Educating Australia: Challenges for the decade ahead

By Melbourne University Publishing Ltd

Where is Australian schooling heading? What forces will shape its future direction? How ready are students, teachers, policy makers and education institutions for the challenges being thrust on them? With chapters ranging across the landscape of school-age education, this book proposes new, evidence-based directions for change in teaching, assessment, curriculum, funding and system-wide collaboration. It provides a grounded, forward-looking guide to questions that will be central to Australia's educational debates, and our performance, in the years ahead.

Drawing directly on research, innovation and policy analysis at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, this book creates an engaging and rigorous overview of the issues confronting school-age education in Australia, and provides insights and actions to help shape our responses into the future.

Contents

Part 1
Evolving the purposes of schooling

1 Time for a reboot: Shifting away from distractions to improve Australia’s schools – John Hattie
2 The changing role of the teacher in a knowledge economy – Patrick Griffin, Lorraine Graham, Susan Marie Harding, Nives Nibali, Narelle English and Monjurul Alam
3 The state of public schooling – Jessica Gerrard
4 Asia Literacy and the Australian curriculum – Fazal Rizvi
5 Curriculum: The challenges and the devil in the details – Lyn Yates
6 Monitoring learning – Geoff N. Masters

Part 2
New pathways to student achievement

7 What is ‘school readiness’, and how are smooth transitions to school supported? – Frank Niklas, Collette Tayler and Caroline Cohrssen
8 Chinese: More equal than others – Jane Orton
9 Lying on the floor: Why Australia can lead the world in music education – Pip Robinson and Ros McMillan
10 Young people at the margins: Where to with education? – Helen Stokes and Malcolm Turnbull
11 What if you’re not going to university? Improving senior secondary education for young Australians – John Polesel, Mary Leahy, Suzanne Rice, Shelley Gillis, Kira Clarke
12 From inequality to quality: Challenging the debate on Indigenous education – Elizabeth McKinley

Part 3
The role and impact of teachers

13 Supporting the development of the profession: The impact of a clinical approach to teacher education – Larissa McLean Davies, Teresa Angelico, Barbara Hadlow, Jeana Kriewaldt, Field Rickards, Jane Thornton, and Peter Wright
14 Creating a third space for learning in teacher education – Helen Cahill
15 Building knowledge about oral language skills into teacher practice and initial teacher education – Patricia Eadie, Hannah Stark and Pamela Snow
16 Aligning curriculum, instruction and assessment – Natasha Ziebell, Aloysius Ong and David Clarke

Part 4
Challenges of system reform

17 Hard-to-staff Australian schools: How can we ensure that all students have access to quality teachers? – Suzanne Rice, Paul W. Richardson, Helen M.G. Watt
18 Collaboration in pursuit of learning – Tom Bentley and Sean Butler
19 Aligning student ability with learning opportunity: How can measures of senior school achievement support better selection for higher education? – Emmaline Bexley
20 Other people’s children: School funding reform in Australia – Tom Bentley
21 Improving national policy processes in Australian schooling – Glenn C. Savage

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jan 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9780522870428

Book preview

Introduction

Tom Bentley and Glenn C. Savage

Since the mid-2000s, school-age education has experienced significant and unprecedented changes, principally through national reforms.¹ In some cases, these changes were debated for decades in Australia but, for various reasons, never materialised. Major reforms include the National Assessment Programme to assess young people’s literacy and numeracy attainment (NAPLAN); a national Australian Curriculum; the My School website, reporting in a consistent and accessible format on the profile, resourcing and achievements of every Australian school; national professional standards for teachers and principals; the legislation and partial implementation of a new federal funding model (the Student Resource Standard), based on the recommendations of the Gonski Review of School Funding; and Australia-wide implementation of a universally accessible year of preschool, together with the Australian Early Development Index (now Census) and national quality standards for early years education and care.

These reforms have been primarily institutional, brought about through public policy reform. They were made possible by unprecedented levels of intergovernmental cooperation, bolstered by increased federal government commitment to investing in education and working with states and territories to pursue national policy goals, particularly during the Labor governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard (2007–13). The scope and depth of these changes leave an indelible imprint on the landscape of education, forming a new national architecture for policy-making, coordination and reporting between governments in our federal system. New organisations have also been established for driving national reform, including the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), which developed the Australian Curriculum, National Assessment Program and My School website; and the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL), which developed the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers and Principals.

