Lessons from the 'Building the Education Revolution' program

So why did the Victorian and NSW government schools have the most complaints? Why did a 2010 survey of 300 members by the Public Schools Principals Forum find that 60 per cent of NSW public school principals believed that the BER did not deliver value, while another December 2010 survey by the NSW auditor general found dissatisfaction from 41 per cent of principals (Anthony Klan, 'BER waste tops $1.5 billion', The Australian, July 8, 2011).

The Taskforce noted that high quality projects in NSW and Victoria were offset by many projects performing poorly in terms of both cost and observed quality; that their approach often 'disenfranchised' school communities instead of involving them in the decision-making process; and, while the Queensland government possessed the requisite technical capacity for capital works project oversight, public works management capacity in NSW and Victoria suffered higher costs due to their limited ability to act prudently in an environment where many services are outsourced.

The NSW government also had high total project costs which reflected the relatively high fees paid to managing contractors; used templates generated by architects engaged by managing contractors for use exclusively on those managing contractor's projects; had just a small percentage of its schools self-managed by schools and principals; and used an overly expensive and sophisticated delivery approach to deliver relatively simple, small and medium size projects in contrast to other states and territories.

To conclude, based on the Victorian and NSW government experience alone, our analysis offers two critical observations that should withstand any political slant seeking to attribute policy success or failure to the BER. First, waste would have been minimised if the public service had more technical expertise. The Taskforce notes that the total number of state government employees (across all Australian jurisdictions) listing their occupation as 'civil engineer' declined from 4,480 in 1976 to 2,547 in 2006, a trend also evident in terms of qualified architects. Second, given the success of the non-government sector and elements of several state governments, there are sound reasons to support greater school autonomy given that principals and local school communities are better placed to encourage value for money.