Australia’s increasingly segregated school system is weakening both educational equality and social cohesion. Breaking the policy deadlock may require giving citizens a greater role in shaping long-term decisions about education.

For decades, Australians have argued about schools as though the problem was simply one of education policy. Funding formulas, curriculum reforms, teacher shortages, NAPLAN and school choice dominate the debate. Yet perhaps we have been looking in the wrong place.

Despite countless reviews, inquiries and election promises, one trend has remained remarkably consistent. Australia now has one of the most socially segregated school systems in the OECD.

Funding inequalities have tended to make public education the safety net for those who can’t afford private education. Public schools now educate a disproportionate number of students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds, while many families with the means to do so have moved into the private sector. Educational inequality has widened, and opportunities for children from different backgrounds to learn together have diminished.

This is having dire consequences for our democracy. Schools do more than teach literacy, numeracy and vocational skills. They help shape the kind of society a nation becomes.

Most parents naturally seek what they believe is the best education for their own children. The issue is not individual parental decisions but the public policies that shape those choices and their cumulative consequences. The democratic question is whether governments should simply respond to those choices or also protect the common good.

Democracy depends upon citizens learning how to live with people whose experiences differ from their own. Free, compulsory and secular public schools are places where young people from different cultures, religions, incomes and beliefs can encounter one another as equals, develop habits of cooperation, empathy and mutual respect, and discover that difference is normal rather than threatening.

A socially segregated education system makes that task far more difficult. As schools become increasingly divided by income, culture or social background, opportunities for those shared experiences diminish. Educational inequality becomes not merely an educational problem but a democratic one.

Thus, education has become the canary in the democratic coal mine. If our democratic institutions cannot make wise decisions about something as fundamental as schooling, we should not be surprised that they struggle in other policy areas.

Over the years many public education advocates, including myself, have argued for fairer funding for public schools and for policies that would reduce educational inequality and strengthen social cohesion. Yet governments of different political persuasions have largely ignored those arguments and continued down the same policy path.

If a democracy repeatedly struggles to make good decisions about one of its most important public institutions, it raises an uncomfortable question. Perhaps the problem is not simply whether Australia needs better education policy, but whether our democracy is capable of producing it.

That is not an argument against representative democracy, which is the cornerstone of Australia’s political system. But it is an argument for reforming aspects of our representative democracy. One of these is to recognise that representative institutions should not be the only places where democratic judgement is formed.

Between elections, public debate is too often compressed into slogans, dominated by short electoral cycles, shaped by tightly disciplined political parties and influenced by well-organised interests with privileged access to decision-makers.

Complex questions that demand careful deliberation are reduced to political contests with winners and losers. The result is not necessarily bad faith or poor intentions. It is a democratic system that often struggles to reason collectively about long-term public problems.

Democracy should involve more than voting every few years. It requires opportunities for citizens to engage in public reasoning: listening to one another, weighing evidence, considering competing values and revising their views in the light of better arguments.

Representative democracy and citizen deliberation are not competing models. They should strengthen one another. Elected representatives bring experience, accountability and authority. Citizens bring lived experience, diverse perspectives and independence from the immediate pressures of electoral politics. It is only when these strengths are brought together that democracies are more likely to arrive at wiser and more enduring judgements.

The challenge is to find ways of enabling citizens to deliberate together in ways that genuinely inform public policy. Around the world, democracies are trialling a range of approaches. Citizens’ assemblies, deliberative panels, participatory budgeting, constitutional conventions and strengthened parliamentary committee processes all reflect the same underlying idea: democratic judgement improves when citizens have meaningful opportunities to contribute to public decision-making between elections in rigorous and systematic ways.

Of course, improving democratic processes will not eliminate disagreement or guarantee better education policy. Democratic societies will always contain competing values and legitimate differences of opinion. But when public policy is informed by considered democratic judgement, better outcomes become more likely.

Education is precisely the kind of long-term policy issue that deserves such an approach.

Imagine bringing together a representative group of Australians to consider the background framing for the next round of discussions about schools funding. Participants would hear evidence from teachers, researchers, principals, students, employers and community organisations before deliberating on questions that rarely receive sustained public attention in a democratic society such as:

Should increasing social segregation between schools be accepted as inevitable? Should public education once again become the institution that brings Australians together? Should individual educational choice always outweigh social cohesion? What responsibilities do all Australians share for ensuring that every child receives an excellent education?

These are not simply questions about the purposes of education. They are questions about democracy itself.

Is it not more likely that the public judgements from such a process would be based on fairness, shared interests and the common good? How different would the subsequent funding policies be if those outcomes were used as a reference point informing the formal political process? Could this be one way out of our education policy stasis?

The point is that if our democratic institutions repeatedly struggle to produce policies that strengthen social cohesion in one of the nation’s most important public institutions, we should not simply ask what is wrong with education policy. We should also ask whether our democratic processes provide sufficient opportunities for citizens to reason together about the kind of society they wish to build.

If we want an education system that strengthens social cohesion, expands opportunity and serves the common good, we need a democracy that invites citizens into the education conversation instead of leaving it largely to governments, political parties and powerful lobby groups.

Better education begins with better democracy.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.