These major reform shifts also reflect broader changes in Australian society and politics, which have seen education receive steadily greater public attention, discussion and policy priority. This is a global phenomenon, fuelled by arguments and evidence regarding the pivotal contribution of education to economic productivity, social cohesion and life chances. This reframing of education is a response to complex social, demographic and economic changes taking place in Australia and globally, which directly influence the work of educators and simultaneously are reshaping the conditions of possibility for school-age education.

For example, Australia continues to become more ethnically and culturally diverse, having significantly lifted its net rate of migration. At the same time, more Australians than ever before are living and working in Asia, a trend that is reframing Australia’s geopolitical relationships and education systems (see chapter 4 of this volume by Fazal Rizvi). Social and technological change has also been pronounced, with Australians now being among the most active users of mobile technology and digital consumer services. Australian cities are evolving rapidly, in often uneven ways, concentrating economic activity and innovation, and redistributing life chances, around certain new industries and locations. Most new migrants reside, and most new jobs are created, in Australian cities. Affordable housing and transport are growing challenges (Australian Government 2015).

The structure of jobs and work is also changing significantly in Australia, with employment in professional and technical jobs increasing while the number of people working in manual jobs has declined. This has serious implications for education. For example, as the structure of employment shifts further towards financial services, health, education and care, clear declines are evident in traditionally strong areas such as manufacturing and farming. Added to this is the fact that Australia has one of the highest rates of casual employment in among member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), with rates of casualisation being especially pronounced among certain population groups, such as young women.

Australia weathered the immediate global financial crisis of 2008–09 relatively well, preventing recession and sustaining growth in jobs and GDP. Nonetheless, the global crisis has subdued economic and wages growth, reduced interest rates and put pressure on public spending. Governments face conflicting pressures to ensure effective investment and demand in the face of waning private sector activity while also struggling to reduce spending deficits.

For now, Australian living standards remain high and unemployment low, by global standards. But international trends are evident here and threaten to expand, including growing inequality of wealth and stratification of the population by socioeconomic class, ethnic identity and cultural geography (a process reinforced and accelerated by growing sectoral divisions between government and non-government schools in Australia), accompanied by the growth of political conflict and social anxiety over migration, religion and race.

The polarisation of educational opportunities and outcomes according to socioeconomic status and cultural geography continues apace, even as national politics stalls and education systems maintain the status quo. This polarisation is leading students from highly educated, well-resourced and highly motivated families and cultural groups into ever tighter clusters, stratifying the student population across different schools and neighbourhoods, and reinforcing the inequality of access to higher education and work opportunities. In turn, this restructuring of education is contributing to similar patterns of growing inequality in our cities and communities.

These social and economic shifts create a prism through which many of the familiar challenges and dilemmas of education policy and practice can be viewed, ranging from how best to design curricula to how schools can best protect young people from future social and economic precarity. Education increasingly seems to be in a vice, facing mounting pressure to achieve better outcomes for more people, while simultaneously being expected to innovate and solve wider problems of society in a context of fiscal austerity. Again, this is a global concern. As the OECD recently put it: ‘Given shrinking public budgets, shifting demographics and the growing importance of education in knowledge-based societies, countries also need to consider how to provide the best learning opportunities to achieve the best learning outcomes equitably and efficiently’ (OECD n.d.).

At the same time, while such dramatic shifts have taken place since the mid-2000s, we can also see that by some important measures, not very much has changed at all. The percentage of Australian students successfully completing year 12, for example, is not improving. After a decade of reform effort, funding policies continue to reproduce a status quo that entrenches sectoral division and elitism. New models of professional learning and evidence-based pedagogical innovations are being taken up very slowly. There has been little meaningful change in improving the status or efficacy of vocational and applied learning throughout school systems. Moreover, since the introduction of NAPLAN in 2008, there has been little significant uplift in literacy and numeracy outcomes, which remain strongly correlated with students’ socioeconomic status. The performance of young Australians on the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has also declined.

Somehow, therefore, despite hard-fought political battles and reforms, the daily efforts of millions of people, and the constant work required to keep education systems afloat, these collective efforts combine to maintain and reproduce a status quo, rather than driving a shared learning trajectory leading to better outcomes. The question remains therefore: what are we doing wrong?

