Read a Q&A with the authors of Waiting for Gonski!

Tom Greenwell teaches history and politics in the ACT public education system. He writes about Australian education policy for Inside Story and The Canberra Times. He has explored a wide range of topics including growing segregation in Australian schooling, the history of Australian education, and contemporary trends and challenges. He previously worked as a research officer with the Australian Education Union.

Chris Bonnor AM is a former teacher and secondary school principal. He was a previous head of the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council and is co-author, with Jane Caro, of The Stupid Country and What Makes a Good School? He has contributed to a range of publications and media, and has jointly authored papers on Australia’s schools in association with the Centre for Policy Development and the Gonski Institute for Education.

Today, we have a Q&A with Tom and Chris that’s all about their new book, Waiting for Gonski: How Australia failed its schools. Read on …

Tom Greenwell (Photo by Michael Hood).

In your book you say education in Australia is failing – what do you mean by this?

Australian 15 year olds are now a full year of learning behind where they were in 2000 in reading, maths and science. On average three years of learning separates the most advantaged and most disadvantaged students in our schools. At the start of the century, Australia could claim to have a high quality, high equity education system. We no longer can. More than similar countries, we are growing a social/educational hierarchy of schools, quite evident in most communities. Higher SES schools are growing and attract more of the advantaged, the strugglers are increasingly found in lower SES schools. So it is the structure of the system that has failed. It tends to reward the well-resourced and punish the rest. This heavily impacts on student achievement. Just as importantly, it means many children feel less connected to school and less positive about their experience at school.

What was the Gonski Review?

The 2012 Review of Funding for schooling, headed by David Gonski, investigated how a different distribution of public funding might boost the achievement of the strugglers. In other words, achieving excellence by improving the equity (which is about opportunity and access) of school resourcing. This would increase the capacity of schools to lift the most disadvantaged. Its comprehensive set of recommendations came after an exhaustive 18 month process which seemed to generate a new national consensus on school funding. But Gonski was told that no school was to lose a dollar. Then its recommendations were watered down, and further distorted in the ensuing years of implementation. Today, we are still not on track to properly fund the most needy.

And why is it so important?

Put simply, we are failing to realise our full potential as a country. Gonski estimated that a million young people were leaving school each year without the basic skills they needed to succeed in life. Inevitably, those young people are more likely to experience unemployment, poverty and social dysfunction. They are less likely to lead meaningful, fulfilling and prosperous lives. That is unacceptable – and it affects us all. Even in narrow economic terms, the cost of this failure far exceeds the price of investing in success.

Some people, including Gonski himself, have argued that it is still too early to judge the outcome of the review. What do you think?

One of the outstanding features of the Gonski report was that it identified how concentrating disadvantaged children together was having a very negative impact on student achievement. Unfortunately, the Gonski review endorsed policies that were producing these concentrations – or at least making them worse. Taxpayer supported resource advantages help some schools attract high-performing students, while unregulated enrolment practices and ever-increasing fees effectively exclude children from disadvantaged backgrounds. On current trajectories, by the end of this decade public schools in most jurisdictions will still be at only 90 per cent of Gonski’s proposed resource standard. Even if they eventually receive the resources they need to succeed (and that’s a big ‘if’), the systemic issues that are concentrating the strugglers in the same schools will still not have been addressed.

David Gonski describes visiting two schools which impacted his review – what are these schools, and how are they faring now?

During the review David Gonski visited Villawood North Public School and Sacred Heart School, in Sydney’s west. The public school enrolled a larger share of the disadvantaged. As the review later stipulated, such schools were to receive the larger share of additional funding. But it was the Catholic school which saw bigger increases. For many years after the review the Catholic school received more taxpayer funding alone than the public school. Today it still has an advantage in total income. The enrolment at the public school has skewed more to the disadvantaged end. Its NAPLAN scores suffered while those of the Catholic school didn’t change that much. While there are always exceptions, the experience of those two schools has been replicated across Australia.

Chris Bonnor

How can we change education for the better?

