Will more funding help revive Australia's embattled education system? Much more than money is needed to improve the quality of teaching.
IN his speech to the Australian Teachers' Union national conference last week the Prime Minister, Mr Keating, promised $130 million over the next few years "to help equip teachers for the challenges they face, to encourage and increase their professionalism, to give them the training and support the need".
These are laudable aims, but simply injecting more money into the system, without basic reforms to the structures and procedures of teacher training and to the attitudes of the major teachers' unions, will not achieve them.
Increasing spending on education without implementing the right educational and industrial relations reforms will not lift the quality of education. Between 1975-76 and 1988-89 expenditure on education per pupil in Victoria increased by 29 per cent in real terms.
Yet studies by the Australian Council for Educational Research comparing literacy and numeracy among Victorian 10-year-olds and 14- year-olds over the same period showed no improvement in minimum standards. The money went towards satisfying union demands, such as for smaller classes.
By 1991, the teacher-pupil ratio in Victorian Government schools was well below the national average, resulting in around $240 million annual "excess" expenditure. No one could reasonably suggest that, as a result, the quality of Victorian education exceeded the national average. Mr Keating's promise to raise the productivity and the status of teachers will not succeed without the problem of union power being confronted.
Among Mr Keating's promises is one to establish a program "to renew and increase teachers' knowledge of their subject disciplines". There is little doubt that knowledge of their disciplines among a minority of teachers is lacking.
According to figures released by the Australian College of Education, one in five teachers of year 12 history has completed only one or two years of tertiary history study. A similar proportion has not studied history at all at the tertiary level. Almost 30 per cent of teachers of foreign languages at year 12 level have not studied these subjects at the tertiary level. One in six teachers of science has not studied science at the tertiary level.
But the problem of inadequate knowledge among teachers is less a result of the information revolution, as Mr Keating implies, than of the inadequacy of training and selection procedures.
The reforms needed to teacher training include raising the entrance requirements to teacher training courses. Throughout Australia, students are being admitted to teacher training programs with HSC scores (or equivalent) on average 100-160 marks lower than those required for commerce, law, medicine and engineering. Raising entrance standards to training courses would help raise the calibre and thus the status of the teaching profession.
Changes in the allocation of time in training programs are also needed. As a 1990 survey revealed, in primary bachelor of education programs, trainees spend on average less than half their time studying the disciplines they will teach.
TOO much of their time is taken up with courses concerned neither with cognitive development nor with the systematic development of teaching skills (eg subjects with titles such as "The Socio-Cultural Context of Education"). Mastery of a subject is an essential condition of teaching it well. Training courses should reflect this fact.
According to Mr Keating, 50 per cent of academics in teacher education have not taught in a schoolroom since 1973 and only 20 per cent have taught in schools in the 1980s. The problem implied here is the remoteness of education academics from schools.
The solution Mr Keating proposes is for the Government to fund the early retirement of academic staff. But a far better solution to the problem of the remoteness of trainers from the reality of schools is for trainees to spend much more of their time in schools under the guidance and instruction of experienced teachers, carefully selected for their outstanding ability. For a trainee to learn from such a teacher on the job is of far greater value than attending classes in the theory of education.
Although the major unions may resist it, alternative avenues of entry to teaching, such as exist in the US, should be established in Australia. Individuals proficient in a professional field are deterred from transferring to teaching mid-career by requirements that they complete long formal training programs as students at institutions.
A training model focused around intensive school-based training would enable the aptitude of candidates to be assessed quickly and the skills needed to allow efficient teaching.
Mr Keating boasts of the large increase, over the past decade, in school retention rates (the proportion of young people who complete year 12) and in the creation of 200,000 higher-education places. He confuses quantity with quality. Retention rates and demand for places in higher education institutions have been propelled by youth unemployment.
One result of the increases has been a higher proportion of senior students who have neither the ability nor the aptitude for study, leading to an increase in problems of classroom disruption.
The real question should be not how many years young people are spending at school, but how their time there is spent. The benefits which might result from the considerable increase in retention rates in Victoria, for example, are severely compromised by the inadequacies of the Victorian Certificate of Education.
Some of Victoria's universities have complained that students who have completed VCE maths know less than students who completed the old "unreformed" HSC maths.
Mr Keating is right to argue in his speech that equity and excellence in education are not incompatible aims (the phrase "excellence and equity" is the NSW Government's motto for education). But he is wrong to see an inconsistency between a voucher scheme (such as that proposed for higher education by the federal coalition) and equity. A voucher scheme ensures that public funding reflects student (and parental) choice.
IN higher education it would allow the development of private institutions and thus encourage diversity. The policy of the Federal Government in higher education has been effectively to encourage uniformity (the so-called unified system).
In his speech, Mr Keating identified values which are central to the purpose of education: an education system, he says, should be both efficient and fair; it should serve the interests of the individual and of the nation; it should instruct young people "in those values we hold as universal and unchangeable, and in the skills and knowledge they will need if they are to play a rewarding role in modern society".
The pity is that the school curriculum does not more fully embody these values and that more of the policy initiatives announced by Mr Keating were not aimed at boosting the place of such values in schools.
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