School funding

School choice: why are more parents picking private over public?

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More students than ever before are being enrolled in Australia’s private schools, according to new data on school choice from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Most states and territories have experienced a similar trend. Even before current increases Australia had among the highest proportion of kids enrolled at non government schools in the OECD.

Why are private schools growing in Australia?

The growth tends to be concentrated in what’s called the lower-fee sector although that can still be a burden – two or three children at school at $5,000 per child before tax income, so it is still quite an expense. By far the highest growth has occurred in the newer, non-elite non-government schools. This group of schools is heavily funded by governments. 

I think there is a mystique around private schools – parents feel that they’re doing the right thing by their children by sending them to private schools. I get asked a lot about values.

What does ‘values’ actually mean?

Public schools have very good values, the most important of which is their fundamental mission to welcome all children. When people talk about values in relation to private schools I get quite irritated because I think of all the reasons why you might choose one school or another, ‘values’ are not really the reason unless you are thinking about a particular religious set of values and religious beliefs. 

The majority of private schools belong to the more traditional Christian churches, the Christian denominations Catholic or Protestant. So  in terms of values, the schools that have the strongest anti-discrimination values, for example, are actually the public schools. Those are values. Anything else is a myth.

When it comes to school choice, does it benefit someone to go to a private school or public school in the long term, in terms of either earnings or job success?

The big difference is to do with other factors: social class is the big factor statistically that shapes people’s outcomes.  Success comes in all sorts of different individual experiences.

Some people from very modest backgrounds go on to the highest offices of the land. Former Prime Ministers John Howard, Julia Gillard, Scott Morrison all attended public schools. Current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went to a Catholic school.

The correlation between class and schooling success

And some people from extraordinarily privileged backgrounds go belly up. Statistically speaking there’s a very strong, long-term and robust correlation between family wealth, or social class or whatever measure you’re going to use, and schooling success. In a wealthy country like Australia, that’s pretty shameful. It’s much stronger than it should be. 

It’s very easy to blame the media. I think media report things that are interesting, and that have conflict, and the discussion about sending your kids to which school you send your kids is a bit of a backyard conversation, a topic among parents. People have arguments about school choice. People hold passionate views, they disagree about it. Sometimes parents disagree with each other. Sometimes grandparents disagree with their children about where the grandchildren are sent. It’s a cause of struggle and interest and so I think that’s where the media interest comes from. There are also widely publicised issues public schools face, such as teacher shortages, which may contribute to parents considering private options.

There has been a long-term disparagement of public schools, there’s been many people talking them down. It is very hard for public school leaders. If they don’t talk about the crisis and the resources, how are they going to get anything done? On the other hand, if parents hear about teacher shortages, they’re naturally going to get very worried.

In a sense, Catholic schools have Catholic offices to lobby for them–as a day job. The private schools have various peak bodies to lobby for them.

Who lobbies for public schools?

No one has the day job of lobbying for public schools yet they still enrol the majority of Australian kids and presumably the majority of Australian parents are pretty happy with their local public school.

We are currently undoubtedly facing a crisis in the nation’s public schools. Now, that’s not all public schools. It’s very much determined by certain localities and certain sort of clusters of areas where there are problems. 

Public school people are in a real bind. If leaders of public schools say nothing, and they say everything’s fine, how are the problems ever going to get addressed? 

And yet if they talk about how much they need more resources, which they do then it has this effect of implying that the education that they’re offering is below standard and one thing we know about parents is that they are absolutely risk-averse. 

That’s their job description, parents’ job description is to be risk averse. If you’re reading in the newspapers, if you’re listening to the radio or you might even see the local public school with, you know, demountable walls or falling-down buildings, your natural instinct is to do what you can to to send your child somewhere else.

Those thousands of unstaffed classrooms across the nation have an impact on parental school choice.  How could it not? If you’re hearing that your child might not have a maths teacher, what are you going to do? 

What impacts school choice?

Of course, you’re going to make a certain set of decisions. I would say to parents, have a look at your local school and see how your local schools are going, because it may well be that you’re not in it in an area where there are those shortages. 

But yes, of course, people are going to be worried about that. And that’s not to say anything about the abiding quality of public education or the dedication and commitment of public school teachers. It’s to say that it’s shameful that a wealthy country like Australia cannot find it in its coffers to properly fund public education.

We know that public schools are the only schools that systematically enrol all children, they enrol all children in an area, they enrol all children,  no matter how savvy their parents are, no matter how wealthy their parents are, no matter what kind of connections that parents have. And so it absolutely is critical to all of us, whether we send our own kids public or private to have a really strong public sector. 

It’s a question of national importance.

Helen Proctor is a professor of education at the University of Sydney, with a research interest in how schools shape social life beyond the school gate. She uses historical methods to examine the making of contemporary educational systems by focussing on the changing relationships between schools, families and ‘communities’.

School funding: Is this Australia’s most important moment for reform?

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School funding policy burst back onto the national agenda last Tuesday. Federal Education Minister Jason Clare announced a ‘statement of intent’ had been signed with Western Australia to fully fund the state’s public schools by 2026.

This language is important. A statement of intent is not  a signed, five-year, bilateral funding agreement. There is still much water to go under the bridge.

Yet, on face value, the announcement is good news. It signals the federal government’s intention to boost overall funding for public schools in WA by an extra $777.4 million over five years. In doing so, lifting its share of public school funding from 20 percent to 22.5 percent. Importantly, priority is also given to the state’s most disadvantaged public schools to ensure they are the first to receive the new funding.

As part of the deal, the WA government committed to providing at least an equivalent amount over this period, or 77.5% of the SRS, bringing total additional investment in public schools to $1.6 billion.

In theory at least, this will bring all WA schools regardless of sector up to 100% of the Student Resource Standard by 2026, in school funding policy terms, a quick turnaround.

So why was WA the first cab off the rank?

A review of the annual reporting of states and territories concerning their bilateral funding agreements shows that in 2018, WA actually funded schools at 104% of the SRS, with the WA state government providing 84.43% of the SRS in addition to the federal government’s 20% contribution. From 2019, each year, WA has incrementally dropped its funding to the plateau in 2021, 2022 and 2023 of 75%.

In short, for the federal government to achieve a much needed political and public victory concerning school funding, WA was low hanging fruit. It was sitting on 95% of the SRS in 2023, and only years before schools had been funded in excess of 100%.

WA is also in strong budgetary position vis a vis the other states and territories with a $3.7 billion net operating budget surplus now forecast for 2023‑24.

Perhaps in a sign of things to come, included in the signed statement of intent was a no-disadvantage clause. This means the WA will net hundreds of millions more for education if the Eastern states secure a higher share.

Judging from the initial reaction from some eastern seaboard states, who rejected outright the federal government’s 2.5% increase in funding, Minster Clare faces a rocky negotiation path ahead.

Don’t get too excited

There’s a lot we don’t know. And a lot to worry about if history repeats itself. Our school funding history in relation to equity and needs-based funding is not reassuring.

Minister Clare obviously hopes that the WA agreement will set the scene for other state and territory agreements. He wants all parties to negotiate in good faith and with noble purpose.

But the much-travelled path of federal/state school funding negotiations is littered with disagreements —protracted and fierce. Their results have seldom been fair let alone noble. 

At this stage Victoria and Queensland are not agreeing to 22.5. In equally good faith they are pushing for 25% funding from the federal government.

The Australian Education Union concurs. Its Every school. Every child campaign has long made this clear. It also asks for 40% for the NT where public schools are in dire straits.

Funding war?

