The national report card came in last week and it is not good. Indeed, if your child brought it home, you would have to seriously consider taking the child out of school.
Indeed, metaphorically, that would be a good solution.
The report card, of course, is the NAPLAN test. It has tested Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 students each year in literacy and numeracy since 2008. Students get one of four achievement results: “needs attention”, “developing,” “strong” and “exceeding”.
This year’s results were bad. One in three students are not meeting basic literacy and numeracy requirements.
The publishing of the annual NAPLAN results always leads to a lot of hand-wringing and accusations of blame. They range from lazy teachers captured by left-wing unions; ideologically polluted curriculums; lack of funding; teacher burn-out; lack of discipline; and falling standards.
Results in 2024 were marginally worse than 2023, but that can perhaps be explained by a slight change of methodology and normal statistical variance.
Some say a lot of the blame game and hand-wringing is misplaced; that Australia is doing OK; and that standards are not falling. But wait a minute.
When you look at the international picture, things are a bit different. The OECD conducts the Program for International Student Assessment every three years, to measure and rank how 15-year-olds in 81 countries perform in reading, maths and science.
Australia is holding its own against other countries. But that is only because those other countries’ standards are falling. We have done a tad better than other countries during the pandemic.
Nonetheless, now, just over half of Australian students achieved PISA’s National Proficiency Standard – 51 per cent in maths, 58 per cent in science and 57 per cent in reading. Since 2006, Australian standards have been falling on the international test, and since 2008 marking time on the national test.
That should be a shocking, shameful report card. If a business marked time for 16 or so years, you would sack the CEO, especially if you were coming off a poor base of under-performance of between a third and a half.
The report card has not shocked because media does not rate staying the same as news.
But Sherlock Holmes knew the importance of the dog that did not bark. Not much change does not mean “nothing to see here”. To the contrary, it means Australia’s education system is failing its students and the nation – and a blame-game finger-pointing exercise is much warranted.
It is worse, the third to a half of students not up to scratch are nearly all from poor socio-economic groups. It is not their fault, though. It is a result of “the system”, in particular, the people who designed and implemented “the system” or allowed “the system” to evolve in such a dysfunctional way.
We are simply not doing enough to pick the low-hanging fruit – the easy stuff – by changing the system to concentrating on bringing poor-performing students – mainly from poor socio-economic groups – up to scratch.
How can this be done? How can it be paid for?
The problem began when the Howard Government began to skew federal funding to private education to correct what it saw as a state bias to public schools and to give more “choice”. The skew has got progressively worse. By last year, state schools were getting just $11 billion of the total Federal $29 billion spend and private (including Catholic) schools got the remaining $18 billion.
Private schools are wallowing in money. So much so that the NSW Government last week accused some of them of being more like profit-making machines, rather than non-profit educational institutions. The massive salaries of their CEOs (which they call principals) attest to this.
State and Federal money is supposed to go to educational things. But even if all of it does, it nonetheless frees up other money to spend on uneducational things, likes chapels, concert halls, and sports arenas. None of that helps lift Australia’s educational standards.
We should sack the Federal Government – withdraw it from school. Maybe the Feds and the states could do a deal with the states taking all of education and the Feds taking all of health.
But the real point is to reallocate money away from private schools, which are doing fine on the education front and need no state money, and place it where it will do the most to improve educational standards – state schools in poor areas.
Some argue that governments should give large amounts of money to private schools because without those schools it would have to do the costly provision amd might not cope, so the government is “saving” money. It is nonsense.
No-one argues that the government should subsidise private cars because they would be saving government money providing public transport.
Some people would send their children to private schools whatever the cost, so government schools would not be swamped.
More importantly, if money were redirected to public schools to lift their standards, a lot of families would be mightily relieved that they would not have to waste money in the private system providing their children with the quality education that the state should provide.
Government schools are now $5 billion short of the Schooling Resource Standard set by the Gonski Report’s recommendations in 2011. That money could be easily provided if redirected from private schools where it is not needed.
