The Productivity Commission’s report into Australia’s education system confirms what most families already know: our school system is expensive and underperforming.
The traditional levers of more funding and increasing regulation have not delivered the improvements students deserve. It is time for greater creativity and political courage in the approach to making schools work.
Labor is unlikely to have the stomach to take on the powerful teachers unions who pull their strings, and so often fight sensible reform as a recruitment tactic.
And although education is seen as a traditional strength for Labor, its performance in the portfolio in recent decades has been weak.
There is a golden opportunity here for the Coalition to drive bold reform that goes to the heart of Australia’s future productivity, economic strength and social cohesion. In can also help solve a burning political problem: winning back the trust of women and families.
The PC observed that NAPLAN performance had not improved between 2008 and 2021, and that the performance of Australian students compared with students from other OECD nations had continued to slide. That is despite record funding of $116 billion across all governments in 2021-22.
Clearly, money is not the issue, even in public schools.
Our system continues to fail boys, who lag well behind their female classmates.
One teacher told me he is dealing with “a generation of lost boys”.
Rural, regional and remote students do not perform well compared to urban students, with performance sliding markedly the further away from the cities a student lives. Although Indigenous students as a group perform less well than non-indigenous students, this is perhaps better understood as an issue of geography rather than race. Indigenous students living in our cities perform well compared to those in remote places.
What those in Labor and the Greens will seek to cast as a story of rising economic inequality is more of a commentary on culture and geography. It cannot be a mere issue of means when the Gonski funding model already provides substantially more funding to those schools teaching cohorts with lower socioeconomic data to correct for this disadvantage.
The PC’s recommendations are worthwhile, to be sure. But the impact of Australia’s culture on education results should not be underestimated.
The Aussie cliche of an easy-going, laid-back attitude fails too many students. A little more of the “tiger” parent at home to drive and support young people to their potential would make a difference for many. This requires policy that encourages some parents to take more interest and responsibility for their children, rather than outsourcing to schools things that are the proper role of parents. It also requires support for those parents who have never been taught, by modelling or otherwise, what they should be doing at this stage of life.
Australians, and our politicians, don’t like talking about the impact of social change on matters such as education performance, for fear of sounding judgmental about the lives of others. That is understandable. But the teachers and the statistics tell the same story: problem parents and home environments overwhelmingly deliver problem students, whether that is in Alice Springs or the city.
There is a clear correlation between those nations with a culture that emphasises strong families, parental involvement in children’s education and an industrious work ethic and those which lead the PISA tables.
In contrast, Australian teachers report a clear correlation between their underperforming students and evidence of the breakdown of the role of parents in the family.
Disengaged parents, the trauma of family breakdown, or one or more absent parents (whether due to work commitments or as a result of dysfunction) stand in the way of children who are not reaching their potential.
Similarly, teachers report the devastating impact of technology on basic skills. It is more than the distraction of social media and phones in high school, although they are a problem. Children are coming to primary school without the basic social and conversational skills that are the product of having parents talk to them for the five years before.
No funding agreement, nor any additional layer of regulation, is going to fix this problem. The solution for these kids lies in the hands of the most important adults in their lives, and in the strength of the community around them. Policy, therefore, should educate, encourage and empower the parents of underperforming students to step up to their role. It should refuse to ask already over-stretched teachers to do what should be happening in the home, because to do so prejudices the ability of all children to learn the essentials and allows adults to abdicate their responsibilities to children.
Governments should commit to removing the bureaucratic barriers to community groups scaffolding at-risk parents and students.
Culture is at the heart of the persistent underperformance of male students, too. One teacher told me he is dealing with “a generation of lost boys”. Without many male teachers, too few present fathers and a consistent message that their masculinity is “toxic” rather than something about which they should be confident and proud, their poor school performance is a symptom of a bigger problem facing men. It is up to parents to show their boys what it means to be a man, and how that can contribute positively to the world. Better school results, improved mental health and reduced problem behaviour would be the by-product.
I accept that this is the tip of the iceberg of what is a complex social problem.
Yet, unless we are each prepared to confront the reality of the impact of culture, and act daily to model and support its improvement, all the Gonski dollars in the world won’t make a difference to school outcomes.
