The dominant faction among those who govern Australian schooling have brought on a fight in which there will be no winners. Headquartered in the NSW Education Department and its creature, the nominally national Australian Education Research Organisation, it is dragging others along behind it, notably the Victorian Education Department.
The push is to eradicate any kind of teaching and learning other than that which is officially mandated, namely “explicit” or “direct” instruction, once known as stand-and-deliver, or the fill ’em up theory of learning. Claiming to be backed by the hot new findings of “learning science,” the reality is long-familiar, with a twist: the teacher at the front facing twenty or twenty-five students delivering a centrally developed and mandated lesson plan in the approved manner as specified in the departmental “teaching and learning model.”
Sold as an educational measure — Victoria’s minister declares “we’ve got to make the precious use of every minute we have of students with us” — the push is better understood as a reassertion of top-down power, of ministers over bureaucracies, of bureaucracies over schools, of teachers over kids, of big states over small and of states over the Commonwealth and its “national approach.” The push comes with the unmistakable frisson of a crackdown.
The official crackdown is backed by a broad-front mobilisation of interests. Hence Michael Stutchbury, the former editor-in-chief of the Financial Review who now heads the conservative Centre for Independent Studies, lauding a standout school in which “Teachers do the teaching and are the authority in the classroom. Desks face the front. Lessons are fast-paced and structured. There are clear rules and expectations…” Hence the Australian attributing Ireland’s recently lifted performance (“making the world green with envy”) to a concentration on the basics. Hence The Australian Curriculum: In Search of a Knowledge-Rich Education, commissioned by another conservative outfit, the Menzies Centre. And hence a high-end conference pitching “knowledge-rich curriculum” as the key to system-wide reform.
Among those on the receiving end of the crackdown, reactions vary.
Few hard-pressed teachers can resist a free lesson plan. Equally few like being told that’s the only approved lesson plan. Even fewer like being told they’ll teach it in the head office way. Some of the more active teachers take a fundamentally different view of teaching and learning: they see teaching as a calling, and the school not as a franchise outlet but as a site for the production of learning and growth, crucially assisted by various forms of teaching. The crackdown breeds resentment and disaffection, hastening the exit of the most capable teachers.
Principals, those unfortunate sergeants of the force, increasingly hold heretical views; many are angry that a curriculum dominated by the university-oriented Australian Tertiary Admission Rank makes it impossible to give the kids what they need. Many bite their tongues; life is hard enough without putting their jobs on the line.
Among the intelligentsia, the teacher educators and others in the universities, on the other hand, the heretical view is close to being an orthodoxy. Some call for “transformation.” The learning scientists generally regard the narrowly cognitive “science” on which the crackdown depends as old hat, wrong about most kinds of learning, and counterproductive. But the academics are more inclined to “critique” than resist; few entertain the idea of getting organised to do something. And they are hierarchs too, in their way; most believe that their “research” finds the way, “practice” follows. Besides, they’ve got their own branch of the crackdown (the 2023 Scott report on teacher education) to contend with.
Then there’s a swarm of retailers of everything from software to school camps to coaching, as well as the “thought leaders” and consultants offering morale-boosting workshops and revamp services to schools, a few targeting the big end of town. (Their number includes Learning First, impresarios of the conference mentioned a moment ago and, not coincidentally, authors of the highly selective account of Ireland’s education reform puffed by the Australian). The general rule for those who depend upon schools and systems for a living must be, of course: follow the money.
And, last of all, the kids. There is much hand-wringing about the lack of “engagement,” “agency” and “wellbeing” among students, about the rising incidence of “school refusal,” “absenteeism,” bullying, “classroom disruption,” straight-out defiance and even violence by students on teachers. Many organisations confessing to such widespread workforce discontent would look to a comprehensive makeover of the whole setup; the leaders of schooling, by contrast, are blaming the victims, and pasting “programs” onto a dysfunctional way of organising daily work and of students’ learning careers.
Here the question of class intrudes, along with a widely unnoticed ageism: the people being cracked down upon are kids, and overwhelmingly they are working-class kids. Almost all of them are in government schools, and government schools are the only schools directly under the bureaucratic and ministerial thumb.
The crackdown is in practice a crackdown on the “hard” government schools, not the selectives (dozens of them in NSW) or the leafy suburb government schools or most of the non-governments, dominated by students and families focused on the big prize at the end. It’s the schools battling high staff turnover, insufficient everything and the humiliation of poor “performance” as divined by NAPLAN and publicised on My School.
It is emblematic of the class politics of the crackdown that the knowledge-rich conference will be held at the five-star Intercontinental Hotel in the Sydney CBD, a long way east of Parramatta — and even Parramatta is a long way east of the geographical centre of greater Sydney, where the westies are.
The crackdown gets the whole problem wrong right from the start. There can be no doubt that the received way of organising teaching and learning can be got to tick over like a Swiss clock — schools like the one lauded by Michael Stutchbury, those very few schools where the many stars of schooling align. The standard model can even be improved a bit across the board — it’s possible that the crackdown will be rewarded by barely visible lifts in this or that indicator.
The “knowledge rich” idea — the latest in a long line of slogans including “effectiveness,” “evidence-based” everything, “quality teaching” — has been around for decades, but always falls at the first hurdle: you can’t get knowledge-rich if you can’t or won’t understand the knowledge, no matter how hard or well the teacher teaches. “Curriculum” is a relationship before it is a menu. The received model cannot engage the many disengaged. Nor can it give the compliant/engaged students in the “good” schools the safe, happy, broad and richly rewarding experience of schooling that it is now possible to provide for just about every kid.
What the crackdown doesn’t recognise or chooses to ignore is that it’s the kids who bring the energy required for learning and growth — or refuse to. It’s the school’s job to find that energy, encourage it, and shape it. The same could be said of the relationship between government schools and systems. The realities of the present moment in Australian schooling should be manna from heaven for a well-organised alliance of the industrial orgs and the professional/curriculum associations. But no such alliance exists. Myriad professional associations stick to their myriad patches while the teacher unions confuse “public” and “system” with the domineering bureaucracies. The divided (and intimidated) are easily conquered.
There are ironies in all this, several of them. One is that the only outright condemnation of (and alternative to) the crackdown’s Gradgrind thinking I’m aware of has come from the grandees of the independent school system. Another: the crackdown is betting the farm on the OECD’s “effective” teaching/schools line just as, rumour has it, that same organisation is about to ditch “effectiveness” in favour of “flourishing.” A third: the knowledge-rich line and its many antecedents focus on the things AI can do instead of the relationships between human beings that only human beings can do.
Fourth, and last: if Michael Young’s classic The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) is even half right — and a growing band of contemporary readers think it is much more than that — then Labor governments, state and federal are driving a form of schooling that is fuelling the voter base for One Nation. •
