Crusade to build on education revolution

WILL Julia Gillard's zeal lead to the kind of education system we want?

AS Julia Gillard jetted around the country to begin her national crusade to lift school standards last week, Kevin Rudd was not quite ready to let go of his education revolution.

The former prime minister, foreign minister and leadership challenger - and now Labor backbencher - could not help reminding the world via Twitter of the impact of his education policies, the $2 billion computers in schools program.

"Saw 400 new laptops at work at Our Lady's College in Annerley," he tweeted, with a picture of him in the classroom. "Principal told me that before our program there were virtually none. The kids love them."

For more than five years, Labor has defined its education policy through the words uttered by Rudd in a speech at the University of Melbourne in January 2007 when he was leader of the opposition. He declared that Australia needed nothing less than a "education revolution" to flourish beyond the mining boom, to tackle the skills shortage and lift productivity. Shifting the way Labor saw education policy, Rudd argued that education was an economic issue rather than just a means of achieving social justice.

"Boosting productivity through an education revolution is the best way to deal with the economic challenge of the future. Otherwise, we may simply end up being China's quarry and Japan's beach," Rudd said.

It was a significant policy framework that Labor took to the election and into government. Key initiatives included the $2bn Digital Education Revolution, to equip every student from Year 9 to Year 12 with a laptop, $2.5bn for Trades Training Centres in schools and the $14.1bn Building the Education Revolution scheme, under which every school received a new hall or library to help boost the economy.

The push for a national curriculum, improving teacher quality and the MySchool website were later initiatives in the revolution.

But in Gillard's speech last week outlining her government's long-awaited response to the Gonski school funding review, she moved on from the "education revolution". She shifted the rhetoric back to the traditional Labor policy of addressing disadvantage, and the need for a moral crusade for improvement in schools.

The Prime Minister announced the government would adopt the recommendations of the Gonski report, introduce school improvement plans and lift Australian student performance into the world's top five by 2025.

" I call on you to join me in a national crusade to give those children a better education and a better future," she said. "Education transforms lives. I know because it transformed mine."

But what happened to Rudd's revolution? According to Brian Caldwell, former dean of education at Melbourne University and now an international consultant, there has been no revolution under Rudd or Gillard.

"Since 2007, schools around the country are quite recognisably the same institutions," he tells Inquirer. "We have not improved the nation's scores in terms of NAPLAN and we have gone backwards in terms of PISA (OECD tests). There has not been an education revolution. There is no question about it."

Caldwell says Rudd deserves some praise for policies such as the BER, but they were short-term and not well thought out. "I drive past too many schools where new classrooms look too much like the old classrooms - factory-style, reflecting mass-production technology - that will be obsolete within a very short time and probably run-down," he says.

Another academic who has examined Rudd's schooling policies, University of South Australia emeritus professor Alan Reid, believes the BER epitomises what was wrong with Rudd's education revolution.

"It was good to see that money was provided to schools, but it wasn't a revolution because there was no significant change in the way we think about teaching and learning in this century," he says.

"BER was a good example of the lack of deep thinking about the kind of education system we want. It was simply providing schools a narrow range of facilities without any talk of learning in the 21st century. I think if it was genuinely part of the education revolution there would have been more thinking about the connection between the building and teaching."

Although the BER guidelines originally stated schools had to build "iconic" structures that would inspire students and staff, the Rudd and Gillard governments have always maintained the BER was first and foremost a economic stimulus program that had to be rolled out quickly to meet the global financial crisis.

The haste of the deadlines that schools were required to meet - but so often did not - led to cost blowouts and a lack of engagement with school communities. BER taskforce head Brad Orgill found two states failed to deliver value for money.

Four years after it was announced by Rudd, the BER is almost complete, with 99 per cent of school projects completed in the $14.1 million Primary Schools for the 21st Century component. The government says the $821.8m worth of Science and Language Centres have been finished and the $1.28bn National School Pride program for refurbishing facilities is also done.

Schools Education Minister Peter Garrett maintains the BER has been positive for schools, as well as minimising the impact of the GFC, and says the unprecedented investment will have a "long-lasting impact" on school communities. He disputes there has been no education revolution.

"I cannot count the number of principals and teachers who tell me it has made such a difference," he tells Inquirer.

"From an education point of view, it is a revolution, albeit a gentle one. It's certainly been transforming education, there is no question about that. We have had unprecedented activity, reform and investment across all sectors."

Reid also has misgivings about the computers in schools initiative, saying that, like the BER, it was rolled out without considering how to use the new technology.

"The vision of computers in schools was done without a substantial sum of money for the development of teachers ... there has been no focus on professional training on how to use these things for student learning," he says.

The government says the program has been delivered ahead of time and on budget, with 957,000 computers installed in schools, exceeding the national target of 786,000. Garrett believes it has helped transform classrooms.

But opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne says the costs blew out, as there was initially no funding for installation and maintenance costs.

"The government also changed the goalposts early in the rollout to include existing computers in schools that were less than four years old, of which there were around 250,000 in schools," Pyne says.

The third key policy of the education revolution was the trade training centres in schools. In May the government put the rest of the $2.5bn project on hold until 2015 to save $102.8m in this year's budget.

Garrett talks about the "incredible" centres he has seen in schools and says $1.2bn has so far been approved for 376 training centres.

But the sector thinks otherwise. TAFE Directors Australia's Martin Riordan says the program has been hit by problems, from confusion about criteria to inflexibility in the conditions schools had to meet to be eligible.

"The scheme hasn't really been successful in rolling out the centres at all, frankly," Riordan says. "It's encouraging that the money should be spent in this area but it is a shame that it's not to be spent well."

Like Caldwell, Pyne also points out that despite the huge investment in the BER and the Digital Education Revolution, there has been no improvement in National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy and Programme for International Student Assessment scores.

"'Despite the new computers, the literacy and numeracy of Australian students has continued to stagnate or decline," he says.

This lack of international success was not lost on Gillard when she gave her education crusade speech, noting that it was her goal to get Australia into the top five, after the 2009 PISA tests ranked Australia seventh on reading and science, and 13th in maths.

Garrett believes there is work to do on improving student results but says programs can't be judged quickly: "These changes will take time. We are effectively trying to redress educational decline over a decade ... We won't necessarily see results jump dramatically over a period of one or two years."

The Australian Council for Educational Research's chief executive, Geoff Masters, agrees, saying it is too soon to assess the impact of Rudd's education revolution. But he says we are going backwards in student performance and there needs to be a greater future focus on teaching: "If we are going to lift our performance into the top five countries, we cannot keep doing what we have been doing."