In inviting me to deliver the Radford Lecture for 1999, the AARE has conferred upon me a great honour. But, in inviting one who is not by profession an education researcher, you have also taken a risk. This decision appears to have been taken deliberately, for the letter of invitation referred explicitly to my having been, ‘for a long time, at an important interface between the work of research and the work of politicians, policy-makers and practices in schools’.

It is true that some of my time has been spent in that space where what might have been--and what ought to be--gets translated into what is. And I have interpreted this invitation to mean that it behoves some of those of us who have been in that space to get our stories straight and to make them known.

At the 1994 annual meeting in New Orleans of the American Education Research Association, Jerome Bruner reminded researchers of the power of narrative in teaching and learning. He noted that narratives start with trouble, with disruption to the smooth surface or flow of events. Policy, like narrative, also tends to start with trouble or with people needing something. Public policy is one of the important ways in which we try to express what we think we are doing to deal with that trouble or to meet that need.

Research, too, starts with trouble. In the course of preparing this paper, I was struck by a reference to a definition of research by William Cropley Radford, in whose honour this annual Lecture was instituted. I found it recorded in Bill Connell’s history of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) from 1930 to 1980:

I was encouraged by this definition to adopt the narrative genre--to tell my own version of events which began in the 1970s. It starts with our nation recognising that we had a need - a need for a universal, high quality, equitable and cost effective school system - a system of schools across our country - to cultivate the intelligence and capability of our children for life in an open, free, just and caring society. For some of the time that followed, I took part in developments in Commonwealth policy. It is from that perspective and not from that of my current role, that I will recount my tale - a tale that combines the elements of irony, romance, tragedy and comedy.

So, it started with the trouble we had in the early 1970s. In relation to schooling, Australian governments at that time found themselves confronting pressing political and demographic problems.

This is my account of the way we responded to these problems, through the Commonwealth Government becoming a significant player in schooling in Australia. It begins with the establishment of the Interim Committee for the Australian Schools Commission in 1973 and the passage of the Schools Commission Act, 1973.

Thinking back on the period and the series of events that form the subject of this lecture, I believe that they constitute a policy cycle or a wave. Or are they merely matters that happen to correspond with my own adult and working life? Either way, the story I wish to tell is my own, and I take full responsibility for it.

There is, however, some artificiality in the concept of ‘policy cycles’. My experience has been that the links between policy and policy implementation are messy. The backlash often pre-empts the frontlash and the ‘lag’ factor means that the whole policy agenda has been completed and abandoned by the avant-garde before it has even been heard of by the rearguard.

The metaphor of the ocean beach was chosen by former Commonwealth Education Minister, Susan Ryan in her recently published political autobiography, Catching the Waves, to describe policy in terms of some of the ‘big waves’ she managed to catch, and ‘a few of the dumpers’.

My story necessarily reflects my social values, beliefs and experiences. To engage your interest it will need to be sufficiently consistent with known facts to be recognisable, and sufficiently principled and fair-minded to persuade you to action, which I believe to be both necessary and urgent.

Too personal a narrative will fail to define what researchers might see as a problem. But some personal details are necessary, perhaps, since they will almost certainly have had an influence on my tale.

So I will reveal this much. By the time I started school I was already without one of my parents. The only form of child care available to my widowed, working mother was a private school in a Sydney suburb where she enrolled her three year old. At just over four years of age I started at my real school. This was the local public school, in an outer Sydney suburb, and the same school my father, uncles and aunts had attended before me. Had my Irish grandfather been willing to spare a horse to transport them to the more distant Catholic parish school, then my father and, possibly, I would have been educated in that system, rather than the public system.

I went on to complete the Leaving Certificate at one of the NSW public academically selective girls’ high schools, with neither of my own parents having survived to see that piece of paper.

I learned later that I was one of those chosen by the hidden hand of the state to enter the gate of St George Girls High on the basis of a composite score stretched along a normal curve. It was, nevertheless, a school which stood for what was, in its day, an egalitarian commitment to provide opportunities for children who had demonstrated some academic talent by the age of eleven or twelve, whatever their family circumstances.

As far as I know, my mother had no choice whatsoever in the public schools I attended, but they were part of a system she viewed with pride and confidence. Before I was seventeen, I had very good reason to be grateful for the public school system of NSW.

One of the themes of this story, then, will be that a commitment by a society to provide for the education of its children in their own right, regardless of what privileges or burdens they may inherit from their parents, is an achievement so remarkable that it should not be lightly undervalued, undermined by stealth, or denigrated either by design or by default.

I want to make very clear that it is not my intention to denigrate those whose life experiences and values are different from mine and who have made different decisions from mine about the education of their children. Whatever choices we have made as individuals we have made in a public policy framework set by governments. It is that framework and, in particular, the contribution to that framework of the national government, the Commonwealth, that is the point of my narrative.

My narrative starts a quarter century ago, with the 1973 Act establishing the Schools Commission. While the Federal Government is not explicitly responsible for education under the Australian Constitution, it had gained the power to provide ‘benefits to students’ through an amendment to Section 51 in a 1946 referendum. This power augmented the Commonwealth’s right to provide financial assistance under States Grants legislation. The Act establishing the Schools Commission on 1 January 1974 marked a turning point in the history of the political, policy and financial framework for Australian schools.

It was an Act designed to deal with trouble. The tale of the opportunism of both major political parties in Australia, of how they abandoned their shared and longheld opposition to public funding for private schools, has passed into the annals of Australian politics and needs no elaboration here.

The social, educational and demographic imperatives of the time were sufficient in themselves to warrant a significant increase in public spending on schools. With only six months to complete its report, the Interim Committee for the Schools Commission, headed by Professor Peter Karmel and with Jean Blackburn as its Deputy Chair, documented compelling evidence that the framework within which Australian schools were working in the early 1970s was breaking down. This framework was sagging under the weight of an increase in the school population, as well as the aspirations of my generation of young parents.

The Karmel Committee understood that the art of good policy consists in building on the strengths of what we have to move forward to new and better things. Anyone can formulate, in a vacuum, an idiosyncratic vision which ignores what has been achieved or learned, and squanders the fruits of past investment. The Committee noted that almost all of Australia’s school students were in either the large, centralised public systems operated by the States or the large network of parochial Catholic schools. To these systemic schools the Karmel Committee directed its attention.