We are teachers, and we know we always have to evaluate and improve what we do. Some, but alas not all, of the within-school reforms over the last couple of decades have worked well. But even the best reforms won’t make an overall difference if the system crowds the strugglers together in disadvantaged schools. The decline in equity across our school school system, and its impact on achievement, acts as a brake on the potentially positive results of school improvement. We have to improve schools and level the playing field on which they operate. Addressing one set of drivers, to the exclusion of others, is a path to failure.

You have spent your career teaching in the public education system. How has this informed the writing of this book?

Chris: I taught in remote schools, and in disadvantaged urban schools. Being a witness to inequity and unfairness is part of my lived experience. As a state principals’ leader I saw how even the most resilient teachers and school leaders could buckle under the increasing weight they carried. Then I crunched the emerging data about schools and it told me the same story in numbers. What’s happening can no longer be hidden, it’s time to act.

Tom: Most teachers will tell you how much the job can change with different classes in different contexts. Some days it’s like conducting an orchestra; the next you’re dodging violins and just trying to keep the brass section and the wind section apart! So, for educators, all the evidence about how much a student’s learning is impacted by their peers is only confirmation of our daily experience. When you create a highly segregated school system, where disadvantaged kids are most likely to be sitting next to kids from a similar background, the challenges of teaching and learning are multiplied many times. So the book is a plea to our politicians to implement policies that will set up every school to succeed.

The pandemic has had a devastating impact on schools. Has this had an impact on inequalities that already existed? In what way?

The pandemic has further exposed the fault lines around access and equity in learning, in resources and teacher supply, and it has highlighted vast differences in the capacity of many families to cope. Since the Gonski report was published a decade ago, there has been a much greater increase in government funding to private schools than to public schools. On top of that long-term trend, many private schools received millions in Job Keeper payments during the pandemic while also making a substantial profit. Meanwhile the kids who were already struggling to engage with school have been hit the hardest by the pandemic. Online learning can work, but it’s less likely to be successful for those children who are disadvantaged and marginalised, who lack the necessary know-how, hardware and connections, both digital and social.

How does Australia’s education system stack up internationally?

Amongst OECD countries, Australia has the fourth most segregated school system, similar to countries like Mexico. What that tells us is that the inequality between our schools does not just reflect inequality in our community. It is also produced by government policies concerning the resourcing and regulation of our schools. Canada and Australia are similar in many ways, but our school systems are very different. In Canada, social disadvantage is much more evenly spread across all schools. And it turns out that Canada consistently outperforms Australia on international measures of student achievement, and has much greater equity. Revealingly, disadvantaged Canadian students feel a stronger sense of belonging at school and more optimism about their future.

We can learn something else from looking at other countries. In a place like Ontario, Catholic schools are free and fully publicly funded. So international examples offer a model of how we could create a school system which provides choice without segregating kids according to social background. In fact, around the world Australia is unique in providing so much public funding to private schools that also have complete freedom to charge fees and select students as they wish.

What do you hope people will take away from your book?

For too long we have taken it for granted that our schools will operate on an unlevel playing field: some schools have an abundance of resources, others struggle to get by; some schools are open to all-comers, others are selective; some are free, others can charge fees. Some families are able to access a fully publicly funded education while other parents have to pay out of their own pockets for their first choice (even when their pockets aren’t especially deep). For the last half century, these arrangements have tended to be assumed rather than carefully justified (including during the Gonski review). If they ever served us well, they no longer do. Until we start questioning these basic assumptions we will fail to address the problems that confront us and realise our shared aspirations for our children.

—Waiting for Gonski: How Australia failed its schools by Tom Greenwell and Chris Bonnor (UNSW Press) is out now.

Waiting for Gonski

How Australia failed its schools

by Tom Greenwell & Chris Bonnor

The Gonski Review seemed like a breakthrough. Commissioned by Prime Minster Julia Gillard and chaired by leading businessman David Gonski, the 2011 review made clear that school education policy wasn't working, and placed a spotlight on the troubling and growing gap between the educational outcomes of disadvantaged children and their more privileged peers.

Gonski proposed a model that provided targeted funding to disadvantaged students based on need, a solution...

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