Opinion: Australia’s failed education system needs urgent overhaul

Australia’s education system is a mess, with almost 90,000 children failing to meet minimum standards of reading and numeracy. It’s time for real measures to fix the problem, writes Kylie Lang.

Australia has had three years of sticking its head in the sand about our dismal education standards, but the world has reopened and a fresh approach is painfully overdue.

We cannot afford a schooling system that promises more of the same because the model was failing kids long before the pandemic hit. I’m talking decades before.

And if behavioural issues weren’t bad enough already, education experts are warning that children are bringing “extra waves of social and emotional needs” to the 2023 classroom due to the learning disruptions and lack of routine in the Covid response.

Strap yourselves in, teachers. More broadly, none of this bodes well for an Australia which needs to be – like it or not – more of a global player than ever before.

Our economic prosperity – and costs of living – are inextricably linked with foreign crises and supply chains. Our young people are competing for jobs and other opportunities against counterparts from standout education countries like Finland and Singapore. And they don’t just need literacy and numeracy skills, they need critical and creative thinking.

Geographically, Australia might be an island but we cannot behave parochially.

When education ministers get together next month, they will need to do more than feign concern about dropping standards. They must admit the system is a mess and overhaul it before more time is lost. Confident? I’m not.

Forced to act as babysitters, teachers must be allowed more time to teach.

Last Friday the Productivity Commission found the National School Reform Agreement – agreed to by federal, state and territory governments in 2018 to boost student outcomes – has been a dud. It has achieved no reform whatsoever.

The commission revealed that almost 90,000 students are failing to meet minimum standards of reading and numeracy in NAPLAN – and that these standards had been on a steady decline over the past five years. Additionally, it found the reform agreement’s targets were “incomplete and too vague to drive reforms”. Here’s the wording of the one target regarding academic achievement: “Australia [is] considered to be a high quality and high equity schooling system by international standards by 2025”.

There are no guidelines for how this might be achieved.

What’s more, the commission found public reporting and transparency about outcomes and progress to be sorely lacking. Could that be because outcomes and progress are poor and/or non-existent, I wonder? In making recommendations to improve the next reform agreement, the commission said priority must be given to “directly lifting student outcomes: ensuring effective teaching and school leadership, reducing differences in outcomes across students, and supporting student wellbeing”.

It is this direct boost in student outcomes that Australia desperately needs – not dancing around the problem with obtuse references to “quality” and “equity”. One key way to lift performance is to let teachers teach. As it stands now, teachers are sideline babysitters, administration clerks and social workers.

The productivity commission came to this conclusion too. “Despite working more hours than their international counterparts, Australian teachers spend less time teaching … (they) spend more time on general administration, such as communication, paperwork and other clerical duties,” its report noted.

“Reducing low-value tasks would not only improve teacher effectiveness – by increasing the time teachers have available to prepare for lessons and undertake professional development – it could help retain more teachers.” None of this is rocket science, is it?

Last year, the federal government announced a $25m plan to cut teacher workloads but don’t get too excited. The commission found the cash splash was a Band-Aid solution that did “not provide a systematic way to identify and reduce burdens on teacher workload”.

Could someone with common sense and the will to effect meaningful change please step up to the plate!

Australia is tanking fast and, as we’ve seen with youth crime, rhetoric and inaction only feed the beast until it can no longer be contained.

The latest PISA test – which ranks Australian students against their international peers – shows we’ve been in a state of educational decline for more than 20 years. PISA measures the achievement of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science in 79 countries. For Australian kids, it reveals “the mean performance in reading has been steadily declining, from initially high levels, since the country first participated in PISA in 2000”.

“Performance in mathematics has been declining too since 2003, and in science, since 2012.”

Proven models for peak educational performance exist elsewhere in the world so why does Australia persist in navel gazing? This has not served us well in the past, and in a pandemic recovery threatens to derail us completely.

We need informed and committed transformation – our children deserve this, at the very least.

LOVE

A win for farmers with Queensland beef and sugar finding lucrative markets in the UK. Let’s hope that doesn’t push prices up here.

Another bid, this time by the Australian Medical Association, for a national tax on sugary drinks. A logical step towards reducing obesity, type-two diabetes and tooth decay.

LOATHE

The inflation rate soaring – and the price of bread, milk, fruit and fuel outstripping it, jumping by 10 per cent – as vulnerable Australians are hit harder.

Staff at youth detention centres taking increased time off due to workplace injuries and trauma. Just another consequence of a state government that has let juvenile crime spiral out of control.

Kylie Lang is associate editor of The Courier-Mail

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