Dr Ken Boston OA, a member of the Gonski Review Panel which looked into how Australian schools are funded, gave a keynote address at the AEU on Thursday. He is a former head of the NSW Education Department, and former Chief Executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in the UK.
Dr Boston outlined the once in a generation opportunity that the Gonski reforms present to guarantee a high quality education for all students, no matter which Australian school they attend.
If only the Australian Government had the will and desire to implement the Gonski vision for education, we would have no need for Education Hothouses or think-tanks or Education Ambassadors or Foundations of Educational Excellence – all of whom are no doubt well-meaning but who will probably come up with the same old same old, couched in the latest Edspeak, very little of which will ever actually be implemented.
Dr Boston’s message was simple – education should be sector-blind and need-based. That means putting money where it is needed most and NOT where it is not needed. Because if we don’t, the whole of Australia will ultimately suffer.
Socio-economic disadvantage is and always has been the chief indicator of educational attainment. If you are middle class and well educated, it won’t matter whether your child goes to private school or not in terms of educational achievement. In other words if your child goes to a state school in a high socioeconomic suburb he/she will do as well as if they went to a private school. And they will do better at university than privately educated children.
This has been proven in England where only 7% of children attend private schools compared with 34% here. As Dr Boston pointed out, the government schools in the leafy green Home Counties achieve excellent results while the sink schools in the north do not.
He also pointed out that it is time we stopped blaming teachers and put the blame where it belongs – on governments asking teachers to do too much with too little. We can all think of the odd inadequate teacher and extrapolate that to judge them all but the truth is that the vast majority of teachers work hard at teaching children.
The equation seems so blatantly obvious to me – if we accept the Maggie Thatcher, right wing attitude that unless a child can do as well as she did, they are of no use to current society and little money should there fore be spent on them – then as a country we will pay the price in physical and mental health, welfare payments, criminality and law and order.
We will, as a result of not adequately supporting the disadvantaged, become a less civil society with all its associated costs.
*Jean Walker taught in Tasmanian high schools for 35 years. She has travelled widely and has taught in England and Sweden. She was state President of the AEU Tasmanian Branch from 2004 to 2008 and in retirement is president of Glenorchy U3A and the Australia-wide U3A Online. She was a marriage celebrant for 12 years and is now working part-time sub-editing at Hansard.
