Opinion & Commentary
Here are the three keys to improving our schools
The Australian government’s ‘Australia 2020 Summit’ is now less than a month away. School education, which falls into the ‘Productivity’ session, has already attracted some controversy. Given the range of interests and views of the participants, this is likely to continue.
It is possible to list dozens of specific problems that need to be resolved to improve the quality of school education. Given the short time available, these will have to be prioritised, but over the course of the Summit weekend the following three aspects of school education are imperative items for the agenda.
First, school funding needs a massive shakeup. It must become centred on the needs of students and be allocated in a transparent way. This is particularly important for public schools. The funding system for most public schools is based more on teacher salaries than on student need. There are various types of add-on funds that are supposed to provide equity for needy students, but they are often inadequate to deal with the multiple educational and social problems some schools are burdened with.
Public schools should be funded on a per student basis, with all students entitled to a standard grant, with graduated loadings for students who cost more to educate, such as kids with disabilities or from disadvantaged homes. This is known in international education policy circles as Weighted Student Funding.
Education Minister Julia Gillard has already expressed an intention to change the way the federal government funds public schools so that the allocation of funds better reflects the real needs of individual schools. This sort of thinking is welcome. Ideally though, both government and non-government schools should be funded under a single system through cooperative funding from the state and federal governments (along with much more encouragement of private investment). If the mechanisms of school funding were open, fair and defensible, there may finally be an end to debate on the topic.
Second, there must be a focus on the nuts and bolts of getting high quality teachers in classrooms. There has been a tendency to place too much emphasis on the number of teachers in schools, with little regard for their aptitude. Low cut-off scores for university education courses attest to this.
Teacher quality rests on two conditions: recruiting good people and training them properly. Teaching needs to become more attractive to intelligent and energetic people who could have any job they want. More rewarding salary schedules, a more flexible career structure, and an emphasis on acquiring high quality candidates in the key disciplines would be crucial in re-energising the teaching profession.
The recent decision of the New South Wales government to give public schools the opportunity to select teachers locally puts it among the states like Victoria that have embraced modern employment practices that provide schools with much more latitude in managing their resources. This is a significant positive step and recasts teachers as professionals in charge of their own careers, rather than ‘workers’ in a union and state controlled industry.
The second bastion of teaching is training. In order to be registered, all teachers have to undertake university-based teacher education courses. The problem is that there is widespread discontent with the training these courses provide.
There are 102 government reports telling us that teacher training is too variable and is largely unsatisfactory to both teachers and principals. At the moment, new teachers spend four years and thousands of dollars at university being poorly prepared for the classroom. A proper audit and evaluation of individual teacher training programs is required to document the content and format of each course and collect data that shows the quality of teaching it produces among its graduates.
State teacher institutes accredit teacher education courses, but because graduate teachers move around the country, a national approach to the quality of outcomes is also required. Teaching Australia is well-placed to take on this task. It is also worth considering alternate forms of teacher-training which have a central role for schools.
Third, decisive efforts must be made to improve the disgraceful standard of education achieved by our indigenous students, especially in remote communities. There is a separate ‘indigenous issues’ session at the Australia 2020 summit, but indigenous education needs the attention of mainstream education experts as well as indigenous justice advocates.
The failure of state and territory governments to fulfill their obligations to provide a decent education to generations of indigenous children is profound. The federal government needs to step in where others have failed, and all levels of government must immediately commit to begin turning the situation around within the next 12 months. Governments are willing to spend billions of dollars subsidising child care for wealthy families. An indigenous population that is literate is not an impossible dream.
Jennifer Buckingham is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies (www.cis.org.au) and will be attending the Australia 2020 Summit.
