Rethink the way we teach kids to achieve maximum productivity

WHAT the Gonski report proposed was no silver bullet, but what emerges from it is likely to be better than what we now have, and much better than anything the opposition has put on the table so far.

One of Gonski's weaknesses, dictated by his inquiry's terms of reference, is in proposing sector-blind funding but leaving intact Australia's peculiar system of three sectors with three funding mixes and three funding sources.

That comes at a continuing cost. Julia Gillard claims that Gonski's model "strips away all the old debates about public v private". Ironically enough, the present debate suggests the contrary. It also reveals the source of the acrimony: some parents pay for schooling and some do not, causing each side to develop strongly felt, legitimate and contradictory complaints about the other.

Why should those who opt out of the government system get government money? says one side. Why should taxpayers who provide $7 billion a year towards the cost of schooling not get their fair share? says the other.

The "old debates" and the present one stem from the sectarian settlement of the 1880s, the "state aid" controversies of the 1960s, and the sadly misconceived Karmel-Whitlam policies of 1973.

Those debates will continue in their divisive way so long as the system persists. It's not the funding formulas or shares that cause the grief; it's the system, stupid!

Second, Gonski proposed an important reform to the machinery of reform, a national resourcing body. This the government has rejected. The extent of the loss is shown in the Gonski process itself.

Much of the criticism of the Prime Minister this week was about the glacial pace of Gonski: two years before the first funds would flow, eight before full implementation and 13 before the day of reckoning.

Several commentators have pointed out that 2025 is four elections away. In fact, it is 30 or more, because all nine Australian governments are involved. Moreover, each is subject to the attentions of three sectors and their lobby groups, and more than 20 schooling jurisdictions. This politicised and dysfunctional arrangement is not of the PM's making but its unchallenged continuation is.

Third is the issue of productivity, the most important single problem of Australian school resourcing. The PM has been running hard on getting value for new money, thereby missing the real task, which is to get more out of the old. This issue was not addressed by Gonski but is open to negotiation with state governments.

Productivity is in free fall. Australian National University economists Andrew Leigh (now a Labor federal member) and Chris Ryan found that, between 1964 and 2003, spending on schooling increased by 258 per cent in real terms, most going to cut average class sizes almost in half. Across the same period, literacy and numeracy outcomes failed to increase at all, resulting in a productivity decline of 73 per cent.

One option is large-scale resource reallocation. There is overwhelming evidence that employing yet more teachers to put in front of ever-smaller classes has long since ceased to yield significant educational returns, at huge cost. The Grattan Institute has suggested trade-offs such as fewer and larger classes to free up time for workplace-based appraisal, feedback and mentoring, a very effective form of teacher development. Another angle is suggested by a recent US calculation that putting an average of five more students in each class would fund a salary increase of 34 per cent for every teacher.

At the micro level there needs to be a rethink of the dominant unit of educational production: one class of fixed maximum size, one rectangular classroom, door usually closed, one 40-minute burst of activity after another, one standard-issue adult trying to get it all functioning productively.

Extensive research suggests that some can but most can't. Very highly skilled teachers can move students along at far above the typical rate, hence the "teacher quality" agenda. Isn't there something the matter with an organisation that functions well only in the hands of a maestro?

The PM, along with almost everyone involved in schooling, is focused on "school improvement" and "teacher quality". But that leaves out the vast bulk of schooling's workforce and the organisation of its work and workplace.

Students are workers. Indeed only they can produce, or decline to produce, learning. Their productivity is shaped by the quality of supervision, of course, as it is for any other workers, but is determined also by the way their work is defined, organised, evaluated and rewarded. The unproductive and taken-for-granted way of combining these elements is becoming obsolete and must become a primary focus of reform.

This is to suggest that any deployment of resources, from the $40 billion-plus spent each year on schooling down to the five hours spent each day by 3.5 million students, must be inspected for cost as well as effectiveness and compared with alternatives.

That will meet resistance from habits of mind, entrenched funding structures, the built environment of schools and, above all, the close regulation of teacher and student work by industrial agreements. New money should come on condition of more flexible rules governing staffing structures and deployment of staff time.

Some weeks ago it looked as though opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne might tackle the productivity question through his arguments for more effective, rather than more, teachers. That germ of an idea has not been developed, however. In the meantime, the opposition has been drawn into a funding auction that will leave an Abbott government in as much budgetary strife as Labor, but with the handicap of the existing funding system, which it says it will keep.

Dean Ashenden has been a consultant to many state and national education agencies and ministers