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'Bloated bureaucracy' or bullying balderdash?

By Lyndsay Connors - posted Friday, 28 September 2012


Even those who aspire to make informed, rational and civil contributions to the debate about the public funding of our schools are not assisted by the complex web of schools funding arrangements in this country.

And, in fairness to the headmaster of The King's School, Timothy Hawkes, anyone spending their days beneath its motto, Fortiter et Fideliter, might be as drawn as he is to indulge in the rhetorical device of consonance.

'Bloated bureaucracies' was one example that popped up in his recent contribution to the schools funding debate. It came in response to the NSW Government's proposal for stripping $1.7 billion from its education budget, with the non-government school sector to take its share.

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From the vantage point of his private school, Headmaster Hawkes expressed his opinion in a newspaper letter (Sun-Herald, 16/9) that 'the cuts borne by public education were limited to trimming bloated bureaucracies', and that 'their schools would have been unaffected'.

His letter did not disclose how an outsider, the head of an independent, non-government school, had acquired the detailed knowledge of the duties, workload and effectiveness of departmental employees to inform these allegations.

The case for greater rather than lesser public investment in Australian schooling mounted by, for example, the recent Gonski Review is backed by credible evidence. But, again in fairness to the headmaster, can it ever be said that there is no scope whatsoever to streamline some procedures in the NSW public school system? And who of us has not had to cut corners to meet the word limit for letters to the editor?

So it may well be that headmaster Hawkes can produce evidence to substantiate his claim of 'bloat' and the assertion that cuts would not damage public schools. But without it 'bloated bureaucracies' sounds more like a cheap shot than the informed commentary expected of an education leader.

His letter went on to claim that the cuts to public schools were less painful than those to independent schools, because the 'independent schools had no bureaucracy to bear the cuts'. This is disingenuous. His school has staff who perform for it the administrative tasks performed by the 'bureaucracy' for the over 2,000 schools in the NSW public system. They also provide professional learning, curriculum and ICT support for classroom teachers. It would surely be remiss of an independent school with an archivist and a squad of employees to tend its large grounds not to do the same.

In the run-up to the inclusion of financial data on the MySchool website, the private school sector (rightly) insisted that the financial value of the support provided by the central bureaucracies for public schools be attributed to the total per student funding reported for the individual schools. This was to enable a comparable assessment of the financial income of schools across the sectors. Is it not now hypocritical of headmaster Hawkes to claim that the loss of services provided by bureaucrats in NSW have no financial or educational impact on schools?

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Dr Hawkes's letter then moved to the realm of speculation. By the time his letter was published, political pressure from the private school sector had achieved a significant government backdown. Nevertheless, he opined that, if the NSW Government had attempted "to take 53 per cent of the state funding from any state school"… "we would be talking capital, not corporal punishment".

This attempt to compare the effect of proposed cuts on his school and on the public school system was rendered specious by a serious sin of omission. Whether by default or design, the headmaster failed to mention that his school draws less than 3 per cent of its total income from the State. So any proposed 53 per cent cut would have applied only to this tiny portion of The King's School income. By contrast, the State provides roughly 90 per cent of the income of the public school system. And even if The King's School were to suffer a cut of 53 per cent to its total funding, this would still leave it with around twice the funding of the most comparable government schools

To explore further the comparison of the NSW government's treatment of schools, let us take one of the schools in the public system serving a concentration of students from financially and educationally privileged backgrounds. Imagine that, like King's, it gets a total of $25,000 or more per secondary student. This requires a feat of imagination, since public schools would only be funded at this rate when catering for students with significant learning or behaviour problems or extreme social disadvantage.

But just imagine what would happen if the principal of a public high school funded at the per student rate of $25,000 annually were to argue to the NSW Government that he was unable to provide a decent education for the students at his school without the provision of further public money from the State (and the Commonwealth). What would happen? We would be talking an official investigation into the leadership and operation of the school by the principal, who would be stood aside pending its outcomes.

But now import into this scenario the headmasters or headmistresses of non-government schools in Australia with per student incomes of this kind from their private fees alone (thereby guaranteeing that the school will serve a financially privileged elite), Governments send out not an investigative team, but a cheque. In this regard, Australia's schools funding arrangements are unique.

Of course, leaders of such schools do not need to apply for such funding. Governments of both major parties have been only too willing to press public funds upon them. The school heads are just willing accomplices in these arrangements, rather like 'accessories after the fact'. They are the beneficiaries of public expenditure for which no educational justification has ever existed or even been argued to exist.

