Julia Gillard's schools - Alice in Fundingland

A blurred distinction between sectors helps support one of her policy solutions: to target funding on school communities rather than school systems. Even this has problems: how might she identify the communities of schools which draw/entice/poach their fee-affording clientele from anywhere?

The other reason Gillard seeks to blur the distinction between sectors is that eventually she wants to drag some of her audience into an integrated school framework. This means she has to be especially nice to non-government school audiences: under current funding arrangements they have nothing to gain and everything to lose by becoming part of an expanded state system. Conversely she doesn't have to be nice to public educators: they'll do as they are told under any frameworks agreement between the states and the commonwealth.

The problem is that Gillard is talking the talk of reducing sectoral divides without seemingly understanding the role of these divides in creating the very equity problems which genuinely occupy much of her attention. It is fantasy to try to solve real problems while at the same time ignoring the public-private divide. It is the mechanism of this very divide which has substantially created the problem! You can deal with mechanisms without being dragged down into ideological trench warfare.

Worse than that, her preference for funding through students rather than systems represents a serious lack of understanding of the role played by one of these systems - the universal, inclusive, free and secular public schools - in creating middle class democracy, social stability and economic growth in this and equivalent countries.

Public schools don't just form another sector; they are an integral part of what we are as a society and nation. To believe this is not to take any "side" in a debate. Nor does it give public education any protected status. What it does mean is that you can't diminish its size, distinctiveness and effectiveness without serious individual and collective consequences. In not understanding this Julia Gillard is hardly on her own on the front bench of the Rudd Labor Government.

Until the Rudd Government comes to terms with these issues Julia Gillard will be condemned to tip-toe through a minefield not even of her own making. Maybe she will get to the other side; maybe she won't. But in the meantime there will be serious limits to what she can achieve.