Spending by governments on public schools in the States and Territories was demonstrably inadequate to educational need. Within the Catholic community, religious orders were rapidly losing the capacity they had displayed in harder times to raise their own religious teaching force. The grimly humorous simile ‘as full as a Catholic school’ had become part of the Australian vernacular. There was little talk about the ‘free market’, probably because so small a minority of Australian parents with children of school age could meet privately the cost of their children’s tuition, on top of housing, feeding and clothing them.

The references in the Karmel report to ‘an equal valuing of people based on their common humanity’ reflected the values I had learned in the home and from which I had benefited in my schooldays. It is difficult for me to convey the joy and hopes that this report, Schools in Australia, excited. There was now an opportunity to sublimate our past differences, to deal with indicting evidence of social neglect and unacceptable forms of inequality.

The Interim Committee reported that ...‘in both the government and the non-government sectors there are schools where the quality of personnel, buildings and equipment reflects an attitude towards children, which whether it arises from public indifference or ignorance, is incompatible with the manifest values of our society’ (para. 5.1). Of the physical condition of older, inner suburban schools, the schools attended by the children of the working poor, it reported its strong feelings ‘that these schools both government and Catholic, are a national disgrace and a sign of indifference towards the children who attend them’ (para. 9.53).

The Schools Commission Act constituted a public account, a statement, that embodied parts of the many stories that had led to its existence, the hopes and fears that were held by Australians for the education of their children. Such was the verity of this account, that it even embodied the unresolved tension between:

This legislation provided for openness in policy formulation, advice and implementation; a membership representative of those directly involved in schooling; an obligation to consult widely; and a responsibility to report publicly.

I saw in the provisions of the Schools Commission Act a new commitment to a high quality education for all. It meant that we had recognised that, through a well-resourced and equitable school system, we could develop potential and aptitude for learning and expand the national pool of talent. I came, like many Australians, from families who combined the social and religious traditions of Protestantism and Irish Catholicism. I perceived in the Schools Commission an opportunity for reconciliation between what were then key elements in society after years of bitter sectarianism, through bringing closer together and upgrading the two large systems that Australians had built through collaborative endeavour for their children. I stood up at a P&C meeting when my daughter was in a Canberra government high school and persuaded other parents not to put funds into the DOGS (Defence of Government Schools) case--to fund the High Court Challenge to the validity of Commonwealth aid to private schools. Instead, I argued for supporting the social justice principles set out in the charter of the Schools Commission.

To get its Act passed in 1973, the Whitlam Government had to jettison the recommendation that no further grants be provided to high fee, non-government schools with a level of private resources already above the standard to which other schools were to be raised. But most of the overall policy framework recommended by the Interim Committee for the Schools Commission was put in place.

As my narrative will reveal, it was a framework that was to be subjected to successive appropriations and accommodations. Among the first of these was the addition of the idea of ‘incentives’ to private effort. This then sat alongside the ‘needs’ rationale - a reward for those parents who could afford to make a private contribution. It was a new theme in the narrative, a rationale for expanding public funding to non-government schools to expand parental ‘choice’.

The developments around these programs can be traced through the Schools Commission’s own public reports and have been well chronicled in books, papers and articles by key players, researchers and commentators. These include Peter Karmel, Jean Blackburn, Ken McKinnon, Don Anderson, Michael Hogan, Simon Marginson, Helen Praetz, Don Smart, Grant Harman, Ian Birch, Ken Johnston, Bob Lingard, to name but a few.

Resources. It has now become fashionable to refer to the first Karmel Report as being more concerned with inputs than with outcomes. On the contrary, the understanding demonstrated in that report about the essential linkages between resources and outcomes had more integrity than many more recent attempts to isolate outcomes from the resources and the context that assist in producing them, to achieve productivity measures.

Of the new public funds injected into schools by the Commonwealth starting in 1974, slightly less than half took the form of general recurrent grants, to both government and non-government schools. Resources in non-government schools were benchmarked against government school standards, with increases for both to achieve specified standards. General recurrent grants to non-government schools were introduced in the form of per capita subsidies, with schools arranged in categories for funding purposes according to their assessed need. Another one-third of the total went into buildings. Around 17 per cent went into targeted programs ( for libraries; disadvantaged schools; special education; teacher development; and innovation). About 70 per cent of the total funding from the Commonwealth went to public schools and around 27 per cent to private schools, with about 3 per cent in joint programs.

By 1999, the share of the public funds provided by the Commonwealth to schools in the form of general recurrent grants has risen from just under 50 per cent to over 80 per cent, with the bulk going to non-government schools. This shift has led to the situation where public schools now get around 38 per cent and non-government schools 62 per cent of the total the Commonwealth provides for schools - a near reversal of where it began. The funding share to targeted and capital programs has been reduced, the latter sharply.

Although the share of the Commonwealth’s total funding of schools allocated to buildings is now only around 8 per cent, the Commonwealth is now a major provider of public funding for capital for government and non-government schools. This is a neglected area of public policy research. The latest National Report on Schooling in Australia shows that the interplay among all funding sources for school buildings, Commonwealth grants and state capital spending, private income, loans and state interest subsidies has produced a heady cocktail. Expenditure from all sources on buildings nationally, per student, is around $350 for government schools, $490 for Catholic systemic schools and $1350 for non-systemic, non-government schools.

Has the entry of the Commonwealth increased the overall funding for schools over the past quarter century? In terms of the share of our national gross domestic product spending on schools remains low by OECD standards. What can be said is that over those years the shape of overall spending on schools has changed significantly, led by Commonwealth policy.

In 1974, general recurrent funding was the main vehicle for the achievement of greater equity in resource standards in schools, the base for enhanced quality and equity in achievement and outcomes.

In 1973, the Karmel Committee found Catholic systemic secondary schools operating at about 70 per cent of national average standards in government schools, while taken as a whole, non-systemic, non-government schools ranged through a scale of 40 to 270 against the government average of 100. Those inequalities in both directions between public and non-government, non-systemic schools have changed. Resource standards in the latter schools have risen sharply, but have, as it were continued to fan out, so that inequalities within that sector remain as sharp, almost certainly sharper, than ever. By 1999, all non-government schools, Catholic systemic and other, have drawn far closer to government schools at the lower end of the range, but non-systemic schools are, as far as one can estimate from the incomplete data publicly available, now stretched along an even wider continuum above the standards in the bulk of systemic schools, public and private. I am prepared to estimate that the scale of 40 to 270 of 1972, has by 1999 become more like a scale of around 90 to 500.

