Make 2020 the year of the student

As parents prepare for the start of the school year, many of them are feeling a growing unease about what’s going on inside classrooms across the country — including concern that policies have busily chased fads while students’ needs have been neglected and schooling quality has diminished.

Australia’s 4 million students will soon hustle into the country’s 10,000 schools — around 320,000 going to school for the first time and around 300,000 entering their final year of schooling.

However, the inconvenient truth is that around 2 in 5 parents — with over 1.5 million students — will ultimately come to regret their chosen school, according to recent CIS research. Many more will be disillusioned with their experience with the school system altogether; and with good reason.

The results of the OECD-run Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) released last month provide conclusive evidence that not only has performance dropped in relative terms to other countries, but we’ve also slipped in absolute terms. There’s no denying that education quality has materially declined in recent years, as all PISA indicators point in the same dispiriting direction.

Only around half of Australian students’ mathematical literacy is at a proficient standard and only one in ten demonstrate high levels of proficiency. At the same time, many other countries have lifted their game, leaving Aussie students less competitive internationally.

To blame is an education system that’s become increasingly out of touch with parents’ expectations, and that’s been rigged in favour of a host of education insiders, who’ve shaped education policies in their own — rather than parents’ or students’ — best interests.

This includes a consortium of: ‘educrats’ — a swollen education bureaucracy fixated on creating ‘busy work’ —, educationalists (many of whom being self-proclaimed education gurus that dress up progressive activism as educational research), and other vested interests who shun accountability, instead seeing schools as their very own fiefdoms.

The top-down bureaucracy that educrats have thrust upon schools has overburdened them in red tape and centralised decision-making. This makes use of money less efficient, means it doesn’t get to the sharp end where it’s needed most, and that decisions are made to suit bureaucrats, not students.

It’s little wonder, then, that CIS research showed parents are more confident about how resources are used in less bureaucratic school sectors. Public school parents are also voting with their feet, embracing alternative school governance approaches where they have a greater say in how schools are run.

Parents are increasingly sceptical of the direction in which educationalists have steered teaching and learning priorities. For instance, a poll published last month found that 90% of parents say the education system isn’t up to scratch, and 80% express concern their child is being negatively impacted by the current system. A majority of students polled said school wasn’t preparing them for the world of work.

Australian parents and taxpayers scratch their heads at how the $60 billion of public investment each year in schooling persistently delivers increasingly poorer academic outcomes. All the while, insiders demand that yet more funding be poured in, and that fewer questions are asked in return.

It’s clear that parents don’t buy that more money is the fix — 88% saying they think schools are raking in enough, or more than enough, funding. They also don’t agree with the priorities on how money is spent in schools; preferring that it be spent on upgrading facilities and activities for students, rather than on shrinking class sizes and upping teachers’ pay.

And despite what other self-interested insiders say, parents value transparency about the performance of schools. A government-commissioned review last year found that 84% of parents support school NAPLAN results being displayed publicly, with 74% saying that it provides them assurance that schools are doing a good job.

However, the good news is that, from time to time, policy can — and does — actually benefit the students that the education system purports to serve.

For instance, in some schools, phonics — understanding the relationship between letters and sounds when learning how to read — will now be prioritised in teaching young readers for the first time in decades. That means that fewer students will slip through the cracks and suffer from lifelong illiteracy.

Screening of students in year 1 is now mandatory in South Australia and is optional in NSW. Education ministers have agreed that all prospective teachers will need to learn how to teach reading via phonics while they’re at uni.

But there is a long way to go until the system has got its priorities right, and works for students.

Quiet Australian taxpayers, parents, and their children have been at the wrong end of education policy for years, while vested interests have ridden roughshod.

Policymakers must ensure that 2020 is the year that this tide begins to turn and that Australian students are finally the beneficiaries of education policy.

Then, and only then, can the education system win back the trust and confidence of parents.

Glenn Fahey is Education Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and author of the research paper What do Parents Want from Schools?