In order to address this question, it is essential to examine and rethink the dynamic, mutually constitutive interactions between (a) the open-ended, partly uncontrollable and interconnected processes of economic, social and technological change, and (b) the formal, institutionally determined, policy-driven processes (and informal governance structures) that are designed to respond to broader change processes and meet a growing public need for education. This long-term interactive, or evolutionary, process is analogous to what has been described by Goldin and Katz as a ‘race between education and technology’ (2012). But it also goes far beyond the interactions between technological innovation and the economy’s productive capacity, to encompass issues of identity, democracy, professionalism, civic institutions and social equality. The pivotal role played by education in the wider processes of change helps to explain why education policy has become so central to politics, and so contested, in recent years.

Indeed, the raft of national reforms achieved since the mid-2000s were designed to address many of the persistent issues of economic restructuring and dislocation, educational underachievement, social and demographic marginalisation to which we are pointing. Yet, as we have argued, Australian education remains paradoxically locked, for the moment, in a status quo where, despite frenetic political activity, significant policy reforms and a constant process of adaptation and adjustment by educational practitioners, key indicators of impact and quality are standing still or going backwards.

In addressing these dynamics, we must ask what can school-age education reasonably be expected to achieve on behalf of wider society. Schools are frequently positioned as sites through which all of society’s problems might be solved, but there are clear limits to what today’s education systems can do. Amid this conflicting set of pressures and responses, education systems—and practitioners—risk getting caught in the middle, forced by a changing reality to adjust to the pressures and practices of a society going through deep change, while also pressured to respond to policy-driven reforms that are attempting to respond to the same trends.

These pressures are deeply problematic. One possible analysis of the sense of overall paralysis is that education systems and all their participants—teachers, policy-makers, parents and students—are caught in a cycle of ‘call and response’, whereby excessive time and energy is taken up reacting to the demands and pressures of the system; meanwhile the overall result does no more than reproducing itself to fight another day. No substantive progress in learning outcomes is achieved, while at the same time the different groups of participants are nonetheless forced to absorb ever-mounting levels of pressure and stress.

The short-term, cyclical churn of today’s politics and media are clearly exacerbating these problems. While governments prevaricate over their long-term policy commitments, they succumb to headline-chasing and are forced to react to media reporting that is often dangerously cynical and superficial. Yet not all political change is superficial. As we have outlined, there have been important and substantive reforms, but they have not yet produced their intended effects. Perhaps one lesson to be learned from the last decade is that single policy interventions, implemented in isolation from each other are unlikely to achieve their objectives when they meet the complex everyday reality of educational institutions.

We cannot expect education to solve all society’s problems, especially via quick-fix plans. Yet it is inescapable that education plays a vital role in influencing the direction of social, economic, technological and cultural change and that politics will seek a legitimate role in improving educational outcomes. So, if we know that education matters, and that it is not a ‘magic bullet’, then we must turn to questions about ‘the what’ and ‘the how’ of schooling, and to questions about how to construct and share the knowledge and capabilities that can translate evidence about what produces positive outcomes into widespread practice. These are the questions that this book aims to address.

Challenges for the decade ahead: diverse perspectives on a complex system

In this collection, authors explore and explain changes in crucial areas of education and research, and consider core challenges for the next decade. In doing so, authors also signal areas where productive changes might be made to public policy, institutional approaches and everyday educational practices. As editors of this collection, we have emphasised the critical importance of seeking to recommend productive ways forward, informed by evidence and expert knowledge. The collection therefore puts forward a pragmatic orientation towards improving and potentially replacing current approaches in diverse parts of our education system.

While the volume spans many areas relevant to school-age education, no collection of this nature can be comprehensive. There are some vital issues in Australian education that are not explicitly addressed in this book, including gender relations in education, school leadership, and the applications of information and communication technologies.

The collection reflects the work of diverse authors, all of whom have a working connection with the Melbourne Graduate School of Education (MGSE) at the University of Melbourne. Together, the chapters reflect the wide range of perspectives informing research, innovation and policy work at MGSE. This diversity can make for challenging reading, as it is clear not all of the authors agree with each other on the big issues and challenges in education, but uniformity of view is not our objective. Instead it is our intention to provoke a diverse range ideas and debates about ways to take education forward over the next decade.