What of targeted programs, which in the main focused small amounts of Commonwealth funding on equity principles and objectives?

For targeted educational programs to work, there must be a consistency of purpose between these programs and the total educational context which underpins them, including its recurrent resource base. No good purpose can be served by targeting assistance at groups with particular claims for support, while neglecting or withdrawing resources from the schools on which the vast majority of students with high resource needs rely.

These programs proved highly susceptible to variations, being a discretionary source of change in a budget largely tied to paying the teacher salary bill for schools in the non-government sector. For example, the funds from the Commonwealth’s contribution to the salaries of teachers of English as a second language and funds from the Disadvantaged Schools Program (DSP) were re-badged as a Literacy Programme by the first Howard Government. Only in New South Wales, does the Disadvantaged Schools Program survive in any recognisable form. No program has been more subject to misrepresentation. Most galling have been the many damaging conclusions that have been drawn by particular researchers, based on a false assumption that it was possible to compare stable populations over time within this Program. In fact, in NSW, the schools originally in the DSP were often those serving the children of the poorest working families in areas of inner city decay. Now they are mostly in different areas of the State, serving the children of those who have paid the price for economic re-structuring.

I will never forget, however, a conversation I had, as a Schools Commissioner, with a group of parents in a primary school outside Launceston. It served the nearby public housing estate. Speaking for the group, one mother reported that what they valued about the DSP was that it meant that ‘somebody cares about our children’s education’.

What was quietly being removed from the schools policy agenda with the re-badging of the Disadvantaged Schools Program was the increasingly serious issue of students whose educational risks are being increased by their being concentrated in particular communities and schools.

It is not possible to draw conclusions about the effects of Commonwealth involvement in schooling on the quality of student outcomes. Over the years in question, schools have widened their net and serve a far more diverse population. There is no convincing evidence that this has, of itself, led to any decline in overall standards.

What can be said is that, in addition to specific programs to enhance the quality of teaching in schools, significant amounts of Commonwealth funding from a changing array of programs, has been directed at professional development. We have probably had, during this time, the most stable, qualified and experienced teaching force in our history. But its benefits have not been equally available to all students.

The growing gap between those on high and low incomes, the educationally qualified and employed and their less privileged peers, are reflected in geographic divides within cities and all large centres and between urban and rural areas. One result appears to be a growth in the number of schools with a disproportionate share of those students who draw very heavily on the time and expertise of teachers. Teachers need to work much harder in such schools to have any hope of achieving student outcomes comparable to those in schools serving families and communities where circumstances are more conducive to scholarship.

Schools in Australia saw schools using their resources to create conditions in which would develop students’ capability to acquire intelligence, rather than engaging in competition to select known ‘winners’. In New South Wales, two years ago, when Professor Barry McGaw and his support team shone a rare, forensic beam inside the public framework for schooling, the Interim Committee may well have been disturbed at what came to light 25 years on. Inside the framework there is at work a system for re-directing students among and between regulated public schools and the de-regulated non-government schools that are resourced through a mix of public funding and upfront parental fees. In some circumstances, it almost appears as if the Catholic system is starting to perform a clearing-house function. The report on the reform of the NSW Higher School Certificate, Shaping their Future, (p.110 ) describes the impact of ‘current recruitment and de-recruitment’ practices, by means of which the ‘top’ independent schools acquire profits (the successful students from other schools) and externalise losses. Their ‘losses’ find their way inexorably into the government non-selective schools which are the backbone of the NSW secondary school system and, indeed, of secondary education throughout Australia. What this report exposed was the differential powers of schools to exclude, powers that have been enhanced by public funding to expand particular forms of parental choice, led by Commonwealth funding arrangements. The Karmel Committee had referred to the need to set a price for parental choice. What needs asking now, twenty-five years later, is what price should be set on those schools whose excellence rests partly if not largely on socio-economic exclusion? For this is a form of excellence with clear limitations.

My fourth baby first sat up by herself in a room of Canberra women who had collectively acquired an Innovations Grant from the Commonwealth. To a modest grant from the Schools Commission’s Innovations Program, we added our unpaid days and nights to complete a project for advancing girls’ understanding of their likely futures. Under the aegis of the Schools Commission Act, the Commonwealth embarked on programs designed to stimulate educational innovation in classrooms and schools through such programs as the Disadvantaged Schools Programs, Projects of National Significance and the Innovations Program. Our group’s modest little project annoyed the ascendancy of male principals in Canberra, whose bizarre reactions I carefully recorded in my report for the edification of the Schools Commissioners.

The programs as a whole led to some creative tensions between the Commonwealth and the large public schools systems operated by the States. By 1999, these Commonwealth-State tensions emanate instead from less creative attempts by the Commonwealth to impose its own array of artificial targets, standards and accountability.

The Interim Committee and the Schools Commission in its early days recognised the need for education systems: ‘The need for overall planning of the scale and distribution of resources becomes more necessary than ever if the devolution of authority is not to result in gross inequalities of provision between regions, whether they be States or smaller areas’ (Karmel 1973 para.2.5).

The Committee members took for granted the exigencies of operating a mass system of compulsory education and the related issue of economies of scale; and the values of consistency, security and predictability in the provision of mass schooling. Their call for devolution of decision-making assumed the ongoing dominance and indestructibility of these large systems, and was a small-scale, subversive attempt to make these systems more open, democratic, flexible and professional in their operation. ‘Devolution’ and ‘diversity’ were concepts appropriated early and often by the economic fundamentalists promoting unfettered and undefined forms of parental choice. It was used to assist the rationale for stand-alone schools competing with each other in a market funded largely by governments.

What we have created over the years since the Interim Committee made its recommendations is not the kind of ‘horizontal educational diversity’ of its vision, but a vertical and largely socially-based diversity - a rigid pecking order in which there is a surprising conformity among schools serving vastly different and socially stratified communities.

One of the more remarkable outcomes of the Commonwealth’s entry to schooling has been the creation and consolidation of large Catholic systems from a network of parochial schools. In NSW, twenty five years after, what was a network of schools collapsing because of the loss of the contributed services of religious is a professionally organised system, staffed by lay teaching staff. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald of 19 September this year revealed that a significant minority (around 17 per cent) of teachers in NSW Catholic systemic schools are not Catholic and that a significant number are taken in each year from the public system (p.14).

