The role of government
The federal government is increasingly influencing educational priorities and school practice through tied funding, to the point where state governments are sidelined in some of the most important aspects of school education. The federal government now controls curriculum and testing, and is dictating school governance arrangements. Both sides of politics are making noises about being more interventionist in teacher education. I see this continuing in the future, especially if the Gonski reforms are implemented, but also to lesser extent, even if they are not, with the extension of National Partnerships under a Coalition government. In Australia, the main areas in which state governments retain control are teacher employment and management of financial and capital resources, but even this may lessen in the long-term.
Funding
It is presently impossible to discuss funding figures with precision but a trend in funding principles is evident. The common feature of the existing SES funding model for non-government schools, the Gonski funding model, group funding of Catholic schools,[1] and most state education system models,[2] is that they are student-centred. By this I mean that an allocation of money is attached to each child and a school’s funding entitlement is mostly a multiple of that figure. The NSW state education system has a variation on this that puts more weight on teacher numbers.[3]
There will continue to be debates about how much funding each student should receive, but there is a growing acceptance of the notion that education funding should be about the needs of students, not the school they attend. At some point in the future I hesitantly predict sector-neutral funding. I don’t expect this will apply to all existing non-government schools because of the interplay between private and public funding, but I think there is scope for a different type of fully-funded non-government school (more on that later).
There is also scope for increasing private funding into both school sectors. Based on the sorts of funding arrangements that have developed over the last decade, I envisage they will fall into three broad categories — philanthropic, partnerships and profit-making.
Non-government schools rely heavily on private funding, particularly in the form of tuition fees but also in the form of philanthropic donations. The capacity of public schools to increase their revenue through private funding has been more limited and is an area of potential growth. Compulsory tuition fees in public schools are unlikely in the short term, but philanthropic funding is an underdeveloped area. Corporations and private trusts are keen to contribute to public schools, particularly those with high levels of disadvantage, but it is not always easy for them to do so, at least not in the ways such organisations prefer to work.
Another avenue for private resourcing of both public and non-government schools is partnerships with community organisations and businesses, often in the form of capital and human resources.
More controversially, the for-profit sector has been involved in higher and further education and in early education for some years, but Australian schools have so far been quarantined. There are a large number of commercial organisations profiting from school education in the area of teaching resources, information technology, sports and music equipment and so on, but for-profit schools do not yet operate within the mainstream school sector.
Accountability
Increased government funding tends to come with strings. The National Plan for School Improvement is a case in point. In exchange for increased funding, the federal government is seeking to set the agenda for education policy in a wide range of areas, from school autonomy, arguably a matter for states, to schools’ bullying policies, arguably a matter for schools.
The federal government’s approach to schooling is a tight-loose-tight paradigm. The inputs to schools — such as curriculum and teacher supply and education — are becoming more tightly-controlled and centralised. The outcomes are also tightly-defined in the form of NAPLAN and reporting to government. In between these things, though, is what schools do. Through the move to decentralisation, there is an attempt to give schools more freedom in how they achieve the outcomes expected of them. This is the ‘loose’ part of the paradigm.
In terms of public accountability, NAPLAN will continue and even possibly expand but My School in its current form is tenuous. NAPLAN will continue because governments like to collect data. What is in danger is the public availability of NAPLAN results, due to the opposition to My School from some vocal quarters. Governments may accede as they are not averse to keeping information from the public.
School governance
Decentralisation/school autonomy has been a distinct development in schools policy in Australia and internationally over the last ten to fifteen years. ‘Decentralisation’ refers to moving decision-making capacity away from central agencies in school systems to more local authorities or to schools themselves, within a centrally-determined framework. This is somewhat different to ‘autonomous’ schools, where there is almost complete independence in governance. The only Australian schools to which the autonomous schools definition applies are independent schools, but they too must dance to governments’ tune to some extent.
Public schools in the Australian Capital Territory have had elements of financial self-management since the 1970s, around the time the Karmel report endorsed the approach.
