Lyndsay Connors (Pearls and Irritations, 14 November 2024) takes issue with my argument that the Commonwealth should get out or be pushed out of schooling.
The argument for a Commonwealth exit is this:
– By just about every indicator Australian schooling has been on the slide for at least 20 years, despite the Rudd/Gillard governments’ boast that a beefed up Commonwealth-led ‘national approach’ would put Australia among the OECD’s top five ‘performers’ by 2025.
– The fundamental problem is not in what the Commonwealth does or doesn’t do, but in the involvement of two levels of government in all three sectors (government, non-government systemic, and independent) in each of eight states and territories.
– Consequences of that involvement include: compounded complexity of governance; nominally ‘national’ policy is dominated by the only government that doesn’t run a school system or, indeed a single school; policy formation is remote from the reality of schools; everyone is responsible for everything and therefore no-one is responsible for anything; nothing happens and good things are prevented from happening.
– Tinkering with the machinery of the ‘national’ approach, as suggested by the Productivity Commission, by Connors, and by other senior figures can have little or no impact on the fundamentals of the problem.
– One or other level of government must get out of schooling. Since that can’t be the states and territories, it has to be the Commonwealth.
Against this Connors argues that schooling is in its nature ‘national’ and so the ‘national’ government must be involved. But what about the example of Canada, also a federal system in which the federal government has almost nothing to do with a school system that is doing significantly better than ours?
Connors also argues that a ‘mature and civil’ debate could generate a consensus and ‘a set of clear, national goals’ which, in combination with ‘the best validated evidence’, could shape key national objectives and priorities. But here too reality gets in the way: we have had a national statement of the goals of schooling since 1989. Despite frequent revisions that statement remains confined to generalisations quite different in spirit from the command-and-control approach taken in most states and territories, and enabled by a national testing and disclosure infrastructure. Much political effort notwithstanding, consensus about purposes capable of driving policy remains elusive.
Connors concedes that since things aren’t going well and since schooling has become ‘a wicked problem’ there is a case for ‘redefining’ the Commonwealth role. But any re-definition capable of resolving the underlying structural problem and of lifting schooling would limit the federal government to a very general statement of principles, and to providing untied grants to the states/territories sufficient to cover all schools in the state or territory, government and non-government alike, subject to just one condition: a substantial re-organisation of governance and funding arrangements within each state and territory.
Of course in any such devolved system states/territories could opt for joint work, pro tem or continuing, in whatever combination, including a ‘national’ combination of all. But that would be a very different thing from being press-ganged into a muscle-bound ‘national approach’ in which the only real beneficiaries are Canberra and a cluster of national organisations.
For more on this topic, P&I recommends:
Dean Ashenden
Dean Ashenden has worked in and around schools as a teacher, academic and consultant, and in journalism. He has contributed to all major print outlets and to many professional, academic, and social affairs journals. His previous book, Telling Tennant’s Story, was inaugural winner of the Australian Political Book of the Year Award. He is a Senior Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
Dean Ashenden has commented on education in all major Australian print outlets. His Unbeaching the Whale: Can Australian schooling be reformed? was published earlier this year by Inside Story
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