The proportion of students attending public and Catholic systemic schools has not changed significantly to date. With parental fees and other private income included, resource levels in NSW Catholic schools are now very similar to those in government schools, with their broader accountabilities. Upfront fees are now a well entrenched feature of Catholic systemic schools, partly arising from pressure on systems for ‘maintenance of effort’ in stemming the losses associated with the decline in religious teaching staff.

When I first heard my relatives, towards the end of the 1980s, referring to the Catholic systemic schools their families had traditionally attended as ‘private’ schools, I knew that a great cultural shift had occurred within the framework legitimised by the Schools Commission Act.

My story began with an assumption that we were funding a Catholic system that aspired to serve the Catholic community as a whole, in parallell with the larger public school system. What the last twenty-five years have demonstrated is that to do this it would require full public funding and no upfront fees. Or to develop a much closer and more reciprocal relationship with the public school system, which in New South Wales, educates around 40 per cent of all Catholic students.

We have now reached a stage in the narrative where we might wonder what all this means. What sense is to be made of it all?

In its eight-year funding scheme adopted from 1985, the Hawke Government attempted to effect a balance back from ‘incentives’ towards ‘needs’ in non-government schools funding and an increase in the rate of funding growth towards government schools. The Commonwealth baulked at the bill, abolished the Schools Commission, and repealed its Act in 1988. As Susan Ryan records in her political autobiography, attempting to redress the balance in Commonwealth funding towards the public education sector was a difficult wave to ride successfully to shore.

When the portfolio passed to John Dawkins, he oversaw the replacement of the Schools and the Tertiary Education Commissions in 1987 with a new National Board of Employment, Education and Training. This incorporated a Schools Council with consultative and advisory, but no program functions. This Board has now all but gone, and its legislation, the Employment, Education and Training Act 1988 is now in political limbo, somewhere between the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Through a progressive set of appropriations and accommodations, the framework originally legitimised by the Schools Commission Act had been hollowed out from within.

This is precisely the phenomenon described by Professor Anthony Giddens in the BBC’s 1999 Reith Lectures, entitled Runaway World.

At the heart of our school system, there is a sad lack of authenticity, there are follies and foibles that are not worthy of an honest, mature, confident, intelligent society, entering the knowledge economy. For we have moved far from being the colonial society whose schools could reasonably be described by the persisting labels of ‘Public, Catholic and other’.

The term, ‘leading, exclusive schools’ for high fee, high resource, non-systemic schools features regularly in the ‘leading’ Sydney newspaper. And with amazing regularity and no hint of irony, this paper will often report as news the fact that such a school lived up to its name and committed acts of exclusion.

Double standards between the public and private sectors are now thoroughly embedded in accountability regimens. What productivity experts have characterised as ‘waste’ and poor productivity in the large public systems has led to the shedding of many experienced education professionals in the interests of efficiency. But the burgeoning numbers of bursars, personnel managers, even directors of educational measurement and research who perform, for one school, outside the public sector and at the same or better salary, the tasks they once performed for a whole system - this is seen as evidence of quality and high standards.

Among what forms of diversity have flourished in recent years, attempts to trick out the wolf of snobbery and class discrimination in the sheep’s clothing of religion are all too prevalent. Curious contradictions between ABS statistics on religious adherence and ABS school statistics can be explained by the fact that there are schools where it would be rare to find many adherents of the religions or churches they claim as sponsors.

There are many competing narratives. A clutch of eminent researchers and academics have been for some time arguing that all schools are now ranged along a continuum of public funding, the regulated and the unregulated, the systemic and the non-systemic. This claim was a recurring theme of an ACER Conference in Sydney last year covering the same period as my own tale. The Conference theme was Schools in Australia 1973-1988: The 25 years since the Karmel Report. The claim is that there is a constructive convergence taking place between public and private schools, and that the terms ‘government’ and ‘non-government’ are anachronistic. All schools are government funded, so the story goes, but some schools just get higher subsidies than others. They argue, further, that fees are now charged in government schools in a number of states, finally rendering null and void the original tenets of public education - compulsory, secular and free. This view is put forward with the admonition that we should avoid ‘polarities’.

No decent narrative can avoid polarities which are the very heart of its matter. We should understand them. The problem with the ‘convergence’ claim is that it is seriously at odds with the facts of this matter, and rests upon an apparent ignorance of the laws of this land. The relevant State and Territory legislation provides no evidence whatsoever for the claim that public schools around this country now charge admission, entry or tuition fees, known in other sectors of education as ‘upfront fees’. The law protects access to free tuition in public schools. This claim rests on a confusion between upfront entry fees and the charges levied in government schools for materials relating to particular areas of study. That is not to say such charges are, or are not desirable, whether voluntary or, as in some states, compulsory. There is a world of difference here between the ‘upfront fees’ for admission to non-government schools and charges for non-tuition purposes in government schools, both in their scale and purpose. The very basis of non-government schools in Australia rests on their formal freedom to select or to discriminate ( using that word in its core and not its ‘loaded’ sense) on grounds that are forbidden by law in the public sector. Where selection is practised in the public sector, criteria for access to the restricted provisions do not include parental capacity to pay, but are based on criteria relevant to curriculum, teaching and learning and to student support needs.

In my story, there is a high degree of convergence between the public and private school sectors in relation to the following: public funding; reliance on the public higher education system for supply of teachers; reliance on publicly developed curriculum and on public credentialling arrangements; and on other forms of public infrastructure such as transport. There is no convergence in relation to: the nature and purpose of admission and exclusion policies; public accountability and reporting; planning to ensure the provision of places for the whole school population; or governance measures to ensure protection of the public interest.

It is necessary to ask at this stage whether this narrative is heading. Whatever her national policy framework for schooling, how could Australia have insulated her schools from the effects of global economic and technological forces that are widening economic divisions? All over the world, governments facing fiscal pressure have increasingly looked to marketplace discipline to facilitate efficiencies and to shifting costs from the general citizenry to individual consumers or clients of services. In all OECD countries the demands of a growing and upwardly aspiring population and the emergence of increasingly competitive technologically sophisticated economies have led to an expansion and diversification of education and training.