Some observers are foreshadowing another ‘funding war’. The exact strategies and tactics of the combatants remain to be seen. Or not. Wider publics are seldom privy to manoeuvres behind-the-scenes. 

The usual funding wars also involve the private schools. Independents, Catholics, the federal government and the states/territories all go into battle for self-interest.

These current negotiations are focused on  the needs-based funding of public schools. Yet Private schools may still enter the funding fray. They always have. 

Currently, for all schools, the SRS is topped up with ‘equity loadings’. We don’t yet know how these will be built into these new funding arrangements. 

There is also the 4% depreciation and other costs loophole that allows the states and territories to reduce their funding in real times. Without its removal, WA Public schools will receive 96% of the SRS rather than the suggested 100%. 

Will disadvantaged schools, with time poor teachers, be given additional support to claim such loadings.  

This federal money is to be tied to various ‘practical reforms’. The Improving Outcomes for All review is the touchstone. These reforms will, in the Minister’s words, ‘help children to keep up, catch up and finish school’.  

But we don’t yet know how these reforms will be rolled out. We don’t know how they will be devised and evaluated, or the assessment and accountability mechanisms involved. 

It is not clear if the Commonwealth has any claw back mechanisms if the states/territories don’t measure up.

Commonwealth accountability mechanisms are notoriously complex, obscure and unhelpful. Danger lurks here.  

Matters to keep in mind

These recent WA developments are an important starting point for the National School Reform Agreement (NSRA) and the new bilateral funding agreements to be negotiated this year.

But, while the haggling over the percentage of government contributions toward the SRS continues, we urge all parties to keep in mind that the SRS represents the minimum standard of funding needed to meet the educational needs of students. 

The WA negotiations have also signalled the federal government’s capacity to move beyond the arbitrarily imposed 80/20% funding split that has shaped federal funding reform since 2017.

This is an important development. It demonstrates there is no constitutional or legislative reason why it can’t move beyond the 22.5% it agreed to on Tuesday, toward the 25% sought by other states.  

We also suggest that substantially strengthened transparency measures be built into the new NSRA and bilateral funding agreements.

Invisibility of funding data

At present, publicly available and easily comprehensible information on how money is spent by governments, and then allocated by schooling sectors is limited. Gaps exist in the visibility of funding data. This is especially problematic given that SRS funding from the federal government is not directly sent to all schools, but redistributed in line with state and sector-based funding models.

These gaps are even more worrisome when considered in relation to the additional government money allocated to priority equity groups (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, students with disability, students with socio-educational disadvantage, students with low English proficiency, small schools and schools in regional and remote locations).

On this, a 2023 Productivity Commission report established that there is ‘no publicly available data on school-level spending on students’ from these cohorts.

Bolster accountability

Enhanced transparency mechanisms would serve to curtail any potential ‘accounting loopholes’ or cost shifting that have historically beset funding agreements. They would also bolster accountability and enforceability in line with the needs-based principles of the SRS which should remain a central focus of any future funding reform.

There is much at stake for public schools and their students, teachers, and leaders around Australia in the coming months as the school funding negotiations ramp up.

Jane Kenway is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Australia, Emeritus Professor at Monash University and Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her research expertise is in educational sociology.  

Matthew P. Sinclair is a lecturer of education policy at Curtin University’s School of Education in Western Australia. His research and teaching focuses on education policy, school funding, globalisation, education futures, and equity in schooling.

Jason Clare, Federal Minister for Education

Elisa Di Gregorio is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne. Her research focus is the sociology of education policy, with a particular interest in articulations of equity in school funding policy.

Timid thinking no longer cuts it. Change is needed now

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Their buildings are substandard— cheap and poorly ventilated.  Their classrooms are under resourced and uninviting. Their gardens are sparce and bleak.  Their play and sports grounds are inadequate— frequently small and ill equipped. Their students often struggle at school and their families often struggle at home. Money is scarce, employment and housing are insecure and good health care is usually unaffordable. 

Their teachers work harder than most because their students need more help than most. But these teachers don’t receive anywhere near the support and recognition they deserve. Many such schools are government schools. Yet they are left to make do with minimal resources and minimal care from state and federal governments. They have been pretty much abandoned— left to deteriorate, not properly helped prosper. 

Instead, these governments have allowed the private sector of schooling to grow without limit— depleting struggling government schools of the material and human resources they need for their students to flourish rather than flounder. 

These schools and these kids are part of the’ long tail’ of under-achievement that characterises the Australian schooling system. But the tail’s problems can’t be addressed in isolation. They are the tragic effect of much bigger problems. Australia’s schooling system is amongst the most privatised and least equitable in the world. And it underperforms on many indicators. 

New opportunities for equitable, achievement-oriented, change in Australian schooling have arisen in 2023. We now have a progressive national government, an equity-sensitive federal Minister for Education, and the National School Reform Agreement is being renegotiated. 

The time is thus ripe to reconsider and reconfigure the fateful intersections between school funding, equity, and achievement. This requires a critical examination of the vexed relationships between the public and private sector and federal and state governments. On Monday, the Melbourne Graduate School of Education hosted a policy symposium and public forum, called Funding, Equity and Achievement, which interrogated these intersections and vexed relationships.

The symposium room was packed with 75 experienced education policy analysts, members of key stake-holder groups and people from state and federal governments. Ten eminent thinkers, including speakers Professor Barry McGaw, The Hon Dr Carmen Lawrence AO and The Hon Verity Firth AM, shared their views and the public forum attracted over 250 participants off and online. And Melbourne University’s Twitter feed had over 3000 views. 

The Gonski Report of 2011 was a touchstone for discussion at this event. All agreed that its funding solutions to the problems of equity and achievement have since been seriously watered down.  

Some argued that the political timidity of the national Labor government, the power of the private school lobby and the sectional interests of the states were ultimately responsible.  

‘Gonski lite’ was the result. Yes, ‘needs-based’ recurrent funding arrangements were a result and the focus on needs was welcome. But ultimately, as many policy experts at the Symposium showed, greed replaced need. Gonski was always in the lite side, others insisted.   It was constrained from the outset by an invented funding architecture involving state, Catholic and Independent school systems.  This architecture, they argued, is a policy construction and convenience. Yet is treated as immovable and untouchable. The implicit message to the Gonski review team was don’t mess with the private schools. 

Historians in the room shared examples of the formidable power of private schools’ backlash-politics – and of their serious electoral consequences.  

State schools abandoned by governments 

So began an unjustifiable pattern of school funding. This is known as the 80/20 split. The wealthier federal government provides 80 per cent funding to private schools and 20 per cent of funding to state schools. The poorer states and territories do the reverse.  And here is the kicker. The Federal government meets its funding obligations to private schools and constantly provides them with lavish top ups. In contrast, the states and territories seldom meet their funding obligations to state schools. 

Speakers at the Sympisoum provided an avalanche of carefully researched numbers which left no doubt about the serious funding inequities. Slide after power-point slide showed how private schools have been consistently over-funded and how state schools have been consistently underfunded.  

A vicious funding circle was identified. The more resources the private sector gets, the more it grows. The more it grows, the greater its market dominance and share of allocated resources. Along with this is a sense of entitlement to automatic funding. In turn, this has led to the private school sector opening new schools and upgrading and expanding existing ones at will. 

This sector has thus enjoyed unfettered growth – becoming ever bigger, more middle class and more segregated from wider Australia. Few people in the room agreed with the funding split that has allowed this to happen. Many firmly believed the Commonwealth should more equally share its funding benevolence with state schools.  

