When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared victory on election night, he said he wanted to unite Australians around our shared values of fairness and opportunity, hard work and kindness to those in need. So what would this look like in Australian schools? After all, schools are where a society that believes in justice and opportunity should begin. Equality is more than just funding schools.
It’s about matching teachers’ passion with the respect, time, resources and conditions that will enable them to do what they signed up to do: make a difference in the lives of students. Based on our research on the use of qualitative evidence to promote quality in education, I propose that fairness, hard work and kindness should support school policy in three ways.
The first priority is fairness in funding. It’s been ten years since the Gonski Review suggested a more equitable approach to school funding. The aim was to ensure that differences in students’ educational outcomes are not the product of differences in wealth, income or power. Since then, the approach has diluted and deteriorated.
While funding for schools grew by more than A$2 billion in a decade, the Grattan Institute found that when wage growth is taken into account, private schools received more than 80 percent of this additional funding, despite receiving less than 20 percent of Australia’s most disadvantaged students had been educated. COVID-19 has exacerbated the inequalities hard-wired in Australia’s education system through the historic separation of schools.
The basis of the reform must therefore be reviewed. As the then Prime Minister Julia Gillard, a former education minister, actually tied a hand behind the government’s back by committing to the principle that no school would lose money as a result of the reforms. This distorted Gonski’s need-based aspiration.
The need-based funding to be sent to public schools to be fully funded under the Gonski model amounts to over $1,000 per student per year. But making sure all schools get their fair share of public funding is only part of the challenge. A second priority is to reward the hard work of teachers fairly. This should include incentives to enter the profession, and better wages and working conditions to keep them there.
The teacher shortage is reaching a critical level. Modeling in Queensland, for example, shows a 25 percent drop in the number of public high school graduates over a five-year period. High school enrollment is expected to increase by 13 percent over the same period. As Pasi Sahlberg, a professor of education at Southern Cross University, points out, teachers start out excited and leave exhausted.
During the campaign, Labor promised that high-achieving students would be paid up to $12,000 a year to study education to raise the standards of teachers. We want to ensure that our children receive the best possible education. That means we have to make sure they get the best education, Albanian said.
Labor also announced plans to double the number of high-achieving students enrolling in teacher training in the next ten years, from about 1,800 a year now to 3,600. Also, approximately 5,000 students who receive an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) of 80 can receive an annual payment of USD 10,000 over their four-year degree. An additional $2,000 a year has been pledged to students committed to teaching in the regions hardest hit by teacher shortages.
Providing such incentives can especially work, as only 3 percent of high achievers in Australia teach for undergraduate studies. Compare this to the 19 percent who choose science for a bachelor’s degree. Three decades ago, about ten times this percentage of high achievers chose to teach.
But unlike other fields, such as agriculture, such rankings are less reliable as predictors of educational achievement. It is rightly argued that in addition to reading and math skills, other skills, such as high-level interpersonal skills, are important for the quality of education. We need to think more boldly and openly about how to inspire and assess people to enter the profession.
But even if such measures can attract new teachers, the dropout rates are also worrying. Teachers constantly report that they suffer from stress, burnout, parental abuse and excessive workload, which takes away from teaching students.
Due to the increased workload, they have less time to focus on teaching students. It eventually drives many out of education. Strikes for better pay in New South Wales over the government-imposed 2.5 percent pay cap for civil servants relate to fair pay at one level, but also reflect deeper concerns about working conditions.
Teachers don’t feel respected. A 2020 survey found that nearly three-quarters of educators felt undervalued. So the challenge of keeping teachers in the profession involves much more than wages. Research has shown that salary is ranked by factors such as dedication to the profession, job satisfaction and positive relationships with students and colleagues. The most common reasons for leaving are work pressure, not being appreciated, stress and burnout from years of struggle in substandard conditions.
Promoting excellence in education is therefore not just about attracting quality candidates, nor is it just about paying them at the right level once they become teachers. It is about respecting their judgment and professionalism and supporting them throughout their careers. Even though the pay may be low compared to other professions and the workload overwhelming, educators continue to teach because they are driven by a deep, passionate moral purpose to make a difference in children’s lives.
We understand the challenges. Let’s hope that kindness, honesty and a clear moral purpose guide the policy of Australia’s new government to address both current problems and deep-seated historical legacies. The Albanian government has an arduous, complex task akin to teaching.
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