Pearls and Irritations

Lack of leadership by successive Australian governments has created a rift between rhetoric and reality that has played a part in eroding public confidence and trust in our school system and generating anxiety for families, teachers and students.

National Goals for Schooling are one example of this credibility gap.

Since 1989, ministerial councils have issued their common and agreed national goals for schooling in Australia, starting with the Hobart Declaration, then the Melbourne, the Adelaide and the Alice Springs (Mpartntwe) versions. But the fine, even heroic, statements of goals have been superimposed on a system that lacks the coherence, consistency, transparency and accountability necessary to achieve them, a system geared to move in the opposite direction from equality, equity, quality, efficiency and effectiveness.

Overlaying national goals for schooling on the Australian school system as it currently operates makes as much sense as if a surgeon were to place a skin graft on top of an open infected wound. Bloviating pronouncements of this kind, in my experience, create an unhealthy scepticism and cynicism among teachers, in particular.

It would be easy for a visiting academic, say, who was not aware of Mpartntwe, to infer from an examination of the available evidence and data on the Australian school system the kinds of goal statement that would align most closely with the realities. Here is one reasonable assumption:

To lower the school completion rate by increasing concentrations of the most educationally disadvantaged students in under-resourced schools.

But what kind of democracy would want to put its name to such a disgraceful goal?

Over the past two decades, we have watched our school system develop into a ‘wicked problem’. Governments appear to have lost the courage and ambition to envision the kind of system that would be more appropriate and sustainable for a liberal democracy. Even if they had such a vision, taking the steps towards achieving it would be politically daunting. But without such a vision, our school system is going downhill.

The end of a line.

In a recent essay in Inside Story (24/10/24), Dean Ashenden concluded that the role of the Commonwealth in schooling is approaching the end of a line laid down by Menzies in the 1960s and then systematised by Whitlam and his Karmel Committee in 1973. Ashenden argues that at first and for many years the Commonwealth was a good and necessary supporter and encourager of teachers and schools, but that those days are long gone.

It is hard not to have a great deal of sympathy for this view. It is also worth noting that the Karmel Committee report warned of the inherent tensions between the traditions of public and non-government schooling in this country. It stated clearly that “the strength and representativeness of the public school sector should not be diluted” by the extension of public funding to non-government schools and the uncoordinated expansion of that sector.

All too soon, when worldwide economic downturn brought funding cuts to the Whitlam government’s expansive schools funding, the general recurrent grants program was protected at the expense of other programs and, within it, the non-government sector was treated (slightly) more favourably than the public.

This was a harbinger of things to come. Over the Fraser government years, Commonwealth spending on schools increased in real terms by 35.4 per cent or $382 million. Of that increase, however, the net effect was that all except $2 million was the result of increased general recurrent funding to non-government schools.

The complexities of the asymmetrical imbalance in the responsibilities of the states and the Commonwealth in the planning and funding of schools have provided ideal conditions for masking special deals, transitional funding arrangements and other devices that have led to the current reality, where more than 56% of private schools are now receiving more government funding than public schools of similar size and that educate very similar cohorts of students.

The Commonwealth’s most significant contribution to schooling has been to siphon taxpayer funding towards the expansion of private schools and on a scale that exceeds the full costs of staffing for that sector as a whole! By 2022, expenditure by the non-government school sector across Australia on teaching staff salaries amounted to $13.493 billion. In the same year, the Commonwealth alone provided $15.824 billion in recurrent funding to this sector.

Such is the sense of entitlement of independent schools in this sector that Independent Schools Australia (ISA) is seeking to have billions in Commonwealth over-funding locked in for years to come, as detailed in Trevor Cobbold’s recent article on this policy platform (4 November).

This combination of an over-developed sense of entitlement and an under-developed sense of responsibility meets the definition of bullying. It is enabled by the political imbalance in the power of private over public school authorities to exert political influence on the Commonwealth. For when it comes to funding, private school providers operate largely as brokers. They arrange for public funding for their schools from both Commonwealth and state/territory governments and for private funding from parents, committing a very small amount of their own resources. They are free to operate as political lobbyists. State and territory governments, as the providers of public schooling, are not able to do the same. If they go to the Commonwealth with demands for betterments for public schools, they will be picking up the major share of the costs themselves.

