The latest act of generosity by former Big Brother entertainment executive, Neil Balnaves, is a new learning centre for Indigenous students at the University of NSW (SMH, September 22-23). Increasingly, philanthropists like Balnaves are turning their attention towards the challenge that politicians have failed to address – improving the educational opportunities of Australia’s most disadvantaged young people.
Australia has a two-tier system of public education. One tier is made up of residualised schools attended by young people with the deepest needs. Like some rural and remote schools, they also have the least experienced teachers. The other tier is made up of all the rest.
Successive governments at the state and national level have supported the growth of these tiers by allowing markets to determine the shape of our education system. In other words, the demands of high-value clients (middle-class parents) have ensured that the best resources and most experienced teachers are available to their children.
Under these conditions, it is necessary to redistribute funds to residualised, rural and remote schools in order to compensate low-income families for bearing the cost of better resources being monopolised by more affluent families. If we want a schooling system that offers all young people a fair go, we need a fair allocation of resources. The test of this would be that parents would feel confident sending their child to any public school, and public schools would not be considered in any way inferior to private or independent schools.
Achieving this kind of education system requires more than the redistribution of funding proposed by David Gonski, it requires a rethinking of the role of education in our society. Cuts to spending on education in NSW will widen the gap between the two tiers of schooling because they will hit the weakest tier the hardest. For example, equity programs and consultants that have supported schools that teach the most challenging students have been axed.
The only real hope for improving the existing conditions of learning and teaching in challenging contexts is through innovation, but there is no government funding available to assist school leaders and teachers to do something really hard better.
In recent years, there has been an increase in the availability of money made available through Private Ancillary Funds (PAFs) or tax deductible giving structures that provide a vehicle for family and corporate philanthropy. Education is one of the three top areas supported by PAFs, along with welfare and rights, and cultural organisations.
A report prepared earlier in the year by Philanthropy Australia noted that while overall giving in Australia has increased steadily over the past decade, individual donations have decreased for the second year running, whereas PAFs are increasing. The one thousandth PAF was registered with the ATO this year.
A summary of recent events down the “big end of town” illustrates the level and type of involvement of PAFs in education: the Macquarie Group Foundation hosted the launch of a report on young people’s experiences of economic adversity funded by the Smith Family; the AMP Foundation hosted the second Social Ventures Australia (SVA) Education Dialogue, which brought together an uncommon alliance of leaders from business, schools, universities, government, and the not-for-profit sector; the Origin Foundation hosted a meeting of researchers it is funding to undertake an evaluation of schools offering a highly personalised approach to learning being established by the Big Picture Education Australia.
The problem being faced by PAFs is how to use limited resources effectively and in ways that are likely to “drive” innovation. Some PAFs address this problem by investing in research. This has been a feature of the work of the Dusseldorp Skills Forum, the Smith, and more recently Origin Foundation.
SVA has filled a gap here by offering to broker funding partnerships between a select group of educational initiatives (venture partners) and individuals, families and corporations looking for a worthy cause. But SVA is also searching for “bright spots” in education as demonstrated through their education dialogues.
The challenge of innovation on “shoestring” is not limited to education, it is THE challenge faced by individuals, organisations and governments working on complex problems in a world saturated with knowledge, experts and markets.
It is also the kind of problem that schools must equip young people to solve.
The Grattan Institute has drawn upon large publicly available national and international data sets to summarise the features of high-performing education systems around the world. However, these “desk-top” reports just add to the long list of things we already know work.
Instead, we need to understand how to support school leaders and teachers to implement what we know works. This is a problem that requires ongoing systematic analysis of the effects of practice. It can only be solved by research that looks deeply into how schools work in a range of contexts over extended periods of time.
We need to recognise that good techniques are only a very small part of good teaching. We would all be master chefs if great cooking simply resulted from following a recipe. The challenge for school leaders and teachers in challenging contexts is figuring out how to teach well in the less than optimal conditions we have created for them to work. Real sustained improvement is only possible if we create conditions more conducive to teaching and learning for all young people.