And for this to happen they thought, a National Schools Resourcing Body as proposed by Gonski should be established. This would over-see funding for both public and private schools— together. The relationships between the sectors would be in plain sight. 

Public funding to private schools is untied. They are not required by law to provide any wider public benefit. They do as they please despite the copious amounts of public money they receive. The Symposium audience was shown how the wealthiest private schools draw on their funding excesses to fund their infrastructure excesses. We wondered if such overabundance could be justified in educational terms.  We agreed it was more about market signalling than student learning. So why fund it? 

Other questions arose. Should public money be conditional on private schools democratising their fee structures, entry policies and governance practices? Yes. 

What can stop them from draining the state school sector of money, reputation and the ‘best’ teachers, students and parents? Cap their growth for a start. Properly fund all state schools so that they can be the best they can be. 

The policy symposium provided unequivocal evidence that increases in private school funding have been at the expense of funding for public schools especially for struggling schools in struggling locations. 

Such underfunding, we agreed, leads to under achievement. Indigenous kids, country kids, kids with disabilities and kids from low-income families under-achieve because they are under-supported. They are under supported because they are under-funded. 

Struggling schools in struggling locations have less money to spend on the bare necessities. Additional resources are necessary to allow them to meet their complex needs in the best ways possible. Distinct and distinctive interventions are required.  

Ken Boston, a member of the Gonski Committee and former Director-General of the NSW Education Department, said as much, back in 2017: “They need smaller class sizes, specialist personnel to deliver the appropriate tiered interventions, speech therapists, counsellors, school/family liaison officers including interpreters, and a range of other support. And that support requires money. You can’t deliver education as a genuine public good without strategically differentiated public funding directed at areas of need. That’s what Gonski sought to achieve.”

Such under-support is sometimes driven by a naive policy mindset. It goes like this, ‘It’s not the money that matters but what you do with it’. Money AND what-you-do-with-it matter. It is not an either/or situation

Serious concerns were expressed that the current federal Labor government might not live up to its policy rhetoric.  People feared it might adopt a target and tinker approach.  Safe, simple and unlikely to make much difference. Time and again people called for systemic change. 

Presenters shared international studies that convincingly show how achieving equity at the systemic level leads to systemic improvements in achievement. Put equity first and achievement follows. 

Further, segregated education systems concentrate disadvantage. This, it was shown, has all sorts of deleterious effects and not just on the schooling of disadvantaged kids. Social cohesion depends on social mixing and where better to learn to mix than at school? The shared case study of Poland’s dramatic rise in school results is attributed to its introduction of comprehensive schools. 

 Many agreed that, despite its limitations, the Gonski review made hope possible. State school supporters united behind the slogan ‘I give a Gonski’.  

Now such supporters must unite again to save state schools from the residualisation caused by private school expansion. And the federal government must be prepared to stand up to the private school lobby which has neither the public interest nor the national interest at heart. 

Timid, standard arrangements and conventional thinking no longer cut it. Change is urgently required. 

Professor Jane Kenway is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Australia, Emeritus Professor at Monash University and Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her research expertise is in educational sociology.  

Scary school stories: from zombie data to systems at war

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Long-standing challenges in education confront the new Labor government: the teacher shortage; teacher pay and conditions; the equitable funding of schools; student performance in standardised tests; and student behaviour and attendance.

It has become all too common for news outlets to seek the opinions of think-tanks, rather than those who have first-hand experience and who might be able to offer solutions to the problems. So, in attempt to give ‘voice’ to these other views, we talked to six education experts: a former NSW education minister, a former principal and education commentator, the president of the Australian Education Union, a journalist, a maths teacher and a prominent academic. 

One voice often overlooked in education controversies  is that of the classroom teacher. Julie Moon is a recently retired teacher who’s taught in rural NSW and metropolitan Sydney, as well as Papua New Guinea. She was an organiser for the NSW Teachers Federation, involved in many negotiations with the NSW Department of Education. In her conversations with us, Moon highlights significant changes to  her workload –  it’s incessant and relentless data collection requirements, that is, data collection for the “sake of data collection”. She says: “It creates a workload that’s unnecessarily onerous.” As  a teacher she is continually collecting data but this task becomes burdensome when she is required to compile additional documentation that may or may not be read or acted on at other levels of the bureaucracy. 

Ongoing data collection was also raised by former NSW education minister Adrian Piccoli who maintains that although initially worthwhile, data collection has now reached a “kind of tipping point where it becomes a negative”. Piccoli says we’ve reached a point where data collection now “drives teachers nuts”, adding to the constraints on teachers’ time and energies, and therefore limiting the opportunity to exercise their professionalism as classroom practitioners. 

Having worked as education minister (2011-2017), Piccoli is aware of the importance of establishing shared goals between state and federal governments. In fact, and even though he was a member of the NSW Coalition government, Piccoli says that it was “easier and smoother working” with the Federal Labor government and Peter Garrett than with the Federal Coalition government that assumed power  in 2013. Both  Piccoli  and Garrett held bipartisan education goals, promoting the Gonski reforms on school funding, and although there were often differences of opinion, he maintains that tension in education debates can be constructive, allowing for ideas to be “tested and challenged”.  

Realities of equity and school funding are close to the heart of former principal and education commentator, Chris Bonnor whose latest book scrutinises school funding in Australia. Bonnor argues that our education system has never been a ‘level playing field’ despite the best efforts of some governments; and decades-long neglect of key issues has seen the gap in academic achievements widen as the economic gap across the community widens. He also asserts that if a public education system is available to all but has to compete with a private system that has very few obligations: “it’s funding system at war with itself”. Consequently, the question of how the private and the public-school systems co-exist, must arise. 

cool This debate led us into a conversation of how education in schools is covered in the media. To gain some insights, we talked with The Age and Sydney Morning Herald journalist, Jacqueline Maley. While Maley’s writing interests extend beyond education she understands the political dimensions and the many polarising issues, for example, phonics. She is aware that certain topics will attract “blowback”; and as a result, Maley is careful to research her topics and adopt a measured tone and approach. We asked  about advice she might give to school students who are thinking of journalism as a career; her recommendations focused on an inherent “curiosity and an outward looking attitude” as well as a very “strong work ethic and an ability to think laterally when you’re looking at a story”. 

Although not preoccupied with education and the media at present President of the Australian Education Union (AEU), Correna Haythorpe’s most recent work has revolved around campaigning for reduced workload, improved conditions and a rise pay for teachers. She is investigating ways to alleviate the teacher shortage which she says in the latest AEU national survey indicates that the average working week for a classroom teacher is 56 hours, with much of it constituting unpaid work.

Possibly the current challenges in our schools are a ‘perfect storm of neoliberal discourses’ in education from the 1980s onwards. This is a persistent theme in our exchange with renowned education scholar Professor Alan Reid. In his latest book, Reid recounts the introduction of private sector practices – ‘corporate managerialism’ – where education became “awash with key performance indicators, vision and mission statements, strategic plans and intrusive accountability”. The mantra of ‘choice and competition’ became ubiquitous. Parents began selecting schools for their children, in much the same way as one might select an item of clothing from a rack in a department store. The thinking was that the best way to improve quality was to get teachers and schools to compete against one another, with the ‘customer’ being the parent and the school or teacher, the ‘product’. Many ‘big ideas’ in education were lost in the move toward a global education ‘industry’.

While many significant challenges remain for most Australia education systems and their communities, a new podcast series “Talking Teachers” by UTS teacher education academics, Dr Don Carter and Associate Professor Jane Hunter reveals there are many fresh ideas for Federal Education Minister Jason Clare and a newly elected NSW Labor government to draw on.

