What do these Tasmanians have in common?

Former Governor Prof Kate Warner; former Premiers David Bartlett and Lara Giddings; MLCs Ruth Forrest and Meg Webb; federal MHAs Bridget Archer and Andrew Wilkie; mayors Anna Reynolds, Brendan Bromley and Christina Holmdahl; independent candidates Lara Alexander, Angela Armstrong, Charlie Burton, Clare Glade-Wright, Sue Hickey, Kristie Johnston and Pam Sharpe; former MLC Greg Hall AM; Michael Bailey, CEO TCCI; Ally Bradley, Executive GM Southern Cross Austereo; Scott Harris, CEO Beacon Foundation; Rosalie Martin, speech pathologist and former Tasmanian of the Year; Ray Mostogl, CEO TMEC; Adrienne Picone, CEO TasCOSS; – Emeritus Professor Bill Mulford AO, former Dean Faculty of Education UTAS; Michael White, former Director of Schools, Victoria; Dianne Underwood, CEO Colony 47; and in numbers too numerous to mention individually, other former members of parliament including former ministers of education; business and community leaders; medical specialists (mostly paediatricians); diverse professionals; entrepreneurs; academics; tradespeople; and most importantly current and former educators – school principals and teachers.

We doubt you will think that all – over 300 at the time of writing – share the same political views. But all have agreed to sign an open letter calling on the incoming government to establish an open and comprehensive inquiry into the Tasmanian education system, within 100 days of assuming office.

The open letter is printed below. There is also a link to the letter where you can add your name, if you share the concern of the signatories for the future of young Tasmanians, and Tasmania.

Here is why we think you should.

Tasmania’s young people are being sold short by our education system. It is not supporting them to achieve learning outcomes which are the ordinary expectation of young people and their families in the rest of Australia.

These outcomes are needed for young Tasmanians not just to find secure, well-paying employment, typically after further training or study beyond the successful completion of Year 12, but also to participate fully in an increasingly complex and demanding society as confident, resilient and well-informed citizens.

There is a host of credible data that shows us the problem.

The open letter refers to the 2024 Report on Government Services (ROGS) from the Productivity Commission, which says just 53% of young Tasmanians gained their Year 12 certificate or the equivalent (a VET Certificate III) in 2022 compared to 76% nationally. (See Data table 4A.42) This data also shows differences by socio-economic status (SES) which tells us that high SES students in Tasmania at 66.5% were less likely to get their Year 12/Cert III than low SES students in the whole of Australia at 69.7%.

Moreover, the gaps between the attainment of Tasmanians and all Australians of high, medium and low SES, which are 16.4%, 18.2% and 24.4%, respectively, show that even though Tasmania has the highest proportion of low SES students, our system is least capable of providing them with an education as good as they would receive in other states. The gap between what Tasmanians achieve at school compared to their interstate cousins widens as we look at students from poorer backgrounds – half as much again for the low SES students compared to the high SES students.

These shocking figures are consistent with data from Tasmania’s Year 12 authority, TASC, which shows the percentage of students in Year 10 in 2020 at public, Catholic and independent schools who completed their TCE by 2022 – 42.7%, 73.6% and 76.8%, respectively.

It takes a while for that to sink in. A Year 10 student in a government school has less than a 50% chance of completing their Year 12. This is data for full-time students, but the TASC data for full-time TCE completions in 2022 (3,184) is only 143 less than for all completions (3,327) so adding in part-time students will not change the picture at all.

How can it be that less than half of our public school Year 10 students go on to gain their Year 12 certificate?

One possible explanation is that our government schools are so woefully underfunded that they simply do not have the resources – teachers and all – to see their students succeed. That’s the argument repeatedly put by the AEU (among others) in their laudable efforts to have the full funding recommended by the Gonski Report, more than a decade ago, finally delivered to all schools.

