The annus horribilis of Australian education
The diabolical state of education in this country can be traced back to a trifecta of policy blunders made by the Labor Government a decade ago, argues James Mathias in a speech to the Western Australian Education Policy Committee.
The following is an edited transcript of the speech.
2012 was surely Julia Gillard’s Annus Horribilis. Her policy failure trifecta in education has caused close to a decade of problems and it’s still not over. Remarkably, everything we know to be wrong in the sector today can be traced back to decisions made by her and the previous Labor Government in that year. And rather cruelly, it may take many more years beyond to fix this mess up.
Australian students participating in our schools, universities, TAFEs and training providers all face some of the greatest policy problems ever faced by any generation of student in the nation’s history.
They are that:
School children are slipping drastically from where they once were and our children are continuing to fall behind those in other countries;
University funding and uncapped commonwealth places are unsustainable and graduate outcomes declining; and
We are in a skills crisis caused by our inability to train more young Australians through apprenticeships and our VET sector is in drastic need of reform.
I cannot begin to explain the damage caused by just one administration over just one year on our education system – it was truly an act of bastardry what happened and I’ll detail just how this happened in all three areas of our education system .
Skills
2012 was a busy year for the Gillard Government in skills as it made two big policy blunders. They signed a five-year national partnership agreement on skills reform with the states and territories and then uncapped VET FEE HELP by abolishing any requirement for a pathway to higher education.
They also gutted the employer incentives program paid to employers who take on apprentices. This combination is what I would describe as one of the worst policy combinations in Australia’s education policy history.
National Partnership Agreement on Skills Reform
It’s important to note that the Commonwealth doesn’t directly fund a single apprenticeship. It is up to the states and territories to define what an apprenticeship is. They pay for most of the training and have their own skills priority lists. The only way the Commonwealth can directly seek to influence policy in this area is through a national partnership agreement with the states and territories where they get paid for meeting certain outcomes.
The Gillard Government signed the national partnership agreement in 2012 and paid $1.75 billion to the states and territories over five years to 2017, effectively locking the Abbott Turnbull government into its mess.
Analysis by the Menzies Research Centre shows that in the previous five years to signing this agreement, every single state and territory was increasing funding in their apprenticeships sector. In Western Australia for example, in 2006 the Government spent $357 million on apprentices and by 2011 this had grown to $577 million.
However, after this national partnership agreement was signed and for reasons I’ll briefly outline, every state and territory began to withdraw funding to their apprenticeships sector and not just by a small amount – in just the first three years following the agreement, they collectively reduced spending by 24 per cent or just over $1 billion.
The reason – because they could.
The agreement was essentially structured as a pre-election subsidy to the states, absent of any tangible outcomes and so loosely worded that not even the small outcomes stipulated needed to be adhered to.
For example, 65 per cent of all the funding was skewed towards ‘structural reform’ and 20 per cent was paid upfront, yet despite the majority of this funding going towards this noble ambition, nobody can actually clearly define what it achieved almost five years after the end of the agreement.
One stated aim of this structural reform was ‘a more efficient VET sector, which is responsive to the needs of students, employers and industry’ and the way to achieve it was to ‘review the National Partnership Agreement’. So essentially, states were to be paid extra Commonwealth money to do something they should have already been doing; and a way to achieve this was to - over 5 years - review the agreement that is meant to achieve this.
You cannot make this stuff up.
The other 35 per cent went towards training outcomes, where the targets were so low that they were actually met within the first two years of the five-year agreement. But truly the most remarkable reflection on this agreement is how any government could actually pay $1.75 billion in an effort to increase apprentice numbers and yet at the end of it actually reduce the number of apprentices in training by almost 300,000 - all the while the states still get paid.
But finally, here is by far and away the reason why this agreement should be seen for the failure that it was. Clause 48 says:
A State will not be penalised where it fails to meet a structural reform milestone and/or agreed training outcome if the failure is due to circumstances beyond the State’s control (including Commonwealth actions) or circumstances not anticipated at the time of signing this Agreement.
Take this to mean, don’t worry if you don’t meet your outcomes – you still get paid.
This agreement was combined with nine successive cuts to the employer incentives program totalling $1.2 billion in removed incentives to employers to take on an apprentice. The combination of these two policy failures was brutal and immediate. Between 2012 and 2013 when Bill Shorten was Employment Minister, the number of apprentices in training dropped by 110,000 - the largest ever annual decline ever recorded.
What does this mean?
The Federal Government’s list reporting occupations that reflect Australia’s genuine skills shortages, and that allows businesses to access foreign workers, has 99 occupations of 216 requiring a trade apprentice pathway (94 others are specialised medical and engineering qualifications).
