THE AGE Newspaper article 19/11/07 

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT FROM THE CAMPAIGN?
 

Five commentators compare and rate what the major parties have promised in their education policies 

Kathy Walker
It is pleasing that both major parties have started to acknowledge that preschool is part of education. At least the words preschool and kindergarten were mentioned when they released their education policies.
This, in itself, is unusual as preschool education is often confused with, or consumed by, discussion about child care. Child care is an important national issue and it is pleasing to note increases in expenditure for this to continue has also been addressed in part, and that early childhood centres can incorporate both child care and preschool in many cases.

Labor's commitment to encouraging higher education for child-care workers, from TAFE to university, is an example of how early childhood is gaining some profile. This recognises the importance of highly qualified teaching staff in the early years of life. Labor has also committed to paying half of the HECS fees for early childhood educators who work in rural areas and this is a significant policy as rural and remote areas are significantly in need of qualified preschool teachers. The Liberal Party's offer of a tax rebate for preschool fees goes some way to recognising the high costs that exist. But, in truth, there is very little of substance in either major party in regard to preschool education.

Early childhood education, particularly preschool education, has been missing from the national agenda for decades, although preschool education has been internationally recognised as being one of the most significant phases of a child's life.

International research strongly indicates that preschool education contributes significantly in the long term, not only in literacy and numeracy but in a person's behaviour, employment, and long term wellbeing. Ensuring the provision of high quality education programs with qualified teachers for preschool children should be one of the highest priorities of a Federal Government.

Leaving most of the funding and organisation to the states has contributed significantly to an inconsistent, fragmented, confusing approach to preschools in Australia - and many thousands of young children are not having a preschool education at all.

Kathy Walker is an education consultant and the author of What's the Hurry? Reclaiming Childhood in an Overscheduled World.

Paul Johnson
According to OECD economists, there are just two policies that consistently generate economic growth - free trade, and expenditure on higher education. With both major parties presenting themselves as guardians of Australia's economic future, we might expect that investment in universities would take pride of place in the election campaign. This is what the party leaders had led us to believe.

There was Prime Minister John Howard's promise earlier this year of "a wonderful new dawn for tertiary education in this country', and Labor leader Kevin Rudd's commitment to "an education revolution" in which universities would be "critical to building Australia's research capacity". But these words now sound hollow.

The Liberals seem to have forgotten about higher education in their quest for votes (well, those lefty lecturers wouldn't vote for Mr Howard anyway, and the students are still grumpy about VSU).

Labor has made a low-cost commitment to additional student scholarships; a welcome move, but a partial response - at best - to the serious issues of student debt and low participation rates in regional Australia. There are also 1000 research fellowships for mid-career academics designed to prevent a further brain-drain overseas. Again a laudable objective, but not something that will transform the research standing of Australian universities.

The higher-education sector badly needs an injection of capital. -Most universities in Australia have some buildings and research facilities of which they can be proud, out every university has a major backlog of infrastructure investment - old laboratories, tired classrooms, leaking roofs, rotting concrete.

The Higher Education Endowment Fund announced by he Coalition in this year's federal budget is supposed to meet this need, but it will produce an average annual disbursement to each university of perhaps $lO million - not enough to transform anything. And there is no sign that either major party is willing to reverse the decline in the real value of university operating grants, which means that the sector will continue to rely heavily, and in some cases precariously, on fee income from overseas students in order to cover costs.

So much for the "new dawn' and the "education revolution'; for the higher education sector the election heralds little more than underfunded "business as usual".

Paul Johnson is vice-chancellor of La Trobe University.

Jane Caro
Would the last middle-class family to leave the Australian public school system please turn out the lights? From the perspective of public schools, Prime Minister John Howard has been nothing but a disaster. He has led a government that has comprehensively undermined confidence in public education (remember the "values-neutral" comment?) and forced public schools to take part in a pseudo market-based competition they simply cannot win because the rules are stacked against them.

The victims of his policies have primarily been the neediest and most vulnerable of our children, concentrated in schools with few, if any, middle-class students or role models. Recently Mr Howard described public schools as a "safety net" system offering a "reasonable" standard of education.

