Competition, 'autonomy' and schools

I should first emphasise that there may well be no good answer to this question. The high degree of autonomy and competitiveness of Australian schools is one indicator of serious and perhaps insurmountable problems of steerage arising from industrial agreements that dictate resource use by systems and schools, from the sector system entrenched by Karmel, and from chronic conflict and confusion over state and federal government roles and responsibilities. We are not well placed to do anything with the degree of coherence and direction rightly urged by Grattan. But to the extent that we are, it may be found in just the place that Grattan suggests we stop looking.

Competition has not worked as governments intended but it certainly does work. It has been a powerful driver of change in the Australian school system, and unlike most such drivers it is self-fuelling and self-expanding. The greater the number of schools and families that get involved the more that have to, for reasons of ambition or of defence. We have probably passed the point of no return and, if so, it becomes important to decide whether the problem is in competition as such or in the particular way it has been conducted over the past several decades. Rather than trying to get the genie back in the bottle, perhaps it can be put to the right kind of work? An intriguing analogy suggests that it might.

The most successful sporting code in the country, the Australian Football League, has discovered that competition is an unbeatable driver of autonomous clubs and of the game as a whole, provided that all play by the same rules (particularly on player recruitment and transfer), and with more or less the same resources, so that every team and its fans can realistically believe that they're in with a chance, if not this year, then soon. To risk an heroically mixed metaphor, by running a comp in which dog is not permitted to eat dog, the AFL has succeeded in lifting all boats, or just about all (and it accepts responsibility for those that aren't).

The analogy is suggestive in several ways. At the most general level, it suggests that centralisation and decentralisation can – must? – go hand in hand, and so must competition and collaboration. Each side of these binaries depends on – expands? – the other.

More specifically, it suggests that governments have not had entirely the wrong idea, just 25 per cent or so of a good one. It suggests that a "good system" no longer consists of instructions enforced by hierarchies but of a few ground rules filled out by incentives and subsidies, conventions and understandings, evidence and argument. It suggests that the way to get schools to "implement" policies is to put them in circumstances in which they can and must learn from each other. It may even suggest how most or all schools might gradually come to join a common system, if by "system" we mean "framework."

The analogy suggests that we may be further along the road to such a framework than might be supposed, and also that there is a long way to go. We have agreed goals for schooling (however conveniently abstract), a national curriculum, of sorts, an increasingly national Year 12 certification system, and some of the elements of a national scoreboard, although as yet narrow and narrowing. What's left of Gonski is likely to establish the right national principle for funding even if it doesn't get that principle anywhere near full practice.

On the other hand, we have wildly different capacities to participate in the comp. For schools, Gonski lite will reduce but not remove the mismatch between the size of the educational job and the size of the budget, and will leave quite untouched a regulatory regime that allows different schools to play by different rules, particularly in the crucial domain of student recruitment, exclusion and ejection. As for families, the mad legacy of Karmel lives on there too. Many families who can't afford to pay fees do, and many of those who can don't. We subsidise those who don't need it and fail to give extra support those who do.

No analogy is complete, of course. What makes a "club" or a "team" in schools? Not individual schools, unless of the behemoth variety exemplified by a few of the wealthy independents. Locality-based groups already half-exist, and have other things going for them as well, particularly if they were to include schools from two or all three of the present "sectors." And what is the prize? There can be no one goal or grand final in schooling. "Performance" in the conventional educational sense is essential, of course, but so is the character and quality of relationships among students and between them and staff, and the mix of students and families. So the analogy won't take us the whole way but it might take us further than looking to the past, or at what happens in Finland or Shanghai or Southeast Queensland.