Federal Election 2022: How do we fix Australia’s education system? Watch replay

Australia’s global education rankings are sliding and there are concerns over the lack of funding for public students. How can it be fixed? Replay the debate.

Principals should be allowed to hire the staff they want, sack those who are not up to scratch and pay teachers based on their performance, a News Corp education debate heard.

The controversial call was made by former teacher and Senior Fellow at ACU, Kevin Donnelly, in a roundtable discussion hosted by Joe Hildebrand on Wednesday night.

He said overseas research in the last four to five years has shown that a lot of the most effective schools in disadvantaged areas such as in American ghettos, or in migrant areas in London, have been autonomous.

“They’ve had the freedom to select their staff, to set the curriculum within a broad framework and a lot of these schools don’t make excuses for failure,” Mr Donnelly said.

He said when kids were in well structured schools with an academic rigorous curriculum, where principals have the right to employ staff and reward them, then that was shown to work.

Watch the replay in the video player above.

“Principals in Australia all say the gravest problem school leaders face is the red tape and bureaucracy,” Mr Donnelly said.

His argument was strongly rejected by Australian Education Union’s Correna Haythorpe, who said that kind of set up would come at a cost to the children and staff and that her members would “fight that”.

“That’s not what we want for Australia.”

The expert panel discussed Australia’s education system.

Earlier, Ms Haythorpe said performance-related pay for teachers would not attract or help retain staff.

She added that kind of talk followed on from recent comments made by Acting Education Minister Stuart Robert, who said that one in 10 teachers were “dragging the chain”, when talking about the standard of teaching in public schools.

Debate host, Mr Hildebrand, said “surely to say one in 10 teachers probably could do with some improvement is not particularly controversial?”, to which Ms Haythorpe said she found that statement “offensive”.

Also on the panel was former school inspector and Senior Lecturer at UTS Don Carter.

He agreed with Mr Hildebrand that education seemed to be missing from the election campaign so far, although all parties had committed to improving NAPLAN test results and Australia’s international ranking, which has slipped during the last decade.

Among the questions listeners watching the debate asked, included why some children were still counting on their fingers when they started high school, and another about how some kids were unable to write a proper sentence.

Ms Haythorpe said at different stages, some children needed more help than others and that’s where the inequities in the education system worked against the most disadvantaged and that the federal government should not be handing out so much money to private schools, over public schools.

State governments provide the bulk of funding for public schools.

The federal government also gives a smaller amount of money to public students, as well as private students, who get a greater wedge of the pie.

Mr Donnelly said he supported parents of kids in the independent sector who were taxpayers too and were already funding government schools, as well as paying school fees.

He argued the government should continue to fund independent and Catholic school pupils.

The panel discussed why the number of kids choosing independent schools over public had increased in the last few years.

Mr Carter said it was probably due to parents seeing how much better resourced they were compared to the public system.

“The people I feel sorry for in particular are the students,” Mr Carter said.

“There is a huge disparity across the range of government schools and private schools and I’ve seen that as an academic, I’ve seen it as an inspector over a 10 year period.

“And to me, it’s a real tragedy in Australia that we have some schools that lack clean toilets and don’t have proper bubblers.

“For students in other schools, they are just swimming in resources.”