Australian education changes: Efficiency or Effectiveness?

The Australian Federal Government funds 25% of education but the responsibility for education rests in the hands of State and Territory governments.

Two decades ago, when I left Australia, there had already been significant debate and planning for a national curriculum. Few will remember the 1989 Hobart Declaration from the 60th meeting of the Australian Education Council, where the Common and Agreed Goals for Schooling in Australia was agreed and published. This route map, which came after two years of negotiation, was meant to have become Australia’s National Curriculum. The plan had eight key learning areas along with profiles, based on typical student progression. Much work was done to try and take this from paper to reality. Sadly, when it came to a final vote to implement the plan in 1993, the states rejected the plan in a push to assert their constitutional control of education. 

Today, Australia has a National Curriculum that began in 2009, a framework to be incorporated into state education systems, guided by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA).

Since then the education landscape has evolved –  the key bureaucratic players at a Federal level are ACARA who administer the national NAPLAN tests, Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO), who aim to build evidence-based improvements in classroom practice, Education Services Australia (ESA) and the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). Like most bureaucracies, none of these bodies are well-known but they are of intense interest to politicians at a state and Federal level, The buck stops with the Federal Minister, Jason Clare, a Labour politician who has held the role since mid-2022. By comparison, there have been six UK  Education Secretaries of State since 2022. 

Clare may be Australia’s equivalent of Nick Gibb, having said in a 2013 interview that he had no desire to lead his party but, “My dream job would to one day be the Minister for Education because I know what that would mean for the community I represent”. The journey to his current role was wide and varied, after serving as Parliamentary Secretary for Employment, Minister for Defence Material, Minister for Home Affairs, Minister for Justice, Cabinet Secretary and Shadow Minister for Communications, Resources and Northern Australia, Trade and Investment, Regional Services, Territories and Local Government, and Housing and Homelessness.

Clare is widely acknowledged to have done a good job thus far but his latest announcement may be his biggest political test and a crucial one for Australian education. Australia does OK on big tests like PISA but these results and indicators like school completion rates show a bifurcated system where private schools are doing well but government schools are slipping. Clare pointed out that, “in the last decade the percentage of young people finishing High School has dropped in public (state) schools from about 83% to as low as 73%.” Having recently announced a $16bn funding deal with the states, Clare is not satisfied. In the same speech he said that the entire education system needed to be reformed and his plan to create a new federal super bureaucracy “is the big one”.

Fine words from someone regarded as a pragmatic conviction politician, but will yet another layer of bureaucracy actually improve outcomes in state schools? On the positive side, Clare is a vastly more talented and pragmatic politician than the UK’s lamentable Bridget Phillipson. They may however share one characteristic, which is that fixing outcomes in government schools does not require seeking to replicate what is working in private schools.

For Phillipson and UK Labour, private education is a target in their class war agenda, but things are very different in Australia where almost 40% of students are privately educated and where the federal funding system supporting the sector was instituted by the late Gough Whitlam, arguably Australia’s most left wing Prime Minister and the only one to have been sacked by the Queen’s Governor General. But will a federal super quango of a merged ACARA/AERO/ESA/AITSL be able to deliver better outcomes at a state level?

My argument is they won’t, as innovation rarely comes from bureaucracies. I’d make three points to support this:

1. UK public sector productivity has declined in the last 25 years while private sector productivity has increased substantially (albeit weakly compared to countries like the Germany and the US). The situation in Australia is similar with the Productivity Commission highlighting the need to ‘improve productivity in the non-market sector’.
2. Having worked at the DfES for two years in the early 2000s, I saw in person just how slow, intractable, politically-biased and lacking in fundamental economic understanding the major government departments and their quango offshoots are.
3. “Evidence” of the success of edu improvement programmes like London Challenge are driven by what is measured (i.e. the programme) but often not by inconvenient facts that don’t fit the bureaucratic/political narrative. In London, the growing and widespread impact of the use of tutors across all socio-economic groups was ignored.

So while I admire Clare as a politician dedicated to improving education, ignoring the success of private schools and imagining there can be a federal bureaucratic-driven solution in state-run systems is a mistake. Why not emulate the widely-studied success of retraining teachers in direct instruction and other evidence-based pedagogies? This is exactly what the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn implemented so successfully with their 1700 teachers across 57 schools and what researchED has been highlighting for a decade. Or take a look at the work of Rowland Fryer and his team at Harvard who show why even successful interventions rarely survive educational bureaucracies and their short-term, funding-driven agendas. 

Governments and their bureaucratic agencies should be agnostic as to where educational improvement ideas come from and instead focus on amplifying these with schools, teachers, parents and students. We need more Tom Bennett’s, Katherine Birbalsingh’s, Reddam Colleges and less quangocrats. It’s simple; improving education depends on seeking effectiveness (getting the right stuff done) and not on bureaucratic efficiency.

Down with the superquango!

Souce: Jared Owens, The Australian, August 25th 2013 (sadly behind a paywall)