Mr Gonski and the social contract

One of the central obstacles to a fully national approach is the so-called "residualisation" process, alluded to above. As the Gonski review and one of its commissioned reports show in close detail, well-positioned schools – in all three sectors – do whatever they can to attract the "best" students and their families, thereby both excluding the rest and undermining the schools that do have access to. Levelling-up the funding field is a part of the answer, but so is doing something about the rules and conventions of the game. On these, Gonski's terms of reference were silent.

Problems of design are compounded by problems of political engineering. The hard fact is that "Gonski" did not get up. The Gillard and Rudd governments tried to get nine governments to pull in the same direction, and Gonski's proposals depended on them being able to do so. They couldn't. That failure follows the failure of Whitlam's Schools Commission, established in 1973 to prosecute a national approach but dead within a decade, victim of states and non-government systems jealous of their prerogatives.

The apparently paradoxical lesson may well be that the Audit Commission's devolution scheme, muscled-up to include targets for and monitoring of schools' social composition, income and expenditure, value-add, and quality of learning experience as well as the "outcomes" nominated by the Commission, is more likely to achieve Gonski's objectives than the mechanisms proposed by the review.

The great danger now, particularly for the Labor Party, is that it will venture once more unto the Gonski breach. Unfortunately, Gonski's remarks did little to encourage Labor to think twice, and Bill Shorten probably wouldn't be listening anyway. His budget-in-reply speech suggests that he can scarcely believe his political luck. He can go to the next election as the man who will deliver Gonski.

For those with long enough memories there is an awful feeling of déjà vu all over again. Gonski's Oration was in honour of Jean Blackburn, the philosopher queen of Australian schooling for two decades or more. Blackburn was a highly influential member of Whitlam's Karmel Committee. It, too, wanted a "national" approach in the social as well as the geographic and political sense, a schooling system that honoured the social contract. It, too, was the hope of the side.

As some of Jean's intimates know, she was worried sick, right from the start, that the alignment of political forces was such that "Karmel," despite having the right impulse, was constructing the wrong machinery. Far from settling the "state aid" question, as Whitlam boasted, she feared that it was being put it on a new, complicated, inherently unstable and heavily defended basis. As a prominent figure in Australian education with important work to do as the Schools Commission's guiding intellectual light, she was hardly in a position to say so. Later, she was.

"There were no rules about student selection and exclusion, no fee limitations, no shared governance, no public education accountability, no common curriculum requirements below the upper secondary level," Blackburn wrote in 1991. "We have now become a kind of wonder at which people [in other countries] gape. The reaction is always, 'What an extraordinary situation.'"

The resulting mess is what, forty years later, Gonski was asked to deal with. Unless we are very lucky, and in particular unless Labor is prepared to do some difficult and rapid thinking, someone will be saying something very like that about Gonski in another forty years' time.