Early indications of what the next federal government wants to do about schools are beginning to appear. They are not promising.

Until recently the opposition confined itself to boilerplate rhetoric based on speakers’ notes recently disclosed by Crikey. Then Tony Abbott used his budget-in-reply speech to promise that within a decade 40% of year 12 students would be studying a language — when we already speak more languages than just about any society on Earth and use the world’s lingua franca, and therefore have almost no students who want to do languages at school.

Now opposition shadow Christopher Pyne is running hard on “teacher quality”.

In last week’s Lateline and in The Weekend Australian (and no doubt tonight on Q&A if he gets a chance), Pyne argues that reducing class sizes is an expensive waste of money. He quotes the Grattan Institute, a Melbourne-based think tank, to claim that “the evidence overwhelmingly shows that investing in improved teacher effectiveness rather than the number of teachers is the most successful method of improving student learning and creating top performing education systems”.

Pyne is absolutely right about class sizes and about the importance of effective teaching. In theory. It’s when he comes to doing it that Pyne is unconvincing.

Several of Pyne’s fixes have been tried before and haven’t worked. The new ideas come from the Grattan Institute’s recent report Learning from the best, but Pyne’s use of it is selective.

On teacher education, for example, Pyne is merely the latest to point out that it does little to prepare neophytes for the real world of the classroom. He will be no more successful than his many predecessors in trying to improve it. The universities don’t know how to do it well, and don’t want to because that’s not where academic career advancement comes from.

In any event, pre-service teacher education doesn’t count for much. Teaching is one of those jobs that has to be learnt on the job, first through an apprenticeship and then by working with colleagues in the right way in the right kind of school.

Pyne thinks he can get both by “introduc[ing] genuine principal and school autonomy into the government school system”. But school autonomy and leadership are just two of many conditions of productive change. The big ones are organisational, and therefore industrial.

This fact the Grattan Institute confronts, but Pyne does not. Grattan argues that “trade-offs” are needed to give teachers the time and circumstances needed for workplace learning. These include less contact-time, in larger classes, spread over a longer working day.

Pyne avoids this crucial but touchy recommendation, as well as the awkward fact that Grattan uses Asian examples to make its case. Pyne thereby slips past the problem that Asian ways of exercising authority and conducting learning can’t be airlifted into Australian schools, and particularly not into the “least effective” schools — i.e. government schools for the poor.

Another of Pyne’s levers of change is the Teach Australia program, which aims to attract more academically able students into the profession. That may be possible, on a small scale, for a while. But most such entrants won’t stay, because neither the career structure nor job satisfaction are there to keep them. The few who do stay will gravitate to schools in leafy suburbs rather than schools where more effective teaching is so badly needed.

The triple problem facing Pyne or any other federal minister is this. First, complex ecologies such as schools and school systems can’t be changed by changing one or two of their components at a time. Second, federal ministers have very little capacity to drive co-ordinated change, particularly when they can’t stump up the money.

And that, third, is because the Australian school system and its decision-making arrangements comprise a world-class mess. The system is divided into three sectors and then again into eight state/territory systems. The national government, one of three paymasters, controls no schools at all.

The upshot is a complex, leaderless group that requires any proposal to fight its way through endless consultations en route to cross-sectoral and cross-state agreements, compacts, charters and partnerships, the parties to which keep changing their political stripes and/or ministers for education and/or positions in the election cycle. All this in a country with just a bit more than half the population of California.

A threshold requirement for talking credibly about “world-class minds teaching the next generation” is some credible talk about how to fix the machinery needed to get it.

Pyne bags Labor’s “education revolution” as “a masterclass in wasteful spending and appalling mis-management”, but all it’s been guilty of is wildly inflated rhetoric and the kind of scattergun approach inflicted on any federal government by the structure of the school system. Ominously, Pyne greeted the Gonski report, the most valuable of Labor’s many bullets, with petty quibbles, and has since been silent on a proposal that would do much more to improve schooling than anything the Coalition has so far offered.

*Dean Ashenden has worked as an academic and a political adviser/consultant to many national and state ministers, agencies and organisations. He has been presenter of Radio National’s Education Issues program and has contributed as a commentator and as compiler/publisher of The Good Universities Guides and The Good Schools Guides to many radio and television programs.