We all understand that our major parties have found a political rationale for providing public funding to even the wealthiest private schools, but there is no excuse for pretending there is an educational one. . Tim Hawkes's letter made no reference to the educational effects of a 53 per cent cut in his school's State funding, merely arguing that it was "too great" and that it was "politically unwise".

How could a professional educator, like headmaster Hawkes, informed by his knowledge of conditions in schools across Australia, truly argue that public funding for his school is a State or national priority. SMH Economics Editor, Ross Gittins, recently wrote that it was truly disillusioning to see head masters and mistresses who are impressive as individuals, using lobbying tricks to preserve their privilege, while professing their fidelity to the principles of Christianity (SMH "Productivity loses in unholy Gonski money fight", 17/9).

Tim Hawkes's letter identified the problem of 'bloat'. A reading of the MySchool data along with a glance at The King's School website and annual reports, combined with a quick drive past its Parramatta site combine to suggest, at face value at least, that 'bloat' is more likely to be found in its own operation than in that of the NSW bureaucracy. If this is the case, then it is a condition largely brought about by lavish private funding.

It is doubtful that even the private fee-paying parents at The King's School are privy to the purse paid to its headmaster, even though they pick up most of the bill.

Allegations by Dr Hawkes of 'bloat' in the public sector would carry more weight if they came with the details of his own total remuneration package, so that this could be assessed against the pay rates in the public sector. Thanks to a very public dispute over the sacking of an independent school principal in Melbourne, we now know that the remuneration packages in that sector can go as high as $500,000 per annum. That is more than the salary of the Director-General of Education in NSW.

Tim Hawkes chose to conclude his letter with a threat that makes him sound more like a school bully than a professional education leader. 'Piccoli has been politically unwise. The non-government sector is a powerful political force. Just ask Mark Latham.'

This implies that Hawkes has himself asked Mark Latham about the political effect of the 2004 ALP election policy proposal to cut funds from schools like his in order to increase funding to more needy schools within the non-government sector itself. It further implies that he has received from Mark Latham evidence that the political opposition mounted to this re-distribution cost Labor the election. This is evidence that has not previously been available publicly to back this boast. It is now incumbent upon Dr Hawkes to provide this evidence, to avoid the impression that he was indulging in bullying balderdash.

In her book, Journeyings, on the Melbourne establishment and their equivalent private schools in Melbourne, Janet McCalman argues that children who are educated behind high walls can find it difficult in later life to become at one with those on the other side and will find it difficult to be good democrats. If the recent Hawkes letter to the Sydney newspaper is any guide, the same may be true of some educators behind those high walls.

If the heads of privileged, private schools choose to write about their private funding, then it is nobody else's business to comment upon the quality, rhetorical style or tone of their utterances.

The letter from the head of The King's School was not about its private funds. It was about the school's entitlement to public funding, a quite different matter. Fortiter and fideliter may sound very fine, but to faithfully and bravely defend one's own selfish interests while dismissing those of others is not necessarily noble.

The seminal report on education in Australia, the 1973 Karmel Report, stated that "the operation of democracy requires an acceptance of rational authority, an intelligent consideration of alternatives, a willingness to participate and an ability to transcend personal interests for the common good".

The original proposal by the NSW Government to cut 53 per cent of the 2.9 per cent of the total funding of The King's School and similar high-resource schools reflected the principle that any cuts should not be applied uniformly across the non-government sector, but should fall more heavily on schools with resource levels two and three times those in other non-government schools. That decision could readily have been argued to have resulted from "an intelligent consideration of alternatives" by the State Minister, Adrian Piccoli. It is not to his discredit that he has fallen foul of the head of The King's School, who has not demonstrated his commitment to meeting the requirements of democracy outlined above.

It is his prerogative to engage in boastful and brash rhetoric or to adopt the mantle of relative victimhood when discussing his school's private business. But we all have to understand that there are many sole parents in this country having to raise (and educate) their children on a pension of around the amount being charged in fees by schools in the high fee end of the independent sector. Their champions have to understand that the public funds to which they feel entitled are generated by taxes on the families for whom such forms of schooling are unaffordable.

When speaking of public funding, we would all do well to keep civil tongues in our heads.

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About the Author

Lyndsay Connors AM FACE is an educator who is currently chair of the Teacher Education Advisory Board at the University of Sydney.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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