Watch federal schools minister Peter Garrett and his shadow Christopher Pyne on last night’s Q&A and despair.
Labor came into office with schools at the top of its playlist. There would be an “education revolution”. In its sixth year the government can reel off a series of impressive-sounding achievements: MySchool and its detailed information on the performance, resourcing and circumstances of every school; money for school IT and other infrastructure upgrades; a national curriculum; targeted funding for literacy, numeracy and teacher ed; and, of course, Gonski.
Gonski is by far the most ambitious and consequential of Labor’s programs. Gonski never was a silver bullet. But its promise of “sector-blind” funding geared to the difficulty of the educational job each school is asked to do was essential to tackling several of schooling’s big tasks: reducing zero-sum competition between sectors for money, students and esteem; stemming the flow of funds toward the already well-off and away from the most needy; and restoring some sense of hope to the public sector, which contains around 80% of the schools doing the hardest yards.
Gonski’s new money might also have permitted a shift away from the fixation on lower maximum class sizes toward spending on more cost-effective strategies.
That was the big and necessary idea. Not surprisingly, Garrett dwelt on the idea rather than the sad reality: Gonski is very nearly gone, even if the next federal government were to implement what’s left. Gonski has been gutted by his riding instructions (no school will be worse off), by the Prime Minister’s subsequent upgrade (every independent school will be better off), by the states’ refusal to wear the proposed “national schools funding body”, by the Catholics’ insistence that money for “need” should be spread across half of all schools, not Gonski’s quarter, and by the government’s very own idea of phasing it all in by 2019 (which by one calculation will cause funding to fall below the growth trend-line).
Still more depressing is the likely Coalition government scenario, for which Christopher Pyne is responsible. Pyne hedged his bets on Q&A as elsewhere, but his language and body language suggest the opposition is going to the election with the funding status quo so scathingly condemned by Gonski.
Pyne was pressed on the question by the heaviest hitter of Australian schooling, Ken Boston. Boston headed up the South Australian and the New South Wales school systems, became a prominent figure in school reform in the UK, and was a member of Gonski’s panel.
Do you realise, Boston asked Pyne, that if you extend the current funding system you will actually decrease per student funding to government schools and increase it for non-government schools? Pyne obfuscated. Boston came back at him, clearly angry. This is urgent, said Boston. No answer.
“The elephant in the Q&A studio was that the Australian school ‘system’ is dysfunctional.”
Teachers were warmly applauded on all sides, of course. Everyone says that teachers are wonderful and deserve our heartfelt thanks, but the same people, including Garrett and Pyne, also want to lift “teacher quality”. On this there was a rare display of bipartisanship, marred only by a little sniping about whose idea it was.
Garrett paraded plans announced earlier in the day for fixing pre-service teacher education by improving methods of selection into teacher education courses, testing student teachers’ literacy and numeracy, and setting standards for pre-service courses, and particularly their practical components.
Consider just the first of these. The problem isn’t in the selecting, it’s in the pool from which selections are made. Bright school-leavers and others rarely apply for teacher ed courses because they understand well enough something that eludes both the schools minister and his shadow: the pay sucks.
The incontrovertible fact is that 50 years of effort to improve teaching’s rewards, status and standards of entry have failed completely. What Garrett and Pyne actually agree on is not how to fix teacher ed, but that they don’t have the money to tackle the root of the problem, or the nerve to talk about shifting resources from one area (eg class sizes) to another (eg teacher salaries).
The elephant in the Q&A studio was that the Australian school “system” is dysfunctional. Its mix of private and public money, state and federal money, has no parallel anywhere in the OECD. It breeds resentment in each sector of the others, and a culture of permanent demand and dissatisfaction. Authority is divided between three school sectors in each of eight states and territories, and subject to the close attentions of nine governments with their endless electoral cycles and annual budgetary games.
Garrett and Pyne both talked as though they were (or soon would be) responsible for Australian schooling in all its many aspects, from methods of teaching reading to teacher training to how schools should be funded and controlled. They are not. No one is. And since the states squashed Gonski’s “national schools resourcing body” we are further away than ever from being able to sheet home responsibilities, hopes and blame.
*Dean Ashenden has been a consultant to many state and national education agencies
Great article. I think like many issues if you study them, you can see the signs of the parlous state of the education system however uniformed commentators from outside all think its fine and that private schools are great for everyone and that we already pay teachers enough and more money is not the answer.
I recently had a conversation with someone who works for a major IT company who told me that the $86K or so a year maximum teacher salary in NSW is awesome and that there are plenty of people in the private sector who earn less than this. Whilst it is true that many people work in the private sector for less than this,it doesn’t mean that is competitive with other professional fields. I am sure he who works in major IT firm earns more than $86,000 a year.
I can gaurantee that everyone of my friends who works in what you might call a professional vocation earns more than this and I am sure that not all of them do more than my wife or father who are teachers.
Even if you take the premise that teacher salaries are good, consider that the only true managers in schools are deputies and principles and that there are only 2 or 3 of those position at most schools, the career path looks grim for those who want to progress up some kind of career path.
It all adds up to teaching not being an attractive profession to all but those who are committed to helping others which clearly most of my friends don’t fall into this category.
Changing standards won’t get the candidates. It will have no impact at all as far as I can see.
it’s all window dressing until teachers’ pay is commensurate with their acknowledged portentous responsiblities.
You poor fellow. You actually watched it? I think I would prefer to have my teeth drilled than watch an hour long program starring Christopher Pyne.
I know several former teachers from the public system who have all given up on teaching. Poor pay (compared with other similarly qualified professions), short term contracts and lack of job security, irrational parents, being a political football, biased funding models, etc. have all taken their toll.
Who seriously, would want their child to study to be a teacher?
I would like to examine ways to lift politician “quality”. Doesn’t seem like it would be too difficult.
Fantastic article that so coherently explained the misgivings I felt watching that very frustrating ‘debate’. It particularly highlighted the deeply politicised nature of debate on education. Both parties are demonstrating all too clearly that they are paralysed by vested interests from implementing solutions to funding problems as well as quality teacher recruitment.
Education is deeply contentious because it represents one of the last solid redoubts of strongly unionised public services (along with health and emergency workers) that have remained resilient against free-market reform while weathering the barrage of system-wide quality-assurance mechanisms while simultaneously adapting to a student-centred professional approach to increase flexibility at the classroom level. The increased complexity of the profession (in parallel with the rise of other knowledge professions such as IT and library) has not attracted a comparable increase in income. On the positive side an experienced teacher’s skill-set is undoubtedly in demand for an evolving knowledge economy. This need not be considered a weakness for the profession, but a potential strength for enabling career-paths that might exist outside of the education sector because some people are genuinely ambitious beyond potential earnings. These possibilities need to be drawn on as an asset. The biggest limitation in today’s thinking is the expectation that young teachers will necessary be teaching in a classroom in thirty years time like many of those of previous generations. Some will stay, others will come and go and others will move on permanently. There are fewer guarantees of continuity in a wealthy and individualist market democracy.
Last night’s Q&A showed that the federal government do not have the answers for these problems, and nor did their ministers have useful opinions on educational issues. Nor should we realistically expect them to; they’re far from experts. They do need to get bold enough to effectively implement expert opinion that will go some way to redress the massive and obvious imbalances in school funding that continue to disadvantage the already disadvantaged.