With this diversity of scope in mind, we nevertheless see some common threads of argument emerging across the different chapters and perspectives.

First, the direction and impact of educational change are heavily mediated by the interaction between ideas, problems, practices and outcomes. These elements and processes of mediation take place through a wide variety of social institutions and settings: from formal institutions like schools, workplaces, and education bureaucracies, to the array of informal sites of learning and knowledge creation, including family structures and the popular media. Together, these sites influence the meanings and practices of education and the conditions for policy and reform.

As several chapters in this collection argue, ignoring the powerful, interconnected relationships between these different sites leads to a host of problems. For example, focussing too heavily on individual schools as the primary site through which learning takes place can lead governments to over-estimate the control and impact they can achieve through direct interventions. Conversely, if citizens and interest groups place too many expectations on governments to solve all educational problems, then the responsibilities of other actors within civil society are obscured from debate and consideration.

At the same time, this collection makes clear that individuals play a crucial role in determining educational outcomes and in changing what social institutions and settings are capable of achieving. The chapters provide rich examples of the power and agency that individual teachers, policy-makers, school leaders, students, policy entrepreneurs and others can exert over their futures, and the contributions these individuals can make to the nourishment of collective social goods.

Second, many of the chapters emphasise the vital role played by public policy in steering and mediating what happens in education. Policy therefore creates ‘conditions of possibility’ for the ideas and practices of education, influenced as they are by both institutions and individuals. However, several chapters make clear that while public policy is critical to achieving positive educational change, it can rarely achieve direct control over what happens in schools, or act to produce better outcomes in linear or predictable ways. There is a crucial difference, therefore, between the ideas and aspirations of policy and its enactment. We argue that far greater attention and skill must be devoted in the decade ahead to how to shape and legitimise the goals of education, how to craft and build the institutional capabilities that render those goals achievable, how to ensure fairness and equity among competing users and providers of education, and how to improve innovation and systemic learning in the public interest.

Third, the collection demonstrates that this process of shaping educational ideas, practices and policies is increasingly complex. Social, economic, cultural and political changes over the past few decades have not only posed new problems for schooling, but have also radically altered the potential ways in which individuals and organisations can act. For example, globalisation and related changes in governance have disrupted previously more stable concepts and assumptions associated with ‘the public’, ‘the nation’ and ‘government’. New priorities have rapidly emerged in education, which would have been inconceivable just decades earlier. Imagine, for example, trying to explain to a teacher in the 1980s what the implicatons are of a ‘BYO tablet policy’ in primary schools.

While complex new challenges abound, however, the knowledge, tools and capabilities with which to tackle them have also proliferated. There are now many opportunities for innovation, institution-building and system learning, ranging from new channels through which governments and policy-makers can share and collaborate across jurisdictions, to online technologies enabling young people in Australian classrooms to engage in synchronous online lessons with partner classrooms in Shanghai or Copenhagen.

To harness these various new potentials, reform of our existing systems is required. For example, one striking conclusion to emerge from these chapters is that Australia’s ability to enact and realise educational progress is often limited by the very institutional parameters put in place by past generations of reformers, pursuing visions of progress in their own time. The current school funding policy impasse is exemplary of this problem. The policy area is continuously bedevilled by the difficulties of achieving effective Commonwealth–State collaboration in our federal system, and hamstrung by existing and highly inequitable funding settlements, established over many decades, which continue to entrench privilege in elite schools, while at the same time consistently failing to provide ‘needs based’ funding to schools and young people who need the most support. Other chapters show how the institutional design of our senior school curriculum, assessments, and university entrance ranking, now constrain our ability to achieve meaningful progress for large numbers of Australian students whose successful participation is, in fact, critical to Australia’s future.

If all young Australians are going to have the best chance of living healthy, meaningful and productive lives in the complex global era that is unfolding, then we need to fundamentally rethink these established traditions and reframe the core objectives that guide decision-making and practice, by focusing on new objectives and goals grounded firmly in the future needs of the whole Australian community.

