Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on behalf of the Australian Greens on the Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Amendment Bill 2006, the first schools bill introduced by the new Minister for Education, Science and Training, Ms Bishop. It is unfortunate for the new minister that the first bill that she has introduced is a bandaid bill to amend the obvious problems that inevitably arose from the shoddy, populist policy follies of her predecessor—but that is what this bill is. The Greens sincerely hope that future bills from the new minister will set a new course for this government regarding schools, one that puts education first rather than the ideology or electoral game playing that we are used to seeing not only in education but also in other portfolios.

This bill seeks to slap bandaids on two programs that have been introduced by the former minister in the past couple of years. They have failed and, as a result, have let down young people, parents and teachers. The bill also amends a provision of the funding act to allow the government more power to manipulate funding spending. The remedies this bill seeks to introduce will simply allow these poor policies to limp on until the next major funding decisions are made in 2007 and 2008. The increased flexibility in funding delivery creates a powerful temptation for political abuse of this funding in the hands of the minister of the day, whoever it may be.

The first program dealt with by this bill is the Investing in Our Schools program, which was announced in a flurry in the last federal election campaign. This program sought to deliver $1 billion of federal funding to schools for capital improvements: airconditioning, shadecloth, repairs and the like. This $1 billion was to be spread over four years, with $300 million going to private schools and $700 million to public schools. There was no consultation with state governments about this program, and the thrust was to cut the state governments out from managing this new capital funding, even though the states have a long established admin infrastructure to manage capital investment in schools. Instead, this cash was to be doled out directly to schools that had applied through P&C committees and school boards—that is, unless you were a private school, in which case the funding went to block grant authorities that already distribute recurrent capital funding to approved projects.

The problem is that just about every public school in Australia has applied for some funding. Many people may think that is not surprising—unless they are the minister for education or a senior official at the Department of Education, Science and Training. They tell us that the program has failed to deliver the promised funds to public schools because they have been so surprised at the overwhelming number of applicants for money. This bill aims to roll over the funding allocation for the program from 2005 to 2006 in order to catch up with the demand and eventual delivery. We are getting used to this sort of frequent incompetence by the government, but it is worth questioning whether there are not other motives at play here.

By rolling over these funds, is the government simply back loading the delivery of these much needed capital projects later into the electoral cycle by delaying the completion of these projects from the first year and a half of the scheme but seeking to deliver the full promised funding in the second half of the four-year funding term? Does that not mean that schools will get their new shadecloths, library extensions or netball courts in an election year? Some people might think this a cynical or uncharitable perspective to take. But let us look at where the funding is already being distributed under this scheme. Others have noted with concern that the funding has been distributed at a ratio of three to one, favouring Liberal held electorates over Labor held electorates. The average funding that coalition electorates have received is $792,010, compared to $549,303 for Labor electorates.

Nine out of the 10 top electorates in receipt of capital funding are coalition seats. This looks like a reasonably obvious case of pork barrelling—that is, spending government funds to benefit sitting members with the hope of retaining government at the coming election. If anyone is confused when trying to understand the reasoning behind the flow of education public policy coming from the Howard government, it is revealing how helpful it is to look at it through the prism of electoral self-interest. Suddenly it does not seem all that confusing at all.

Of course, this could just be a coincidence, but I suggest it is not. The only other reading of this situation suggests that, if you put funding applications in the hands of parental bodies or P&C committees, the number and speed of qualifying applications will favour schools from areas where the parents’ education level and familiarity with the administrative process is highest. That will favour areas of higher socioeconomic status, which in turn are more likely to be areas held by the coalition. If this is true, it is still an indication of the failure of policy that delivers money not on the basis of need but, rather, on who is best at filling out applications—a pattern that, as we have seen, had a devastating effect in the government’s mismanagement of Indigenous schools funding programs.

These problems have been bypassed by the private school sector, however. For some mysterious reason, their funding is managed through existing block grant authorities. Not only this, but also they do not have the $150,000 cap on school projects like public schools have—a funding inequity without any explanation. All in all, the Investing in Our Schools program is a mess—either by design, for cynically political self-serving reasons, or by default, as a poorly designed bit of policy on the run. Either way, the only good thing is that, in the end, new infrastructure does get built in schools. This is the only reason that the Greens have any support for this proposal.

The second failure that this bill seeks to address is the much heralded literacy voucher scheme. This policy was to issue $700 vouchers to parents whose children had failed to achieve their benchmark in year 3 literacy. The voucher could pay for supplementary literacy support for that child. The support could be delivered by approved providers including private providers. This program was again developed without consultation with the state governments that run our public school system. As a direct result, it has been a complete shambles. Only 12 per cent of eligible children in Victoria and only 18 per cent in Queensland have received any tuition through this scheme. Even in the states where the state school system has been the dominant approved provider of additional tuition, the take-up has been less than 70 per cent. As a result, the scheme has been massively underspent.