The Victorian state government implemented extensive school-based management reforms in the mid-1990s, with public schools gaining control of more than 90% of their budget, as well as the ability to hire their own staff. There are now 255 independent public schools in Western Australia, which is around one third of public schools in the state. In Queensland, it is anticipated that there will be a total of 120 independent public schools over the next four years.[4]
Independent public schools have sometimes incorrectly been described as charter schools. They are not, the key difference being that independent public schools are still government-owned and operated; the principal and staff are still government employees and schools must still adhere to state industrial legislation and curriculum and other state and national policies.
We do not (yet) have charter schools in Australia. They are schools that may or may not formerly have been public schools, but which are managed by a private organisation under a legislative contract or ‘charter’ with the government or charter authority. Charter schools usually cannot charge fees, but they are only ‘public’ to the extent specified in the charter. There are around 1.6 million students in 5000 charter schools in the US, across 40 states, which represents about 5% of all public schools.[5]
Many countries have funding and governance arrangements that allow the establishment of privately-managed, free schools, including the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands. The ‘free schools’ now operating in England are similar to charter schools. They receive public funding equivalent to similar public schools with the condition that they do not charge tuition fees, and there are some conditions around enrolment and access.[6] New Zealand is also heading down this path with Partnership Schools.[7] It is only a matter of time before these developments are debated seriously as a prospect in Australia.
Provision
All of this leads inexorably toward greater diversity in provision. There is likely to be increasing diversity of provision in all school sectors, and the potential emergence of a fourth sector, like charter schools or free schools, established to provide choice for parents who currently have none, or to provide a type of schooling currently unavailable. Of the 102 free schools approved in the UK last year, 12 were alternative provision schools for students who have behavioural problems, students with long-term health problems, and teenage mothers.[8] Certainly, there are schools within the independent school sector in Australia which serve this purpose but existing funding policies and regulations make it a difficult prospect.
Greater diversity in schooling will also be driven by the changing nature of students and the wider variety of options provided by technology. We are seeing this at the moment in the higher education sector. It would be surprising if the flipped classroom approach[9] — where students watch lectures independently online and then do what we would think of as homework at school with a teacher’s support — did not begin to trickle down to the secondary sector in the next decade.
Technology is also enabling homeschooling and hybrid schooling, in which children are home-schooled a few days a week and attend school on the other days. More than 50 virtual charter schools in the US provide online curriculum. Another possibility is ‘micro-schools’ set up by cooperatives of families pooling their resources to open one-room schools, largely based around on-line learning.[10]. The home-schoolers of the future will be very different to the stereotype of today.
It is inevitable that technology will be involved in some significant changes in teaching and learning, but I don’t think it will become widespread quickly. Schooling has changed very little in the last 100 years for good reason — traditional methods work very well for many students.
Variety in provision in traditional schools will also be driven by some very practical demands created by social change. Longer and more flexible school hours are talking points in many schools for a range of reasons. For some students, it is because of their parents’ working hours. For other students, it is because they need extra learning time.
Curriculum
Curriculum is now caught up in the tight part of the tight-loose-tight paradigm. While ever we have a national curriculum it will continue to be contentious and politicised. Every new education minister, conservative and progressive, will potentially be able to imprint their own values and priorities. The content of the national curriculum at present has gone largely unscrutinised while we have been preoccupied with funding and the Gonski reforms. Curriculum will be a flash-point again in the future.
Teaching
Identifying quality in teaching is a difficult and fraught exercise. Witness the very long time taken to develop professional standards that define high quality teaching. Also witness the difficulty in using professional standards to differentiate teachers. The Age newspaper reported that 99.8% of Victorian public school teachers passed the annual performance review last year and progressed up the pay scale.[11] The majority of policy debate is now beginning to focus on the quality of teacher candidates before they get into the classroom, and the standard of their training.