In such circumstances, competition among parents for resources for their children’s education could only have been expected to intensify. Parents anxious to secure their own children’s educational advantage have a powerful incentive to avoid placing them in competition for quality teacher time with those many children who demand a disproportionate share of that scarce resource. Where public and private school sectors co-exist, this market competition will be played within and between them and will affect their own market share. The Sydney Morning Herald of September 18 this year reported that ‘since the early 1990s spending on private education has increased at double rate of spending increases by Federal and State Governments, reflecting the drift in all of Australian States towards private schools’. Schools public or private, placed in competition with each other, have a similar incentive to avoid the overly demanding child.

Or can this state of affairs in this narrative be ascribed, at least partly, to particular features of the national policy framework Australia has constructed?

The epiphany in my tale takes the form of the Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment (EBA). This has made manifest elements of the Commonwealth’s involvement in schooling over the past 25 years whose nature I, at least, had never previously understood.

We now have embedded in our national framework a device used by the Commonwealth to pay less to the State of NSW in respect of every student in its public school system than the amount set down in the schedule to the States Grants (Primary and Secondary Education Assistance) Act 1996, which has the assent of Parliament. Some other States and Territories incurred a similar penalty. Through a provision in its Administrative Guidelines, the Commonwealth can proceed to reduce per student grants for public schools on the basis of any increases in the proportions of students enrolled in non-government schools compared with a 1996 ‘benchmark’ arrived at for each State and Territory.

The general recurrent grants scheme is a per capita funding scheme. The Commonwealth already has to hand its mechanism for adjusting for any movement of students from the government to the non-government school sectors. The extraordinary feature of the Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment is that it reduces the legislated funding amount for those remaining in the government school system of NSW.

For one attempting to write an explanatory account about the effects of Commonwealth intervention in schooling over the past twenty five years, from that ‘interface between the work of politicians, policy-makers and practices in schools’ the Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment is both revelatory and cathartic.

States were quick to demonstrate that the EBA is a technically flawed mechanism, in its failure to distinguish between average and marginal costs. The Commonwealth has justified its reduction to the grants paid in respect of government school students on the grounds that every student less the State has to educate represents a saving of the average cost of educating a student in the public school system. This, in itself, reflects ignorance or disregard of the practicalities that flow from the legal responsibility of state public school systems to educate all comers. The EBA reflects an understanding of the economics of operating a private school, which may well refuse to take the one parental fee to enrol a student who triggers the need for an additional teacher or classroom. But, as the Karmel Committee noted in its 1973 report, the choices open to State Governments are limited in that geographic and demographic considerations may well override economic and pedagogic ones (para. 6.9).

At the heart of the EBA mechanism lies the device of open-ended per capita funding. This is not a device that reflects the operational realities of systems of interdependent schools wherein economies of scale can be achieved to create a dividend to meet truly educational needs. It is a congenial device for promoting ‘stand-alone’, ‘island’ schools, in a system where the powerful, schools and individuals, can externalise to others the costs of universal schooling and privatise the benefits. It is essentially an ‘uncivil’ device.

The ideological roots of the Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment lie in the belief that the primary rationale for government intervention in schooling is to enable individual parents to choose schools for their own children which reflect their personal preferences. In Australia this commitment to choice has been expressed through rapid and substantial increases in the public funding of non-government schools. But it can also take root in publicly funded and operated systems. A recent account in The Australian (15/11/99) described the New Zealand public school system, with its self-managing schools model, as ‘highly atomised’. The outcomes of this atomisation were listed as increased transaction costs, displacement of educational by management considerations, an unwillingness to share information or expertise, and disparity based on socio-economic lines rather than true educational diversity.

Based on the experience of the past 25 years, the public funds clawed back from public schools by the Commonwealth’s EBA, will contribute to the expansion of the non-systemic sector. This is the sector with a built-in proclivity to widen the gap in educational resources, achievements and outcomes between the children of the affluent and well-educated (and, incidentally, largely urban-dwelling) parents and those in low-fee, low resource schools. One of the most profound indicators of the effect of the Commonwealth’s entry to schooling has been a net shift from public systemic schools to non-government, non-systemic schools, including some small systems contrived largely for public funding purposes. It is a shift now poised to gather momentum.

What we are seeing is not what many have claimed - a form of ‘privatisation’. For it involves the shifting of very significant amounts of public funding. What we have seen over the past 25 years since the first Karmel Report is best now described, in my view, as the progressive de-mutualisation of schooling.

The symbolics of the Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment are significant. The mechanism provides a signal, more powerful so far than the actual funding effects to date, that Australia has developed a framework for schooling within which the Commonwealth Government’s role has embedded in it an inbuilt indifference to our public school systems.

I would not want to suggest here that the secular or civic values embedded in public school systems and, along with religious values, in Catholic school systems have ever found a perfect expression in practice. That is no good reason to abandon them without a full and open debate, especially at a time when new technologies expand their potential to effect what has been difficult to achieve in the past.

The virtues of the public school system are often described in terms of inclusiveness and social comprehensiveness, accountability, tolerance and openness, including intellectual openness. These all matter and matter greatly. But we need to focus urgently on two aspects of the capability of public systems or indeed of systemic schooling - on the related moral and the economic possibilities they provide.

When I was seventeen, like so many others, I was able to complete my schooling in a system created collectively through governments by previous generations of responsible adults, to ensure that all children and young people could be treated in the way theywould have wanted their own children to be treated in similar circumstances. Not just a system to treat the children known to those adults personally, or the children who went to the same church, or whose parents shared the same tastes. But the children of perfect strangers. It is the expression of mutuality, based on our shared humanity, which is disappearing by degrees from our arrangements for schooling. We are seeing the disappearance of possibilities for altruism...the love of strangers. This kind of love rests on being there. It cannot be bought or sold, or compensated for with money. It is the kind of public virtue, the sense of solidarity and reciprocity, the ‘all for one and one for all’ that inspires blood donors in this country; and the parents who commit their babies to mass immunisation programs for their own protection and for the common good, seeing any risks involved as being worthwhile.

The economies of scale which are open to systemic school authorities are among their chief virtues. Systems can enable meaningful forms of reciprocity and can take responsibility for ensuring that the choices that parents are making are all choices of schools in which decent, minimum standards apply. They have the capability to save on what can be done for large numbers of students in common in order to fund the provision for their legitimate but more specific and diverse needs.