Dr Don Carter is a senior lecturer in the UTS School of International Studies and Education, he specialises in working with teachers to investigate innovative writing pedagogies to improve student performance and outcomes across the curriculum. Carter is a chief investigator, with Linda Lorenza, on the Emerging Priorities Program research into arts online learning.

Dr Jane Hunter is an associate professor in the UTS School of International Studies and Education, with expertise in pedagogy, curriculum, practitioner inquiry, technology-enhanced learning and teacher professional learning. In 2019 her research was awarded High Impact in the first Engagement and Impact Assessment by the Australian Research Council.

How the brilliant democracy sausage reveals the secrets of school funding

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WATCH: There’s a snag in school funding.

New Education Minister Jason Clare is like any other student on their first day of school – there is a lot to learn about the problems facing the education system in Australia. But, in this case, Mr Clare can discover the answers by revisiting one of the highlights of the recent election campaign – the democracy sausage. 

Federal election day 2022 has arguably marked a new beginning for Australian federal politics and policy, and the road forward will be tough. Education is one of the portfolios that was policy-lite during the campaign, from all sides of politics. But it is through equitable education policy, that many of the key challenges facing Australians can be addressed. 

A key to understanding this is the humble democracy sausage.

The distribution and availability of a sausage on election day represents a country with the fourth most segregated schooling system and a major housing crisis connected to gentrification.

Approximately $8billion dollars in non-government or private funding flows through the school system each year. Those who receive the most are the very advantaged school and the very disadvantaged schools, probably due to targeted philanthropic donations to both. External income raising for a school is time intensive and in most public schools done by Parent and Citizen organisations. Basically, the quality of resources available to teachers is connected to parents’ inclination and willingness to donate funds, time and skills to a school. The least willing are middle income earners in gentrifying suburbs. 

The democracy sausage and volunteering

Volunteer organisations barbequing sausages on bread has become a familiar sight on election days in Australia. It has a hashtags and a hashflag (automatic emoji of a sausage on bread). Facebook community pages advertise where to find a sausage on election morning when choosing where to vote. There is even a dedicated website to tracking the availability of sausages and other stalls around the country. 

DemocracySausage.org 2022 Federal Election data suggested that 43.4% of Australian voters had access to a sausage on election day based on Australian Electoral Commission poll booth attendance statistics from the 2019 election. DemocracySausage.org’s data correlated with publicly available data about schools shows that only 46.9% of school-based polling booths provided access to a sausage.

This incorporates data from © Commonwealth of Australia (Australian Electoral Commission) 2022, DemocracySausage.org and ACARA School Profile 2021

Information on other treats provided by school-based fundraising, like whether a polling booth had a cake stall, halal or vegetarian options, or coffee, mapped against a school’s socio-economic school ranking (Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage – ICSEA), reveals something Mr Clare should pay attention to. 

The provision of options outside the sausage shows there is not much difference between different school communities. However, when the percentage of booths that provided variety is mapped against the ICSEA value of the school, things look different.

This incorporates data from © Commonwealth of Australia (Australian Electoral Commission) 2022, DemocracySausage.org and ACARA School Profile 2021

Schools within the middle socio-economic range are less likely to have a P&C provide a variety of options for voters. So, what does this data mean for Education policy?

The ability to volunteer is related to demographics

That more than 50% of schools are unable able to field fundraising barbeques is a reflection of a nationwide trend in all community volunteering over the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, a two-thirds drop in people willing to volunteer was reported, with work commitments and family care being the reason for less people being willing to volunteer. 

Variety in election barbeques is directly related to the number of volunteers an organization can field. The more options, the more people are needed. This reality explains why school P&Cs in the medium-to-high ICSEA ranked areas are less likely to provide variety in their election day stalls. 

Schools in middle income areas are most likely to be schools in areas which are gentrifying. This means that the homeowners in the area are most likely to be double-income earners juggling high mortgages or rents alongside expensive child-care. They are, therefore, less likely to donate time or money to public schools. The families in these areas who earn higher incomes, and therefore have less financial and family pressure, are also more likely to bypass the local public school and enroll their children in schools in the higher ICSEA ranked areas. Those are the P&Cs they will donate to. This means that it is harder for P&Cs in the medium-ranked 50% of schools to attract donations. They are also less likely to attract the large philanthropic donations of low and high ranked schools. 

Australia’s market-driven approach to school funding means that schools are more reliant on an active Parent and Citizens Association. Parents and teachers are exhausted in at least 50% of schools. Teachers are exhausted because they are under-resourced. Parents have volunteer fatigue. The downward spiral in school-based volunteering will severely affect schools going forward. School funding, and subsequently quality, is affected by housing affordability and participation in the community. 

The market-based approach to schooling is not working in Australia and it has to change. So next time you buy a democracy sausage, remember your access to this little symbol of Australian civic duty is determined by enormous inequity in Australian schooling policy.

Dr Naomi Barnes is a network analyst and theorist interested in how ideas influence education policy. She is a senior lecturer in literacy teaching and has worked for Education Queensland as a senior writer and has worked as a secondary English, history and geography teacher in government, Catholic and independent schools.

The map in our header comes from https://democracysausage.org/federal_election_2022

Everything you never knew you wanted to know about school funding

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Book review: Waiting For Gonski: How Australia Failed its Schools, by Tom Greenwell and Chris Bonnor

With the 2022 federal election now in the rear-view mirror and a new Labor government taking office, discussions about the Education portfolio have already begun. As journalists and media commentators noted, education did not figure largely in the election campaign, notwithstanding the understandable public interest in this area. One of the enduring topics of education debates –  and the key theme of Waiting For Gonski: How Australia Failed its Schools, by Tom Greenwell and Chris Bonnor – is school funding.

It is easy, and common, to view the school funding debate as a partisan issue. Inequities in school funding are often presumed to be an extension of conservative government policies going back to the Howard government. Waiting for Gonski shows how inaccurate this perception is, and how far governments of any political persuasion have to go before true reform is achieved. 

The first part of the book is an analysis of the context that gave rise to the Review of Funding for Schooling in 2011, commonly known as the Gonski Report. Greenwell and Bonnor devote their first chapter to an overview of the policy arguments and reforms that consumed much of the 20th century, leading to the Gillard government establishing the review. This history is written in a compelling, detailed and interesting way, and contains many eye-opening revelations. For example, the parallels between the 1973 Karmel report and the 2011 Gonski version are somewhat demoralizing for those who feel that school funding reform should be attainable in our lifetimes. Secondly, the integral role that Catholic church authorities have played in the structure of funding distributions that continue to the present day is, I think, a piece of 20th century history that is very little known. Julia Gillard’s establishment of the first Gonski review is thus situated as part of a longer narrative that is as much a part of Australia’s cultural legacy as are questions around national holidays, or whether or not Australia should become a republic.

Several subsequent chapters detail the findings of the 2011 Gonski review, its reception by governments, lobby groups, and the public, and the immediate rush to build in exceptions when interest groups (particularly independent and catholic school bodies) saw they would “lose money”. The extent to which federal Labor governments are equally responsible for the inequitable state of school funding is made more and more apparent in the first half of the book. Greenwell and Bonnor sought far and wide for comments and recollections from many of the major players in this process, including politicians of both colours, commentators, lobbyists, and members of the review panel itself. This certainly shows in the rich detail and description of this section.

Rather than representing a true champion of equity and fairness, the Gonski report is painted as one built on flawed assumptions, burdened with legacies that were not properly unpacked, and marred by a multitude of compromises, designed to appease the loudest proponents of public funding for private and catholic schools. The second Gonski review, officially titled, Through Growth to Achievement: Report of The Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools, is given less emphasis perhaps because this second review was less about equity and funding and more about teacher quality and instructional reform – a book-length subject in itself.

