Excuse me Miss, but the Prime Minister's cheating

Julia Gillard is claiming someone else's work as her own

JULIA Gillard has spent a lot of time recently referring to a little-known initiative called Teach for Australia in a bid to highlight educational outcomes from her time as minister in the portfolio.

From a National Press Club address on February 24 to an interview on The 7.30 Report this week, Gillard has been keen to take credit for the program at every turn.

On ABC Radio she answered a question by saying she would be "able to give you the names of our Teach for Australia graduates" (never mind privacy laws) to appease concerns about quality teaching in schools.

When Kerry O'Brien quizzed Gillard earlier this week about results in her education portfolio, and whether she could point to anything she had done to improve teaching, she answered: "I can point you to our new program, Teach for Australia."

Our program? If TFA is her program then everything and anything the commonwealth government helps to fund, but has nothing to do with the running of, are also Gillard's programs to own and take credit for.

Gillard has never been directly involved with the TFA initiative. It is run by an independent not-for-profit organisation. It receives funding not only from the government but from individuals and corporate sponsors as well. It even has a Liberal on its board of directors: Alan Tudge, the candidate for the Victorian seat of Aston. And the idea for the scheme certainly wasn't Gillard's; it came from the US, where a similar venture, Teach for America, has operated for years.

As Opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne says: "If Teach For Australia is a government program then so is the management and operation of every non-government school in Australia just because they all attract federal government funding."

From private schools to private hospitals to any number of independent charities that receive small amounts of government support, according to Gillard's logic she can take credit for it all. That sounds more like Kevin Rudd's self-important dictatorial view of the world.

In the case of TFA, $22 million of taxpayers' money goes towards the project, a drop in the ocean compared with the many billions of dollars being spent on the Building the Education Revolution, in which failures of delivery have been regularly exposed, particularly by this newspaper. It is in this area, where Gillard is directly responsible for the program, that she should be taking credit (or shouldering the blame).

The Labor government continues to be dogged by criticisms about poor delivery across a range of portfolio areas during its first term in office. References to TFA by Gillard are designed to establish that, unlike Rudd, what she has administered directly has been a success.

That would be a fair political strategy if she actually had anything to do with the scheme's delivery.

TFA puts high-achieving university graduates who do not have formal teaching qualifications through an intensive six-week training program run by the Melbourne University Graduate School of Education, before placing them in disadvantaged schools for two years. On completion of their stint in the classroom, they receive a postgraduate qualification in teaching, and it is hoped they will be inspired to stay in the profession longer term. If not, the program administrators argue that during the two years the participants were on placement, students would have benefited from exposure to high-quality individuals who might not otherwise have chosen education as a career. The sorts of people participating include first-class honours graduates and university medallists in disciplines ranging from law to business to science.

The first concept paper for the Australian model of the scheme was worked on by the chief executive of Teach for Australia, Melodie Potts-Rosevear, as well as prominent Aboriginal activist Noel Pearson and Tudge. The program finally got under way in January last year. The first cohort of participants, 45 of them, began their training the following year.

The level of credit for, and ownership of, the program that Gillard is taking just doesn't mesh with the autonomous nature of TFA. The website describes it as an independent organisation and lists a number of corporate sponsors affiliated with it, such as Google and Microsoft. It states: "Teach for Australia is an independent, not-for-profit, charitable organisation supported by both public and private sector partners. We are a public company limited by guarantee, registered under the Corporations Act 2001."

You certainly don't get that impression of the program when the Prime Minister discusses it.

The philosophical underpinnings of TFA are more in keeping with the Liberal Party model of outsourcing management of programs to the NGO sector, or the private sector, as it did in the welfare policy area during the Howard years. It's a different model to the state-run BER program Gillard has overseen. That's probably why Tudge and not a Labor identity is on the board. The Howard government was, courtesy of Tudge's agitating, already looking into the scheme while Gillard was still in opposition.

While Gillard is desperate to take credit for TFA despite having nothing to do with it other than signing off on the occasional cheque, question marks still exist as to whether the model is all it is touted to be. Some of the scholarly literature out of the US, where the scheme has been in operation for almost 20 years, questions whether it delivers the outcomes it claims to.

That criticism is founded on concerns about the minimal training for classroom management that Teach for America participants receive, which is also the case here.

In Australia, training to become a school teacher normally takes 12 months, and that's on the back of a three-year degree obtained to give graduates knowledge in their intended subject field. Although the sorts of people getting involved in TFA might be gifted university graduates, and few of us would want to discourage their willingness to teach, the training shortcuts will require long-term examination to evaluate their appropriateness.

So the educational initiative Gillard frequently points at to justify how well we can expect her to run the country isn't even something she has been involved with. It is micro in scale and the operational effectiveness of it remains contested. That's all before even considering if Gillard is being disingenuous, tricky and misleading to characterise it as a success story she has a right to claim credit for.

Is it any wonder the public don't trust what politicians tell us?

Watch Peter van Onselen interview the Minister for Housing Tanya Plibersek on Sky News Saturday Agenda, live at 8.15am. The interview will also be broadcast on The Australian's website after the telecast.