Opinion & Commentary
Informed choice leads to better schooling outcomes
Over the last 10 years or so, the school education landscape across Australia has altered significantly. There have been changes in the types of schools children attend, as well as the way they are funded. There has been a move toward increasing school’s accountability for their performance, and the important influence of teacher quality on student achievement has been acknowledged.
South Australia is no exception. Student numbers in the South Australian non-government school sector increased by 22% from 1998 to 2008, while the state school sector shrunk by 8%. Over the same period, there was a significant increase in federal funding to non-government schools.
It is easy to blame the federal funding changes for the movement to non-government schools. But it is more complicated than that. The biggest drops in state school student numbers were in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This was before the federal funding changes were implemented and suggests that the trend was already well-established. In recent times, from 2006 to 2008, the numbers of students in the two sectors stabilized.
It is impossible to know for sure, but it is likely that the stabilization of student numbers in state schools is at least part in due to the effect of competition. Dwindling enrolments in state schools compelled the SA government, and the schools themselves, to adapt to parent and community expectations or continue to lose students and teachers. The proposed Super Schools are evidence of this continuing campaign to keep families in state schools.
In some circles, competition and choice are dirty words when applied to education. But school choice allows parents to send a loud and clear message to governments about the standards of schooling they expect. Writing letters of complaint to the minister does not have the same effect as the combined actions of many parents opting out of the state school sector, despite the fact it costs quite a lot of money to do so.
An added benefit of choice and competition is that it requires good information. After many years of doing everything possible to avoid public scrutiny of individual schools, state and territory governments have agreed to allow the federal government to publish information about the performance of each state and non-government school so they can be compared. Finally, parents will be able to make informed choices about their children’s schooling rather than basing their judgments on the way a school looks or how well a school markets itself.
Another change has been the focus on teachers and teaching. Thanks to researchers like John Hattie and the late Ken Rowe, it has now been acknowledged that educational outcomes are not determined simply by socio-economic status as had been the prevailing view, and that good teachers can help all children achieve at school.
The teaching profession is going through a painful transition at the moment. There are pressures to lift the standards of people going in to teacher education and to apply quality controls to people graduating from teacher education. At the same time, there is an existing shortage of teachers in the key curriculum areas of maths, science and information technology, and a looming nation-wide shortage of teachers due to retirement and resignations.
One thing that hasn’t changed, unfortunately, is the regular and epic struggle between teachers unions and state governments, usually over salaries. State school teachers unions remain committed to collective bargaining and to a lock-step salary structure that rewards longevity rather than merit. They resist moves to allow principals more say in who gets hired and fired and to allow teachers more say in where and how they work.
Industrial arrangements of this sort have long since been abandoned in other professions and industries. Arguably, the rigid nature of state school teacher employment is contributing to the difficulties being experienced by the profession and is hampering the ability of state schools to respond to competition and the new era of accountability. Hopefully, it too will soon become a relic of the past.
Jennifer Buckingham is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. Her new publication Schools of Thought: A Collection of Articles on Education was published in August .