Waiting for Gonski is most certainly an intriguing and entertaining read (a considerable achievement, given its fairly dry subject matter), and is highly relevant for those of us working towards educational improvements of any description in Australia. My main criticism of the book is that it tends to drag a little in the middle third. While the details of machinations between political leaders and catholic and independent school lobbyists are certainly interesting, the arguments in these middle chapters are generally repetitions from earlier chapters, with reiterated examples of specific funding inequities between schools. 

A second concern I have is the uncritical focus on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data to support claims of widespread student academic failure. While it’s true that PISA shows long-term average declines in achievement amongst Australian school students, these assessments are not the only standardized tests of student achievement in this country. The National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) is briefly touched upon in Chapter 8, but not emphasized. The reality is that while average student achievement on NAPLAN literacy and numeracy tests have not increased – after their initial boost between 2008 and 2009 – nor have students’ results suffered large scale declines. Figure 1 demonstrates this graphically, showing the mean scores for all cohorts who have completed four NAPLAN assessments (up until 2019).

Figure 1. Mean NAPLAN reading achievement for six cohorts in all Australian states and territories. Calendar years indicate Year 3. (Data sourced from the National Assessment Program: Results website) 

It seems somewhat disingenuous to focus so wholeheartedly on one standardized assessment regime at the expense of another to support claims that schools and students are ‘failing’. For example, in Chapter 3 the authors argue that,

 “…the second unlevel playing field [i.e. the uneven power of Australian schools to attract high performing students] is a major cause of negative peer effects and, therefore, the decline in the educational outcomes of young Australians witnessed over the course of the 21st century” (p.93) 

In my view, claims such as these are over-reach, not least because arguments of a decline in educational outcomes rely solely on PISA results. Furthermore, the notion that the scale and influence of peer effects are established facts is also not necessarily supported by the research literature. Other claims made about student achievement growth are similarly unsupported by longitudinal research. In this latter case, not because claims overinterpret existing research, rather because there is very little truly longitudinal research in Australia on patterns of basic skills development – despite the fact that NAPLAN is a tool capable of tracking achievement over time. 

Using hyperbole to reinforce a point is not a crime, of course, however the endless repetition of similar claims in the public sphere in Australia tends to reify ideas that are not always supported by empirical evidence. While these may simply be stylistic criticisms, they also throw into sharp relief the research gaps in the Australian context that could do with addressing from several angles (not just reports produced by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], which are liberally cited throughout).

I hope that the overabundance of detail, and the somewhat repetitive nature of the examples in this middle section of the book, don’t deter readers from the final chapter: Leveling the playing field. To the credit of Greenwell and Bonnor, rather than outline all the problems leaving readers with a sense of despair, the final chapter spells out several compelling policy options for future reform. While structures of education funding in Australia may seem intractable, the suggestions give concrete and seemingly-achievable options which would work presuming all players are equally interested in educational equity. The authors also tackle the issue of religious schools with sensitivity and candour. It is true that some parents want their children to attend religious schools. How policy can ensure that these schools don’t move further and further along the path of excluding the poorest and most disadvantaged – arguably those whom churches have the greatest mission to help – should be fully considered, without commentators tying themselves in knots over the fact that a proportion of Australia’s citizens have religious convictions.

Questions around school funding, school choice and educational outcomes are perennial topics in public debate in Australia. However, claims about funding reform should be underpinned by a good understanding of how the system actually works, and why it is like this in the first place. This is the great achievement of Greenwell and Bonnor in Waiting for Gonski. The way schools obtain government funding are obscure, to say the least, and there is a perception that private schools are not funded to the same extent as public schools. Waiting for Gonski clearly shows how wrong this idea is. As the book so powerfully argues, what Australia’s school funding system essentially does is allow children from already economically advantaged families to have access to additional educational resources via the school fee contributions these families are able to make. The book is a call to action to all of us to advocate for a rethink of the system.

Education is at the heart of public policy in many nations, not least in Australia. Waiting for Gonski is as much a cautionary tale for other nations as it is a comprehensive and insightful evaluation of what’s gone wrong in Australia, and how we might go about fixing it. 

Waiting for Gonski: How Australia Failed its Schools by Tom Greenwell & Chris Bonnor. 367pp. UNSW Press. RRP $39.99

Sally Larsen is a Lecturer in Learning, Teaching and Inclusive Education at the University of New England. Her research is in the area of reading and maths development across the primary and early secondary school years in Australia, including investigating patterns of growth in NAPLAN assessment data. She is interested in educational measurement and quantitative methods in social and educational research. You can find her on Twitter @SallyLars_27

How to fix education: cut tests, defund private schools

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In the final part in our series of what the next government should do to save Australian education, Jill Blackmore, Amanda Keddie and Katrina MacDonald ask: What is the problem of schooling in Australia and how can we fix it?

Education has been politicised over the last three decades, yet it has not been a key feature of the current election campaign. To be sure, we have heard public statements from Federal Education Minister (acting) Stuart Robert about ‘dud’ teachers in our public education system as well as his approval of increasing student demand for private sector schooling. Amid both parties’ support for parental choice in education and concerns about Australia’s under-performance on standardised international and national tests such as PISA and NAPLAN, the focus in this election campaign has largely been on how teacher quality might be improved through attracting and retaining better teachers. While quality teaching is important, this focus misrecognises the ‘problems’ of Australian education in a number of ways.

First, the yardstick of a successful education cannot be measured by student performance on standardised tests. These are highly narrow indicators of school success but continue to be put forth as evidence that our teachers and schools are effective/ineffective. For decades, education policy and practice has mandated the multiple purposes of education (academic and social). It is more important than ever before as we witness the social and economic costs of rising global and local conflict and the continued degradation of our environment that schools develop students’ critical, social and relational capacities as future active citizens to change a world on the brink of destruction. Although, it is promising to see the inclusion of sexual consent education in the Australian Curriculum as well as efforts to better recognise and integrate Indigenous perspectives and learning, it seems that politicians remain focused on narrow academic outcomes as the indicator of school success. Decades of research has told us that the testing culture in schools continues to degrade quality teaching and learning. Standardised testing of literacy, numeracy and science is not the problem. The problem is the way it has been weaponised to blame schools, teachers and students within a marketized and competitive education systems where under-performance on these tests is equated with bad teachers and schools (Smyth, 2011). How might this be different? Some have suggested that testing a randomised sample of schools to represent the diversity of schools in Australia might be a good way of gauging school performance on these markers.  Many countries reject standardised assessment, and have adopted this practice, such as New Zealand did in 2018.

Second, the emphasis on teacher quality in current political arguments tends to focus on teachers as individuals rather than as part of a feminised and (now) marketised profession that continues to be maligned publicly including by our elected representatives in government (Barnes, 2021). Raising the status of the teaching profession is a laudable goal amongst Labor’s education policy promises. Teachers are underpaid relative to other professions. They are overworked, confronted with increasing violence from students and parents, and they are operating in marketized systems where they must prioritise improvements on the measures that count (i.e., narrow academic outputs) lest their school becomes labelled as failing. In this pressurised environment, teachers are exhausted by increasingly untenable amounts of administration, accountability checklists and external demands (Heffernan, Bright, Kim, Longmuir, & Magyar, 2022). Teaching is therefore no longer attractive to many and even those who become teachers are disenchanted and exit because of the conditions of work and lack of professional autonomy. Both major parties have a commitment to attract high academic performing students into the profession through various programs and incentives. These initiatives may raise the status of teaching to some extent for some schools but they will do little to change the devaluing of the profession as feminised or the marketized system that has de-professionalised teachers.