The Western Australia State Skills Needs List has listed as a priority occupation in acute skills shortage:
o Automotive Electrician
o Mechanic
o Fitter
o Panel Beater
o Bricklayer
o Plasterer
o Plumber
o Glazier
o Electrician
The list goes on but as the front page of the West Australian recently reported, because of this shortage it now takes three years to build a house in WA because you have no skilled workers to do it.
But this is such a shame as outcomes for apprentices are outstanding. 92 per cent of trade apprentices go straight into employment within 3 months of completing their apprenticeship.
They are earning and learning from day one and more than that complete their training without having any student debt. This should be the pinnacle our system.
VET FEE HELP
VET FEE-HELP has been around since 2008, but it was only available if you were doing a pathway to higher education. In 2012 this was abolished and everyone, studying anything was allowed to have it.
The scheme exploded and costs skyrocketed. In 2009, whilst capped to proper pathways, it cost the Government $25.6 million. But by 2015 it was $2.9 billion and all this additional funding went to courses like Chinese Herbal Medicine Mixology.
It also set up a system for providers to estimate how many students they were going to train, that the Government pay the money and then to reconcile that at the end of the period, such that providers were claiming and getting paid for supposedly training thousands of students but never actually doing it and running off with the money.
It took the Coalition 20 separate measures and three years just to cease the program and since 2016, the Coalition Government has spent over $1 billion re-crediting over 66,500 students for Labor’s failed VET FEE HELP loan debts.
Schools
Gillard again in 2012 implemented Gonski 1.0 to deliver $14 billion of extra funding to the states and territories on the proviso that they also lift their funding by 3 per cent over six years. It was based on a schooling resource standard or base cost for educating a pupil and then separate loadings based on certain factors like socioeconomic status. But when the report was delivered, by its own admission this needed considerably more work.
The Gillard Government complemented its announcement with a slick $20 million advertising campaign to sway the public.
Unfortunately, as we now know and what should have been investigated further is that the link purely between increased funding does not directly relate to increased outcomes.
In the last year of the Howard Government, average funding per student was $14,731 (2014-15 dollars). By 2015 under Gonski 1.0 this had risen to $16,670 but despite this massive funding increase student outcomes dropped dramatically.
At the end of the Howard Government 66.5 per cent of students were proficient in mathematics. This had fallen to 55.4 per cent in 2015.
And this pattern extends across the board. 67.8 per cent of students were proficient in science in 2006 compared with 60.8 per cent in 2015 and in reading, standards dropped by 5 per cent proficiency over the same period.
Most bizarrely however, is that the whole funding model was set up to reduce the gap in educational attainment by wealth, and yet today there is still a three-year gap in maths and science, and 2.75 years in the reading standards of a high socioeconomic status student over one in the lowest quintile.
This policy is marked as a fail.
National Curriculum
Developed in 2012 the document today still remains extremely cluttered. Elements of the curriculum are listed in apparently random fashion with no hierarchy of priorities.
The skills a child is expected to attain in a given year are scattered throughout the content description and elaboration columns.
For example, the first item on the year three English curriculum concerns the cultural construction of meaning and understanding First Nations Australian languages. The concrete skills of correct grammar and the skill of using cursive script are the last two items on the list.
Teaching versus learning
The sparse use of the verb “to teach” betrays a philosophical bias towards learner-centred education in the revised curriculum. In the English curriculum, for example, the word “teach” and its derivatives appears 29 times while “learn” features on 129 occasions.
The history curriculum contains eight references to Islam but only five to Christianity, all of them dating back to the Medieval period or before. Christianity is the world’s largest and fastest-growing religion, yet we are asked to assume it had no effect on human history after 1750 and is irrelevant to Australian civic life.
This is another lasting legacy of 2012 that will be with us for some time.
Uncapping of University Places
When did this happen – you guessed it 2012!
In 2009, estimates of 458,000 undergraduate places for 2012 were increased to 512,600; and this grew to 589,000 places in 2016.
In 2009–10 Commonwealth Government Support spending was $4.56 billion and increased to $7.19 billion in 2016–17. Such growth has raised concerns about the sustainability of the uncapped system in a period of budget restraints.
Individual completion rates for a bachelor degree are 45.1 per cent whist the individual completion rate for an Australian apprentice is currently 56.1 per cent.
It could be contended that uncapping places at university diverted people who traditionally would have and should have studied a trade into university and dropped out prematurely. And those that did complete their degree entered an employment market flooded with skilled people far in excess of requirements.
Conclusion
2012 was not just the Annus Horribilis for Gillard but for the entire nation’s education sector, the likes of which continue to destroy outcomes for so many Australian students.