Pearls and Irritations

In a school system so deeply segregated along class and cultural lines it is not hard to identify the losers. But the question is whether there are any real winners?

The clear losers are students in those schools that are unable to provide them with the range and depth of the school curriculum through having a shortage of teachers and/or teachers having to teach outside their own fields of expertise. Their classrooms lack the educational materials necessary to support teaching and learning. Their buildings and facilities are often sub-standard. They are under-funded according to the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) set by government, and for providing the support needed by the concentrations of students they enrol who cannot draw on the resources of families and communities like their peers in more affluent locations. They contribute disproportionately to falling school completion rates.

These are the ‘have-not’ schools, which are largely found in the public sector.

These are the schools that would face challenges regardless of the nation’s education policies, arising from factors such as location, social and economic disadvantage. When it comes to decisions about schooling, families and schools are not operating on a level playing field. 

But, in Australia’s increasingly privatised and market-based school system, the decisions made by families and schools which are ‘strong’ in the market can further damage the prospects of those which are ‘weak’, including by increasing the concentrations of disadvantaged students in under-resourced schools.

There are those who would argue that a highly stratified school system could be justified if the value contributed to educational outcomes overall by those schools and students who were ‘winners’ far outstripped the value which could be achieved by having more socially representative, comprehensive schools.

But this argument is not relevant here because there is no evidence that the ‘winner’ schools – even some with very high resource levels – do produce correspondingly high outcomes, once proper account is taken of the achievement levels of students from similar backgrounds. And this holds true at both the local level and across the system.

There are other reasons to steer well clear of this kind of argument, given the weight of evidence that inequality in a school system, of itself, has a negative effect on outcomes overall. There are no real ‘winners’ in such a system from an educational standpoint. And producing a society with a deep educational divide has political risks. This was clearly one of the factors in the US election that helped to create a simmering sea of resentments across the population ready to be exploited by those advocating ‘small government’.

Their game is to foster a resentment of raising taxes to the level needed to equip those schools with students from educationally deprived homes and communities to offer the more intensive support they will need to do their best. Their next strategy is to persuade those who are missing out on educational opportunities to direct their resentment at those who do have a better quality of schooling. They are encouraged to scorn those who go on to become scientists, environmentalists, educators, medicos, lawyers; to label them as ‘elites’; to denigrate their informed advice; and to vote for governments who do the same.

Fears and hopes. The election of the Howard Government in 1996 accelerated a neo-liberal agenda, with schools funding policies geared to expanding the privatisation of schooling. The PM himself chose to play on the fears of parents by attacking the values in public schools. At the same time, the decision to send children to schools in the private sector was valorised and associated with good parenting. Even if political leaders do opt to characterise paying private school fees as a financial form of sacrifice, they should understand that it is not a virtue available to those families who have nothing to sacrifice; and that it is an affront to the many parents whose decision is to send their children to public schools because they believe that it is in their own children’s best interests for all children to have the best quality of schooling the country can afford.

It has been disturbing over recent decades, in my view, to see the concept of ‘sacrifice’ being used as a siren song to lure parents to enrol their children in the private school sector where this strains the family budget. This risks creating anxiety for parents about their future earning capacity; potential for tensions between parents and students; and having to remove students from a school to which they have become attached.

As adults, many of us will remember childhood and adolescence as a time of joys and hopes as well as fears and anxieties, the latter much more real and significant for some than for others. And we will recognise that there is a high level of anxiety for many of our children and grandchildren today, arising from the pandemic and the effects of climate change as well as from personal circumstances.

Our school system should be designed to support them to manage their anxieties, not to add to them.

But we are a society which generates mixed messages. Sports coverage in the media is teeming with ads promoting gambling followed immediately by warnings against it! And the same hypocrisy and double-speak now infests our school system. Teenagers are being told, on the one hand, not to become overly stressed about attaining a high-ranking tertiary entrance score because this is not the meaning of life. And, at the same time, the school system itself is dominated by the machinations of the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) scoring system.

Whatever kind of school system a country adopts, the reality is that schools are subtle organisations, highly sensitive to a range of influences within and between the public and private sectors, so that it is sometimes hard to understand the forces at play. Take the curious case of the NSW Higher School Certificate (HSC)and the disability provisions designed to give practical assistance to students who may otherwise be disadvantaged when undertaking this high-pressure end-of-school examination. In 2023, in the public school sector, an application was made for this disability provision for one in every 8 students sitting the HSC. In the Catholic sector, an application was made for one in every 6 students. In the Independent schools sector, an application was made for one in every 5 students. It would be interesting to know what forces produce this disproportionately high number of students from this particular sector.

We owe our children a better and fairer school system

A good starting point would be to take the time and trouble to think about the fundamental purpose of our school system and where it fits into the broader concept of education. Schools serve a range of purposes, but I recall when studying for a DipEd years ago a description which came close to capturing the essential purpose of a school system in a democracy. Here it is, to the best of my recall:

Schooling is the formal process for assisting children and young people to develop their capacity to learn and to think for themselves in an open, just and caring society.

Of course, schooling serves many other purposes both formal and informal, but it is, at heart, the formal process for inducting each generation into our best-validated ways of understanding the world – the knowledge, the understandings and skills they will need to participate in decisions about the society they share, as well as about their personal lives.

Some economists would describe schooling as a process for building the nation’s intellectual capital, a preparation for adult life. This does no justice to the fact that, for all of us, childhood and adolescence are highly significant years of our lives and are not just some kind of rehearsal for later. Surely we have an obligation to ensure that all schools can provide their students in these vital years with engaging, enjoyable and rewarding experiences that have immediate as well as longer-term benefits for them.

We need a better and fairer kind of school system to achieve these purposes.

There is a clear value, in my view, in the concept of a broad, national core curriculum to ensure that all schools provide students with access to what could be described here as the key disciplines such as literacy, numeracy, science, arts, history, geography, civics, physical education. This all rests on teachers who can provide this access to students with their varying aptitudes, interests, needs and abilities.

But there is a need for a greater balance between this core and the freedom and capacity for schools to provide engaging, enjoyable and rewarding experiences for the particular students they enrol in vastly different communities across the country. This area of the school curriculum would be framed around the special interests and strengths of students and teachers and the resources available in local communities.

Where this kind of balance does exist in schools, students are more likely to have a sense of belonging as well as a sense of their own identity. If students have some activity at their school about which they are passionate, this can motivate them to attend and to learn to engage with those parts of the curriculum which may have less appeal for them.

There is an urgent for us to think long and hard about these issues, particularly in the light of the moves towards ultranationalist, authoritarian politics across the world. We need our political leaders to abandon their fixation on mutual ‘wedging’ and to weave clear and convincing narratives about their visions of the country we want to be. That will provide a firmer basis for attempting to build a consensus about the changes we need to our school system.

We need, in particular, to grasp the reality that decisions about the purposes of schooling, and the curriculum and teaching should be driving schools funding arrangements. These are currently divorced from these realities and are locking in differences between the public and private school sectors in a system where there are no real winners.

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