Let me be perfectly clear that the point I am making has nothing whatsoever to do with the motives of individual persons involved in particular forms of schooling. What I am arguing is that particular forms of organisation have virtue over others in a civil society. Policy approaches, funding mechanisms are not innocent. Certain devices serve certain desires more easily than others.

Whereas systems have at least a capability to develop ethical rules among schools as to how the pleasures and pains of teaching students will be shared, independent stand-alone schools are constituted as free riders, willing to benefit from membership of the group constituted by the national framework for schooling, while poorly placed to contribute to the common cause.

At least in the short term, the Commonwealth has moved to ‘buffer’ the full effects of its decision to apply the EBA. The NSW Government has refused to allow its effects to fall on the public school system. These moves highlight the cracks that have now appeared in the national policy and funding framework for schools. The Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment revealed an alarming split in the policy frameworks for schooling of Commonwealth and State Governments. The EBA demonstrates that the national planning and funding framework for schools has degenerated into arguments about cost shifting between the Commonwealth and the States.

This fault line extends past schools, to the whole education and training sector.

It is worth pausing here to note a curious paradox. At the very time the Whitlam Government moved to provide state aid to non-government schools, it also negotiated with the States to take over full funding responsibility for universities. In 1974, as part of this Commonwealth-State agreement, Whitlam withdrew from universities their right to charge tuition fees. By contrast, the Commonwealth’s intervention in the schools sector was to expand the proportion of schools with the right to charge upfront fees.

In addition to the funding being provided to by states and territories, non-government schools are now moving towards receiving, on average, almost half of their total funding from the Commonwealth. In the higher education sector, by contrast, the proportion of funding our public universities are now receiving from the Commonwealth budget has gone in the opposite direction, and is now heading back down to less than 50 per cent, around the same proportion of funding the Commonwealth had provided prior to 1974.

Commonwealth policies for schools and university funding led inexorably to a recent attempt by a NSW university to sell a campus that had been provided to it by the NSW state government for the purposes of teacher education - to a high-fee, high resource, independent school. The reason given for the sale by the university was its need to deal with the effects of cuts to its public funding from the Commonwealth. The NSW Government passed special legislation to prevent the site’s alienation from use by the wider community as a public education facility. This episode is yet another revelation, in microcosm, of the decrepid state of the national public framework for education and training.

A huge political outcry recently forced the Commonwealth Government to repudiate key aspects of a new funding scheme for universities, following the premature and unofficial release of a submission to Cabinet. It was a funding scheme that resembled quite closely the scheme which has evolved at the heart of the national framework for schooling, through an accretion of decisions made by successive Commonwealth governments which gradually overturned the purposes that gained consensus a quarter century ago.

The Enrolment Benchmark chapter in my tale needs to be followed by a chapter giving consideration to alternative approaches that recognise the practicalities and ethics of universal, mass schooling. There is a need for a policy framework within which planning and funding mechanisms protect the public values of mutuality and inclusivity.

What kinds of funding mechanism might, in future, be more appropriate to the framework which the original Interim Committee for the Schools Commission sought to establish? a framework for teaching and learning for all in which those schools making a real and meaningful contribution to the overall inclusiveness of the system as a whole would be appropriately supported? It might be recognised that it is not only our land, water and air which need protection, but the delicate ecology of our education system.

In such a system, those schools reliant for their excellence on forms of choice that entail social exclusion, or on externalising the costs of a universal system on to others while retaining private control over the benefits, might be taxed, rather than publicly subsidised.

Such approaches might be adapted from the concept of resources taxes now being introduced to limit toxic greenhouse gas emissions. If the right to practise particular forms of exclusion had to be purchased from the government, much as the right to certain levels of carbon gas emission, it may be that we could greatly improve the quality, equity and cost-effectiveness of our school system and plug the holes through which too many are still dropping out prematurely and ill-prepared for what faces them.

A new narrative might include the abandonment of the EBA, the Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment; and adoption instead of an ETA - the Exclusion Tax Adjustment; or a variation, the Education Quality for All Levy.

Emerging from this fantasy, I recognise that the plot, the narrative that began in 1973 and 1974 has run its full course. The ‘needs’ rationale for funding Catholic systemic schools, which has from the start been a central theme of Commonwealth involvement in schooling, is now exhausted in terms of their relativity to government school standards.

The new funding scheme announced by the Commonwealth to take us into the next century has appropriated some of the previous rhetoric, but none of its realities. The story is now about the virtues of private investment in schooling. The Commonwealth’s role, in providing increased amounts of public funding to non-government schools, is now intended to increase competitive pressures among non-government and between non-government and government schools, thus stimulating the latter, in particular, to achieve higher educational outcomes. Between 2000 and 2004, the Commonwealth has foreshadowed additional funding for non-government schools of at least $1 billion. At least half of this increase will be provided to Catholic systemic schools under a separate arrangement from the new funding scheme which starts in 2001. The other half of this increase will be allocated among the remaining 30 per cent of non-government schools. This re-distribution of funding to a new socio-economically based formula will be achieved through additional funding to ensure that there are no ‘losers’. This new index, cloaked in the rhetoric of equity, signals the triumph of ‘incentives’ over ‘needs’. Schools will be able to add private funding to their base public funding entitlement without ‘penalty’, in a system where the standard of resources students receive will depend upon the capacity of their parents or supporting community to add income from private sources.

In the UK, the Blair Government was elected on a platform that gave a central place to education, and to lifelong learning beginning with early childhood education. In the USA, President Clinton’s 1999 State of the Union Address gave high priority to spending on schools describing them as ‘the roads to the future’. Pressures for higher public funding for schooling are starting to emerge again in Australia. We are heading back to where we were in the 1950s and 1960s, where we are not investing publicly in education sufficient resources to meet the expanding aspiration of many parents for their children--of parents who are themselves well educated, who are highly anxious about their children’s futures, and who understand the demands that the so-called Information Age and the Knowledge Economy will make on future citizens generally.

If schools have been the road to our future for the past twenty-five years, then the Commonwealth Government’s policy contribution to their funding began with placing the dollars for our non-government schools in the ‘catch-up’ lane. The dollars being provided for schools in the public sector are now being assigned to the far left hand lane, with some indications that a warning ‘left lane ends’ sign might soon appear. Commonwealth dollars for Catholic systemic schools are now cruising comfortably in the middle lane. For non-systemic, non-government schools the Commonwealth is assigning dollars to the right hand, ‘overtaking’ lane.

