad sense of that word and able to understand the world around them and interested in the future and in humanity, then we have to recognise that the education process doesn’t start at school but in the earliest years, in the home with parents, carers, other children and amongst a physical and emotional environment which has profound and long lasting influence.
Pyne’s curriculum review has been heavily criticised by academics and education researchers, media commentators and parents and citizens groups as premature at best and unnecessary at worst.
Maralyn Parker in her Daily Telegraph blog branded the exercise a shambles. She quoted reviewer Dr Kevin Donnelly as complaining that every subject had to be taught through a perspective “where new age, 21st century generic skills and competencies undermine academic content”, “the draft civics and citizenship curriculum air brushes Christianity from the nation’s civic life and institutions and adopts a postmodern, subjective definition of citizenship”.
Dr Donnelly has also asserted that, “The history curriculum, in addition to uncritically promoting diversity and difference instead of what binds as a community and a nation, undervalues Western civilisation and the significance of Judeo-Christian values to our institutions and way of life” and the English national curriculum as adopting “an exploded definition of literature, one where classic works from the literary canon jostle for attention along side SMS messages, film posters, graffiti and multi-modal texts”.
Maralyn Parker also made this prescient comment:
“Next will be an attempt to change how teachers teach.
“Kevin claims “One reason why the cultural-left has been so successful in controlling the education system is because the majority of Australia’s professional bodies, subject associations and teacher training academics are hostile to a conservative view of education epitomised by choice and diversity, an academic curriculum, meritocracy and traditional styles of teaching.”
Indeed Mr Pyne has announced a review of teacher education! That is for another time.
Commentator Mungo MacCallum (“History repeats in curriculum war”) writing in The Drum, the ABC’s comments site, on 21 January observed that Education Minister Christopher Pyne’s review of the national curriculum will not be left solely to his two hand-picked cultural warriors of the extreme right. “They now say they will co-opt experts in every field, as well as call for submissions from all the state and territory curriculum authorities, the independent and Catholic schools, principals, teachers and parents – just about everyone, in fact, except the students themselves. In effect they will be starting again from scratch, and since the process of evolving the original curriculum took several years, Pyne’s ambition to see the results of his review incorporated in the curriculum for the 2015 teaching year seem unlikely to be realised. Indeed, state authorities in New South Wales, to name but one state, have dismissed the idea as fanciful.”
MacCallum also observed, “Wiltshire, whose expertise has been in the broad field of public administration, has some experience in curriculum reform; he headed a similar exercise for Queensland’s Labor premier Wayne Goss, a job which brought him into open conflict with Goss’s chief of staff, one Kevin Rudd. But once again, he has no known acquaintance with maths and science. It is hard to see this ideologically driven review coming up with big improvements in the teaching of either discipline.”
Associate Professor Tony Taylor at Monash University has been intimately associated with the review and formulation of history curricula. In 1999 he was appointed Director of the Australian Government’s National Inquiry into the Teaching and Learning of History and, from 2001-2007, he was Director of the Australian Government’s National Centre for History Education. He has researched and published extensively on history and education. He was a senior consultant with successive Coalition and ALP federal governments in formulating three drafts of a national history curriculum and also developed national professional standards for the teaching and learning of history.
Professor Taylor wrote in The Conversation 10 January, “These appointments come as no surprise. They are entirely in line with the government’s brazen approach to appointing close supporters to positions of authority and influence. The justificatory rhetoric that surrounds the current nominations is familiar, stale and inaccurate.”
Taylor commented in the Fairfax Press on January 16 that “Since federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne’s launch last week of a two-man curriculum review panel, of conservative educationist Kevin Donnelly and conservatively inclined business academic Kenneth Wiltshire, levels of incredulity, derision and cynicism among educators and political commentators (outside News Corp media) have gone off the Richter scale.” He continued, “Pyne might as well have announced he was rearranging the communal henhouse by shoving two foxes through its front door. The curriculum history wars, part of the bigger culture wars that have been blighting the Australian cultural and political landscape for more than a decade, were on again.”
Professor Taylor also observed, “Finally, any criticism of this world view is to be regarded as subversive and is based on godless Marxism or is just plain atheist in origin. Occasionally ill-informed mentions of bogyman postmodernism are thrown into the mix. These complaints form the basis of the current curriculum review.”
Reporters Josephine Tovey and Judith Ireland (“Education: Christopher Pyne’s move to review curriculum dubbed a political stunt”, January 11) reported
the lead writer of the new history curriculum, Professor Stuart Macintyre of the University of Melbourne, as pointing out that the curriculum had been developed by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), over three years, involving consultation, submissions and contributions from a huge number of people – more than 4000 submissions and surveys were received in relation to English, maths, science and history alone. ”Whereas this is to be conducted by two people who have particular backgrounds. How they’re expected to apply expertise is beyond me, both in the subject areas and in curriculum”.
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority’s board chairman, Barry McGaw, said he welcomed the review. But he also said the authority had used a ”rigorous, national process” that had produced a high-quality curriculum. ”The Australian curriculum is setting higher standards across the country, perhaps most notably in mathematics and science at the primary school level”.
On the other hand, Professor Judith Sloan, writing in The Australian (October 12, 2013), described the national curriculum as mired in half-baked fads. “I HAVE never been a fan of the idea of a national school curriculum. I can understand why some people find it attractive. What happens to the 80,000 odd school-aged children whose families move interstate every year? How confusing it must be for them to deal with differences in curriculum. Actually, this is a very weak argument. In point of fact, the differences in the content of school courses have never been vast across the states.”
