Western Australia’s decision to decline Commonwealth funding does not indicate a failure of federal government policy on Independent Public Schools, education researcher Dr Jennifer Buckingham says.
“Independent Public Schools are a positive feature of the educational landscape in Australia. The federal government’s Independent Public Schools policy is aimed to encourage state governments to allow public schools to operate with more autonomy, by devolving more responsibility to principals and school boards, says Dr Buckingham, a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
“At the time the policy was announced, there was wide variation in the amount of autonomy already within state school systems — Victorian public schools had a high level of autonomy compared with other states, Western Australia had begun introducing Independent Public Schools (it provided the model for the federal policy), and NSW public schools were and still are relatively centralised in their governance.
”The WA government deserves congratulation for turning down Commonwealth dollars for a program that was already successfully running in that state. That was the right thing to do and not a failure of the federal government policy,” Dr Buckingham says.
In 2015, there will be 578 Independent Public Schools in Western Australia, 130 Independent Public Schools in Queensland and 6 Independent Public Schools in the Northern Territory.
”Greater autonomy for schools is not a guarantee of better quality education, it simply provides a platform and opportunity for schools to improve by allowing the people who know students best – the principal, teachers, and school community – to make decisions about how best to use their resources. States that choose not to pursue autonomy for public schools are denying their school communities that opportunity,” Dr Buckingham says.
Dr Jennifer Buckingham is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. She is author of Why Jaydon Can’t Read: The Triumph of Ideology over Evidence in Teaching Reading (2013) and School Funding on a Budget(2014).