Australia’s education debate must move beyond funding and sector structure to confront a deeper governance problem: school systems that measure constantly but fail to learn from teachers, principals and communities.
The recent exchange between Trevor Cobbold and Save Our Schools and Chris Bonnor with Tom Greenwell, highlights both the strength of, and the frustration with, contemporary education debate.
Trevor has once again mounted a powerful defence of public education and needs-based funding. Greenwell and Bonnor have responded with a thoughtful argument that structural reform must go beyond funding and address the competitive advantages enjoyed by non-government schools.
There is much merit in both positions. Both are motivated by a genuine concern for educational equity. Both recognise the increasing segregation of Australian schooling and the growing concentration of disadvantage within the public system. Both seek a fairer system.
Yet reading the exchange, I found myself wondering whether we have become trapped within a debate that is now too narrow.
After more than 40 years in education, I have come to suspect that funding is only one part of a much larger governance problem. It is a suspicion that sharpens when I ask a simple question: what if the reforms being proposed were actually achieved?
What if public schools finally reached 100 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard? What if some version of the structural reforms proposed by Bonner and Greenwell were implemented? Would we necessarily see the improvements we expect?
The answer may seem obvious. More resources should produce better outcomes. Fairer arrangements should produce fairer results.
Funding matters. Public schools should be properly resourced and concerns about the competitive imbalance between sectors deserve serious consideration.
The question, however, is whether we have become so focused on funding and structure that we have overlooked the way educational systems themselves operate.
When I began teaching, schools were comparatively simple organisations. They were not necessarily better and they were certainly not perfect. But they operated within clearer boundaries. Teachers taught. Principals led their schools. Regional offices provided support. Central offices established broad policy directions. Most importantly, there was a widespread assumption that those closest to the work possessed valuable knowledge about how that work should be done.
Over time something changed.
As society became more complex, schools inherited more responsibilities. Problems that once belonged primarily to families, communities, health systems and welfare agencies increasingly arrived at the school gate carrying the expectation of educational solutions.
Many of these expectations were understandable. The response, however, was typically administrative. New policies, frameworks, reporting requirements and compliance processes were introduced in the hope that greater oversight would produce better outcomes. Individually, many appeared sensible. Collectively, they created a system of growing complexity.
As complexity increased, authority moved steadily away from schools and towards systems. The assumption seemed to be that improvement could be designed from the centre and delivered through increasingly detailed oversight. Yet schools are not factories and education is not a production line.
One of the paradoxes of modern education is that systems collect more information from schools than at any point in history while appearing less willing to learn from the people providing it. Teachers are constantly consulted, surveyed and reviewed, yet many would struggle to identify a major policy initiative that emerged directly from their collective experience.
Information flows upwards and instructions flow downwards. Somewhere in between, professional knowledge is often lost.
This is not simply a problem of administration. It is a problem of governance.
Effective governance depends on a system’s ability to learn. That learning occurs when information flows not only upwards, but also influences the decisions that flow back down. Teachers, principals and communities are not simply recipients of policy. They are the system’s primary source of knowledge about what is actually happening in schools.
Yet modern education often behaves as though expertise resides primarily in the bureaucracy rather than in the classroom. Schools are expected to provide information. Central offices are expected to provide solutions.
The result is a curious imbalance. We have become extraordinarily good at measuring schools while paying comparatively little attention to measuring the effectiveness of the systems that govern them.
Attendance, literacy, retention, achievement and wellbeing are monitored relentlessly. Yet questions about the effectiveness of bureaucratic structures, policy initiatives and compliance frameworks are rarely subjected to the same scrutiny.
In any other field this would seem unusual. We would not evaluate workers without evaluating management. We would not assess outcomes without examining the structures responsible for producing them. Yet in education this asymmetry has become normal.
The question is not whether bureaucracy is necessary. It is. The question is whether the bureaucracy itself remains capable of learning.
These are governance questions, yet they receive remarkably little attention.
One of the ironies of contemporary education is that debates about funding rarely examine where the money goes once it enters the system. Every new compliance requirement creates additional administrative work. Every new framework requires implementation, monitoring and review. Every new reform generates a demand for coordinators, consultants, project teams and reporting mechanisms.
The cumulative effect is that significant resources are diverted from classrooms to the structures established to oversee them. That may be entirely justified if educational outcomes improve. The problem is that we rarely subject these structures to the same scrutiny we apply to schools. We measure attendance, literacy, retention and achievement with increasing precision, yet seldom ask whether the bureaucratic expansion consuming these resources has produced comparable gains in learning.
The funding debate matters, as does the structural debate. Trevor Cobbold is right to insist that public schools deserve fair funding. Bonner and Greenwell are right to question a system that places public schools in competition with institutions operating under different rules.
But perhaps neither debate reaches the heart of the problem.
Perhaps the deeper question is whether we have built educational systems capable of using resources effectively in the first place. How large should central bureaucracies be? What decisions genuinely require central control and what decisions should belong to schools? How do systems learn from practitioners and how do they know when they have stopped listening?
These are governance questions, yet they sit largely outside the mainstream education debate. They may be the questions that matter most.
At its heart, the challenge facing Australian education may be a question of trust. Trust that teachers possess valuable professional knowledge. Trust that principals understand the realities of their communities. Trust that local circumstances matter and that professional judgement remains an essential part of effective practice.
Without that trust, every problem risks generating another layer of oversight and every failure another compliance requirement. The result is a system that becomes increasingly difficult to govern and increasingly distant from the realities of classrooms.
A system that ceases to listen to its teachers eventually loses its capacity to learn from its own experience. Funding can address resource shortages. Structural reform can address inequity. Neither, however, can compensate for a system that has become disconnected from the knowledge held by the people it employs to educate children.
Until we confront the question of governance, we may continue arguing about how much money enters the system while overlooking a more fundamental question:
Have we built a system capable of learning from the people it employs to teach children?
John Frew worked in public education, including as foundation principal at a secondary school for students with Conduct Disorder and Oppositional Disturbance. John has authored numerous books the latest being ‘Neuroscience and Teaching Very Difficult Kids’. Since retiring, he has continued to comment on social issues.