Australian Education: moving from 'good' to 'excellent'

Evaluation of teaching

Of course, if current teachers are to be treated as professionals this will require openness on their part to self-criticism and peer evaluation. In all the high achieving systems of East Asia as reported on the Grattan Institute Study teachers regularly observe the lessons of their peers through carefully designed mentoring and teacher evaluation, with a focus on how the teaching impacts on individual students rather than on the strategies employed by the teacher.

For this to happen in Australia teachers and their unions would need to adopt a less defensive attitude. Here what happened in the Canadian province of Ontario, which is well into a long term and systematic reform process, is relevant. In the 1990s the education system had been badly affected by bitter conflicts between the authorities and the teacher unions. As part of the transformation that began in 2003 the unions were brought in as partners and the education ministry undertook to work with the teacher unions in policy development and provided them with funds to support their role in the professional development of teachers. Summer Vacation Professional development was run by the Unions and high numbers of teachers attended.

The McKinsey and Company report also indicated the importance of school-based decision making, but it must be stressed that this is quite different from the models of school autonomy that are being introduced in some Australian states. These models are in effect are just transfers of certain powers from the central authority to school principals and in fact can educe the autonomy of teachers. In the worst cases support staff and teachers are placed on short term contracts to give flexibility in staffing, and teaching positions are traded for resources or buildings. Micro-management becomes an end in itself, with no real impact on student learning.

Just as poor teachers, who actually have an amazing amount of autonomy in their classroom, blame their ineffectiveness on parents and administration, so poor principals complain about their hands being tied. In a truly autonomous school, teachers, school executive, parents and the wider community would be focussed on improving the learning experiences of all the students.

Future possibilities

What are the chances of us moving from the good to the excellent system? While at the Federal level there are policies I have disagreed with, both Julia Gillard and Peter Garret appear to have a genuine desire to improve education and are willing to seek out and listen to good advice. We have some of the world's leading educationist to give this advice: Barry McGaw, John Hattie and Brian Caldwell to name just three. We also have some excellent reports from Governments such as the Gonski report on school funding, the Productivity Commission Draft Report on Educational Training Workforce: Schools and reports from independent public policy think tanks like the Grattan Institute which are based on thorough research.

The process involved in preparing an Australian curriculum demonstrated that the states and territories can work together, and the new Coalition state governments are showing a willingness to utilise a more evidence based approach rather than an ideological one although it will be few years before we have evidence of how successful they might be.

Our children's futures should not be at the mercy of opposing ideologies. We have the financial and intellectual resources to build a system that is both of the highest quality and fairer. If Governments will not take the responsibility for this community leaders, teacher bodies, independent think tanks, academics and the media must join forces to show how this can be achieved and to demand that it can be done. Our children and their parents deserve nothing less.