However, these discussions about purpose and goals will not thrive if they are separated and abstracted from the practices and politics of education, and the places and spaces where policies are implemented, where students experience schooling, where professional identities are formed and challenged. As editors, this is perhaps our central contention: that the key ideas, problems, policies and practices in education gain shape and traction through interaction with each other—an ongoing process of imperfect exploration, iteration, interpretation and learning.

Shaping core ideas: structure and key themes of the collection

The book is structured into four overarching sections. While the chapters within each section remain diverse in subject matter and arguments, we have chosen to group chapters together in a way that reflects underpinning themes inherent to each.

The first section, ‘Evolving the purposes of schooling’, includes five diverse chapters, which together emphasise the importance of reframing and interrogating afresh the purposes of key educational ideas and assumptions through robust public discussion. John Hattie calls for a ‘reboot’ of the narratives shaping Australian schooling reform, by shifting focus away from ‘distractions’ like school choice and competition, to focus instead on high level goals and interventions proven to make a difference, like teachers working together to deepen their expertise, investing more in early childhood education and making schooling an engaging experience for senior secondary students. Patrick Griffin, Lorraine Graham, Susan Marie Harding, Nives Nibali, Narelle English and Monjurul Alam outline the radical shift towards collaboration, communication and critical thinking required for ‘knowledge-economy skills’. Fazal Rizvi shows how ‘Asia Literacy’ has become a central reference point in Australian education policies, but suffers from distinct limits in how it is defined and practised, and requires radical rethinking. Jessica Gerrard shows how the meanings of ‘public schooling’ are highly contested and argues that there is a need to rethink core meanings and assumptions in response to emerging ‘transnational publics’. Lyn Yates considers the purposes of the Australian Curriculum, concluding that while there are strong arguments in favour of a national approach, more focus is needed over the next decade on the roles of teachers and students in relation to the curriculum. Geoff Masters argues for a fundamental shift in how educators understand the dominant purpose of assessment, shifting the focus of assessment practices from ‘judging and grading’ to ‘monitoring learning’.

The second section, ‘New pathways to student achievement’, features chapters that argue, from very different vantage points, that the knowledge, skills and capabilities needed by students (and therefore by educators) has become far broader and richer than the framework of Australian schooling currently allows. Frank Niklas, Collette Tayler and Caroline Cohrssen examine the meaning of ‘school readiness’ and the evidence for different approaches to achieving it. They conclude that children’s likelihood of thriving at school and through their lives is influenced by the interaction between a number of supporting systems, and that educators can do far more to improve children’s learning capabilities by focusing specifically on these capabilities and working more directly with families and community partners. Patricia Eadie, Hannah Stark and Pamela Snow show that oral literacy plays a far more powerful role in the development of educational achievement than formal schooling frameworks have thus far allowed, and argue for a different approach to preparing teachers to develop oral literacy. Jane Orton argues that if Australia is to act on the strategic imperative to develop Chinese language skills then a radically different approach to pedagogy and assessment is needed. Pip Robinson and Jane MacMillan show how music education could make a vital contribution to the development of creative, critical and innovative abilities among Australian students, but that making this change relies on a deep shift in the prevailing approach to teaching music in schools. Helen Stokes and Malcolm Turnbull examine the growth and importance of alternative educational settings for young people who become detached and marginalised from secondary schooling, examining recent practical innovations in this area, and discussing how secondary education should work together with alternative providers to improve student outcomes. John Polesel, Mary Leahy, Suzanne Rice and Kira Clarke demonstrate how pathways and options for the hundreds of thousands of Australian students who will not follow an academic pathway into university remain fragmented and poorly supported, and examine the reforms of curriculum, partnership and pedagogy needed to achieve better post-secondary outcomes for these students. Liz McKinley advocates for a comprehensive, evidence approach to Indigenous education, moving from continuous marginalisation to an insistence on the highest quality teaching. In all these specific areas of student learning, huge value would be created in Australia if the dominant ways of framing and delivering teaching and learning were adjusted to reflect new methods and perspectives arising from innovative practice and research.

