Although much has been made about the poverty of educational standards in Australian schools lately, it is surprising that things are not a good deal worse. On many important aspects of education policy state governments are in the grip of teacher unions, creating a situation where public school systems are not being run first and foremost for the benefit of students.

Public school teachers in all states and territories except Victoria are appointed by centralised teacher allocation systems which give public school principals and school communities very little say over who is hired to teach in their school, who stays, who goes and how they are paid. These decisions are made by government bureaucrats and merit is typically at the bottom of the list.

Ironically, in centralised staffing systems aggressively defended by teacher unions, teachers themselves have little control over the terms of their employment. They cannot apply directly to a public school with a vacancy and be hired on their ability and suitability for the position. Instead they languish in a queue until the people ahead of them resign or retire. A career in teaching is a waiting game.

Patience is rewarded over excellence. Teachers earn "transfer points" for working in hard-to-staff schools. Transfer points are used as currency to get a more appealing teaching position and are supposedly the only way to ensure a supply of teachers to hard-to-staff schools.

In reality, transfer point systems deliver neither quality nor equality in teaching. It is well known that the least experienced teachers are concentrated in the most challenging schools, creating the added problem of high turnover. Many teachers who do not leave teaching because of the difficulty of beginning their career in hard-to-staff schools stay there just long enough to accumulate sufficient points to transfer to a more desirable school.

The children who most need quality and consistency are least likely to get it.

Principals and teachers are unhappy with the system, as survey data and commissioned reports show. A 2004 report for the Ministerial Council for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, for instance, found that "many teachers feel that they are being marshalled and not treated like individuals" and are also "unconvinced that the system works equitably". Teachers in focus groups said it was at odds with their self-perception as autonomous professionals and denied them the freedom to make choices.

In centralised staffing systems, not only are public school principals unable to appoint teachers on merit, it is extremely difficult to get rid of incompetent teachers. Teachers are more likely to be shuffled between schools than disciplined or dismissed, with obvious detrimental effects on students, and serious repercussions for the teaching profession.
Sheltering poor teachers affects morale and reflects badly on the teaching profession as a whole.

If public schools are to flourish into the future, the nexus between the teacher unions and state governments must be broken.
Teachers whose careers are determined by a remote and faceless state government department understandably feel as if they need the security of a strong and politically active union. The union, in turn, uses its clout to aggressively and publicly pursue its agenda against the government, blurring the line between professional and industrial matters.

The vital first step in a decentralisation process that would reduce both union and government bureaucratic influence over public schools is to give greater staffing autonomy to schools. Schools should be given their entire personnel budget to select the mix of staff they require.

Schools that have traditionally had difficulty recruiting and keeping staff should be given budgets proportionate to their needs so that they can offer the types of incentive packages they believe to be most effective.

International evidence from the largest and most credible studies indicates that one of the hallmarks of effective schools is the ability to make important decisions that have an impact on the quality of education they can offer. For example, an analysis of results from the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment shows that schools with greater autonomy, particularly in relation to staffing and school budgets, tend to have higher performance.

For teaching to be seriously considered a profession, teachers must be given more freedom and responsibility for their career paths. Public school principals, who are increasingly being held accountable for the performance of their schools, need to have authority over their school's most important resource: teachers. Policies that prevent principals from hiring the best and removing the worst teachers do students, and, ultimately, public education, no service.

Jennifer Buckingham is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney and author of a paper Teachers and the Waiting Game, out this week.