His education promises in this election campaign appear designed to complete the job of stripping the middle class out of public schools entirely. Not satisfied with giving 70 per cent of his funding to the 30 per cent of kids who attend private schools, he now wants to give private school parents a rebate on their fees (this has been tried before and abandoned), making those schools more affordable to the bottom end of the middle class.

While the initial amounts are small (and also cover the money he described as being "dressed up" as voluntary contributions in public schools), if he wins the election and keeps his promise, no doubt the amounts will go up, and the middle class will go with them.

A decent education in Australia will have ceased to be a right for all children and have become a purchasable commodity.

And Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd's response? Far from WorkChoices being the policy that cannot speak its name, the slow, boiling frog, destruction of the public education system, is the issue that cannot be mentioned, as poor Major Mike Kelly found out when he criticised the absurd census code system of establishing need and got jumped on from a great height. No, instead, Mr Rudd bedazzled Australia's parents with the latest in bright, shiny objects and has allowed the frog to go on boiling.

Jane Caro is co-author of The Stupid Country; How Australia is Dismantling Public Education, U N S W Press, 2007.

Andrew Norton
Some big dollars are attached to the word "education' in this campaign, but much of it is rebranded welfare rather than genuine education spending.

The Coalition promises a tax rebate on school education expenses worth about $2 billion a year. Educationally, the impact will be minimal. Many middle-income families, and all of them paying private school fees, will qualify for the full rebate without increasing their education spending at all.

Labor's education tax refund covers a narrower range of expenses and will cost taxpayers a little over half as much as the Coalition's rebate, but it shares the same problem: for most families it will replace rather than add to their own education spending.

Retailer Harvey Norman will see more education rebate dollars than Australia's schools.

Ineffective spending mars Labor's higher education policy as well. It is offering half-price HECS for maths and science, but fee discounting has little influence on discipline choice. Student interests are what count most. For the same reason, Labor's scholarships for students in 'national priority' degrees such as teaching, nursing, medicine and dentistry won't change student preferences.

The most concerning aspect of Labor's higher-education initiatives is less the wasted money than the misunderstanding they reveal. Labor's policies target demand for university places, but weak demand is not a major issue in higher education. Demand exceeds supply overall and by large margins for some courses. Lifting supply to meet demand is the policy challenge.

Under the Coalition, the system has been slow to respond to demand because Commonwealth-supported places are allocated through an inflexible centralised system, and because university revenue per student for these places is too low. Unfortunately, Labor's only announced policy in this area, abolishing full-fee undergraduate places, would make the supply problem worse.

In several "national priority" areas, full-fee students provide much-needed additional numbers. An "education revolution' in the way university places are funded and allocated is a good idea, but so far the choice is between the status quo and something slightly worse.

Andrew Norton is a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.

David Loader
Any money given to schools, or to parents to assist with schooling, has to be good, but you can't call that an educational revolution. And to think that such tinkering is presented with fanfare and the expectation of adulation; I am not impressed and I hope the community isn't either. In Australia, there is significant inequality in the outcomes from schooling. This exists between sectors, such as private and public. It also exists within each sector. In fact, the inequality of outcomes from schooling can be as great or even greater between schools in the same sector, as between schools in the different sectors. The gaps between the high and low performing students in Australia are unacceptably large.

this is not just a problem for the individual student who is disadvantaged; it is a problem for society. Yet it would appear that our politicians are prepared to tolerate an unjust system.

A better, more equitable future will not be delivered by providing improved school facilities, better school leadership, better-trained teachers, additional technology, although all of this would help. We need to urgently address the plight of the disadvantaged in our community and that may not necessarily be best achieved in schools as they are presently constituted.

Where is the bold reimagining that might lead to an educational revolution? Where is the encouragement and support of social capital, so critical if we are to move forward as a society? It is not acceptable that schools might be inadvertently contributing to a worsening social situation, supporting one group over another or one student over another.

And one other very important point, politicians. The quality of today's schools cannot exceed the quality of the teachers who are at the heart of them. We need to get the right people to be teachers and to retain the talented teachers and principals. Let' s stop the demeaning public quibbling over salaries and acknowledge that for quality we need to pay not a little more but a lot more to those people who have both our young people and our future as a community in their care. Dare to lead, don't just tinker!

David Loader is an education consultant and associate professor in the faculty of education at the University of Melbourne. He is a former principal of M LC and Wesley College.