The third section, ‘The role and impact of teachers’, focuses on changing pedagogical innovations and imperitives, as well as advances and challenges in teacher education. Larissa McLean Davies, Teresa Angelico, Barbara Hadlow, Jeana Kriewaldt, Field Rickards, Jane Thornton, Brendan Tuckerman and Peter Wright focus on the lessons from and impact of MGSE’s development of a clinical model of teacher education since the mid-2000s. A deep shift has begun in understanding the role of teachers in a knowledge-based society, and this involves major shifts in our approach to preparing teachers and structuring their professional learning. Using new techniques, rigorously supported by evidence must be a core part of the repertoire of teacher education, and therefore a core part of the skillset of teachers. Helen Cahill examines the notion of a ‘third space’ in teacher education, in which school students themselves become contributors to the learning and development of teachers through feedback and shared problem-solving. Natasha Ziebell, Aloysius Ong and David Clarke show how the practices of teachers determine the influence of the formal curriculum on student learning outcomes, and how we could better understand and utilise curriculum ‘alignment’ as a dynamic, ongoing process of implementation and learning.

The final section, ‘Challenges of system reform’, examines the influence of institutional and system design on the possibilities and outcomes of education. Emmaline Bexley shows how the assessment and sorting of senior secondary school students contributes to a situation in which only a minority of high-achieving academic candidates are well served by the information generated by the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) system, and in which the intent of past reforms to expand participation in secondary education remains frustrated by the lack of curriculum and assessment reform to make sure that all students can access engaged, meaningful, educational pathways. Suzanne Rice, Paul Richardson and Helen Watt show how the recruitment and distribution of teachers to different schools across Australia poses major challenges for equity, as schools serving disadvantaged students persistently face the greatest problems in recruiting and retaining the most effective and ambitious teachers. They examine a range of options for addressing this situation that are not properly discussed in Australian reform debates. Tom Bentley and Sean Butler analyse the growth of collaboration as a central element in educational strategies at every level from student to system. In a separate chapter, Tom Bentley provides an account of the political and policy dynamics of school funding reform in Australia. Glenn Savage shows how the dominant debates about intergovernmental relations in Australia’s federal system actually miss some of the key factors shaping contemporary Australian policy-making in schooling, because they continue to focus on the vertical division of roles and responsibilities between different levels of government, when in fact policy outcomes are achieved through highly intertwined and interdependent decision-making and implementation processes.

Reviewing all of these arguments, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that growing inequity and inequality are the greatest threats to educational progress over the coming decade. These dynamics disfigure the practice of education and create long-term social and economic harm. The dynamic interactions between theory, evidence and practice surveyed in this collection suggest that the forms of governance needed to support more effective education must also be increasingly networked and collaborative. The greatest failures of the last decade—failures to advance in the face of overwhelming evidence—are arguably failures of collaboration in governance, politics and community. That fact must be explicitly acknowledged in order to be overcome.

Seizing the moment …

Given what we have outlined above, and the rich terrain explored in the chapters to follow, it seems clear that there are many opportunities to pursue educational progress, and the imperatives to do so are compelling, even in the face of apparently overwhelming odds. Major policy reforms achieved since the mid-2000s were, in many cases, designed to tackle perennial, system-wide problems in Australian education. The chapters in this collection show that key reforms in such areas as curriculum, assessment and teaching represent just the beginning of a much longer journey towards improving education for all young Australians.

If we want to achieve future reforms of policy and practice to be effective, the design of new innovations and interventions must be grounded in wide-ranging discussion and dialogue about the nature of the problems we need solve, and our priorities.

Taken together, the chapters in this volume present a detailed, long-range map of the educational landscape, and the various challenges and opportunities that lie ahead of us. Cumulatively, they help to show how the possibilities of the future are realised through interaction between the formation of key ideas and their realisation in practice, across tens of thousands of classrooms and communities. We hope that this volume will contribute to supporting efforts towards improving education for all young Australians.

Tom Bentley and Glenn C. Savage

Note

1    The term ‘school-age education’ encompasses schooling and the organisation of schools, as well as the increasingly important range of educational activities, partnerships and relationships which take place in non-school settings and outside of school hours, ranging from early childhood education and care to family learning, work and community-based learning.