Third, improving Initial Teacher Education is another policy focus for both major parties. Again, as it is situated within a competitive marketized system, Initial Teacher Education has been damaged as a consequence of JobReady policies. Federal funding to Education faculties has declined at the same time as they are expected to teach more students. This has led to a degrading of teacher education courses. Competitive market and education policy pressures have led to a burgeoning of shorter courses provided by multiple providers and intensified measures of accountability. Teaching is a complex profession that will not be mastered through short university courses. Teacher quality that leads to creating active, informed and critical citizens who can change the world for the better requires degree courses that foster deep, critical and broad learning about this complex job.

Fourth, both parties are silent on the gross funding inequality within and between our education system. In 2020, the total gross income available (including state and federal recurrent funding, equity loadings, fees and charges) per student was $16,020 for public schools, $17,057 for Catholic schools and $22,081 for independent schools (Australian Curriculum and Assessment and Reporting Authority). The reality is that public schools are chronically underfunded according to the minimum Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) (less than 1% of public schools will receive the minimum funding by 2023). In addition, the Catholic Education Office and ‘Independent’ schools have fewer accountability requirements. These schools are, of course, selective in who they accept (on the basis of ability to pay but also other factors such as religion and gender) which segregates children and fortifies inequality. Public schools, on the other hand, are left to support the most disadvantaged students with less resources. 

Fifth, both major parties support the right for parents to shop around and select the ‘best’ school for their children. What politicians don’t divulge is how this practice has been highly damaging for school equality. School choice policies over decades have encouraged competition, stratification and residualisation within and between education sectors assisted by the public availability of standardised testing data (MySchool) where schools are ranked on their performance. This has increased inequality between schools, students, communities, families and teachers – the ‘good’ schools get more students and more funds while ’bad’ schools get less students and less funds. What politicians don’t say is how school choice privileges already privileged parents and students who have the capacity and resources to select schools (including moving house to be close to ‘better’ schools). 

State governments are ostensibly responsible for public schooling in Australia, however federal governments can do a lot to improve education. If political parties are serious in this endeavour, the following (at least) needs to occur:

  • Remove standardised testing of narrow academic performance of all schools to testing of a random representative sample of schools
  • Improve the work conditions of teachers and school principals through greater pay, less intensive workloads, greater access to specialist support, greater time for professional development and planning, and greater security of employment (e.g. reducing casualisation)
  • Stop blaming teachers especially those in the public sector for problems that the system and society have created (schools cannot cure the ills of neoliberal, capitalist societies)
  • Implement the Gonski funding recommendations fully and immediately as they intended. This means equitable and fair redistribution of resources on the basis of need. This will mean recalibrating federal and state funding models to reduce or remove funding to ‘independent’ schools that do not need this funding.

From left to right: Jill Blackmore AM Ph D FASSA is Alfred Deakin Professor in Education, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Australia and Vice-President  of the Australian Association of University Professors.  She researches from a feminist perspective education policy and governance; international and intercultural education; leadership, and organisational change; spatial redesign and innovative pedagogies; and teachers’ and academics’ work. Recent projects have focused on school autonomy reform and international students’ mobility, identity, belonging and connectedness. Her latest publication is Disrupting Leadership in the Entrepreneurial University: Disengagement and Diversity (2022, Bloomsbury). Amanda Keddie is a Professor of Education at Deakin University. Her research examines the processes, practices and conditions that can impact on the pursuit of social justice in education settings. Amanda’s qualitative research has been based within the Australian, English and American schooling contexts. Follow her on @amandamkeddie. Katrina MacDonald is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Deakin University’s Strategic Research Centre in Education, Research for Educational Impact (REDI). Her research and teaching interests are in educational leadership, social justice, spatiality, and the sociology of education through a practice lens (feminist, Bourdieu, practice architectures). Katrina’s qualitative research has focused on principal’s social justice understandings and practices, and the impact of school reform policies on the provision of just public schooling. She tweets at @drfeersumenjin

Image by M Parker

Stop all government funding for private schools. (Why and how we could do it)

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Along with many fellow Australians I was momentarily heartened last year by the United Kingdom’s Labour party announcing that it would scrap elitist private schools in the UK (which are confusingly called “public schools”) if it won the UK election. Had it happened, those UK private schools would have been nationalised, their charitable status removed and their endowments, investments and properties redistributed to the state sector.

I have often called for the defunding of private schools in Australia, but I want to make the distinction between defunding and nationalising. I don’t believe all private schools in Australia should be nationalised. I do believe no private school should receive public funding via governments. Private schools that are unviable without being funded by governments should transition into becoming faith-based public schools, similar to the UK model of faith-based public schools.

UK faith-based public schools

Most faith-based schools in the UK are part of the public system (as they are in most European countries and in Canada).  Religious schools (Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh) are public schools and almost fully funded by the public. They do not charge additional parental fees – and follow the same National Curriculum, enrolment and staffing rules as public schools.

The difference between the UK and Australia

In the UK, private schools are not publicly funded but have tax deductible status and there are far fewer of them than we have here in Australia, currently they educate only around 7% of the UK population. They rely totally on fees raised from parents and donors.

This was also the situation in Australia prior to the 1963 with the beginning of what has been termed State Aid to Catholic schools aimed at bringing their “systemic” or parish school science facilities up to a comparable standard to science facilities in public schools.

So began the long-term process of providing federal benefits to private schools in Australia. At that time some 25% of students were enrolled in private schools in Australia and in 1965 these schools received 25% of all Commonwealth funding. 

The morphing of Australia’s school funding into the unsustainable model we have today

Today private schools in Australia receive 75% of all federal funding. We have gone a long way past just bringing poor Catholic parish schools up to public school standards. These days the poor schools across Australia, those needing help, are public schools. Today we don’t just fund Catholic schools, we now fund all religious schools including two Scientology schools with fewer than 50 students, each receiving almost $10,000 per student every year from the public purse. We also fund 31 Exclusive Brethren schools that in many cases get more government funding per student than nearby government schools.

In Germany the “Church” of Scientology is an illegal organisation. In Australia they are a tax-exempt charity. And you might remember Kevin Rudd labelled the Brethren group as “an extremist cult that breaks up families.” But now we gift them more money for their schools than we give to many public schools.

The recent OECD Education at a Glance 2019 shows that Australia is the 4th most privatised country for education. Whereas countries like Sweden, Norway, Finland and Luxembourg spend almost no private money on school education, Australia ranks 4th as the most privatised school education spending in the OECD after Mexico, Columbia and Turkey, with 35% of students attending private schools.

In Australia private schools on average receive about $10K per student from combined government funding on top of the parental fees which can be as much as $35k per student (non-boarding).

According to research by former Productivity Commissioner Trevor Cobbold, real government funding (adjusted for inflation) for public schools between 2009-2017 was cut by $17 per student (-0.2%) while funding for Catholic schools increased by $1420 per student (+18.4%) and $1318 (+20.9%) for so-called Independent schools per student.

Total real income per public student over that time period fell by $58 (-0.5) per student for public schools but increased by $1888 (+17.8%) in Catholic schools and by $2,306 (+15.1%) in Independent schools.

May I remind you most Australians (around 65%) still send their children to public schools.

Value for money spent on private schools?

