Labor's "education revolution": lessons from Britain

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, writes FRANK BONGIORNO in London OVER the next year or so, my family is destined to participate in a great struggle. We’re under no illusions: the battle will be fierce. All around the country, campaign plans are being carefully laid, tactics honed in preparation. The commanders are poring over the latest intelligence, inspecting maps and making choices about whether to occupy this salient or that ridge, whether to train all their guns on the main objective or to attack softer targets in the hope of capturing valuable territory for more ambitious assaults. Yes, in a year’s time we’ll be applying to get our daughter into a London primary school. And if you think I exaggerate then look at the media reports of the bitter recriminations following each annual round of school admissions, which show just how seriously large numbers of parents take this responsibility. And who can blame them? I was recently given some advice on the matter by a British colleague with several children of her own. Even years later she still seemed to be suffering from the experience. Start your research early, she said. Make sure you rent or buy in an area where you’ll have good schools to choose from. Select your preferred schools strategically. She and her husband had placed a school with a solid-middling reputation at the top of their list of preferences rather than one they knew to be outstanding and therefore in impossibly high demand. You don’t want to have your child allocated to an under-subscribed school, she warned. There’s usually a good reason why they’re under-subscribed. I hope I’m not alarming you Well, actually, she was alarming us, but her advice was undoubtedly sound and certainly well meant. Of course, if choosing a school for your child in Britain is a case of “buyer beware,” at least the British consumer is better supplied with information than her counterpart in Australia. Any time I feel like increasing my stress levels, I can go onto the Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) site and, for instance, quickly learn that nearby Argyle Primary School “is a good school where pupils thrive in the positive, multicultural environment Their spiritual, moral, social and cultural development is excellent. The outstanding curriculum includes excellent opportunities for enrichment and creative activities. It prepares pupils very well for life as citizens of a changing world.” Ofsted’s reports also address the children directly. “Your behaviour is good, and you all get on well with each other,” it tells the fortunate pupils at Argyle. “We were particularly pleased by how sensible and responsible you are, and how older pupils help to look after younger ones. You are growing up into young people that the school and your parents can be proud of.” And so on. It’s all very reassuring reassuring, that is, if your children go to Argyle Primary School. If, on the other hand, you’re still engaged in the mad scramble to try to get your kids into a decent school in the first place, the “transparency” of the British system also adds an intensely competitive, even ruthless edge. In one recent and widely reported case Ofsted told children as young as four that they were failing in certain core subjects “and this means you are not well prepared for your next stage of education, nor your future adult lives.” It’s a hard world out there, boys and girls, so we might as well break the bad news sooner rather than later. As part of its “education revolution” the Rudd government has recently announced a series of reforms that, in their emphasis on increasing “transparency” and “accountability,” will potentially shift the Australian education system decisively in the same direction as Britain’s. That the Blair and Brown governments’ own education revolution should exercise such influence is hardly surprising. Both Australian Labor and British Labour have been deeply influenced by ideas about “social capital” and “social inclusion.” Each sees investment in education, combined with an efficient system of school accountability, as critical in preparing its country’s citizens for lives of productivity and self-fulfilment in a rapidly changing world. Each regards education as essential in contributing to economic prosperity but also in meeting the kinds of social objectives that modern centre-left governments value: building community, overcoming disadvantage, reducing poverty, and combating crime and anti-social behaviour. The importance the Rudd government attaches to education is underlined by the portfolio having been taken by the deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard - its place in government thinking underlined by her simultaneous responsibility for workplace relations and social inclusion. Consequently, modern social-democratic governments invest large sums of money in education but also sternly demand “transparency” and “accountability” in return. The taxpayer will need to be shown that their money is being spent wisely. As a key instrument for achieving its goals, the Rudd government will establish a National School Assessment and Data Centre - a body that seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to Ofsted - to carry out the required monitoring and reporting. School principals will be offered greater autonomy in connection with staffing and salaries, but there will also be initiatives to improve teachers’ career structures and reward excellent teaching. The Rudd government is especially taken with the United Kingdom’s Teach First program, itself inspired by an older and similar scheme in the United States, in which government, policy-makers, the teaching profession and businesses work together to recruit and then train young graduates for leadership roles in “difficult” schools. British influence is also evident in the Rudd government’s plans for “full service extended schools” which have been developed in some British schools to provide an extended range of services and facilities within the usual hours - health-care, adult learning, community activities, study support and child-care - thereby adding value to schools as centres of community life. Meanwhile Britain’s Sure Start program, which includes free pre-schooling of fifteen hours a week to all children from the age of three, is echoed in the Rudd government’s plans for the extension of early childhood education. British Labour points to major improvements in educational outcomes during its period in office and there was some recent (and favourable) publicity given to the first GCSE (Year 11) graduates whose entire education had occurred since it took office in 1997. There have also been reports that thousands more students are now achieving the expected levels of attainment in Maths and English for their age than when Labour came to power, and that black students are more likely to remain at school beyond the compulsory minimum age of sixteen. More controversially, the Blair government set up an expensive scheme for “city academies” to be established in place of “failing” schools. The academies operate outside the ordinary structure of the public school system, usually with a combination of government money and private sponsorship (including start-up funding), which gives the sponsor, often a business, a major say in governing the school and setting the curriculum. Critics have argued that they give too much influence to private concerns and individuals; some wonder, for instance, what a hedge-fund manager would know about running a school. But now universities and high-performing schools can sponsor an academy without having to provide the initial £2 million start-up fee required of private sponsors. Mark Latham, it might be recalled, suggested some years ago