Public Education for a Smart Country

 Teachers are a resilient lot. Any that have been in the profession for more than a few years have learnt to be patient and to take things with a grain of salt. And that’s just in the classroom. Our victories are small and personal. A student conquering their fears about something or gaining confidence or believing in themselves. These aren’t things that are necessarily measurable. Quite often they’re not even noticed but they are what keep most of us going.

 Demands on teachers have multiplied over the years along with growing calls for accountability. Every teacher knows about accountability. Every class you teach makes you accountable, otherwise, you’ll have a riot on your hands. Nevertheless, the demands for accountability in terms of filling in registers and proving you have done the work have increased exponentially. As the Public Education Network recently pointed out, “Education is the only field where you spend more time justifying how, where and when you do your job than actually doing it”. Teachers don’t have a problem with accountability as long as it doesn’t impinge on the actual teaching and lesson preparation time.

 What they do have a problem with is the gap between public and private schools. This gap was identified by the Gonski Report over a decade ago. It’s a gap that has continued to widen. Gonski recommended increased funding for the public system to redress the imbalance between the two systems, but no government has been prepared to go as far as Gonski recommended. This lack of support for public education reinforces a social divide and enshrines social inequity. Disadvantage is becoming entrenched in the public system. There simply aren’t enough resources to lift many schools out of disadvantage. School funding might have increased to 72 million dollars but how much of that has gone into supporting disadvantaged students in the public system?

 The Program for International Students Assessment (PISA) found that the “achievement gap between the richest and poorest students” in this country continues to grow and that disadvantaged students are continuing to fall behind advantaged students. Unsurprisingly it found that many students in public schools were struggling to reach expected standards in maths and reading.

 There are any number of reports that support this finding. The recently released National School Reform Agreement concluded that there needed to be increased funding for public schools if they were to catch up with private schools. The Improving Outcome for All Report arrived at similar conclusions.

 There doesn’t seem to be any argument about the impact of the current education funding model. There is plenty of argument when it comes to redressing it. We are quite prepared to sacrifice the needs of disadvantaged schools so that extremely affluent ones can improve their already extensive resources. There is competition for the education dollar and the public system is missing out. This means the vast majority of young Australians who will be making up our workforce and our collective future.

This competition has spread into recruitment. Some private schools are offering inducements to teachers in the public system to bolster their teaching ranks. Faced with the choice between better pay and conditions and staying in what can feel like a broken system, it is no surprise that many teachers jump ship, especially young ones. This is having a devastating effect on public schools. Not only are they losing the teachers they have nurtured, but they find it nearly impossible to replace them. The impact of this is that in some schools, there aren’t enough teachers to go around. Students end up being supervised in the playground instead of being taught in a classroom.

The recently released National School Reform Agreement concluded that there needed to be increased funding for public schools if they were to catch up with private schools. The Improving Outcome for All Report arrived at similar conclusions.

One very alarming trend in the public sector is that many young teachers are choosing to work casually rather than take up permanent positions. This clearly has a deleterious effect on students who need consistency in terms of their teachers. The suggestion that young teachers would choose casual work and eschew all the benefits of a permanent position is proof enough that something is seriously wrong.

 We need to decide what sort of a country we want to be. Do we want to continue building an education system that leaves the majority of Australians behind? Do we want to diminish our collective social power as an educated society? There is no doubt what needs to be done. We need to re-prioritise public education and recognise it as a vital engine for Australia’s future and its place in the world. And we need to do it now.