That the ACT has a crisis in its health system is pretty much an accepted fact of life these days. What is generally less well-known – except among certain insiders – is that our ACT education system is just about as bad.
In fact, it may be worse. Most people get appropriate treatment in ACT hospitals, but the evidence is mounting that most students in ACT government schools are getting suboptimal outcomes, and things are getting worse.
In the last four years, the verdict on our education system from independent reviews has been consistent: our system is failing. In 2017, the ACT Auditor-General found that government schools on average “achieve negative results on every measure”. A study by Victoria University that year found ACT students are almost six months behind students in comparable schools by Year 5. The Grattan Institute branded the ACT “the worst performer” in the nation in 2018.
NAPLAN testing measures literacy and numeracy among Australian students. NAPLAN testing confirms ACT students are slipping behind. The most recent test shows the ACT to be performing below NSW and Victoria, and below the Australian mean scale score for Numeracy in each of Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. Shocking.
I may share some of the blame for this. As education minister in the early 1990s, I promoted the system where individual schools exercised autonomy over management and teaching priorities. We thought this model would mean that parents would drive higher standards.
The current evidence is that this approach may have been misconceived. Instead of pursuing excellence, it seems that overworked school leaderships are falling back on education “fads” about which there is little evidence of better outcomes for students.
The recent unedifying headlines about Margaret Hendry School in Gungahlin, with angry claims from some parents that the “inquiry-based learning” practised there has deprived their kids of the basic tools for later learning, may be one example of this trend.
Resourcing of schools is not to blame. We have the second-highest education funding per student in Australia, and the smallest class sizes. Excellent inputs, but the outcomes don’t reflect this investment. And talking up the government system, as the ACT education minister unfailingly does, is no substitute for tackling these appalling outcomes.
Incidentally, the “insiders” I refer to in the first paragraph, who have worked out the problem with ACT government schools, are ACT parents. A well-educated population like ours usually knows a dud school system when it sees one.
And it certainly sees one in this town. The evidence of that? Despite the mantra about “government good, private bad”, a higher proportion of ACT parents enrol their kids in non-government schools than anywhere else in the nation. It says a lot, in a government town like Canberra, that parents abandon government schools in such large numbers.
And the independent report cards on those schools suggest the rot is far from over.