successful private schools might be asked to assist their disadvantaged public cousins, so some elements of the British reforms have at least been raised in Australian Labor Party policy circles. The British government’s plans for the academies have recently been vastly expanded, with numbers already pushing up towards the century and hundreds more planned for the next few years. The government’s plans for “trust schools” - essentially publicly funded schools governed by a charitable trust in which a business partner would have an influential role - have also aroused considerable hostility. Critics argue that they allow private interests to rule the roost in schools that are being bankrolled by the taxpayer while sidelining parents and local authorities. The Trust itself, for instance, hires staff and sets admissions policies, roles traditionally performed by government. Meanwhile, the Rudd government’s thrust is towards giving individual schools greater autonomy in staffing matters, empowering parents, integrating the education system more fully into a strategy for increasing national economic competitiveness, and strengthening the bonds between schools and their communities. In the circumstances, it would probably also be attracted to the idea of getting more business investment - and with it, influence - into state schools, even if it doesn’t embrace Blairite policies in toto. Labor governments in Australia, after all, have displayed occasional partiality towards public-private partnerships and the idea has already extended to schools. The Rudd government has announced an $11 billion Education Investment Fund that follows the billions of pounds British Labour governments have poured into improving education outcomes in Britain. But neither in Britain nor - it would now seem - in Australia, will schools be able to get their hands on this money without providing what the government deems acceptable performance in return. The “philosophy” behind the Rudd government’s initiatives, like the British system as it has evolved, is that schools should be accountable for the quality of the teaching they provide, as measured in “outcomes.” Parents, says Rudd, will then be able to make more “informed choices,” as was their “right.” The object is naturally to lift the quality of teaching and learning, and so improve these “outcomes” in order that Australia’s economy will become more competitive, its people will achieve their full potential, and social disadvantage will be overcome. Probably no sensible person would be inclined to query most of these objectives or the idea that parents are fully entitled to all available information on the performance of particular schools so that they can make an informed decision about where to send their children. There will be opposition in Australia - especially to any suggestion of the kinds of league tables that have become all the vogue in Britain - but the most significant arguments are likely to occur in connection with processes and procedures rather than larger goals or philosophies. Some critics, however, naturally have a gut reaction against the market-derived language of “choice” being applied in a simple-minded way to education provision, and a bureaucratic buzz-word such as “outcomes” being used as if educational attainment were as easily measurable as a bag of spuds. And this is where the problems begin, for the Rudd government appears to be moving towards a system based on a British model just as the very same approach is coming under increasingly sharp critique in this country. In particular, there is a widespread feeling that British school-children are now over-tested in the quest for those twin goals of accountability and transparency. This attitude was widely aired during a recent fiasco involving one stage of the national testing of British school-children. The immediate concerns turned on the efficiency of the conduct of a particular test by the American company that held the lucrative contract to run it, and there were calls for the resignation of Ken Boston, the Australian head of Britain’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. What was more interesting was that the public debate quickly turned to the larger and more important question of whether such tests, and indeed many aspects of the elaborate apparatus that had been assembled to measure “outcomes,” were needed anyway. As the Guardian (19 July 2008) recently commented: “Education is at the heart of progressive government. There is a danger though in its very prominence, for the more important it is to the government, the more the government will want proof that its policies work. As a result, tests intended quite sensibly to measure progress have become a curse, a stress for the children that sit them, a much-hated constraint on the teachers that teach them and, when processed into league tables, a controversial way of informing parents about how good schools are.” Many schools now distrust the results of the tests, seeing in them a blunt and unreliable instrument for assessing student capabilities. Some high schools ignore the results of tests conducted on primary school students and instead conduct their own. There’s also a feeling about that the testing system, on which much of the “accountability” system depends, is leading to a narrowing of educational horizons, in which students are prepared for tests more than for life. Outside the Labour “true believers” - a dwindling minority in this country - there would be some incredulity that Australia is treating British education as, in many respects, a desirable model. This attitude would be unfair as it’s clear that there are success stories in this country. Many of the achievements claimed by the Labour government cannot be dismissed as “spin.” But still there are complaints that too few children have achieved adequate standards of literacy and numeracy, that schools are “failing” British children, that middle-class parents are abandoning the public system, that political correctness has been substituted for real education, that grades are being inflated in the senior-year exams, that the curriculum is too crowded, that schools are hampered by excessive bureaucratic interference, and so on. There’s even an echo of the endless Australian debates about what role the federal and state governments should respectively play in the school system, but here it turns on the proper division of responsibility between local authorities, the schools themselves and Whitehall. The British and Australian Labo(u)r Parties have complex, intertwined recent histories, and during that period education has been a major field of policy cross-fertilisation between the two countries. Just as a version of Australia’s Higher Education Contribution Scheme was adopted for tertiary education by the Blair government, so now the Rudd government looks to some of the policies of its ailing British relative as it contemplates reform of Australia’s school system. But let’s hope that in the zeal for ensuring high performance, the excesses that occurred under Labour can be avoided. Accountability and transparency are only means to ends and if pursuing them through endless testing of dubious value undermines the quality of the educational experience, their place in the policy of a Labor government needs to be re-thought. And while parents do have a right to know if there are schools in their communities that are ill-equipped to provide their children with a good education, the purpose of such monitoring should be to assist battling schools to improve their performance, not shame them. But unfortunately, in the hands of Australia’s cultural warriors, a little knowledge is likely to be a dangerous thing. • Frank Bongiorno teaches in the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London. Photo: iStockphoto.co