It is claimed by conservative commentators that private schools are more efficient in their use of money. In 2018 2,558,169 or 65% of Australian students attended public primary and secondary schools. Combined government recurrent (non-capital) expenditure (latest figures 2016-17) averaged $17,531 per student across all states and territories. In the Catholic and Independent schools this figure was $19,302 including $10,664 of public funding per student, the rest being mainly made up of parent fees.

For example, public schools in NSW are operating with less than 70 per cent of the income per student of private schools, with public schools reporting a net yearly income of $13,318 a student compared to the private schools’ income of $20,053 a student.

Given recent research finds that public schools (excluding select entry schools) equal or outperform private schools when socio-economic status is considered, one must ask why does it take so much extra money to educate private school students? Perhaps it is because the decline in Australia’s performance in international tests over the decade is primarily due to falling results in private schools, the falls being similar in both Independent and Catholic schools.

Money matters for disadvantaged schools

Study after study indicates that money does really matter in education in disadvantaged communities but not in wealthier ones.

Unfortunately, in Australia it seems that most of the additional government spend on education flows to private schools that don’t need this additional money.  According to ABC research

  • Half of the $22 billion spent on capital projects in Australian schools between 2013 and 2017 was spent in just 10 per cent of schools
  • These schools are the country’s richest, ranked by average annual income from all sources (federal and state government funding, fees and other private funding) over the five-year period. They teach fewer than 30 per cent of students
  • They also reaped 28 per cent (or $2.4 billion) of the $8.6 billion in capital spending funded by government.

Over the past decade, public funding to private schools has risen nearly twice as fast as public funding to public schools. Recurrent public funding to private schools topped $14 billion in 2017.

What should happen

I believe any private school that charges fees over the agreed Schooling Resource Standard (the SRS is $11,343 for primary and $14,254 for secondary students in 2019) should immediately lose all public funding. Elitist schools across Australia charging over $20,000 in fees do not need public money. They will not lose too many students if they need to raise their fees even higher. Those private schools unable to meet their recurrent costs could voluntarily become public schools, opening enrolment to all students in their local area.

Private schools charging less than the SRS should have their public funding reduced gradually by 10% per annum until it is zero. Again, if these schools cannot meet their financial obligations they could be taken over by the state and become, as in the UK and elsewhere, state-run faith-based schools open to all children in their local area. This would be an actual saving of money for Australian tax payers over time.

Given that Catholic and Independent schools in Australia were subsidised by $14.03 billion in public funding  in 2018, should some close and even if 5-10% of their students were to enrol in public schools there would be no problem integrating all these kids into an equitable multicultural diverse public education system. We would then return to the same situation prior to the beginning of the “school choice” phenomenon.

I believe this is what we should be planning because all of the data indicates that what we are doing with school funding in Australia is blatantly unfair and financially unsustainable.

David Zyngier is Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Education at Southern Cross University. He is a former school teacher and principal. He spent most of his teaching career in disadvantaged public schools. David’s research focuses on teacher pedagogies that engage all students, but in particular how these can improve outcomes for students from communities of disadvantage by focusing on issues of social justice and social inclusion. He is on Twitter @dzyngier

Q:Which major party will fully fund public schools? A:None. Here’s what’s happening

Education policy, Evidence Institute for Schools, NAPLAN, School funding, , , ,

You would be forgiven for thinking that policy related to schooling is not a major issue in Australia. In the lead up to the federal election, scant attention has been paid to it during the three leaders’ debates. One of the reasons could be because the education policies of the major parties have largely converged around key issues.

Both Labor and the Coalition are promising to increase funding to schools but neither is prepared to fully fund government schools to the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS).  Under a Coalition government public schools will get up to 95 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard by 2027, under a Labor government they will get 97 per cent by 2027. Either way we are talking two elections away and to what degree public schools will remain underfunded.

Both the Coalition and Labor plan to fully fund allprivate schools to the Schooling Resource Standard by 2023. Some private schools are already fully funded and many are already over funded. 

Yes, Labor is promising to put equality and redistribution back on the agenda in areas such as tax reform and childcare policy, but its Fair funding for Australian Schools policy fails to close the funding gap between what government schools get, and what they need.  And yes Labor is promising to put back the $14 billion cut from public schools by the Coalition’s Gonski 2.0 plan and will inject $3.3 billion of that during its 2019-22 term, if elected.

The point I want to make is neither major party is prepared to fully fund government schools to the level that is needed according to the Schooling Resource Standard.

I find this deeply disappointing.

There are certainly differences between Coalition and Labor education policies, the main being that Labor will outspend the Coalition across each education sector from pre-schools to universities.

However, as I see it, neither major party has put forward an education policy platform. Instead, they have presented a clutch of ideas that fail to address key issues of concern in education, such as dismantling the contrived system of school comparison generated by NAPLAN and the MySchool website, and tackling Australia’s massive and growing equity issues.

Both major parties believe that the best mechanism for delivering quality and accountability is by setting and rewarding performance outcomes. This approach shifts responsibility for delivering improvements in the system down the line.

And let’s get to standardised testing. There is a place for standardised tests in education. However, when these tests are misused they have perverse negative consequences including narrowing the curriculum, intensifying residualisation, increasing the amount of time spent on test preparation, and encouraging ‘gaming’ behaviour.

Labor has promised to take a serious look at how to improve the insights from tests like NAPLAN, but this is not sufficient to redress the damage they are doing to the quality of schooling and the schooling experiences of young people.

These tests can be used to identify weaknesses in student achievement on a very narrow range of curriculum outcomes but there are cheaper, more effective and less problematic ways of finding this out. And the tests are specifically designed to produce a range of results, so it is intended for some children to do badly; a fact missed entirely by the mainstream media coverage of NAPLAN results.

National testing, NAPLAN, is supported by both Labor and the Coalition. Both consistently tell us that inequality matters, but both know the children who underperform are more likely to come from communities experiencing hardship and social exclusion. These are the communities whose children attend those schools that neither major party is willing to fund fully to the Schooling Resource Standard.

Consequently, teachers in underfunded government schools are required to do the ‘heavy lifting’ of educating the young people who rely most on schooling to deliver the knowledge and social capital they need to succeed in life.

The performance of students on OECD PISA data along with NAPLAN show the strength of the link between low achievement and socio-economic background in Australia; a stronger link than in many similar economies. This needs to be confronted with proper and fair funding plus redistributive funding on top of that.

A misuse of standardised tests by politicians, inflamed by mainstream media, has resulted in teachers in our public schools being blamed for the persistent low achievement of some groups of children and, by extension, initial teacher education providers being blamed for producing ‘poor quality’ teachers.

There is no educational justification for introducing more tests, such as the Coalition’s proposed Year 1 phonics test. Instead, federal politicians need to give up some of the power that standardised tests have afforded them to intervene in education. They need to step away from constantly using NAPLAN results to steer education for their own political purposes. Instead they need to step up to providing fair funding for all of Australia’s schools.

I believe when the focus is placed strongly on outputs, governments are let ‘off the hook’ for poorly delivering inputs through the redistribution of resources. Improved practices at the local level can indeed help deliver system quality, but not when that system is facing chronic, eternal underfunding.

Here I must comment on Labor’s proposal to establish a  $280 million Evidence Institute for Schools.  Presumably, this is Labor’s response to the Productivity Commission’s recommendation to improve the quality of existing education data. Labor is to be commended for responding to this recommendation. The Coalition is yet to say how they will fund the initiative.

However what Labor is proposing is not what the Productivity Commission recommended. The Commission argued that performance benchmarking and competition between schools alone are insufficient to achieve gains in education outcomes. They proposed a broad ranging approach to improving the national education evidence base, including the evaluation of policies and building an understanding of how to turn what we know works into into common practice on the ground.