This bill seeks to roll those unspent funds into schools based literacy programs. It should be obvious—and it was said at the time—that, had this funding been spent in schools from the outset, 100 per cent of those young people needing extra help would have benefited from the money. This bill basically amounts to an admission by the government that they were wrong about the benefits of vouchers and the scheme should as a result be discontinued.

But that is not the approach that the government is taking. The government sees vouchers as a way to sell their half-baked choice based vision for education. Perhaps government polling is telling them that it sounds popular and those best placed to benefit from the scheme are those who are most likely to be voting for individualistic ideologues. So vouchers continue to stay on the government’s agenda. Indeed, one of the only things that the new Minister for Education, Science and Training has had to say about schools has been an indication that she would like to see the voucher scheme expanded. She was reported in the Australian recently as saying:

I am quite supportive of the notion of vouchers across the board ... The notion of vouchers to give parents choice is a notion that appeals to me. There are a whole range of areas where tutorial vouchers could be utilised.

We should be astounded at this continuing infatuation with vouchers in the face of the failure of this trial scheme. However, the interest in vouchers is not an interest in practical solutions to problems of educational quality. Rather, it is an application of an ideology that is flawed.

School vouchers are not a new idea. They have been used in various countries around the world with patchy impact at best. In Chile, school vouchers which could be redeemed at private schools were introduced in the late 1980s. A World Bank report in the late 1990s found that, after 13 years of operation:

There are no improvements in student achievement, contrary to the predictions of the voucher proponents.

Having weighed up the Chilean experience and with the experience of voucher systems directed only at the poorer students in Milwaukee in the United States, the same report concluded:

There is no persuasive evidence that private schools are more effective than public schools and the evidence that they are more cost-effective is mixed.

So, after years of data, there is no strong evidence to prove that vouchers improve educational quality. Vouchers are only a success in accelerating the privatisation of schooling and providing an opportunity to claim an increase in choice for parents.

But even this idea of increased choice is also flawed. In the United Kingdom, debate has recently raged over the introduction of so-called trust schools, which allow business, religious organisations and other partners to enter into administrative arrangements to manage existing schools or set up new schools. They will take control of their own buildings and land, directly employ their own staff and set and manage their own admissions criteria while remaining state-maintained schools. This is about giving parents choice, according to Mr Blair’s government, just like the voucher system. It is supposed to free parents from sending their kids to the local school and it instead offers them a broader menu to choose from.

This kind of choice is an illusion and the logic is flawed. How can everyone choose to send their children to the best schools? It is simply not possible. Schools fill up, parents cannot afford to transport their children the distances that are required and religious and other criteria exclude certain children from access to particular schools. Such models, which are designed to give choice, actually give the schools more choice, not the parents. The schools are empowered to pick the most attractive students. In turn, many local comprehensive schools suffer by having their brightest children or children from a particular section of the community picked off. This means less choice for parents who cannot get their children into alternative schools.

Just like the World Bank report found, parents are discovering that opting out of the public education system does not necessarily deliver better results for their children. Recent research that was commissioned by the New South Wales Teachers Federation has shown that, increasingly, parents are coming back into the public system after having enrolled their children in one of the burgeoning number of private schools—many of them new schools—on the promise of higher quality and a better learning environment. They have quickly found out that smart uniforms and fancy names do not equate to quality teaching and education excellence.

The Greens continue to worry that it is the view of the government that private schooling is necessarily better schooling and that any scheme that encourages parents to choose private schooling should be encouraged. The evidence is that this is not good for our children’s education and, to the extent that it distracts from the need to heavily invest in the growth and quality of public schools of all kinds, it is a dangerously flippant policy.

The Greens would like to see the $1 billion earmarked for the Investing in Our Schools program and the money earmarked for the tutorial voucher scheme be part of an investment strategy that is based on need. Rather than the criteria for funding being based on the ability of parents to fill out applications or the ability to take up voucher offers, the Greens would like to see such funding distributed on the basis of the best assessment of which investments will bring us the best bang for our education buck. That means investing in public schools, investing in Indigenous education, investing in special needs education and investing in early childhood education. In just a few weeks time we will be told by the government that they have more money than ever before for they have a record surplus, record revenue and record forecasts for more. But, if the best that the government can do to invest in all our futures through the education system is this bill, there will be record disappointment and record cynicism at that failure.

The Greens reluctantly support this bill—only because we want the $7 million to get to those public schools most in need and we support more money being spent in school literacy programs. We have deep reservations about the targeting of the $300 million that is directed specifically at the private school sector. It is disappointing to see that the government are continuing their blind faith in the continuation of a proven to be failed voucher scheme. The Greens will continue to call for the multibillion dollar investment that is needed to deliver the quality of public education that our young people deserve. Until this becomes a priority for all governments, they will find that the Greens continue to be their harshest critic in this area and the loudest advocates for public schools.