This upper-middle-class welfare to private schools should never have been started in the first place. If you want private education, by all means have it, but you should have to pay for all of it. And like nearly every other good or service you should pay the GST on it. That would raise nearly $2 billion.
There might be a case for government funding of private schools if it delivered an educational dividend. But, as last week’s report shows, it does not. At best we are standing still, and governments are not delivering what should be a human right – a free quality education for all.
Crispin Hull
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 20 August 2024.
Crispin,
Great article. From what I see and hear in the circles in which I work, it looks to me that our education standards are indeed falling, and I think it should be a concern for all of us.
I do have a question about school funding. My understanding, possibly wrong, is that the government allocates funding based heavily on a per student basis. I don’t know what the dollar figure is per student but for arguments sake, lets say it’s $20k per student per year, and it is allocated regardless of which education system you are in.
[Note 1. In the 2021/2022 financial year, average total government recurrent expenditures (money spent on the daily operations of schools) in government schools was $22,511 per student. In the 2022 calendar year, average total recurrent expenditure was $19,372 per student in non-government schools. ref https://acara.edu.au/reporting/national-report-on-schooling-in-australia/school-expenditure#:~:text=Key%20Facts,student%20in%20non%2Dgovernment%20schools.%5D
So if a school, public or “private”, have 100 students, they might get about $2m in funding from the government.
For the record, I’m dead against the “rich get richer” / “only the rich can afford an excellent education” mentality, and I detest the obscene salaries of anyone on the public payroll.
I do sense a bit of anti private school sentiment in your post and to an extent I share that, but I think your assertion about government funding to schools is a bit misleading. It also is quite commonly trotted out as a defence for the poor performance of students in some public schools.
Taking money off the privates isn’t necessarily the answer. It might be, but I think there is a lot more to it.
Perhaps an analogy might be something like this:
I have a football team and two of the players are incredible, one comes from a wealthy family. The other is equally as good and comes from the other side of the tracks.The rest of the team are just ok.
Do I take the boots off the kids who are brilliant and give them to the kids who are just ok?
It’s not the boots that will improve someone’s game that much. Sure they help, but it’s so much more than that.
Do I stop teaching / extending the best kids and wait for the others to catch up?
I’d say neither of those is the answer. I’d say there is a whole lot of stuff behind the scenes – and a big one is parents having involvement outside of the coaching times. Even if it’s just having a casual kick around in the back yard. We need to look at the big picture and start answering the why questions.
Why are some kids better at some stuff than others?
It’s not because they are wearing the latest boots and hi tech outfit.
Sure we could and maybe should be spending more money on some of the “poorer” schools, but it looks to me that in many cases, throwing more money at a problem doesn’t always fix it.
I think the problem needs to be addressed on a far wider scope – with a much broader reach.
It seems to me the decline in the family unit has been pretty evident for at least the last 20 years. It surely follows that what comes out of that family unit (i.e kids) will not be as well adjusted in many areas. Physically, socially, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, financially, academically.
I’d be inclined to gun for increased support for and of the family unit, incentivising and encouraging parents to parent well, champion personal responsibility, let kids be kids and while we’re at it, get rid of social media under the age of say 16. That last one is definitely some low hanging fruit that I reckon could be a small (yet huge) step in the right direction.
Thanks,
Ross.
Labor, Green, and Liberals all accept, that selective church schools with uncapped fees are also the priority sector for federal-state funding. Under Albanese, the archbishops all know this corrupt and divisive system is as safe as houses. Equity and performance can go jump.
My wife and I are both products of Catholic schools of the nineteen forties and fifties. We have now put six children through Catholic and government schools, and observed the education of 11 grandchildren through Catholic, public, and private schools and home education. Some went on to gain TAFE trade qualifications and others to be awarded University Batchlor degrees. With that experience we have formed that opinion that the national government should get right out of education and on a per-capita basis, hand all the funds it currently spends on administration and dispenses to the state and territory governments. Just one exception, the national government should fund the national university.