There is no proper legislative backing to lend rational authority for the shift from the aspirations of the Karmel Report for quality through social and educational justice to the current Commonwealth agenda providing public funding to fuel the forms of choice, competition and inducements for private effort which are demonstrably robust without such assistance.

The Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment and the thinking behind it has called into question, from the perspective of the majority of students around Australia, the legitimacy of Commonwealth intervention in schooling under the Section 51 of the Constitution which refers to ‘benefit to students’.

The public school system is, by its nature, residual. It is residual because, in a largely universal school system it has a legal obligation to take all comers, alongside a sector which is free to select and de-select its own intake. Largely as a result of developments legitimised and led by the Commonwealth since its entry to schooling, the government school systems which educated generations of our families now has within it many children whose parents feel vulnerable because they cannot afford private school fees or do not live in wealthy areas or in areas where private schools can afford to operate! It also has many children with parents committed to participation in a high quality, universal education system with the wide range of educational choices and educational opportunities need in our diverse society - a great mosaic. All are waiting to see what will fill the great void in our national civic life left by the withdrawal of any legislation which spells out the intentions of the Commonwealth in regard to the education of their children.

While all may not be peaceful in the sphere of health from the point of intergovernmental relations, at least the Commonwealth’s Health Care (Appropriation) Act has enshrined within it principles of equity that protect the right to services by public patients free of charge on the basis of clinical need and within a clinically appropriate period!

In my own narrative, the greatest loss has been the loss of the feeling expressed by the mother in Launceston that somebody cares. For me, as a child, that someone was, in fact, the State Government. But with its entry into schooling, such hopes were extended to the Commonwealth Government in the early 1970s.

The Adelaide Declaration on National Goals for Schooling in the Twenty-First Century recently signed by all Australian education ministers, sets out clearly an ongoing role for government.

Landscape For A Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, is Carolyn Steedman’s account of growing up in the England of the 1950s, and of the differences between her mother’s life and her own. It reminded me of how strong a connection there was in my own life between what is provided for children through schooling and the formation of attitudes to government.

Steedman describes how what her mother lacked, she was given; and how, though vast inequalities remained between her and others of her generation, that a benevolent state bestowed on her the sense that she existed and she was worthy of that existence.

If the Commonwealth cannot re-build its connection with the public systems of this country it should quit the field of schooling, before more damage is done. The Act establishing the Schools Commission was a hard act to follow in more ways than one. But its abolition along with shelving of the subsequent legislation for the National Board of Employment, Education and Training, has left a tear in our national, civic life around the schooling of our children.

In the Sydney Morning Herald, October 27, 1999, Ross Gittens wrote , that ‘most of us have it in our minds that the proportion of young people staying on to Year 12 has risen enormously’. He goes on to say that is true, or rather it was true, and that between the start of the 1980s and 1992, the Year 12 apparent retention rate more than doubled from 35 per cent to 77 per cent. He further reports that since then it has been falling and is back to 72 per cent leaving us with ‘the second highest high school drop-out rate among the main OECD countries’.

Even more seriously, however, as he reports ‘we appear to be the only country in which school participation rates have been falling in the 1990s’. ‘Here is a contrast’, he warns, that ‘while the retention rate has been falling the proportion of Year 12 students going on to university has been rising - our division into Two Nations starts early’.

There is, of course, a complex relationship between data on apparent school retention and on participation in education and training. But on international comparisons of the highest completed level of education in 1997, the Report on Government Services, 1999 by the Steering Committee on the Review of Commonwealth-State Service Provision, shows Australia lagging well behind the major OECD countries in terms of total post-school education and training for the labour force aged between 25 and 64.

Our other most distinguishing feature among OECD countries is our arrangements for the funding of schools. These were described in the Sydney Morning Herald (19/9/99) from the perspective of non-government schools as ‘better than those existing in most, if not all, other countries’.

The question now facing us in my narrative is whether or not these two achievements are connected? I would recommend to the Australian Association for Research in Education that it choose the conservative, the safer and wiser course. This is to fear the worst, and to proceed on the assumption that there may be elements of our performance that are poor by international standards and that can be attributed to our own conduct of educational affairs.

What connection is there between our record of progress in the numbers and distribution of young people completing their schooling successfully and moving on to education, training and

employment - between the consolidating group of young people identified by the Dusseldorp Skills Forum as being ‘marginalised’ - and the level and distribution of public resources in our schools? My narrative would end on a positive note if this Association were to pledge itself to lead the research effort that will be needed to answer this vital question.

I was among those who joined the great fanfare when the Commonwealth entered the fray to defend quality and equality on behalf of all Australian children. Twenty-five years on, the effect of the Commonwealth and States assuming asymmetrical responsibilities for public and private schools has been to obscure and distort the real interface between the work of politicians, policy-makers and practices in schools and to mask the extent of social, educational and financial cost-shifting which is occurring. It is occurring to the detriment of those who most need the assistance of government and of the relationship between teachers and students in many of our schools.

The University of Sydney recently conferred an Honorary Doctorate on The Honourable Justice Mary Gaudron. Responding in her Occasional Address she stated:

The policy framework which brought the Commonwealth into schooling in the 1970s has not survived. But many of those of us who bear some responsibility for our contribution to it are left standing and are wondering what we have learned.

There are many whose accounting for these years would be quite different from mine. Nor was I so foolish as to expect that a framework set in place in 1974 would have remained unchanged, and that political support for various social purposes would not have shifted in a changing economic climate. Hugh Stretton and Lionel Orchard remind us, in Public Goods, Public Enterprise, Public Choice that

The choices remain political and many cannot be judged to be optimal or not, except with reference to particular social values.

In the new international economy, large global corporations are lining up to run for profit things that were once the province of either governments or communities -- from gaols and hospitals to local football clubs and cricket competitions. I am confident in predicting that schools serving the children of new international elites will soon be made offers by large corporations and will be run for profit and will dispense internationally developed credentials. There will also be all sorts of new education services, raising controversial principles and challenging our laws and institutions.

