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Priorities in education

By Jack Keating - posted Friday, 8 February 2008


The three Federal post war Labor Governments have all entered office with education as a priority.

The Whitlam Government had a social vision of a better and more just society and of a stronger sense of an Australian culture and the nation’s place in the world. This was reflected in particular in the work of the Schools Commission and its major initiatives in needs-based programs and in the expansion of a free university system.

The Hawke Government’s priorities for national economic restructuring and infrastructure building influenced its major reforms in vocational education and training and the expansion of higher education.

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Both governments invested in other areas - Whitlam in the establishment of the TAFE system, and Hawke in a Participation and Equity program. However, on the whole the landmark initiatives reflected what Gough Whitlam has termed the “contemporary relevance” of the reformist foci of the respective governments.

The Rudd Government has now arrived with an “Education Revolution”. Its list of initiatives is formed under the mantra of human capital. In a sense it’s a clever focus as it allows the convergence of economic priorities and Labor’s traditional equity principles of quality education and a decent work for all. In another, however, it’s nothing new. Most of its key elements constitute increased investments in current elements of the education systems.

This is not necessarily a criticism, as the reversal of the public disinvestment in education over the past decade is welcome. However, it raises the questions of what’s revolutionary about it, is there a need for an education revolution, and if so in what areas?

The “education revolution” inevitably needs to focus largely upon the schools sector. Schooling continues to account for $3 out of every $4 of public spending on education, and the human capital agenda is largely dependent upon a foundation of schooling.

In schooling, apart from the trades wings (which will need some heavy revision) and a laptop for students, the major platform items of the new government are a national curriculum and more open reporting of school results. There are clear echoes of the strategies of New Labour in England in these plans, as well in the emphasis upon teacher quality.

The Blair Government’s efforts in schooling should not be dismissed. The financial reinvestment has been large and the claims of major improvements in standards and outcomes are justified. New Labour also can make some claims of an educational revolution in that it has challenged long established cultures of schooling in England, including a deficit view towards educational failure.

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However, New Labour’s educational revolution has its limits. The improvement in results appears to have stalled, with England’s 2006 PISA results being below its 2000 results, and there has been minimal advance in long standing problem of unequal social distributions of educational outcomes.

For the Rudd Government the New Labour approach has another problem in that it is dealing with a very different type of “school system” to that in England. Local education authorities in England and Wales have now been reduced to mostly service delivery agencies with minimal governance roles and the school system has effectively become an educational market, albeit with some minimum guarantees and robust state intervention.

Australian schooling on the other hand is riven with systems. There are eight government school “systems” plus Catholic school systems across the states and territories. There is also an independent school sector. Although this sector is not a system in its governance it is a system in its political behaviour, as Labor experienced at the 2004 elections.

Some unique features of these systems are their high degree of autonomy and associated closed or fenced cultures, separate and different public funding systems, and competitive relationships. These are all supply side features that are not matched with demand side attitudes, as various surveys show that parents differentiate school mostly upon their perception of what is a good and not so good school. However, the supply side governance and financial arrangements and the associated policy cultures have the effect of restricting school education policy in Australia.

All state Labor Governments have stated or de facto policies of winning back market share, especially in secondary education where the enrolment losses have been greatest. Government schools have been losing middle-class students who tend to have stronger educational outcomes to the non-government sectors, thus threatening to residualise the government sectors.

A curiosity of Australian schooling is that its supply side Balkanisation contrasts with a susceptibility to liberal ideologies of self governance and competition between schools. The sectoral isolation and different governance, accountability and financing arrangements have resulted in an unequal distribution of market power between the sectors, especially in a context of rising middle class affluence. As a consequence the government sectors, that have the poorest market deal, have attempted to deliver market power internally.

The means of achieving this invariably is to allow the government systems to become more internally selective. To an extent this strategy has been successful as most states have a number of government schools that can compete with the highest performing private schools in scholastic outcomes. However, the cost is to internally concentrate educational disadvantage and under achievement, an outcome that sits uncomfortably with traditional Labor values.

At the same time, the broad social drift of better off students from the government to the non-government sectors and poorer students from the non-government sectors to the government sectors has continued. This drift on top of the increase in selective practices has produced a high concentration of poor students in schools with declining enrolments and weak scholastic outcomes, mostly in Labor electorates.

The issues also go beyond the government school sector. The New South Wales and Victorian Catholic Education Commissions have both published studies that reiterate the historical role of the Catholic system in educating the “poor” and that express a concern that they may not now be doing this.

