Here we are again back at school. Tens of thousands of new prep kids are joining the system which Labor claims to be revolutionising. Many are attending schools with shiny new buildings, some of which are even well equipped and properly finished. A few older kids might even be getting individual laptops and many might have teachers who have managed to reboot their system over the holidays and be rejoining their classes full of enthusiasm, despite the overwork that awaits.
For most parents their first concern is for the welfare of their kids. For the better off families this is often couched in terms of pastoral care. Some of their kids might even be lucky enough to spend their first years in play and welfare centred curriculum settings, where the luxury of learning through fun prevails. For most kids and certainly for the almost 80 percent of kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds who attend public schools, school promptly becomes a matter of measuring up to set standards regulated by a testing environment.
On this measure, much touted by Labor, kids in Australia aren’t moving anywhere fast. NAPLAN test data has not shown any significant improvements since 2008. Compared to other OECD countries Australia is actually one of the few where academic results, especially at the higher end, seem to be slipping. The “achievement gap” is also growing. A poor student in year 9 is likely to be three to four years behind a year 9 student from a high-income family.
If Australia is to compete in the increasingly competitive Asian and global markets, it needs much more of a “world-class” education system. Labour is acutely aware of the sort of counter-revolution this requires. Much of the structure of the Australian schooling system was put in place in the pre-neoliberal era. Hawke and Keating did their best to marketise higher education but both Labor and Liberal had until recently avoided major reforms to the school system.
Borrowing from Blair and Bush, Labor has sought to refashion the school system to ensure a much more tightly regulated chain of supply of skilled and highly skilled labour. As the 2020 Summit outlined, this means a “strategy to invest more in our capacity for knowledge … and to ensure that we generate sustainable higher returns from that investment in the form of productivity growth.” Labor considers that at “present there is a mismatch between education and business”, including in the targeting of school funding, curriculum and the teaching profession.
The Australian school system needs to compete in the world of “knowledge capitalism”, which in the words of former Downing Street adviser Charles Leadbeater, is about “the drive to generate new ideas and turn them into commercial products and services which consumers want. This process of creating, disseminating and exploiting new knowledge is the dynamo behind rising living standards and economic growth.”
Labor’s reforms aim to make schools the “focal point of social capital”, marketising all knowledge for the “aspiring” working and middle classes and shifting the blame of failure among poorer communities to the individual. The rhetoric of social rights gives way to individual responsibility and social inclusion agencies are charged with the role of targeting individual children and families to help them “adapt”.
As Julia Gillard put it in a 2007 speech to the Australian Industry Group:
In today’s world, the areas covered by my portfolios – early childhood education and childcare, schooling, training, universities, social inclusion, employment participation and workplace cooperation – are all ultimately about the same thing: Productivity. So while my portfolios can be a mouthful, I’ll be happy to be referred to simply as ‘the Minister for Productivity.
In this framework the Gonski review of funding is likely to meet the need to rationalise school funding, making it more transparent and open to the mechanisms of the market. Some measure of fairness may influence funding reforms, at least in the first instance, meaning Sydney north-shore elite schools may stop getting the sort of public funding even they are embarrassed about. In the longer run, however, the main purpose of the review is to open the door to further market reforms and more of the “formal partnerships between industry, business and schools” envisioned by the 2020 Summit.
The Gonski review of funding will ensure that the rhetoric of “choice” remains and is strengthened; keeping the blame on teachers, families and students for their “failures”. Success will continue to follow the rich kids and failure the poor ones. For those in between, the idea of learning to understand is increasingly replaced with the language of performance.
Teachers too will be increasingly divided between those who hit targets and those who fail to. The idea of teachers who inspire inquiry will be left to another era.
This counter-revolution in education will likely leave very few with the privilege of learning, or teaching, adding instead to the ranks of those the system considers failures.
For the left, the challenge is not simply to fight for more equitable funding arrangements, although this is important and necessary, but also to fight for a new idea of knowledge and learning – not bound up with commerce and productivity but rather with justice, authentic democracy and fundamental social change.
