The title of the new plan for school education, the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement, might come back to haunt us well before it expires in 2034. As an agreement it doesn’t look any better, and it certainly won’t be fairer. It will lock Australia into a schooling framework which is worsening with each passing year – and long ago stopped being fair.
Yes, Jason Clare has ensured that the Commonwealth will pay more, but we still won’t see public schools resourced at the level needed to attain minimum standards. And can we be sure that the states, after a suitable interval, won’t (yet again) under-deliver on their side of the bargain? The rhetoric about ‘full-funding’ continues to act as a cover for something that, in reality, will continue to be too little, too late … if ever.
Even the language and activity surrounding the plan is dredged from failures of the past. Just over a decade ago Julia Gillard toured the land, hoping to sign each state and territory up to ‘Gonski’. Labor had already recast ‘Gonski’ as being about school reform, and the pattern was set. Hence in 2024 yet another entitlement to fair (?) funding comes with a thinly veiled threat that somehow the money might not happen if the reforms don’t materialise.
The proposed reforms themselves are a mixed bag. The agreement includes the latest brainwaves from well-placed think tanks and pressure groups (think phonics, tutoring, teacher recruitment and support). But the track record of setting grand targets linked to familiar measures (think NAPLAN), isn’t comforting.
The government claims that the new agreement has been informed by the work of the Productivity Commission and by an expert panel set up by the federal minister. Its report, a Review to Inform a Better and Fairer Education System is essential reading. Jason Clare heard and even echoed much of what it said – but it seems that the authors of the new agreement managed to sidestep clearly stated concerns and suggestions for something better.
The review panel pointed to the growing segregation of school enrolments as a problem that needs to be addressed. Indeed, it stated that the current system entrenches educational disadvantage, in the process making it less likely that other reforms will realise Australia’s longstanding ambition of equity and excellence.
None of that is up in lights in the new agreement, just more “other reforms”. Even the review’s modest recommendation to annually measure socio-economic diversity in schools and find ways to increase this diversity … went missing in (in)action. This agreement can’t last for ten years. There are too many other problems which will continue to undermine it.
Consider school equity as an example. It is essential to improving overall student outcomes, equity and excellence are joined at the hip. In overall terms our schools won’t achieve unless all students have access to at least equivalent opportunities. Without that access we can lift some, but at the price of leaving others behind. The blessed are those in advantaged schools, the ‘others’ are not. In effect, differences in educational outcomes then become (and have become) the result of differences in wealth, income, power, or possessions – to use Gonski’s wording.
Hence measuring equity has to be front and centre of any plan for schools. We especially need to know how much the gaps in student achievement are created by the socio-economic circumstances of families and schools – ahead of what schools and teachers actually do.
The good news is that changes in school system equity can be measured and tracked. The bad news is that the evidence to date suggests that this equity is in slow but inexorable decline.
The measures of equity come from the My School website which tells us about student learning outcomes, you guessed it, in NAPLAN. But it also tells us about school/family status via a measure of socio-educational advantage (aka ICSEA). The relationship between NAPLAN and ICSEA can be expressed as an equity gradient or slope. Think of walking uphill: a slope of 25% is steep enough, 40% is much steeper. Steep slopes can be a barrier to getting anywhere.
That’s the way these equity gradients work with schools. A lower gradient is created when schools, and what they do, is more likely to be creating achievement. A higher number tells us that the social status of families could be calling the tune.
How has this played out over time? Back in 2012 quite a few groups of schools had an equity slope in the 20-30% range. Not bad. But now most are in the 30s and even the 40s – remember, higher numbers mean poor equity. This change has been quite consistent, and in some cases, dramatic.
Inequity varies from place to place and even between school sectors. This is well-illustrated by our status ladder of schools. Most schools are on the middle rungs and are close to the average Australian equity gradient of 37%. Those on the bottom show steepening (worsening) equity slopes – possibly because they are feeling the impact of their growing numbers of the most disadvantaged kids. Picking up these strugglers requires a much bigger investment.
Here’s the biggest shock: it is those schools towards the top of the ladder which have the most rapidly worsening equity. Their average equity slope rocketed from 37% to 56% between 2012 and 2019. Their 10,000 teachers are having less of an impact on student achievement than we are led to believe. In NSW, where there is an unholy affinity between high-end private and selective public schools, the slope shifted to a very high 64%. It seems ‘elite’ schools are making a difference, alas not the one we expect.
And the surprises keep coming. In NSW the three school sectors, government, Catholic and independent, are almost as bad as each other, especially in the major cities. Even if it doesn’t further worsen, inequity is baked into our school system. This alone will surely force a rethink of the current agreement, and challenge our blinkered view of what constitutes school reform.
There are some caveats, and we need to know more. Other things, both inside and outside of schools can impact on achievement. And of course, measures of anything can be less than perfect, including measures of advantage and student achievement. Most important, good schools are about much more than such measures.
At the very least the ten-year plan must include measures of school system equity, along with ongoing research to explain how and why this varies over time. Any future planning must take into account what we already know about this problem and be prepared to add system-wide structural change to the plan. If that doesn’t happen it won’t be hard to predict what Australia’s schools will look like in a decades’ time.
Chris Bonnor is co-author, with Tom Greenwell, of Choice and Fairness, a common framework for all Australian schools. Data in this article is sourced in a soon-to-be-published research report.
Chris Bonnor is co-author, with Tom Greenwell, of Choice and Fairness: A Common Framework for all Australian schools, Koshland Innovation Fund, 2023.
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