Priorities in education

The Whitlam Government’s Schools Commission made some attempt to reach a settlement with the church schools, similar to the one that was achieved at the same time in New Zealand. Federalism contributed to the demise of the Whitlam initiative as it has exacerbated the systemic separation of schooling that supports stakeholder interests that are dependant upon this separation. Since the earliest days of the Whitlam Government the approach of Labor has been to simply live with the complex, inconsistent and unequal governance and funding arrangements in Australian schooling.

The policy and strategy challenges of this situation are major and complex. However, without radical changes to the governance, accountability and associated funding arrangements for schooling in Australia it will be difficult to shift the market behaviours of schools and open the policy scope of state governments.

The historical moment for Federal Labor is obvious. But the strategy also needs to be long term, as it will not be possible to seriously and immediately threaten the major stakeholder interests. Not with standing this and Labor’s promise to not change the non-government sectors’ funding arrangements in the short term, a new and historic settlement will inevitably need to address funding and accountability. The initial challenge, however, is that of building a national consensus about the public, social and economic purposes of schooling. To achieve this it will be important to take this exercise beyond the traditional educational stakeholders, otherwise it will get bogged in the semantics and posturings that have plagued federalist dialogue in education.

Upon such a consensus it may then be possible to build a platform of a more logical, consistent and equitable funding arrangements and appropriate governance and accountability arrangements for all publicly funded schools. Part of these arrangements could be collective approaches towards dealing with area or regionally based under achievement and under participation in education.

The long term alternative to these arrangements is a continued hegemony of an educational market in schooling. This might be acceptable in a supply side context of a relatively even playing field, as may be the case in the UK. However, in Australia this is clearly not the case with responsibilities, market restraints, and market power and opportunity being far from equal across the sectors and schools within the sectors.

The proportion of schools that select and exclude students through fees, scholarships, special programs, house and rental prices, direct exclusions, and other mechanisms has grown within both the government and non-government sectors.

The long term effect will be a substantial group of ghettoised schools for an economic and educational underclass. This is not a formula for the COAG agenda or Labor’s education revolution. As the OECD PISA study has shown segregated school systems have tended to produce poor results (and weaker human capital), and as its recent equity study has shown they are also more socially exclusionary.

The Rudd Government could combine the current National Reform Agenda with strategies to widen the constituency for schooling beyond the supply side interests that were so successful for John Dawkins in his training reform initiatives in the 1990s. This involved the building of a strong support base with the unions and industry.

Federal Labor should do the same with the wider civil society - industry, the churches, NGOs, and so on - combining the economic and social justice imperatives of the reforms. In particular there is a ready opportunity for dialogue with those non-government school elements that share similar principles of access and justice as should a Labor government.