Despite dozens of reviews of initial teacher education, all of which concluded pretty much the same thing, change has progressed at a glacial pace. Both federal and state governments are now turning their attention to recruitment and selection, influenced by the high performance in PISA of countries whose teachers are drawn from the academic elite. There are moves to limit both entry to and exit from teacher education courses by setting minimum achievement benchmarks. This will have a number of spin-off effects and I think we are only seeing the beginning of this trend.
Performance management is also a continuing problem. Some systems may experiment with forms of bonuses and performance pay but, due to continuing unionisation, they are likely to be marginal. Governments and unions will, however, be under increasing pressure to deal with under-performing teachers more effectively.
Jennifer Buckingham is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. This is an edited version of a speech given at the Independent Schools Queensland State Forum, 23 May 2013.
[1] http://www.qcec.catholic.edu.au/upload/publicsite/Finance/Catholic%20Schools%20Funding%20Powerpoint%20Final%2030%2003%2010.pdf
[2] http://education.qld.gov.au/schools/grants/state/core/school.html; http://www.premier.vic.gov.au/images/stories/documents/mediareleases/2013/February/Victorias_Plan_for_School_Funding_Reform.pdf; http://www.mceecdya.edu.au/verve/_resources/Mapping_Funding_and_Regulatory_Arrangements_-July_2011.pdf
[3] http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/media/downloads/news/lsld/ram/ram_fact_sheet_number_2.pdf
[4] http://education.qld.gov.au/schools/independent-public-schools/
[5] http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Organizing-a-school/Charter-schools-Finding-out-the-facts-At-a-glance
[6] http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/f/free%20schools%20faqs%20130301%20v3.pdf
[7] http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10870578
[8] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-more-new-free-schools-than-ever-before-to-raise-standards-and-increase-choice
[9] http://educationviews.org/the-transformational-potential-of-flipped-classrooms/
[10] http://educationnext.org/how-to-raise-smart-kids-in-the-wrong-zip-code/
[11] http://m.theage.com.au/victoria/teacher-pay-scale-plan-denied-20130521-2jyx3.html
Home > Commentary > Opinion > Education landscape: The next 10 years?
Education landscape: The next 10 years?
The role of government
The federal government is increasingly influencing educational priorities and school practice through tied funding, to the point where state governments are sidelined in some of the most important aspects of school education. The federal government now controls curriculum and testing, and is dictating school governance arrangements. Both sides of politics are making noises about being more interventionist in teacher education. I see this continuing in the future, especially if the Gonski reforms are implemented, but also to lesser extent, even if they are not, with the extension of National Partnerships under a Coalition government. In Australia, the main areas in which state governments retain control are teacher employment and management of financial and capital resources, but even this may lessen in the long-term.
Funding
It is presently impossible to discuss funding figures with precision but a trend in funding principles is evident. The common feature of the existing SES funding model for non-government schools, the Gonski funding model, group funding of Catholic schools,[1] and most state education system models,[2] is that they are student-centred. By this I mean that an allocation of money is attached to each child and a school’s funding entitlement is mostly a multiple of that figure. The NSW state education system has a variation on this that puts more weight on teacher numbers.[3]
There will continue to be debates about how much funding each student should receive, but there is a growing acceptance of the notion that education funding should be about the needs of students, not the school they attend. At some point in the future I hesitantly predict sector-neutral funding. I don’t expect this will apply to all existing non-government schools because of the interplay between private and public funding, but I think there is scope for a different type of fully-funded non-government school (more on that later).
There is also scope for increasing private funding into both school sectors. Based on the sorts of funding arrangements that have developed over the last decade, I envisage they will fall into three broad categories — philanthropic, partnerships and profit-making.
Non-government schools rely heavily on private funding, particularly in the form of tuition fees but also in the form of philanthropic donations. The capacity of public schools to increase their revenue through private funding has been more limited and is an area of potential growth. Compulsory tuition fees in public schools are unlikely in the short term, but philanthropic funding is an underdeveloped area. Corporations and private trusts are keen to contribute to public schools, particularly those with high levels of disadvantage, but it is not always easy for them to do so, at least not in the ways such organisations prefer to work.
