Opinion & Commentary
Good for jobs, bad for education
If ever there was good evidence that politics and education don’t mix, the fiasco of the Building the Education Revolution (BER) program is it. Every principal, P&C, teacher, student and parent in the country should be overjoyed at $14.7 billion being thrown in their general direction. Yet discontent is widespread and many questions have been raised about the real value of this money for schools now and in the future.
How did this policy, which should have been a political slam-dunk, go so spectacularly wrong?
The first reason is that the BER program was never about education, it was about job creation. According to a 14 June media release from the Minister Gillard’s office, ‘The Guidelines for the Building the Education Revolution are clear and were developed to ensure that this investment supported as many jobs, in as many communities and as quickly as possible, to cushion the effects of the global recession on the Australian economy.’ Nothing there about teaching, learning, student achievement, or anything even remotely scholastic.
To meet the economic stimulus objective, the time frame for applications and approvals has been extremely short, and schools have had to accept what would normally be unacceptable in both nature and cost, or risk missing out altogether. But just to confuse matters, in a bid to make the program sound education-friendly, all building works must be mainly for student use, which presents schools with a fairly narrow range of options and not necessarily the most useful ones.
For example, a school in my area already has a new hall/gymnasium and library, so it is using its BER funding to build more new classrooms when it already has several unused ones. What this school really needs is better staff facilities and a building that could be used both in and out-of-school hours to increase parental and community involvement in the school, which is sorely lacking. This does not meet the funding criteria, however. A story in this paper last weekend told of a school in remote Western Australia that needs decent teacher housing so that it can attract and keep good teachers. This is a top priority for all remote schools. Instead, the 24-student school is getting a hall.
On top of these problems, the cost of the buildings for public schools is being inflated by the use of state government contractors, substantial project-management costs extracted by state governments, and the price premiums caused by urgency. Nobody is getting value for money, least of all the tax-payer.
The second reason for the BER’s woes is that the conditions for funding do not take school need into account. In a laudable effort to maintain a sector-neutral approach and treat government and non-government schools equally, the size of the building grants is dependent only on school enrolments. Unfortunately, this means that schools in both sectors that already have every kind of building they could conceivably need have been given millions of dollars to build more. Hard-nosed lefties and hard-headed rationalists alike think that’s a bad use of public money.
Much attention has been paid to some obvious stuff-ups, such as schools slated for closure being given money for new buildings, and rushing out a funding program of this scope will inevitably get it wrong in some cases. However, the broader issue of school need is fundamental. It should have been foreseen and could have been fixed pretty simply. School need would not have to be based on fees or socioeconomic status, just on whether the school already has ample facilities.
It is hard not to see this as a missed opportunity. There might be a positive impact on employment in the building and manufacturing industries but the long-term cost of achieving this aim may well exceed the short-term benefits. Schools in this instance were mistakenly seen as a politically safe place to dump some money. Although improving education was not the main game, a better program could have served both purposes with a smaller price tag.
Jennifer Buckingham is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