ROGS provides data on this too. Let’s start with teachers. (See Table 4A.13)

Tasmania has one public school teacher for 12.7 students. Only Victoria and the NT have more teachers per student. The Australian average is 13.4 students for every teacher. So, a Tasmanian school with around 500 students would have two more teachers than the Australian average. That might not sound like much, but it does make clear that lack of teachers does not explain why our students learn less.

It might be that Tasmanian teachers are less well supported by non-teaching staff. But in Tasmania there are 8.2 students for every member of total staff, whereas in the whole of Australia there are 9.2. Therefore our Tasmanian school with 500 students has 6.7 more members of staff than the average Australian school.

Perhaps additional staff are needed to offer relatively poor Tasmanian students the same learning opportunities as students from wealthier communities? Well, of course they are! This is the whole basis of the argument for Gonski funding. But poorer students and schools need this additional money in all of Australia, and to date none have it.

To be clear: Gonski funding is needed to close the gap between the attainment of low and high SES students, which the ROGS data for 2022 tells us is 13.2% for the whole of Australia, as measured by Year 12 attainment. Gonski is aimed at narrowing that – let’s call it the ‘Gonski gap’.

The Gonski gap in Tasmania is wider than the national average at 21.2%. Lack of Gonski funding in Tasmania does not explain why the gap between low and high SES students Year 12 attainment in Tasmania is getting close to double the whole of Australia.

Nor does lack of Gonski funding explain the attainment gap between students in the same SES band in Tasmania and elsewhere. Gonski is about evening up the learning outcomes of rich and poor. It is not about evening up the learning outcomes of Tasmanians and others of the same wealth, or lack of it. That is a separate and peculiarly Tasmanian problem which if all schools in Australia had the full Gonski funding might well widen, rather than close, as poorer mainland schools close in on the attainment of their wealthier neighbours.

So yes, bring on Gonski, all Australia needs it, but let’s not pretend that it will solve our peculiar Tasmanian problem of low attainment of all students compared to like students in the rest of Australia. Nor, by itself, the larger than elsewhere inequality of outcomes between rich and poor in Tasmania. Especially since other data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that Tasmania already spends $2,827 per full-time equivalent student more than the national average. That is 28.3% more, for outcomes at Year 12 that are 23.3% less.

But if lack of Gonski funding does not explain Tasmania’s low educational attainment and the greater disparity between outcomes for low and high SES students here, what might? ROGS does report some data that might be explanatory. (See Table 4A.24) According to the results of the 2018 OECD Program for International Assessment of 15-year-olds (PISA), 56% of the lowest SES quartile of Tasmanian students do not feel that they belong at school, compared to 32% of this group in the whole of Australia. That is the highest figure for all quintiles of students in all jurisdictions in Australia. Furthermore, in Tasmania this lowest quintile of students is twice as likely to feel like they don’t belong at school compared to the next highest quintile, and the ones above that.

We need to be careful of reading too much into this data as the error margins are quite large, but even so the difference between the sense of belonging to school of Tasmania’s poorest students and those elsewhere is stark.

Does our education system have a problem with poor students that does not exist elsewhere in Australia?

Explanations of data such as we have presented above abound. Just using letters to the editor over the years as a sample, the cause of Tasmania’s twin education attainment problems – our extra-large Gonski gap, and the gap between Tasmanian and like SES students in the other states – is variously supposed to be Tasmanian parents’ poor parenting skills; childhood poverty; bad teaching in primary schools; lack of discipline in high schools; lack of respect for teachers; a crowded and irrelevant curriculum; poor integration of the levels of schooling, particularly between high school and college; communities and families that do not see the value of education; teacher and teacher union opposition to reform; UTAS poor teacher training; the Tasmanian economy not providing economic rewards from completing school; our convict past; and so on. And the definitive counsel of despair that was put forward by one letter writer aiming to set a mainland critic straight: Tasmanians are inbred which will mean our children will never have the intelligence to succeed like mainlanders whose parents had a wider choice of mates!

