Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

We have been asked in recent times if we give Gonski. The AEU wants us all to give a Gonski—they want us to give Gonski $5 billion. Is the question whether we care about a productive, effective mass public education system or if we care that federal government should be more involved in the schooling of young people through direct funding? When we consider the purpose of education, it is to grow the mind, to develop, to socialise, to civilise. These are also the roles of parents, and the community more generally.

Once when only the elite were able to access education, simple practices of literacy and access to words were restricted to the church and the rich. These two iconic cultural conglomerates have been intertwined for millennia to maintain the status quo for knowledge, money and power. There is much academic literature on the role of the public education system in continuing the disadvantage, skilling young people for work rather than to think. As a former public school teacher and a passionate advocate for a vibrant public education sector, I can refute this, not with a critical theorist hat on, one that sees anyone from a background other than working class as suspicious, nor with a technocratic response that believes that public education should be a vehicle for sorting and sifting the capacity of resources for use in the labour market. I care about public education—and yes, there was always going to be a 'but'—and it is the state's responsibility to deliver it. I also believe in small government and in using our resources as a nation in the most efficient manner. I also believe that the best people to know what they need from teachers and curriculum and schools are the locals.

A mass education system needs to accomplish a few key outcomes. People need to leave school with the skills and knowledge of how to participate in their society, to understand the cultural cues, and for us in our current society, that means being able to read. Our students need to be inspired by their education and they need to be critical thinkers now more than ever. These key ingredients of a great education are the bare essentials. The extras such as sport coaching, opportunities for art and music, debating and international travel, whilst important for additional learning and development, personal satisfaction and enjoyment, are not essential—desirable, but not essential.

My concern at the moment is that we are not delivering on the bare minimum. For instance, we are not delivering maths and science graduates. We are not delivering critical consumers of media in an era, I believe, when we are going to need that capacity in our young people more than ever. The report Mathematics, engineering and science in the national interest by Professor Ian Chubb shows the number of students doing science based courses has increased by only 18,000 since 2002, whereas health and commerce numbers increased by more than 97,000 and 66,000 students respectively. In a 2010 survey of 1,200 Australians aged 18 years and over, scientists were rated as the third-highest contributors to the wellbeing of a society after doctors and teachers, yet the proportion of year 12 students in Australia taking physics fell by 32 per cent between 1992 and 2009. And after my own year 12 experience with the subject, barely scraping through, I appreciate in this highly competitive ATAR world that our young people are involved in, that that might be an issue. But the actual subject studied was fascinating, and there is nothing more interesting than the quirky physics teacher.

The decline for biology was the same, while chemistry was down 25 per cent. Of Australian high school students not taking science, only one per cent agreed in a survey that science would be almost always 'relevant to their future', a statistic Professor Chubb labelled as 'frightening'. Professor Chubb went on to say:

Our future lies in creating a high technology, high productivity economy; to innovate and to compete at the high-end of provision. To do so, the technical skills and scientific awareness of the entire workforce must be raised.

That talks about actually increasing our scientific literacy. The number of maths, engineering and science graduates needs to increase to allow industry to expand in these areas, yet our current performance is wanting and we compare poorly with our leading Asian neighbours. We must invest appropriately and wisely and not waste our talent, to benefit our own community, and humanity more widely.

The Chinese increase in innovation, the push to commercialise scientific work, to go beyond mimicry to create and commercialise in the areas of science technology is evidenced from their increase in spending on research and development from 0.9 per cent of GDP in 2000 to 1.7 per cent of GDP in 2009. This is a phenomenal amount of money to be invested in R&D, and that was the difference in investment in China in research and development as a percentage of their GDP over a nine-year period. The Chinese have worked out exactly where their future and the future development of their society and economy lies. It is in increasing the construction of scientific knowledge and the commercialisation of its outcomes.

I recently returned from a delegation to China with the Senate's Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committee. Previously China implemented the IP of others. Their jump to the next stage of development will involve China producing the scientific breakthroughs and also commercialising them, and many of the people we met with from the Ministry of Education to the leading professoriate, if you like, at many of the universities we attended as a committee, spoke about the desire and the focus of the next five-year plan being on science and technology and the commercialisation of that research.

