Julia Gillard's schools - Alice in Fundingland

I've always admired people who can successfully multitask, and Julia Gillard certainly fits that category. With a job title longer than my CV, Ms Gillard has made a splash across her two portfolios, plus the odd stint as relieving prime minister. She is one of those people who I can't resist urging on to bigger and better things.

But if education policy is any guide she seems increasingly unable or unwilling to get her mind around some of the complexities of this huge portfolio. Despite a tribe of Victorians near her office and despite (or because?) hanging on to the best of DEST she has managed to manoeuvre herself into a number of conflicting or at best highly debatable policy positions - while being unwilling to tackle some difficult issues that just won't go away.

This was illustrated by her recent speech to the Association of Independent Schools (New South Wales), which was widely and variously reported in the national media - in some cases so variously one wonders if it was the same speech.

From the outset no one should blame a minister of the crown for wanting to please a large and partisan audience of people with an intense interest in her policies. But what emerged from this speech was an eagerness to please, combined with statements which would not only raised the eyebrows of public educators but will almost certainly leave the most balanced commentators scratching their heads.

In her speech she voiced concern about equity, but was quick to set her audience at ease about funding. "Let me spell it out", she said, "We will maintain the funding levels, including indexation, of non-government schools".

If you are new to this issue let me try to explain. The Howard government initiated the SES system to fund private schools on need - sort of. When told that better-off schools would lose money they fiddled the system so that funding could only go up. Catholic schools were given an exemption so that their funding could also go up.

Over the years and despite (or because of) Mark Latham the funding of private schools certainly did go up. Some of them lost enrolments but their funding still went ... up. A secret Howard government report timidly claimed that all this “going up” was not really a good thing. The Rudd Government ignored the report because they had exorcised “down” from their own policy language.

Julia Gillard has little choice - the funding of some schools will go down. What she has managed to do is turn a potential “down” into an “up”. New SES figures show that more schools' funding should go down - but the schools can wait until their new SES score reaches the level of their current funding.

It is a sort of a cushioned “down” - a fiscal detoxification for those private schools hooked on public funding. But in the meantime their total funding (wait for it) ... goes UP by $1.3 billion over the next four years. Not a problem for Julia: the actual going down bit may take so long that it will be someone else's problem.

In keeping with a Rudd Government theme she again stressed "it's time we got beyond the public versus private divide that has blighted our education debates for so long". This is a time-honoured way of denying difference and debate, ranking up there with “politics of envy” and variations of “mission accomplished”.

The problems she won't deal with are obvious. It is the very way that public and private providers operate in this country, with different rules, funding sources and sets of obligations, that creates the same problems of access and equity about which she professes to be concerned. It isn't enough to declare such concerns off-limits in the hope that the mounting problems of our public-private framework will just go away.

Where Julia Gillard makes serious errors is in trying to blur the current distinctions that do exist between public and private schools, in particular by claiming that it is impossible to say that one is rich and the other poor. This isn't supported by data: as Barbara Preston shows, 40 per cent of government school students are in low income families. The figure for Catholic schools is 25 per cent and for other private schools is 22 per cent (source: The social make-up of schools (PDF 253KB)).

A blurred distinction between sectors helps support one of her policy solutions: to target funding on school communities rather than school systems. Even this has problems: how might she identify the communities of schools which draw/entice/poach their fee-affording clientele from anywhere?

The other reason Gillard seeks to blur the distinction between sectors is that eventually she wants to drag some of her audience into an integrated school framework. This means she has to be especially nice to non-government school audiences: under current funding arrangements they have nothing to gain and everything to lose by becoming part of an expanded state system. Conversely she doesn't have to be nice to public educators: they'll do as they are told under any frameworks agreement between the states and the commonwealth.

The problem is that Gillard is talking the talk of reducing sectoral divides without seemingly understanding the role of these divides in creating the very equity problems which genuinely occupy much of her attention. It is fantasy to try to solve real problems while at the same time ignoring the public-private divide. It is the mechanism of this very divide which has substantially created the problem! You can deal with mechanisms without being dragged down into ideological trench warfare.

Worse than that, her preference for funding through students rather than systems represents a serious lack of understanding of the role played by one of these systems - the universal, inclusive, free and secular public schools - in creating middle class democracy, social stability and economic growth in this and equivalent countries.

Public schools don't just form another sector; they are an integral part of what we are as a society and nation. To believe this is not to take any "side" in a debate. Nor does it give public education any protected status. What it does mean is that you can't diminish its size, distinctiveness and effectiveness without serious individual and collective consequences. In not understanding this Julia Gillard is hardly on her own on the front bench of the Rudd Labor Government.

Until the Rudd Government comes to terms with these issues Julia Gillard will be condemned to tip-toe through a minefield not even of her own making. Maybe she will get to the other side; maybe she won't. But in the meantime there will be serious limits to what she can achieve.