New Matilda | Education in 2015

Education Vision for 2015
By: John Spierings
14 December 2005
Of all the institutions established around the time of the industrial revolution, schooling has perhaps been the most enduring. Gone are many of the factories, revolutionised are the transport systems, transformed is Australia‘s political settlement, but schooling survives largely intact.
The ingredients so essential to schooling‘s original design - the classroom, chalk and talk, the textbook, homework, assembly, compulsory attendance, a uniform starting age, measured annualised progression - still remain at its core. Although not quite frozen in time, the lesson is that change in schooling tends to be an incremental rather than a radical thing, developed through a process of additions rather than by inventing bold new formulas.
In thinking about what education might look like ten years hence, it might be instructive to identify some of the most critical incremental changes over the ten years past.
First, the growing popularity of vocational education and training. For example, participation in Vocational Education Training (VET) in schools has grown from a fifth to half of all senior secondary students and last year Newspoll revealed high levels of support for apprenticeship and training pathways for young people;
Secondly, non-teaching staff or intermediaries are playing an increasingly important role alongside teachers, for example in supporting students, in mentoring, workplace learning, and the transition from school.
Thirdly, in hundreds of small-scale but important annexes, teaching units and other programs, ‘alternatives‘ catering to the needs of ‘hard to teach‘ students have developed to complement ‘mainstream‘ school provision.
Fourthly, the experience of childhood is increasingly being concertinaed with pressures on young people to think and act as rational adults sooner and more consistently.
Finally, governments have gradually altered the landscape of senior secondary schooling, by raising the compulsory school attendance age, introducing greater choice and flexibility in senior certificates, better support for early school leavers and monitoring of student destinations once they are beyond the school gate.
Perhaps what has changed most over time are the social expectations that we now have of schooling: not just that it will impart ever expanding chunks of knowledge and skills, but that almost all young people can and should attend school for up to twelve or thirteen years of their lives.
This is a new experience. In 2005 most states have either legislated to compel young people to continue in schooling until the age of 17 or completion of Year 12 or an equivalent qualification (Queensland, Tasmania, Western Australia), or have set ambitious participation targets (Victoria). Only a quarter of a century ago, however, retention to Year 12 was just 35 percent. Public education systems only began offering comprehensive opportunities to complete Year 12 in the 1950s; prior to that the public effort had been concentrated in providing universal primary and lower secondary educational qualifications.
The greatest challenge we now face in education is how to provide a quality educational experience for students on a mass scale.
As educational participation has increased a consumer market in education has evolved, due in part to the active role of the federal government in underwriting parent participation in the private school sector. The market share of non-government secondary schools has grown from 35 percent in the mid-1980s to around 42 percent in 2004. However it is a sector increasingly reliant on public subsidies with about 70 percent of expenditures in the Catholic system and a third of the costs of other non-government schools being met by the taxpayer.
In the competition for scarce public resources defining and achieving clear public interest outcomes for the public investments being made - regardless of school ownership or auspice - is a further major challenge for policy-makers.
So by 2015 how will these challenges be met?
On the funding question, the debate about funding for private schools will be resolved. We will come to redefine the meaning of public education, and come to view public financing in education as a means to achieve shared purposes across sectors rather than a tool to maintain hostile interests. We would see that public funding has in effect extended the reach of the public interest into the realm of erstwhile private schools. Schools would be more able to share innovations, pedagogies and resources for the benefit of students, parents and communities. Rather than untied grants, funding to non-government systems would be in the form of contracts to meet broad public responsibilities, including attending to the needs of students at risk of educational failure and to indigenous young Australians.
On how to provide quality education on a mass scale, the stranglehold of universities in determining the measures of success in our schools will be largely broken. Apprenticeships, TAFE courses and community service will be recognised as valid pathways, as prestigious as university entrance. There will be many and varied ‘mainstreams‘. Senior curricula will be less skewed towards the needs of our higher education institutions, and more capable of developing literate, critical and confident students.
Students will play a much more active role in the organisation and direction of schools. They will learn not so much by being attentive consumers of knowledge but by actively helping to shape and expand the frontiers of knowledge. Media such as the internet and digital communication technology will be more mature and able to be extensively manipulated, customised and redesigned by individuals. Students will increasingly rely on insights and knowledge derived from authentic experience, on personal feel, taste, and creation of the tools and content of education.
An issue educators will confront is the disconnection between learning and production, because consumption is the dominant mode through which much of our life is mediated. This is especially so for young people being welcomed into society. VET will evolve into more than a ‘learning by doing‘ pedagogy; it will be about ‘learning by doing‘ as another way of living a life.
This reshaping will occur in several ways, including the integration of schools and TAFE colleges, and employability skills developed through more intimate relationships between the learning needs of employers and the schooling system. The cognitive and intellectual skills associated with VET will be better understood and regarded, and VET learning will be informed by more rigorous grounding in the social sciences and arts.
The strength of this emphasis on individual autonomy and responsibility for learning would be balanced by a strong democratic, inclusive ethos in the culture and management of schooling. As institutions schools will be less hierarchical in their administration and in their approach to teaching and to learning. Relationships between students and teachers would develop from stronger bonds of mutual respect and trust. Intermediaries - youth workers, mentors, teacher‘s aides and other para-professionals - acting as a bridge between schools and the wider community would be recognised and highly valued.
To underpin these developments in pedagogy teacher training will be revamped: specialist approaches in working with ‘hardest to teach‘ students, and in developing authentic learning opportunities would become part of every teacher‘s bag of tricks.
If there is to be one giant leap forward, it will be that Australian students will obtain a legislated right to education. Such a right would establish the responsibility of governments to provide free and compulsory education that is relevant, of good quality and reflecting individual student needs at least till the designated age for compulsory attendance. Governments would face the need and have the means to articulate these responsibilities, and especially what it means to provide high quality schooling for all young people.