Gillard's education pipedream

'You can't get there from here' goes the gag, usually told at the expense of the Irish ancient and the baffled tourist. Well, now the joke's on us too. To get to the OECD's top five school systems by 2025 we'd have to have a school system and a strategy and a chain of command, but we have none of them, and getting them is probably beyond our reach. And so we are stuck.

In setting the 'top five by '25' target the Prime Minister has done us a favour, but made a rod for her own back. The target is narrowly-focused, but focused on areas of learning - reading, maths, science - that are 'basic' as ends in themselves and as means to other learning. Achievement of the target would require a more equitable distribution of attainment as well as better performance overall.

For the Prime Minister, the target is mostly trouble.

The first problem is the amount of daylight between here and there. The most recent round of international comparisons revealed that at the year 4 level, we are 22nd in reading, 18th in maths and 19th in science. More worrying than the league table is that up to a quarter of students who have been at school for nearly four years still can't read, do simple maths, or understand elementary scientific concepts.

Other international comparisons released this year suggest things are better by the secondary years, particularly compared with the UK and US. But they're still not good enough to match Canada, not to mention Finland and several Asian systems, all of which are lifting both overall performance and equity. We are not. We're flatlining.

Another problem for the Prime Minister is that she has little control over what happens next.

We have three school systems, or eight, or 24, depending how you slice it. There are three sectors: government, non-government systemic (mainly Catholic), and independent. Then there are eight states and territories, each with its own government system and non-government schools. That makes 24 'jurisdictions' (or even more, since the Catholic sector is further divided along diocesan lines). The feds are involved in all 24 yet control none.

School systems are complex organisms, hard to change even when change is coordinated, cumulative and sustained. Our policies are none of these, Julia Gillard's valiant efforts notwithstanding. She has been the driving force in a government more active in, committed to, and optimistic about schooling than any since Whitlam.

Many of her initiatives are both necessary and constructive: a revived national curriculum; publicly available information about the resourcing and performance of every school; support to schools in getting more control over their own destinies; an IT upgrade; and most importantly, the Gonski proposal to fund schools according to their educational task rather than the sector to which they belong.

But this is all tactic and no strategy. The idea of an encompassing strategy appeared only in September of this year, five years after the 'education revolution' was inaugurated, and still exists only as a bare outline.

Moreover, there is no high command to drive it. As Federal Minister for Education Gillard set up a new ministerial council and a new system of performance contracts, but the cats still decline to be herded.

Gonski's funding scheme has been watered down at the behest of the states and independent schools, and his plan weakened by the states' veto of the 'national school resourcing body', yet Gonski is still neither agreed nor funded. The Federal Opposition has threatened to repeal any Gonski legislation in favour of a funding status quo.

State premiers and ministers of education have problems of their own. All contribute to funding non-government schools, but get little say. All have chronic problems of steerage in their own government systems. Most of their tightening budgets are locked up by industrial agreements centring on fixed maximum class sizes, leaving room only for low-spend policies tied to three-year election cycles. Big reform is beyond them.

Every state minister of education agrees, for example, that 'teacher quality' is key to better student outcomes, and that much-improved salaries are key to 'teacher quality'. But where will the money come from?

It could come from re-allocation. One US calculation found that just five more students in every classroom - and remember that the great majority of classes contain less than the allowable maximum - would deliver a 34 per cent salary increase for every teacher. But which minister would dare to mention such a heresy?

Last in this dismal catalogue is the most powerful underlying dynamic of Australian schooling, often referred to as 'residualisation'.

On the face of it the problem stems from exceptionally high levels of competition between sectors and schools. This is one league table where we come out on top. When principals around the OECD were asked how many schools they compete with our principals nominated an average of four, far ahead of the next on the list. But does the problem lie in the amount of competition, or in the kind?

Competition for more successful schooling for more students could be a powerful force for good. But that is not what our schools compete for. As demonstrated by one of Gonski's commissioned studies, our schools compete for students, causing the educationally rich to cluster with their kind and the poor with theirs, to the advantage of the former and the disadvantage of the latter.

Gonski - if agreed, if funded, and if implemented - would slow this dynamic and reduce its worst effects, but not eliminate it.

It is difficult to see our present way of organising, funding and governing schooling getting us anywhere near the 'top five by '25', even if other school systems agreed to stand still in the meantime. What kind of system might?

It would, first, turn the toxic competition between schools and sectors to advantage by levelling the playing field, and freeing up all schools to play. We could do worse than adapt the AFL model, a masterclass in combining funding and regulation, subsidies and penalties, socialism and the market to generate a competition that elevates the game because everybody has a chance of winning. (Well, nearly everybody.)

Second, a more productive system would be both more centralised and more decentralised, and less politicised. National coordination of funding and a common regulatory framework, for the great majority of schools, at arm's length from governments and politics, would combine with resource control down in schools or groups of schools.

Third, schools would be required to make more flexible and outcomes-focused use of resources in exchange for new money. Staffing, training and career progression would be restructured, and teacher pay lifted by at least 25 per cent. These changes would require, among other things, staffing schools according to student-staff ratios rather than fixed class size maxima.

But how to get there from here? Such a system is not off the planet. Its key features are generally consistent with, if much more ambitious than, policies and proposals currently being pursued piecemeal in Australia.

Nor is the scale of change without precedent - consider, for example, the creation of the great government systems in the 1880s, or the Karmel/Whitlltam program of the early 1970s, or the Dawkins reforms to higher education a couple of decades later.

The difficulty is in finding the political pressure, ambition and muscle of the kind that drove such game-changing reforms. In its probable absence, come 2025 we'll still be here, baffled, and stuck.