But in visiting China and seeing their education system up close, for me it posed a question around the need for creativity in developing scientific proficiency. Creativity is not just a technical proficiency, and my art teacher from year 8 will agree. I believe—and I am not alone in thinking it—that this may be one of the challenges for China, and they recognise that themselves.

One of the attractions for our committee in visiting China was the PISA results, an international test on numeracy and literacy, amongst other things, for the Shanghai region. It drove our committee to desire to see what was happening in China on the education front. The PISA test said that in 2009, whilst Australia received results above the OECD average for every category, 14 per cent of Australian students aged 15 failed to reach the baseline level of reading proficiency considered essential for future development in a number of areas of knowledge acquisition. Another 20 per cent were functioning at the minimum baseline sufficiency level. This is backed up by a 2006 ABS study that found that just under half—46 per cent—of Australian adults cannot confidently read newspapers, follow a recipe, make sense of timetables or understand the instructions on a medicine bottle. Key issues are not up for negotiating everyday life and if one of the core functions of the public education system is for us to be literate in how we live our life in our society, then surely that is key.

The link between those young people who lack literacy skills and youth unemployment statistics is also telling. An Australian Council for Education Research longitudinal study found that students who scored badly on literacy and numeracy tests in year 9 were more likely to be unemployed, and if they were employed, were more likely to earn a low wage. The study found that low school achievement in literacy and numeracy was consistently associated with youth unemployment, with effects continuing through to 33 years of age.

In 2006, the unemployment rates for men and women aged from 25 to 64 without post school qualifications were 2.9 and 1.3 percentage points higher respectively than for those with some form of post-school qualification. For those with a degree or higher, the difference in unemployment rates was even greater. So the research tells us that while some are doing well in our nation, there are key cohorts that are not doing well. Shifting the education spend and control to centralised bean counters in Canberra is simply not the answer to address these issues. The long distance remote control responses that have seen big government solutions foisted on communities are simple illustrations of why solution finding at a local level is never better done from a distance.

These cohorts of young people who need targeting and specific interventions require localised responses, not a one-size-fits-all policy which Canberra is so good at. Building the Education Revolution is a good example of centralised policymaking—schools ending up with halls instead of infrastructure they actually need, like working toilets or classrooms to replace dilapidated portables. One of the cohorts of young people missing out is the young man who was a kinaesthetic learner. Our classrooms are not built for him, our curriculum is not responsive to his interests, our teachers are not trained with specific teaching practice to assist him, and our education policy that requires or mandates his attendance at school rather than facilitating him into a job or a trade is not helping anyone.

In 2011, our education system in its present form was failing our young men. In 2011, 75 per cent of boys entering high school were likely to be studying until year 12 compared with 84 per cent of young women. This is an ongoing divide with only 30 per cent of men aged 25 to 29 completing a bachelor degree or higher compared with 41 per cent of women of the same age. We have to think why as a society we are pushing square pegs into round holes for somehow we have deemed that higher education means a higher standard of living. Yes, but if you look deeper into that research that is so often the basis for these decisions, there are other factors at play which mean that these decisions end up disadvantaging that particular student more. We are not digging down into the research, we are simply using words: 'If you go to higher education you are going to end up with all these better outcomes'. Yes, broadly speaking that is what the research tells us but if we dig down we see the need for targeted policy responses for the various cohorts in our public education system.

Research conducted by the Smith Family and the AMP Foundation late in 2003 found that young males not in the labour force have a mortality rate 8.6 times higher than those who worked or studied. The same report sought to quantify the impact. It found early school leaving cost Australia $2.6 billion a year.

Going back to my trip to China, another issue raised with our delegation was the different classroom behaviour and pedagogy differences between our two education systems. One of the universities we visited in Shanghai was a teacher training university, which sent its young teachers on a teaching exchange to Australia. The Chinese teachers would regularly comment back on the lack of discipline in Australian schools and the poor behaviour of our students. I am sure that if the reverse was said, there would be public school teachers from Australia wondering why the students in China were not engaged and why that repartee between student and teacher is not at the same level as we would expect from our classrooms here. While much of this can be put down to cultural differences, the role of the teacher and education of young people is paramount. Any discussion of education without focussing on teachers is simply missing the point. Teachers need to be valued in our society, through money and through cultural status and recognition, such as in China—the Confucian tradition, for instance, and learning values. There are those cultural underpinnings for how teachers are treated in China.

