School culture the big problem

THE Gonski report has made a heroic effort to strike a new political bargain to reform funding for all Australian schools - yet its aspiration may be undeliverable in our broken political system.

The two immediate obstacles are obvious.

First, getting the agreement of the states who run the schools system and have to fund upwards of 70 per cent of the $5 billion extra yearly recurrent spending that Gonski envisages.

And second, getting the legislation through the parliament by having either the Greens or the Coalition on board. Given the Coalition's unjustified dump on this report, Labor is left with the Greens as its legislative partner and it is almost inconceivable the Greens would not seek further changes to assist public at the expense of private schools.

Keeping enough stakeholders locked in to make the Gonski bargain workable may prove a bridge too far. There is one certainty: it cannot work without a strong, confident, committed national government. That does not exist at present.

Remember when Gough Whitlam carried the initial Karmel report in 1973? He had to threaten a double dissolution election and prevailed only because he split the Coalition, with the National Party voting with Labor to pass the schools deal.

Julia Gillard blundered this week in not offering stronger backing for Gonski in principle. The reaction, so far, from public and private schools and the teachers lobby has been remarkably supportive.

The degree of difficulty in this exercise is huge. The panel, chaired by company director David Gonski, has tried to achieve several goals -- to devise a new School Resource Standard as the foundation for funding for all students; to give extra funding to public schools in recognition of their higher ratio of students from a lower socio-economic background; to fund private schools on the needs principle by retaining the philosophy that underpins the current socio-economic status formula; to guarantee base minimum funding for private school students at 20-25 per cent of the new SRS; to eliminate the unacceptable private school "funding maintenance" anomaly; and to address the federal-state imbalance by having the national government offer more funds for public schools and the states more to private schools.

The technique to achieve such an improbable basket of goals is more money. Hence the nominated $5bn extra in 2009 dollars. Gonski seeks to "buy" competing stakeholders to his model. It is a classic illustration of the "all winners, no losers" reform model heavily practised over the past 10-15 years.

Yet this model is reaching its fiscal limits. Indeed, it may be exhausted in fiscal terms given Labor's surplus pledge in 2012-13 and the need to fund competing reform demands.

It is no surprise that Gillard declined to endorse the $5bn figure. Minister Assisting on Schools, Brendan O'Connor, said Gonski's $5bn was "notional" implying it would be revised. He said because "state and territory governments are the major funders" of schools this is where the conversation must start. Gonski called for "incentives" to be given the states. This means a greater funding contribution from the national government beyond the current 30-70 per cent split where the states are the dominant funder of schools. At face value, "buying" such reform seems too daunting for either Canberra or the states. There is, however, a way forward: it lies in a protracted introduction of the new policy and new funding.

Pivotal to this issue is whether state Liberal governments in NSW, Victoria, Western Australia and Queensland (in prospect) are prepared to negotiate in good faith over the Gonski model that is being imposed on them. There must be extreme doubts on this front.

Meanwhile the opposition is bent on distorting the report. Shadow minister Christopher Pyne's claim that "every" private school is now on a hit list is ludicrous. It is conspicuously not endorsed by chief of the NSW Independent Schools Association, Geoff Newcombe, for the good reason there is no basis for it.

Gonski's report backs the principle of indexation based on "actual costs" affecting the new SRS. His report says that private schools must not be penalised for the private funding they get. The panel rejected the option of "linking public funding directly to a non-government school's private income" because of complexity, equity and the disincentive it constituted for parents to invest in the education of their children.

The problem, overall, is that Gonski has produced a macro plan short of the data that enables individual schools to see where they are located. The risk is that fear can be promoted from either the public or private school lobby prejudicing Gonski's effort to end this bitter conflict, surely the longest in Australia's political history.

The related message from the past week is that money alone cannot fix our schools. This needs to be imprinted in headlines above the entire debate. Gonski was explicit: our school system is deteriorating. Standing next to Gillard on Monday, he said: "Australia's schooling performance has slipped over the past decade and it is at serious risk in our opinion of continuing to slide further."

The previous week the Grattan Institute, in an analysis of East Asia's schools, showed that schools in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Korea and Singapore were one, two and three years ahead of Australia depending on subject. These Asian systems combined excellence and equity and had a relentless focus on student learning. The Grattan report reveals

an Australian failure: we have lifted investment in schools enormously but our performance has fallen. The figures condemn our public policy and its implementation.

"The world's best school systems are rarely the world's biggest spenders," the report says. "Australian school expenditure has increased dramatically." It rose by 44 per cent in real terms over 2001-09 yet Australia has fallen in global ratings.

The Gonski report said: "Over the last decade the performance of Australian students has declined at all levels of achievement." In its final chapter, Gonski canvassed the changes in culture and governance transcending funding that are essential for Australia to recover.

A common theme runs through Gonski and Grattan: there is a cultural problem in the Australian classroom that impedes improvement and accountability of teachers and the required focus on student learning. Unless Australia confronts this cultural malaise, then parents and governments are throwing good money after bad. There is little hope for optimism.