Another avenue for private resourcing of both public and non-government schools is partnerships with community organisations and businesses, often in the form of capital and human resources.
More controversially, the for-profit sector has been involved in higher and further education and in early education for some years, but Australian schools have so far been quarantined. There are a large number of commercial organisations profiting from school education in the area of teaching resources, information technology, sports and music equipment and so on, but for-profit schools do not yet operate within the mainstream school sector.
Accountability
Increased government funding tends to come with strings. The National Plan for School Improvement is a case in point. In exchange for increased funding, the federal government is seeking to set the agenda for education policy in a wide range of areas, from school autonomy, arguably a matter for states, to schools’ bullying policies, arguably a matter for schools.
The federal government’s approach to schooling is a tight-loose-tight paradigm. The inputs to schools — such as curriculum and teacher supply and education — are becoming more tightly-controlled and centralised. The outcomes are also tightly-defined in the form of NAPLAN and reporting to government. In between these things, though, is what schools do. Through the move to decentralisation, there is an attempt to give schools more freedom in how they achieve the outcomes expected of them. This is the ‘loose’ part of the paradigm.
In terms of public accountability, NAPLAN will continue and even possibly expand but My School in its current form is tenuous. NAPLAN will continue because governments like to collect data. What is in danger is the public availability of NAPLAN results, due to the opposition to My School from some vocal quarters. Governments may accede as they are not averse to keeping information from the public.
School governance
Decentralisation/school autonomy has been a distinct development in schools policy in Australia and internationally over the last ten to fifteen years. ‘Decentralisation’ refers to moving decision-making capacity away from central agencies in school systems to more local authorities or to schools themselves, within a centrally-determined framework. This is somewhat different to ‘autonomous’ schools, where there is almost complete independence in governance. The only Australian schools to which the autonomous schools definition applies are independent schools, but they too must dance to governments’ tune to some extent.
Public schools in the Australian Capital Territory have had elements of financial self-management since the 1970s, around the time the Karmel report endorsed the approach.
The Victorian state government implemented extensive school-based management reforms in the mid-1990s, with public schools gaining control of more than 90% of their budget, as well as the ability to hire their own staff. There are now 255 independent public schools in Western Australia, which is around one third of public schools in the state. In Queensland, it is anticipated that there will be a total of 120 independent public schools over the next four years.[4]
Independent public schools have sometimes incorrectly been described as charter schools. They are not, the key difference being that independent public schools are still government-owned and operated; the principal and staff are still government employees and schools must still adhere to state industrial legislation and curriculum and other state and national policies.
We do not (yet) have charter schools in Australia. They are schools that may or may not formerly have been public schools, but which are managed by a private organisation under a legislative contract or ‘charter’ with the government or charter authority. Charter schools usually cannot charge fees, but they are only ‘public’ to the extent specified in the charter. There are around 1.6 million students in 5000 charter schools in the US, across 40 states, which represents about 5% of all public schools.[5]
Many countries have funding and governance arrangements that allow the establishment of privately-managed, free schools, including the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands. The ‘free schools’ now operating in England are similar to charter schools. They receive public funding equivalent to similar public schools with the condition that they do not charge tuition fees, and there are some conditions around enrolment and access.[6] New Zealand is also heading down this path with Partnership Schools.[7] It is only a matter of time before these developments are debated seriously as a prospect in Australia.
Provision
All of this leads inexorably toward greater diversity in provision. There is likely to be increasing diversity of provision in all school sectors, and the potential emergence of a fourth sector, like charter schools or free schools, established to provide choice for parents who currently have none, or to provide a type of schooling currently unavailable. Of the 102 free schools approved in the UK last year, 12 were alternative provision schools for students who have behavioural problems, students with long-term health problems, and teenage mothers.[8] Certainly, there are schools within the independent school sector in Australia which serve this purpose but existing funding policies and regulations make it a difficult prospect.
