Noel Pearson: Australia’s education system is critical to fixing its productivity problem - so why don’t we know how to talk about it?
Australia needs to lift our schools one performance stage: from the good system that it is, to great.
This will mean four things. First, because there is no single system but a federation of systems and subsystems, the federal government must have a real plan to effect an Australia-wide school performance shift that does not allow any state and territory system and subsystem to drag its feet and resist the reforms required.
Second, there are anywhere between 250 and 500 schools (out of a total 10,000) that are poor. These are schools where it is of no value for students to turn up because they don’t receive the teaching that honours their attendance and results in them learning. These schools must be transformed, and this can be done promptly if you know what must be done.
Third, the vast number of Australian schools are fair and good. Many thousands of them. The majority are “coasting”. They could be much better. Underachievement is the problem with this large middle. The fair schools must move to good and the good schools must move to great.
Fourth, there are a couple thousand great schools. We need them to become excellent. For the past quarter-century Australia has had policy-illiterate ministers for education – Amanda Vanstone, Peter Garrett and Simon Birmingham come to mind – and the country made no progress with school education under Liberal-National and Labor governments from John Howard’s prime ministership to Scott Morrison’s. A succession of ministers from Brendan Nelson to Dan Tehan – including Julia Gillard – failed to turn around the decline in school performance compared with systems around the world. Even the most literate ministers, Christopher Pyne and Alan Tudge, failed.
Resourcing of public schools is shameful compared with private schools and needed to be remedied, but money alone will not turn Australian schools around. It is how money is used that will be determinative. The Gonski review of a decade ago focused on resourcing but failed to develop a national approach to turn around declining school performance. Its second iteration added nothing to the first.
Enough time has passed for all to see Gonski was a waste of time. David Gonski failed because his review was determined to be agnostic about pedagogy: teaching. He did not want to arouse an ideological confrontation on the most important reform missing from the debate: the necessity for teachers to teach first.
My friend and education policy wonk, Ben Jensen, called his schools organisation Learning First. I say to him: Ben, it should be Teaching First because learning follows teaching. As the founder of Direct Instruction, Siegfried Engelmann, always said: if the student has not learned, the teacher has not taught. This aphorism is at the heart of the ideological impasse on pedagogy. Can you believe we still don’t agree whether the knowledgeable teacher should first teach the as-yet not knowledgeable learner?
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Of more substantial concern is the parlous comparison between the standards mandated by the Australian Curriculum and curriculums in other countries. Jensen’s 2023 benchmarking report sets out a terrible comparison of Australia’s expectations of science learning against other countries.
Australia has the lowest expectations, far below the US, Singapore and Britain. If the same applied to other subjects then this is a major problem for Australia.
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