Much of this is blaming – indeed, insulting – the victim, and blame shifting between various parts of the education ecology: community, parents, teachers, employers, the organisation of schooling, unions, and governments, state and federal. And much of the education discourse focuses on competing narratives about the cause as if naming the problem was the solution, rather than attempting to understand how change might best be effected.

So while the political parties are presenting ideas and funding proposals for education which we welcome, whether focused on strengthening our teacher workforce and supporting students to succeed in TAFE and university as Labor has done; putting the emphasis on supporting earlier learning including reforming the teaching of literacy in primary schools, and increasing infrastructure spending as per the policy of the Liberals; or the Greens defending the importance of quality public education being available for all, along with well-intentioned statements by the Jackie Lambie Network and many independents, we need to know what is going wrong before we can be sure any of this will put it right. Tasmania’s young people need more than nudging the system in any of the right directions.

We need a wide ranging and effective inquiry which can investigate the cause or more likely causes of our twin problems, which can explain why we are different by discovering where we are different, and recommends how we can change.

So please, read the letter and consider adding your name to the call for our new government to make fixing our education problems a first and foremost order of business.

Call for an Inquiry into the Tasmanian Education System

We call on whoever wins the upcoming 23 March 2024 election and forms the next Tasmanian Government to commission an independent inquiry into the effectiveness of the Tasmanian Education System and its functions, within the first 100 days of assuming office.

We believe the outcome of an independent inquiry will provide the Government of the day the opportunity to reform the Tasmanian Education System as needed to ensure that young Tasmanians benefit from education at least to the same extent as their equals elsewhere in Australia.

We acknowledge the good intentions of the current and previous governments to improve educational outcomes for young Tasmanians. But, while there has been significant investment in the education system to this end, there has been little improvement.

Indeed, data provided by the Productivity Commission’s most recent Report on Government Services shows the gap between Tasmanian educational outcomes and those in other jurisdictions is large and widening. Just 53% of young Tasmanians are leaving school with a Year 12 or equivalent qualification, compared to 76% nationally.

This is despite the Tasmanian Government already spending more money per student than all other jurisdictions, bar the Northern Territory, and having higher ratios of staff to students.

Many now agree that the system is not functioning as it should, nor is it meeting the needs of Tasmania, nor Tasmanians.

There is also little agreement as to the scale and source of the problem, nor how it can be fixed. Tasmania deserves a fresh approach.

We believe that an inquiry must have the authority to establish why young Tasmanians are not achieving educational outcomes like their peers in other states. And, that an inquiry must have the expertise to recommend solutions to the cause/s of the problems identified.

The inquiry should be led by an acknowledged educational leader of national standing and include members with expertise and experience in effective education reform.

The inquiry must:

*Clearly articulate the objective of an educational system fit for Tasmania and Tasmanians in the 21st century;

*Map the different parts of the existing system and their roles and functions as they currently operate;

*Assess whether the different parts of the existing system are functioning as needed;

*Clarify how the Tasmanian education system compares with those of other states and territories in processes, regulation and outcomes; and

*Make recommendations for improving the system including, if needed but not limited to, changes in legislation, regulations, organisational structure, staffing and curriculum.

We make this call out of our shared deep concern for the future of young Tasmanians, and their families, for the well-being of all, and for the broader Tasmanian community and economy. It is no longer acceptable that Tasmania continues to languish at the bottom of Australia’s economic and social indicators.

We believe that an effectively functioning Tasmanian education system is the key to unlocking a brighter future for all Tasmanians.

You can add your support ot the letter here: https://openletter.earth/call-for-an-inquiry-into-the-tasmanian-education-system-45369f23

Dr Lisa Denny, workforce demographer; Saul Eslake, economist and Vice Chancellor’s Fellow, UTAS; Emeritus Professor Michael Rowan, philosopher.