2025-03-18
Good education outcomes are due to equality – the more equality the better – but Australia’s education system has become increasingly unequal over recent decades. Greens education policies should prioritise reducing these obscene levels of inequality.
By Rob Delves, a Green Issue co-editor and a member of the Fremantle-Tangney Regional Group
The one big thing I learned from 51 years as a teacher in several countries and three states is this: make the schools as equal as possible. This is best given expression by the local state school, offering education that is free, compulsory and secular, with all children from that community “learning together side by side.” WHY? Firstly, it’s basic social justice, equality of opportunity. Secondly, you get better outcomes this way. Around the world the correlations are very strong – the more equal the country, the better the overall performance of the schools. Rank countries by how big is the gap between the richest 10% and poorest 10% and that will be very close to their rankings on school outcomes.
Unfortunately we’ve come a long way from that federation era commitment to equality in education and the rot really accelerated with Howard. He set out to destroy the principle of equality expressed in equally well funded free local schools. The values he introduced were individualism and parental choice. The unstated but clear message to parents was: “It’s your responsibility to seek out the best school you can for your child and we’ll help you in that search by increasing funding for private schools so they can reduce their fees for your benefit, while for those parents who don’t make the effort and sacrifice to make best use of our choice model, you’ll have to make do with a basic, second rate local school”.
There have been two major results from 30 years of this education model: first, inequalities between schools have reached obscene levels – just have a look at Guildford Grammar and Governor Stirling High School sitting right next to each other. As well as inequalities of facilities, there has developed a huge inequality in which schools take on the very difficult task of educating children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The famous Gonski Report of 2011 was mostly remembered for advocating big increases in school funding, but perhaps even more important was the Gonski team’s detailed analysis of who was doing the heavy lifting of educating disadvantaged and damaged children. He blew apart the bullshit PR spin from the private school lobby that they were doing their fair share – the many state schools that were struggling were doing so because they were dealing with a very unfair share of difficult kids. Gonski’s second main recommendation was lots of extra funding for schools dealing with concentrated disadvantage.
The second result from Howard is that we’ve become a dumber country. Our results on international rankings have slid down. Our top 30% do about the same as the top 30% in other countries, but our bottom 30% achieve much poorer results than in more equal countries – Finland, all the Nordics, Japan, Singapore, Canada, etc… That’s what you get when you overfund already wealthy private schools and underfund the many state schools struggling with concentrated disadvantage.
The Liberals have been in power for so long that this inequality has become entrenched. They love it. Labor is much better, but as in so many other areas, its moves in the right direction are far too timid. I think it’s mostly because they are afraid to take on the rich and powerful. The classic example was Gillard’s response to the Gonski Report: “we will implement its main points but not one school will lose a single dollar of funding under my government.”
The Greens platform on education should start with going the full Gonski, as Bob Brown committed to at the time. Increase total funding, with much more to schools struggling with concentrated disadvantage. This is not economically illiterate hippie dreaming ‒ David Gonski was a successful, hard-nosed businessman whose team researched how to improve our education outcomes. Humane social justice meets hard-nosed evidence ‒ as in many other policy areas, that combination is what I love about our party.
Header photo: Wembley Primary School 2019. Credit: State Library of Western Australia
[Opinions expressed are those of the author and not official policy of Greens WA]