Andrew Bills: The burden of lifting up the most disadvantaged is not evenly spread

The recent fallout of the school rezoning issues concerning Adelaide and Botanic high schools reveals just how much class has come to mean to classrooms, writes Andrew Bills.

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The recent political and public fallout of the school rezoning issues concerning Adelaide and Botanic high schools speak to a wider issue gripping public schools across Australia.

A segregated landscape of advantage and disadvantage, most apparent in public high schools, has emerged via changing enrolment patterns across the past 10 years.

Public schooling is at a tipping point — made so by a history of inequitable federal funding, a politically inspired doctrine of schooling competition, more standardised bureaucratic regulation, and the consequent fallout felt by many public schools serving those hit by economic downturn and geographical isolation.

Flinders University academic Dr Andrew Bills.

The educated middle class has more choice to seek and buy educational advantage for their children, meaning a gravitational move to more desirable public schools.

These can raise more money to offer more curriculum options such as charging higher fees. But now these schools are bursting at the seams. The educational marketplace is having its say.

Research indicates schools that have greater concentrations of high social and economic capital enrolments enjoy a multiplier effect of improved educational outcomes.

Conversely, schools in more disadvantaged locations within the educational market are taking on greater concentrations of low socio-economic enrolments experiencing a multiplier effect of disadvantage.

This is supported in research by Centre for Policy Development’s Chris Bonner AM, indicating “achievement outcomes are becoming increasingly connected to the level of advantage of the school a student attends”.

The burden of lifting up the most disadvantaged is not evenly spread.

So what can we do?

School leaders and teachers can courageously choose to do schooling differently.

More radical and pragmatic school leaders are needed. They need to be willing to innovate personalised learning forms that engage disadvantaged students.

There are examples of innovation emerging in other states such as “Big Picture”, where the mantra of “one child at a time” means schooling design and life attends closely to the learning interests and passions of the child.

In South Australia, the Australian Science and Mathematics School has fostered a STEM learning approach for many years featuring open learning spaces and student choice. Springbank Secondary College is now working with the ASMS on their own STEM agenda.

But for wide-scale schooling redesign to happen, SA needs a bureaucracy that fosters a culture of inquiry and research for schooling innovation so all parts of the education system are equally valued and heard.

Dr Andrew Bills is a Flinders Uni education researcher