Part 1

Evolving the purposes of schooling

CHAPTER 1

Time for a reboot

Shifting away from distractions to improve Australia’s schools

John Hattie

This chapter argues that we must intentionally change the narrative that frames our definition of ‘success’ in education and our priorities for reform. The narrative of choice and autonomy has impeded and undermined our focus on enhancing achievement for every student. Keating et al. (2013, 276–7) addressed this issue:

There is evidence to suggest that marketization produces the opposite effect, amplifying and normalising ‘brand value’ associated with academic excellence. Instead of promoting greater diversity, secondary schools … find themselves chasing the same academic pot of gold in a market in which ‘being academic’ is the prime indicator of market value … There is limited incentive in this environment for schools to develop vocational or alternative (or personalised) learning models, as doing so optimises their market position. Then the government school sector is also forced to privilege an academic curriculum in order to compete with the private sector for middle-class and high-achieving students.

This current narrative of ‘success’ leads to a relentless focus on the differences between schools and on arguments about school choice. We risk a major residualisation of our public school system (and parts of our Catholic and independent systems) while at the same time increases in education funding are funnelled towards uses that do not improve educational quality or outcomes. Over the past ten years we have had more than double the funding to schools relative to increased student numbers, but our overall performance is stagnating or declining. Spending more to continue the current system is not wise behaviour and is unlikely to affect student achievement.

Social stratification is sharper in Australia, and we now have a lower proportion of students attending socially mixed schools than in most countries to which we most typically wish to compare. Paradoxically, this leads not only to more low-income students facing greater obstacles to educational achievement because they are segregated into residualised schools but also to more ‘cruising’ schools that may serve better off students but do not add significant value to their educational achievement. In this chapter I argue that this latter trend is a major contributor to Australia’s declining educational performance.

We need a reboot that focuses effort and resources on supporting teachers to work together, collaboratively, to improve student achievement over time. This requires that we build a narrative based on identifying and valuing expertise, working together and opening classrooms to collaboration, targeting resources at need, and teachers and leaders accepting evidence and evaluating progress transparently over time.

1 The need for a reboot in our education system

When your computer system has major problems, it might be time for a reboot. A reboot causes the system to reconfigure itself, preserving the essential things you have on your computer, but makes it run more smoothly, gets rid of corruption and ensures that the desired pathways are restored. Like a computer, it is time for this reboot of Australian schooling—provided we keep the excellence we have but rid ourselves of the creeping, perverse parts of our system that are clogging up this excellence, leading us down wrong paths, and leading to introducing absurd corrections to solve the wrong problems.

There are at least four major indicators that the Australian Education system is moving in the wrong direction and ready for a reboot. The major argument is that the narrative driving our education system is wrong and that we are wasting so much money on driving the wrong narrative.

(i) We are among the world’s biggest losers in literacy and numeracy

Literacy and numeracy remain the critical bases of any educated person, and while many would (correctly) argue that these are attributes of narrow excellence, they are the building blocks of the wider excellence to which many of us aspire. Our PISA results in reading, mathematics and science have slipped in every testing cycle since the turn of this century, and this decline occurs in every Australian state. A deeper analysis of the PISA decline shows that Australia has more cruising schools and students than other countries. The major source of variance in the decline is among the top 40 per cent of our students (Ainley and Gebhardt 2015). This decline has occurred during a time when funding to schools has increased by 30 per cent (while student numbers have increased by only 13 per cent). Our major reboot needs to reverse this trend.

(ii) We are overly focused on school differences

Australia has embarked on major debates about school choice. We have invited parents to debate the merits of schools (and they do incessantly), but the variance between schools in Australia is much smaller than the variance within schools. What matters most is the teacher your child has. Despite this we do not (for many good reasons) allow parents to choose teachers but default to give them the almost meaningless decision about the choice of school—which ratchets up the competition. School choice has led to a clogging of the motorways. In Melbourne, the majority of students bypass their local schools en route to a chosen alternative—and nearly all this choice is based on hearsay, the nature of the students, and rarely on whether the school is or is not adding value to the students’ learning. We need a reboot in our debates about the value of the local school.

(iii) We do not have as a driver that schools must be inviting places to learn

Levin, etal. (2007) showed that the best predictor of adult health, wealth and happiness was not achievement at school but the number of years of schooling. So how do we make our schools inviting places for students to want to come to learn? One in five Australian students do not complete high school—this should be a national disgrace. Yes, some students leave to take apprenticeships or further training, and this is positive. But the retention rate has barely changed for twenty years. The major exception are Aboriginal students, who have almost doubled their retention rate over the same time. Across all students, 26 per cent do not attain Year 12 or equivalent by age 19. The SES gap is as much as 28 per cent between highest and lowest SES sectors (Lamb et al. 2015).

