Gonski reforms were about education and they were lost in the mire

IT'S little wonder David Gonski asked his friend Kevin Rudd to stop calling Labor's education policy Gonski.

It bore so little resemblance to the one Gonski and his committee thoughtfully developed across nearly two years that he would have been within his rights to launch a defamation action.

The Gonski saga, as it has now become, is a classic example of how good public policy is never created in the prism of an election campaign.

While the now Coalition government and opposition argue over their respective funding policies, it is easy to forget Gonski delivered a comprehensive report on lifting Australia's education performance. It was not a funding policy. It was only when the Gonski reforms were hijacked by special interest groups that they were reduced from education to funding initiatives, in a cynical grab for cash.

We know the most important factor in lifting the education performance of our students is our teachers, which is why we need to pay them more and lift underperforming teachers or move them on.

The Australian Education Union saw the Gonski cash as a chance to recruit more teachers and members, instead of the opportunity to lift teacher performance. Unfortunately, Labor partnered with the AEU for campaign support instead of seizing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform the teaching workforce. They took 18 months to work out what to do with the recommendations under education minister Peter Garrett, who never really understood how schools work after inheriting the portfolio from the real driver - Julia Gillard - when she became prime minister.

At the 11th hour Bill Shorten was called in to fix the mess and cut special deals with the states to get something - anything - up before the election.

For its part, the Coalition blindly moved to neutralise the issue without ever giving a public policy response to the overall merits of the Gonski reform package. Both parties tried to wedge each other and lost sight of the overall objective.

Australian parents should be assured that education in this country is not broken and we have much to be proud of.

The notion that our system is broken was an invention of the Gillard government.

As the Gonski report highlighted, overall Australia has a relatively high-performing schooling system when measured against international benchmarks such as the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment. Compared with other nations, we have consistently performed above the average.

That said, while PISA results are a helpful tool, they are too narrow to adequately judge education systems. For example, PISA often misses the cultural diversity across Australia's schooling system compared with that of the cities in China and the nations of Finland and South Korea. The only country we come close to in cultural diversity is Canada, but even there most citizens are bilingual.

What makes Australian schools unique is our focus beyond merely the academic performance of a student to incorporate their physical, social, emotional, moral, spiritual and overall wellbeing as intrinsic to positive educational outcomes. As Gonski noted, many researchers have found higher levels of education are associated with almost every positive life outcome - not only improved employment and earnings but also health, longevity, successful parenting, civic participation and social cohesion.

That philosophy sits at the core of Catholic education, to educate the whole child. For more than 150 years, our schools have embraced the same values identified in the Gonski report. Australia has an education system that is performing relatively well and our schools are working to lift performance from an already high base. But that has not and will not come about just because of what we spend.

Unfortunately now, with the election over, both sides are still embroiled in political point scoring without engaging in the real issue of public policy: how do we lift our education performance in all schools and in all communities?

The government must honour its commitment and engage in real policy reform, and the opposition must stop pretending its pre-election policy resembled what Gonski and his esteemed committee recommended.

Stephen Elder is executive director of Catholic Education.