So it is not hard to understand why Dean Ashenden would conclude that “nothing in the Commonwealth’s sixty-year life in schooling would so become it as the graceful leaving of it”.

He goes on, however, to argue that it is not logical for those who conclude that the system is broken to offer suggestions for fixing it; and that “engineering isn’t the problem”. While agreeing with Ashenden that the way in which the two levels of government are involved in public and private schooling in eight states and territories is a fundamental problem, it is not the only one.

Engineering is also a fundamental problem. This country’s school system has been engineered over decades to keep adding to the share of the ‘heavy lifting’ borne by an under-funded public sector; to produce the fastest growth in a generally over-funded independent school sector with its concentrations of advantage; and to increase the concentration of disadvantaged students in disadvantaged schools at a rate second to only other country, the Czech Republic! Simply removing the Commonwealth from school level education and leaving these policy settings to the states and territories will not resolve these problems.

It is essential, in my view, to understand that we are one nation and that we have one school system, hybrid and fractured as it is.

There is a strong case, therefore, for taking the development of National Goals for Schooling more seriously than in the past. It would be in the national interest, and certainly in the interest of future generations of students and teachers, to have a mature and civil debate to try and reach a consensus about what we stand for as a society and the values and ideals on which our school system should be based if we are to remain a healthy democracy. A set of clear, national goals would provide the basis for identifying key objectives, for setting priorities both immediate and longer-term and for identifying those strategies most likely to achieve these objectives based on the best validated evidence available.

I write this from the perspective of one who owes much to the public school system, and who is fearful for its future given current trends. I understand and accept that a large private school sector will continue to be a reality in Australia for the foreseeable future. But I am wearied by the incessant and insatiable demands of the private school sector; and the privileging of greed over need by our politicians.

Independent school principals are now writing letters to parents to justify the latest of their (habitual) fee increases on the basis of wage increases for teachers in public schools; and the need to maintain a financial edge especially in a time of teacher shortage in attracting and retaining highly valued staff (Sun-Herald, 10 November). It would be interesting to know if these letters inform parents that independent schools already employ a disproportionately large share of teachers for the numbers of students they enrol; and that these salary increases will lead to increased public funding for their schools via the mechanism of indexation which is highly weighted towards teacher salaries.

It would be a relief to see private schools issued with an ultimatum to make known their ambit claim for public funding; and to provide a clear statement of their guiding values and principles so that we can have a rational and open debate about what political compromises might have to be made in order to move forward and to develop a genuine set of National Goals for Schooling. These would need to be broad and explicit, so that all schools would have a shared responsibility and would be held accountable for making a positive contribution to their achievement.

Rather than expelling the Commonwealth, there is a strong case for re-defining its role.

The fact that the Commonwealth’s major contribution to education and training in Australia is the public funding of private schools is an outcome of political choice and not legal imperative.

But the Commonwealth does have a particular legal responsibility for funding higher education, which it took over from the states in 1974. There is a wealth of evidence that the most effective lever available to governments to raise the quality of schooling for all our students is strengthening the supply of quality teaching. The Commonwealth could do much to contribute to democratic values and social cohesion through exerting pressure on our universities to play a more effective role, in consultation with states and territories, in the selection, initial education and career development of the nation’s teaching force; and to strengthen the link between research, theory and the craft of teaching. The Commonwealth could also examine whether there should be a more systemic, national approach among universities, to providing initial teacher education.

The future of our democracy.

We have seen in recent days, in the US, the harm to democracy of allowing the development of a deep educational divide. There is surely a role for the Commonwealth in working with states and territories to reduce this risk in our country. It could start by doing more to increase public understanding and recognition of the social and the economic value of teachers to our society; and of the need for us to contribute the tax revenue necessary to make teaching an attractive and rewarding career for our best and brightest!

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