There is no government or agency or combination of them capable of conceiving and driving the kind and scale of change Australian schooling now requires. The ‘national approach’ installed by the Rudd and Gillard governments fifteen years ago has not worked and cannot. Its sponsor, the Commonwealth, should move or be moved to the margins or get out of schooling altogether.
The ‘education revolution’ promised that there would be a new deal for schools: teachers would be better paid and free to focus on their work in the classroom; the ‘long tail’ of student attainment would be reduced along with inequality across the system; and the slide in ‘outcomes’ would be arrested and reversed. Indeed, by 2025 Australia would be in the top five performers in international league tables. All this would be driven by a newly enabled ‘national approach’ centred on National School Reform Agreements (NSRAs); they would steer the states/territories and the Commonwealth into a single reform direction.
None of this has happened. Instead, outcomes have failed to lift and by some measures are in steady decline, as are teachers’ pay, prospects and professional standing and standards of entry to teacher education courses. Too many young people still leave school early, often with no usable qualification or skills. Students’ sense of belonging at school was low 15 years ago and is now lower still. Two school sectors still suck the life out of the third, which is still doing almost all the hard educational yards. Inequality, however defined, is unchanged at best; social segregation across the system has increased. Some reforms have worked, particularly in making schools more lively and humane places than they once were, but that is mostly the schools’ doing anyway.
The NSRAs have failed to herd the state/territory cats and are best seen as a power grab by the Commonwealth. In its recent review of the NSRAs the Productivity Commission found that most ‘initiatives’ had been ‘delivered’, but with no detectable impact on outcomes; three had not been delivered and two of those, touted as doing what others haven’t, namely, lifting outcomes, had been ‘stalled’, for 13 years.
Suggesting how things might be done in the future the Commission recommended that NSRAs should be confined to a small number of reforms and avoid a ‘one size fits all’ approach in favour of undertakings that might benefit from coordination. In other words, agreements had been made with no clear or shared idea about where ‘reform’ was up to or exactly where it was headed, had avoided difficult issues, and had probably hindered more than helped.
Federal education minister Jason Clare has been moving cautiously. He has allowed time for careful review and extensive consultation and is now negotiating with his state/territory opposite numbers for a NSRA tightened and focussed along lines suggested by the Productivity Commission.
One problem for this commendable caution is that the NSRAs are only one part of the complicated machinery of the ‘national approach’. Other aspects of the national approach are a statement of the goals of schooling, a national curriculum, the Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority and the national Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership), a powerful federal department of education, and a national and international testing regime along with full disclosure of every school’s ‘performance’ on the My School Website.
There are yet more complications in the structure of the entire system. Two levels of government are involved in funding and policy for each of three quite distinct school sectors in each of eight states and territories, the whole subject to nine different three-year election cycles.
All this is a relatively recent problem. For the first 60 years of Federation the Commonwealth had nothing to do with schools, with the Constitution giving it no role or rights in schooling whatsoever. In the 1960s, however, Menzies won elections on the promise that he would ‘solve’ the state aid problem with Commonwealth money and in 1973 Whitlam went further via his ‘Karmel’ report. Karmel made the Commonwealth the most powerful single player in the rapidly expanding world of schooling. The Rudd/Gillard governments’ compounded the structural problems bequeathed by Menzies and Whitlam. In its ‘national approach’ guise or any other, the Commonwealth has become a part of the problem, not its solution. It must move or be moved out by pressure from below.
But in favour of what? The structural problem within states/territories is as many-sided and substantial as at the national level.
State ministers could do worse than commission some systematic thinking about how to reduce the fragmentation of authority and responsibility within each state/territory; how to get school administrations to shift from compliance-demanding micro-management toward an encouraging and supportive relationship with schools; how to help schools to shift toward a progress-and-growth approach for all students; and how all this could work at arm’s length from ministers and government.
This is very different from the agenda of current negotiations over the next NSRA. It is also a very tall order.
Too tall? In which case, what is to stop the long slide in Australia’s schooling from continuing into the indefinite future?
Dean Ashenden’s Unbeaching the Whale: Can Australia’s schooling be reformed? is available for $24.95 (print) and $9.95 (ebook) from cse.edu.au
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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