Professor Sloan trashed the economics curriculum: “The bottom line is that the national curriculum on economics and business for years 5 to 10 is tosh. It is page after page of earnest, largely worthless, drivel. I pity the poor teachers who have to use this guide as a basis for preparing teaching materials and lessons.”
The Australian Council of State School Organisations, a peak national group affiliated with most state and territory parents and citizens associations, was reported by Daniel Hurst in The Guardian of 13 January (‘National curriculum review premature, say parents and teachers’) as questioning the review’s timing and motivation.
“The council’s chief executive officer, Dianne Giblin, said parents were “a bit bemused” by the review because the national curriculum was yet to be completely rolled out. She said parents and parent groups had been heavily involved in developing the national curriculum, with the process attracting thousands of submissions.”
Minister Pyne has said, as reported by Hurst in The Guardian, the aim of the review “was to turn out a robust curriculum, a good curriculum that improves the results of our students” and he said he was confident Donnelly and Wiltshire would produce an objective and fair report. He said the national curriculum should not be a static document and should always be questioned, tested and argued about. “I haven’t appointed a committee that tries to please everybody and therefore does not produce a robust result,” Pyne said.
Neither Donnelly or the other reviewer Professor Ken Wiltshire at the University of Queensland are curriculum experts. The study of curricula is a discipline in itself and one of Australia’s education researchers, Professor Lynn Yates of Melbourne University’s Graduate School of Education is a leading expert in the field. A major conference on the curriculum held at the University of Melbourne in late February 2010 involved distinguished experts in many disciplines. It was hardly reported in the media.
The reasons why the review of the curriculum is a waste of time is at Moving deckchairs on the wrong ship!
Prime Minister Tony Blair speaking on the Arts March 6 2007
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007
On March 6, British Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke gave an important speech at Tate Modern on the arts. The intended speech is reprinted in full in the Guardian.
Here are some highlights – the first several introductory paragraphs and then statements referring specifically to museums. Not the least interesting statistics are those concerning the increases in attendances at the National Museums since admission was made free, including increases from particular socio-economic groupings which are historically less inclined to visit museums.
There are also interesting observations about “arms length” administration and funding rather than control.
These statements can surely be used in advocacy in Australia.
Years ago, before coming to government, I said that we would make the arts and culture part of our “core script”. In other words, it was no longer to be on the periphery, an add-on, a valued bit of fun when the serious work of government was done; but rather it was to be central, an essential part of the narrative about the character of a new, different, changed Britain.
When I said this all those years back, I think there was a certain amount of scepticism. But at last week’s Downing Street seminar in advance of this speech, one participant said we would look back on the last 10 years as a “golden age” for the arts. I will come on to why that has happened in a moment.
But the important point to realise is why I said it. I didn’t say it because I thought we, as a government, were of great importance to you, the arts, but rather because you, the arts, were going to be of fundamental importance to the country.
The reason for this will be spelt out in the policy reviews shortly to be published across government and is utterly critical to understanding why arts and culture matter to a modern nation like Britain.
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So when more children get access to the joy of art, it is not the art alone that they learn; it is the art of living, thinking and creating. They may never be, probably won’t ever be, an artist or a dancer or a designer, but in whatever job, in whichever walk of life, they will carry an idea that is not just about the buying and selling, but about what makes the ordinary, special. When people on low incomes can visit museums free of charge, and see great works of art, they take something of the inspiration with them. A nation that cares about art will not just be a better nation. In the early 21st Century it will be a more successful one.
It is worth a brief counter-factual exercise. Imagine what the world would have been like if we had continued with the funding regime and the policies that we inherited. Many of the country’s finest regional theatres would have closed or would exist as shadows of themselves, on a diet of light drama. Many orchestras would have gone to the wall. There would be no new programmes for art education. Museums, far from being full, would have gradually diminished in importance as charging reduced the audience to the middle class. I’m not sure there would be a British film industry, or at least not one nearly so healthy, or the same huge success at the National Theatre.
Instead government funding has doubled since 1997 and is now done on a more stable 3-year basis. Free admission has meant that there are 42 million visits each year to museums and galleries.
We have been able to run very effective policies to keep ticket prices down. In the case of national museums, of course, entry is free.… visits to national museums have risen by almost 30 million.
Between 2002/03 and 2004/05 the number of people from lower socio-economic groups visiting government-sponsored museums increased by almost 30%. The Renaissance in the Regions programme has helped attract almost three quarters of a million new visitors from communities that would not traditionally attend a museum.
The tourist benefit shows the British model in action. Seven of the ten most popular tourist attractions in this country are government-sponsored museums and galleries. 28% of visitors to the London theatre come from overseas.
Increasing numbers of British arts organisations and artists now tour internationally. The British Museum’s exhibition in Tehran provided an opportunity for the Foreign Secretary to visit at a sensitive time. The Arts Council’s international fellowship programme and its Artists Link Programme with the British Council in China have created some great international exchanges. The British Museum and the V&A have also announced an unprecedented programme of collaboration with China. Exhibitions from the British Museum have also been helping build civil society in Kenya and Ethiopia.
I think the results have been spectacular. When you are searching to show how things have changed you are usually seeking a policy that somehow embodies it.
Perhaps it is free entry to museums. But actually the crucial thing is not the policy but the fact that, as Nick Serota said to me recently, museums now just “feel” different. They have a different atmosphere.