Labor claims that its Evidence Institute for Schools will ensure that teachers and parents have access to ‘high quality’ ‘ground breaking’ research, and it will be ‘the right’ research to assist teachers and early educators to refine and improve their practice.

As an educational researcher, I welcome all increases in funding for research but feel compelled to point out according to the report on Excellence in Research for Australia that was recently completed by the Australian Research Council, the vast majority of education research institutions in Australia are already producing educational research assessed to be of or above world class standard.

The problem is not a lack of high quality research, or a lack of the right kind of research. Nor is it the case that teachers do not have access to research to inform their practice. Without a well-considered education platform developed in consultation with key stakeholders, this kind of policy looks like a solution in search of a problem, rather than a welcome and needed response to a genuine educational issue.

Both major parties need to do more to adequately respond to the gap in the education evidence base identified by the Productivity Commission. This includes a systematic evaluation of the effects of education policies, particularly the negative effects of standardised tests.

The people most affected by the unwillingness of the major parties to imagine a better future for Australia’s schools are our young people, the same young people who are demanding action on the climate crisis. They need an education system that will give them the best chance to fix the mess we are leaving them. Until we can fully fund the schools where the majority of them are educated in Australia we are failing them there too.

Dr Debra Hayes is Head of School and Professor, Education & Equity at the Sydney School of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney. She is also the President of the Australian Association for Research in Education. Her next book, co-authored with Craig Campbell, will be available in August – Jean Blackburn: Education Feminism and Social Justice (Monash University Press). @DrDebHayes

Words matter: how the latest school funding report (Gonski 2.0) gets it so wrong

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education, Gonski, Indigenous education, School funding, , , , , ,

Much has been said about David Gonski’s second review of school funding in Australia. It is a document made up 46,327 words aimed at advising the Australian Government on how school funding can be used to improve student achievement and school performance.

Within those 46,327 words in the 150-page document, Through Growth to Achievement: Report of the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools, the term ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ‘ is only used 10 times. This is less than 0.1% of the total focus within the entire document.

Deficit discourse

It gets worse. When reference to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander is used in the document, it is predominantly based on ‘deficit discourse’, that is discussion that represents people or groups in terms of deficiency, absence, lack or failure. And it sets up Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander to be considered different to the dominant norm.  For example:

“This holds regardless of a student’s circumstances, whether they are students with disability, students in rural or remote locations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students,those from non-English speaking backgrounds, low socio-economic backgrounds, gifted and talented students, or any combination of these” (p. x, emphasis added);

“The review Panel heard from a range of stakeholders that there are common fundamentals needed to support all students – those in capital cities and territories, those in rural or remote locations, students with disability, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students,students from non-English speaking backgrounds, students from low socio-economic backgrounds, gifted and talented students, academically advanced or less-advanced students, or any combination of these” (p. 4, emphasis added); and

“The strategy seeks to lift students’ foundational skills in STEM learning areas, improve Australia’s STEM performance in international comparative assessments, reverse the declining number of skilled graduates in STEM-related subjects, and address the under-representation in STEM of girls, of students from low socio-economic status backgrounds, of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, and of students from non-metropolitan areas (p. 37, emphasis added).

By consistently listing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander uniqueness as a deficit, it maintains the dominant norm and perpetuates stereotypes.  The use of “or any combination of these” is also an interesting clause.  It seems a blasé term of reference acting to minimise the varying forms of inequity that peoples face and in turn, dismisses the lack of focus on addressing inequity.

Representation

Another mention of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples within the report includes an explicit mention of the need to increase Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teacher representation.  As I see it, this limits the expectations of Indigenous peoples. They are seen as teachers not also as principals or educational leaders.

In the same way the document lacks promotion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples within educational decision-making, even though this is advocated within numerous current policies.  Instead, the reasoning given for increasing representation is that “it promotes student creativity, motivation, deeper learning and problem-solving skills” (p. 73).

The reasoning seems very lack lustre when considering that an entire chapter within the document is focused on “Creating, supporting and valuing a profession of expert educators” (Chapter 3 pp. 56-81). This chapter draws on the work of Professors Jo Lampert and Bruce Burnett and their project, National Exceptional Teaching in Disadvantaged Schools programwhich seeks to address disadvantage by seeking exceptional pre-service teachers to fill ‘hard to place’ schools’ staffing issues. Little mention is made of the clientele of these schools or the reason for the schools being deemed ‘hard to place’ except for a mention of low socio-economic status schools.

Missed opportunities for positive acknowledgement

Yet, aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educational research is used to emphasise the importance of classroom teachers and their role in education as well as the involvement of parents and community within the classroom setting.  For example, the Families as First teachers programis mentioned to illustrate the important role of parents supporting cognitive development. This program grew from a project within Kuranda to build parents capacity to assist their children in early childhood.

The omission of recognition of this being an Indigenous-led project now adapted within schools nationally, further silences the achievements and success of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Further to this, the notion of mentoring is also discussed.  While Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are not explicitly mentioned, the Promising Practices in Supporting Success for Indigenous Students report (OECD, 2017) was used as the substantiating evidence for mentoring.

The needs based funding loading specifically for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students is omitted from the actual report but needs based funding is championed as “levelling the playing field” (p.6).

The Review Panel was established “to examine evidence and make recommendations on how school funding should be used to improve school performance and student outcomes”, so these omissions are interesting.

One mention only of Cross-Curriculum Priorities

There are three cross curriculum priorities of the Australian National Curriculum. These are: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and Sustainability. The cross curriculum priorities are part of the national curriculum, which is made up of three dimensions: specific disciplinary knowledge (such as English, science, maths), general capabilities (such as creative thinking, social and emotional skills) and the three cross curriculum priorities (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia and Sustainability).

Mention of the cross curriculum priorities is limited to one occasion within the report. And on that one occasion, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures is omitted.  That is, when describing the Australian Curriculum, the report states,

“The Australian Curriculum can be depicted as a cube of three dimensions: disciplinary knowledge, skills and understanding in learning areas such as English, mathematics and science; general capabilities such as personal and social capability; and cross-curriculum priorities such as Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia” (p. 38).

Why the omission?

I believe the omission of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures may have been intentional. Previous reviews and reports commissioned by the Liberal Government by the likes of Kevin Donnelly have argued (paywalled) that the inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures within the curriculum is “hostile towards the institutions, beliefs and grand narrative associated with Western civilisation that makes this nation unique”.

So is the omission purposeful; to align with the Liberal agenda of shifting focus? At least the inclusion of Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia as the lone cross-curriculum priority is interesting. Considering the Liberal’s stance on climate change it is probably not surprising that Sustainability, the other cross-curriculum priority is also omitted.

In its defence, the report does acknowledge the numerous reviews undertaken addressing rural and remote education and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education and that it “has sought to complement them, rather than go over the same ground. [Stating that,] our specific focus has been on improving school education outcomes for all students across Australia” (p. 14).

However if the review panel’s focus was on improving student outcomes and school performance, how can the needs of specific groups that are identified within governmental data sets as struggling to meet national minimum standards be so readily dismissed and silenced?

 

 

Melitta Hogarth is a Kamilaroi woman who is also the Indigenous Education Lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland within the College for Indigenous Studies, Education and Research.  Prior to entering academia, Melitta taught for almost 20 years in all three sectors of the Queensland education system specifically in Secondary education.  Melitta’s interests are in education, equity and social justice.  She recently completed her PhD titled “Addressing the rights of Indigenous peoples in education: A critical analysis of Indigenous education policy”.