Teachers need to be trained appropriately. Teacher training in universities is an issue. The gap between academics and teaching on the ground is real and we ignore it at our peril. Our young trainee teachers need to learn how to teach that young man what he needs. We do not expect our young people to all sit in straight lines and be quiet. Teachers need assistance in schools where they can teach and be able to discipline children who disrupt, ensuring our education system works more closely with the training sector. Poor teachers in our public schools do not help the argument—and we all know who they are, other teachers, the students, the parents and the principals. Some teachers are good for some students, and we need to empower principals to sort it out.

It does raise questions for those of us interested in a public education where clever kids can learn and compete and kids who do not want to participate can find a place to succeed in our society. Our committee heard how education in China is changing, that teachers are experimenting with pedagogies in the classroom that can provide student-centred methods. It will be interesting to see the effect this has on their educative performance, their drive for innovation and the empowerment more broadly of individuals within this Chinese society. I have been wondering about this and about Confucius as a teacher and the educative approach of their other religions, and whether it is a result of the economic situation: competitive individuals seeking to differentiate through education.

As I listened and watched the young people and educationalists in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu, I was struck by the focused determination of all involved. Educationalists, government officials, parents and students, one and all, have organised a system which has 21 million teachers, over 200 million students and services a society of 1.3 billion.

One issue we did hear about that is receiving attention more broadly is gaokoa, which is essentially their year 12 exams. We heard about the rigidity of gaokoa. We have horizontal movement within our education system. We might do some vocational training and then head off to university. The gaokoa basically sets you on a path for life—your future is sealed; there is no lateral movement. When I questioned students about whether they would prefer to study electronics rather than physics, their look of confusion that one would value a lesser job over a higher status role was telling. I found that fascinating.

One story which has propelled the issues around gaokoa and the rigidity of the system into public discourse in China involved a young man whose parents were in a car accident two weeks prior to his gaokoa. The mother died and the father was in a coma for two weeks. The family, the school and the community conspired to keep the accident from this young man for two weeks because they did not want the trauma to wreck his gaokoa results. This incident went viral on the internet. As this poor young man exited his exams, he was confronted by the media and everybody telling him exactly what happened. The trauma was there for all to see.

On the trip I also found it interesting to compare the inequities in China with those that exist in Australia, something the Nationals know only too well. For educational outcome and experience, postcodes matter in China as they do in Australia. For China, the question of competitive advantage is clear as parents in certain geographic areas do not want to lose their child's spot in the queue as migrant children compete with local students for precious university places.

At present, families in China are allocated their area of residence, which determines where they can access education services and healthcare services. With the mobility of the Chinese workforce increasing as people seek higher paying jobs in urban centres, there are upwards of one million people not living where they are registered. All their kids have to go to school somewhere and have to access health care somewhere. This has led to issues when coming to the gaokoa, as students have to return home to their registered place of residence rather than their local school. This in turn decreases their chances of getting into the higher status universities, further exacerbating the inequities between the urban Chinese experience and the rural when it comes to education.

What we do see as a challenge for China is the same challenge that exists for our own nation—the tyranny of distance. Despite technological advancement in communications, despite advancement in transport options, despite commitment from successive governments to ensuring that geography does not matter, it does. It matters to your educational outcomes, educational aspirations and educational access from early childhood right through to university and training. This is the same whether you are in Gormandale or Guangzhou.

I would love to return to my comments on the Gonski report, but I am unable to in the interests of time. The Chinese experience with the Senate Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committee was indeed a great learning and educative one. I saw firsthand the desire of higher education providers in China to host Australian student and heard about the challenges of educating a population the size and spread of China. I learnt about the intricacies of their education system. That fostered in all of us, I think, a new sense of understanding and appreciation for the role of education in a modern world. (Time expired)