(iv) The growing pains of inequality

Kenway (2013) noted that the ‘Gonski report provided stark evidence and a nationally humiliating reminder that Australia does not have a high-performing education system as it does not combine quality with equity’ (p. 288). She noted the branding of the high-status schools (mostly independent) via the introduction of the International Baccalaureate (IB), country ‘adventure’ campuses, benchmarking against other national education ‘product differentiation’ systems, and inclusion of well-being programs—all playing a critical role in their marketing of their product. The OECD has long recognised Australia’s dismal showing among highly developed nations—it has a high-quality but low-equity education system.

Social stratification is sharper in Australia and a lower proportion of students go to socially mixed schools than in most countries with which we wish to compare. Students from wealthy, privileged backgrounds tend to go to high-fee, independent high schools; whereas students from low-income, disadvantaged backgrounds tend to go to government high schools. Attending a low SES school amounts to more than a year’s difference in academic performance. We have created a system in which schools compete for students and funds, we privilege autonomy that increases the spread, and we entice principals to steal students from other schools to make them look good.

2 The steps to reboot our education system

(i) Changing the narrative: identifying and valuing expertise

Among the most important things we need to retain as we reboot relates to the expertise of the teachers and school leaders—especially those who can show that their students are making at least a year’s progress for a year’s input (Hattie 2009). The magnitude of the effects of expertise towers above the structural influences (class size, ability grouping, private vs public school and so on). It is teachers working together as evaluators of their impact, their skill in knowing what students now know and providing them with explicit success criteria near the beginning of a series of lessons, ensuring high trust in the classroom so that errors and misunderstanding are welcomed as opportunities to learn, maximising feedback to teachers about their impact (especially from assessments; ensuring a balance of surface and deep learning, and focusing on the Goldilocks principles of challenge for students (not too hard, not too boring) while providing maximum opportunities for students to deliberately practise and attain these challenges. The mantra of visible learning relates to teachers seeing learning through the eyes of students and students seeing themselves as their own teachers.

Expertise is critical, but dependably recognising this expertise is also critical. Attestations, test scores alone and portfolios of exemplar lessons do not cut it for dependability. There needs to be rigorous emphasis on teachers demonstrating their conceptions of challenge and impact, through exemplars of students’ progress (in their work, their test scores, their commitment to wanting to reinvest in learning, as well as student voice about learning in this class). This is what the AITSL process involves based on the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers: to move into Graduate, then to Proficient, Highly Accomplished, and Lead Teachers. The states make these decisions, moderated by AITSL at a national level. The solution is already with us.

(ii) Changing the narrative: what do we mean by ‘impact’?

There needs to be a robust discussion about what ‘impact’ means in teaching within and across schools; the sufficiency of the magnitude of this impact; and the equity question about how many students are attaining this impact. The aim is to ensure that teachers have a common conception of progress. It should not be random that every time a student meets a new teacher they go up or down in their learning, depending on that teacher’s particular notion of challenge and progress. It is necessary to work collectively to understand what sufficient progress means, what it means to be good at X, and what it means to gain a year’s growth for a year’s input.

(iii) Changing the narrative: appease the students and stop appeasing the parents (or at least re-educate the parents)

When the various influences are considered, it becomes obvious that so many of the most debated issues in schools across Australia concern those that sit nearer the bottom of the list of impact. These include autonomy, teacher aides, money, class size—and the list goes on. We love to debate the things that matter least. As part of the Revolution School, the ABC undertook a survey of 1004 Australian adults about what they considered to be the major influences on student achievement and well-being in our schools. These adults considered the highest rated influence on student achievement to be smaller class sizes (91 per cent), followed by providing extra-curricular activities aimed at improving academic results (76 per cent), enforcing homework (71 per cent of which has a negative effect on the basis of research), whether the school is religious or non-religious (70 per cent, but there are no demonstrable differences), and wearing school uniforms (66 per cent, a zero effect from the research). In the middle, and therefore about half and half saying yes or no, are retention (repeating a year; 59 per cent, one of the most systematically negative influences), private or government school (56 per cent, when prior achievement before they enter a school is considered, the differences between government