Thanks to the ABC, I have already prepared myself for that future time. I will be following the advice of, among many others, Professor Martin Krygier, Professor of Law at the UNSW, as set out in the book based on his 1997 ABC Boyer lectures, Between Fear and Hope. The lectures set out his perspectives, as a self-described cultural hybrid, on the values that are at stake in Australian public life: questions of tolerance, civility, decency, responsibility, nationality, pride and shame, among others. He spoke of the difference between ‘conditions of existence’ and ‘conditions of flourishing’; and, in particular, of the responsibility of governments to avoid damage to citizens as well as to hazard improvement. And he advised us to live our lives tempering fear with hope and hope with fear.

When I am freed from the constraints of paid work, I look forward to suggesting, firstly, some radical forms of damage control.

The first future damage control measure that I am envisaging I have already outlined: a new framework for schooling, in which forms of educational choice that are based on social exclusion would attract a tax rather than a benefit--the ETA or the EQUAL scheme.

I hope to be sufficiently rebellious in old age to propose a revolutionary scheme to re-distribute university and TAFE places among all secondary schools with their pro rata share of these benefits. This would be a scheme dedicated to the memories of all the mothers and fathers who understood that being poor was not necessarily attributable to being stupid; and that their children may be capable of university education given the opportunity. In memory of all those whose taxes paid for us, their children, many of us in this room, to attend public universities and to have technical and further education. These were mothers and fathers who understood very well just what a strong and direct interest they had in the quality of workers, including the professionals, the teachers and the doctors who would serve their families and the lawyers who would protect their rights. We need a return to principles of intergenerational equity, to extend to those children who stand where some of us once stood, the same consideration and decency that was extended to us.

Those who will object to my scheme most vigorously will be those who understand most clearly that we have created in some schools conditions of flourishing, where it is easy for every student to do his or her own best; but that we have also created too many schools with conditions of mere existence, where the best teachers find it difficult to give their students the chances they deserve. By distributing university places more fairly, and by insisting that they would remain there for a period of at least ten or twenty years, we could achieve a great saving in transport in some areas. Those who have acquired four-wheel drives to transport their children to city schools will have incentives to put them to better use, getting their children to and from some of the remoter areas where they may judge themselves, under my scheme, to have more chance of scoring a glittering prize. University academics might feel more more interested in ensuring the quality of teaching in all schools than some of them appear to be now.

This will be seen as wild and fanciful in its radical egalitarianism by some--but it no more radical than the policy directions now taken, seen from where my narrative began. Much work has been done, including by churches, to make respectable current inequitable policy settings. If as much work were done, including through research, to make my proposal respectable, it could come to be considered as an acceptable form of affirmative action necessary for a specified period, to re-establish some of the pre-conditions for the meritocracy to which we once aspired.

The events of recent years have revealed the need for structures in the governance of schooling generally that preserve openness to public scrutiny, and that ensure that the safety of children is placed above the interest of school authorities everywhere in protecting their own reputations, or the reputations of sponsoring organisations.

There is likewise a need, as a sensible form of damage prevention, to institute proper contractual or prudential arrangements to ensure that the interests of students and taxpayers are protected against any default by private providers. Non-government school authorities generally have proved to be highly reliable providers to date. But the Australian public has now invested so heavily in this provision that it is now reliant upon it. It would seem appropriate to put in place prudent contractual arrangements to protect the public interest in the assets of the marriage between governments and the non-government sector, against any possible future applications for annulment.

Tempering hope with fear, I have argued that the national policy framework within which schools are operating is extremely fragile. It has been a framework that was never been really tested by chronic teacher shortage and any thought that it could be tested while it is in such a fragile state would fill me with fear. One of the greatest challenges that faces all large systemic authorities is how to provide all their schools with a fair share of the most qualified, experienced and able teachers. I have described what has been over the past twenty-five years a competition for advantage between and among government and non-government schools for public dollars and profitable students. What we should fear is that the next object of this competition could be teachers, as Australia moves to replace its ageing teaching force.

I fear greatly that the view will take hold that the public school system is a safety net provision and that the rich and well-educated should not be using it. The more this view prevails, the more there will be resentment at paying taxes, through an equitable and progressive tax system, to support it for the rest and the system itself will disintegrate.

I have, in a sense, complained about the dismantling of the legislative framework which provides the rational authority for the Commonwealth’s contribution to schooling. Curiously, this is also my greatest source of hope. The fact that the Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment has not been enshrined in legislation gives me hope that sufficient of our prouder traditions remain. The Commonwealth Parliament will, however, soon need to consider changes to legislation to give effect to the current Government’s policy - to increase non-government schools funding following introduction of its new socio-economic index. This presents an opportunity for the Parliament as a whole to insist on a more comprehensive and explicit commitment to the principles underlying the purposes of Commonwealth intervention in schooling.

My hope is that we will understand our wealth of opportunities, perhaps the richest of almost any country on earth in its cultural and linguistic possibilities, for creating public forms of schooling where children can gain knowledge, experience and skills in, to quote the Interim Report, ‘being members of a diverse society and through which they may come to feel concern for others and to develop their own sense of identity’. That report reminded us that schools offer important means of passage into a wider society, extending the limited range of adult models within our families and close communities, vital as they are (Karmel 1973 para. 2.21). As we head into uncharted waters, swamped with information, we will need quality teachers in quality schools to teach our children to turn that into knowledge, values, skills and understanding that can contribute to a more connected and altruistic society. Turning our school system into an assortment of corporations, clubs, cathedrals, charities or casinos will not serve that purpose.

At the end of her remarkable book, Journeyings. The Bigraphy of a Middle-Class Generation 1920 - 1990, Janet McCalman argues that we are, beneath the surface, ‘a deeply class-divided society, where even in eras of apparent consensus, resentments between the rich, the comfortable and the poor eat away at its commonweal’ (p.301). By contrast, she argues that ‘societies which have universal pensions and health services and whose government schools possess the highest academic prestige enjoy a a national unity that continues to elude us...In societies where the middle class see themselves as part of the whole - both givers and takers - they are less resentful’.

I saw my mother, though having almost no opportunities to exercise individual choice about my education, having a great sense of pride in the public education system which, collectively, Australians had provided in the 1950s. Now I see young parents, in Sydney, having to make choices from a far wider set of options within a public framework of which they are far less proud. We need to provide forms of choice in education that can meet the diverse abilities, aspirations and interests of all our children, and of which we can all be proud. They are forms of choice only governments can mediate.