A further symptom of the policy restriction is the susceptibility of schooling in Australia to solutions to educational under performance that dismiss system effects. The argument that educational outcomes are mostly determined by the quality of the teachers now resonates in policies of most school systems and the main political parties - including the Labor’s Education Revolution. This argument allows an ignoring of the impact of selection within schooling and the impact of other school factors that will typically occur under situations of falling enrolments and market duress.

The teacher argument has substance both intuitively and in its research base. However, there are other factors that have an impact and they include students’ social background, the mix of students in a classroom and overall school effects. Efforts to improve the quality of teaching should be applauded. However, they should not be part of an ideology that ignores the distribution of good teachers, the mixes of students, the resources they get, and the conditions under which good teaching can take place.

There is a good case for a Labor government to deliver an educational revolution. The human capital imperative will get its best returns in the Labor heartlands. There are areas in most of the states and territories where school completion rates are barely 50 per cent, and there are many schools where the situation is far worse. Poverty in Australia is highly concentrated in families of school-age children. The marginal returns to investments should be highest in these areas and among these families.

However, this revolution needs to confront dominant policy frames that on the one hand are influenced by a cultural of sectoral closure and competitiveness and on the other by the associated ideologies of what influences educational outcomes. For the Rudd Government to reiterate these ideologies and ignore the impact of the sectoral stand offs would be a significant disappointment and missed opportunity.

The core historical reason for the sectoral fragmentation is the weaknesses of the unique settlement in Australia of what constitutes public schooling. It has been established as an institutional rather than educational or cultural form, and this has been reinforced through the unresolved conflicts over public and private education of the last half century.

There have been several attempts by individuals and organisations to articulate a new concept of public schooling in Australia that locate public education in what is delivered to students rather than the institutional form of schooling. All have faced major obstacles of institutional and cultural rigidity, and a certain degree of supply side self interest.

The Whitlam Government’s Schools Commission made some attempt to reach a settlement with the church schools, similar to the one that was achieved at the same time in New Zealand. Federalism contributed to the demise of the Whitlam initiative as it has exacerbated the systemic separation of schooling that supports stakeholder interests that are dependant upon this separation. Since the earliest days of the Whitlam Government the approach of Labor has been to simply live with the complex, inconsistent and unequal governance and funding arrangements in Australian schooling.

The policy and strategy challenges of this situation are major and complex. However, without radical changes to the governance, accountability and associated funding arrangements for schooling in Australia it will be difficult to shift the market behaviours of schools and open the policy scope of state governments.

The historical moment for Federal Labor is obvious. But the strategy also needs to be long term, as it will not be possible to seriously and immediately threaten the major stakeholder interests. Not with standing this and Labor’s promise to not change the non-government sectors’ funding arrangements in the short term, a new and historic settlement will inevitably need to address funding and accountability. The initial challenge, however, is that of building a national consensus about the public, social and economic purposes of schooling. To achieve this it will be important to take this exercise beyond the traditional educational stakeholders, otherwise it will get bogged in the semantics and posturings that have plagued federalist dialogue in education.

Upon such a consensus it may then be possible to build a platform of a more logical, consistent and equitable funding arrangements and appropriate governance and accountability arrangements for all publicly funded schools. Part of these arrangements could be collective approaches towards dealing with area or regionally based under achievement and under participation in education.

The long term alternative to these arrangements is a continued hegemony of an educational market in schooling. This might be acceptable in a supply side context of a relatively even playing field, as may be the case in the UK. However, in Australia this is clearly not the case with responsibilities, market restraints, and market power and opportunity being far from equal across the sectors and schools within the sectors.

The proportion of schools that select and exclude students through fees, scholarships, special programs, house and rental prices, direct exclusions, and other mechanisms has grown within both the government and non-government sectors.

The long term effect will be a substantial group of ghettoised schools for an economic and educational underclass. This is not a formula for the COAG agenda or Labor’s education revolution. As the OECD PISA study has shown segregated school systems have tended to produce poor results (and weaker human capital), and as its recent equity study has shown they are also more socially exclusionary.

The Rudd Government could combine the current National Reform Agenda with strategies to widen the constituency for schooling beyond the supply side interests that were so successful for John Dawkins in his training reform initiatives in the 1990s. This involved the building of a strong support base with the unions and industry.

Federal Labor should do the same with the wider civil society - industry, the churches, NGOs, and so on - combining the economic and social justice imperatives of the reforms. In particular there is a ready opportunity for dialogue with those non-government school elements that share similar principles of access and justice as should a Labor government.

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About the Author

Jack Keating is a professorial fellow in education at the University of Melbourne.

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