Public education is not just the government's business

Professor Brian Caldwell (Sydney Morning Herald 21 June 2007)

Brian Caldwell heads Educational Transformations and is a professorial fellow at the
University of Melbourne, where he was dean of education from 1998 to 2004. This
article draws from the 2007 Phillip Hughes Oration for the Australian College of
Educators 21 June 2007.

An expanded role for business in schools has been placed on the agenda in recent weeks, yet Australia has a long way to go before we match what has been accomplished elsewhere. Resistance is strong in large sections of the educational community and at one end of the political spectrum. There is still the view that business has no place and, at least in the public sector, schools should be built, funded, owned, operated and supported from the public purse and that policy and practice should be solely determined by the provider.

England is an exemplar of how schools can establish partnerships with business. Some 2700 of about 3100 state secondary schools have achieved such an arrangement, on a limited scale under the Conservatives but comprehensively under the Blair Labour Government. These schools have changed from a standard comprehensive to a specialist schools model, offering at least one of 11 specialisations while still addressing the broad national curriculum. The specialisations are technology, arts, business and enterprise, engineering, humanities, language, mathematics and computing, music, science, sports and special education.

Each school has at least one partnership with business in its area of specialism. Except for small schools, business contributes £50,000 ($118,000) in cash or in-kind support, generating from the Department for Education and Skills an additional £100,000 capital grant and a per-student recurrent grant. The school must demonstrate in a three-year development plan how the specialisation will enhance its overall performance. A non-profit charitable trust is funded by the department to support schools in creating these partnerships. Academics may debate the impact, but there is clear evidence that specialist schools outperform non-specialist schools and the impact becomes stronger the longer a school remains in the program. This is one of the most significant developments in secondary education in any country.

Australia and England were comparable less than 20 years ago as far as business partnerships were concerned. Yet Australia has barely moved as England has been transformed. We have no counterpart to the strategies that have been adopted in England, such as a nationally funded trust that can create and support the synergy. While government and business are broadly supportive, we have not yet seen the advocacy for such arrangements to match that of Britain's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, or business leaders such as Sir John Bond, a former chairman of HSBC, and Sir John Rose, chief executive of Rolls-Royce. We lack an imaginative approach to specialism in our schools. In Australia we tend to conflate the concept of a specialist school with that of a selective school. This is not the case in England, where no more than one in 10 of the student intake in a specialist school can be selected on the basis of prior academic achievement, allowing every student priority access to their nearest secondary school if it offers their preferred specialism. Different kinds of partnerships are emerging in parts of Australia, notably South Australia and Tasmania.

Seventeen schools in Adelaide are to be closed and replaced by six "super schools" that combine preschool, primary, secondary and a range of community services on one site in state of- the-art facilities: Australia's first large-scale adoption of the concept of the "full-service school". Tasmania will radically change the way its bureaucracy works by selling its head office and locating senior officers in schools. Proceeds from the sale will help rebuild schools. Regional directors will be accountable for the quality of their services to local boards of principals. There has been nothing like it in the history of state education in Australia.