Greater diversity in schooling will also be driven by the changing nature of students and the wider variety of options provided by technology. We are seeing this at the moment in the higher education sector. It would be surprising if the flipped classroom approach[9] — where students watch lectures independently online and then do what we would think of as homework at school with a teacher’s support — did not begin to trickle down to the secondary sector in the next decade.
Technology is also enabling homeschooling and hybrid schooling, in which children are home-schooled a few days a week and attend school on the other days. More than 50 virtual charter schools in the US provide online curriculum. Another possibility is ‘micro-schools’ set up by cooperatives of families pooling their resources to open one-room schools, largely based around on-line learning.[10]. The home-schoolers of the future will be very different to the stereotype of today.
It is inevitable that technology will be involved in some significant changes in teaching and learning, but I don’t think it will become widespread quickly. Schooling has changed very little in the last 100 years for good reason — traditional methods work very well for many students.
Variety in provision in traditional schools will also be driven by some very practical demands created by social change. Longer and more flexible school hours are talking points in many schools for a range of reasons. For some students, it is because of their parents’ working hours. For other students, it is because they need extra learning time.
Curriculum
Curriculum is now caught up in the tight part of the tight-loose-tight paradigm. While ever we have a national curriculum it will continue to be contentious and politicised. Every new education minister, conservative and progressive, will potentially be able to imprint their own values and priorities. The content of the national curriculum at present has gone largely unscrutinised while we have been preoccupied with funding and the Gonski reforms. Curriculum will be a flash-point again in the future.
Teaching
Identifying quality in teaching is a difficult and fraught exercise. Witness the very long time taken to develop professional standards that define high quality teaching. Also witness the difficulty in using professional standards to differentiate teachers. The Age newspaper reported that 99.8% of Victorian public school teachers passed the annual performance review last year and progressed up the pay scale.[11] The majority of policy debate is now beginning to focus on the quality of teacher candidates before they get into the classroom, and the standard of their training.
Despite dozens of reviews of initial teacher education, all of which concluded pretty much the same thing, change has progressed at a glacial pace. Both federal and state governments are now turning their attention to recruitment and selection, influenced by the high performance in PISA of countries whose teachers are drawn from the academic elite. There are moves to limit both entry to and exit from teacher education courses by setting minimum achievement benchmarks. This will have a number of spin-off effects and I think we are only seeing the beginning of this trend.
Performance management is also a continuing problem. Some systems may experiment with forms of bonuses and performance pay but, due to continuing unionisation, they are likely to be marginal. Governments and unions will, however, be under increasing pressure to deal with under-performing teachers more effectively.
Jennifer Buckingham is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. This is an edited version of a speech given at the Independent Schools Queensland State Forum, 23 May 2013.
[1] http://www.qcec.catholic.edu.au/upload/publicsite/Finance/Catholic%20Schools%20Funding%20Powerpoint%20Final%2030%2003%2010.pdf
[2] http://education.qld.gov.au/schools/grants/state/core/school.html; http://www.premier.vic.gov.au/images/stories/documents/mediareleases/2013/February/Victorias_Plan_for_School_Funding_Reform.pdf; http://www.mceecdya.edu.au/verve/_resources/Mapping_Funding_and_Regulatory_Arrangements_-July_2011.pdf
[3] http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/media/downloads/news/lsld/ram/ram_fact_sheet_number_2.pdf
[4] http://education.qld.gov.au/schools/independent-public-schools/
[5] http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Organizing-a-school/Charter-schools-Finding-out-the-facts-At-a-glance
[6] http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/f/free%20schools%20faqs%20130301%20v3.pdf
[7] http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10870578
[8] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-more-new-free-schools-than-ever-before-to-raise-standards-and-increase-choice
[9] http://educationviews.org/the-transformational-potential-of-flipped-classrooms/
[10] http://educationnext.org/how-to-raise-smart-kids-in-the-wrong-zip-code/
[11] http://m.theage.com.au/victoria/teacher-pay-scale-plan-denied-20130521-2jyx3.html
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