Government schools in Victoria had the autonomy that matters – curriculum autonomy – 40 years ago. Management autonomy does not improve student learning. It is cover to allow increased exploitation of teachers under the mantra of “flexibility”.

The Napthine government is now easily spinning journalists into reporting that it plans to increase autonomy when in fact it proposes to reduce it (The great divide over school reform, School reforms divide principals,
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/school-reforms-divide-principals-20140906-10darv.html#comments)

According to the Victorian Competition and Efficiency Commission report, local, elected parent-majority school councils (themselves a Liberal initiative of 1975) are to be sidelined by district multi-school boards, appointed by the government, paid by the government, with the power to appoint the principal of your local school and with the authority to employ their own bureaucrats. This is not autonomy. This is not community. This is not democracy. This is a series of mini-empires.

Currently parents and teachers elect representatives to school councils who have the confidence of those who elect them. The government calls these elected teachers “token teachers” and wants them replaced by appointed yes-men and yes-women, spun as “staff with greater expertise”. It is not so politically inept as to call the parents “token parents”, though I think the teacher-bashing inherent in calling elected teachers “token teachers” is pretty inept too. After all, the not token parents work with the “token teachers” on school councils and know the government is talking rot yet again. Then again, we have a token government that did nothing for its first two years and is now wasting out money on TV ads telling us that it going to do something one day – though not in education.

We would do far better if we could just dissolve the states, and then use the 70 billions plus per that we would save, at the very coalface
We are just one country, we call it Australia.
That being so, we need just one Australia wide curriculum! No ifs, buts or maybes!
This might conflict with some very self centered teacher career/control aspirations; but, will always be better for students in these days of massively increased mobility!
It's entirely unfair, i.e., to learn Roman mythology/history, and then due excursively to unavoidable mobility, be tested in the Greek equivalent/teacher personal preference! [N.B. Chris.]
As for the mooted Competition?
It can only lead to winners and losers, with funding going to those with their noses already buried the deepest in the publicly/preferentially funded trough!?
I believe a better scheme, along with far more regional autonomy, is fixing the funding paradigm exclusively to the parent(s) rather than this or that school; and then allow all schools to compete with each other, for their share of the taxpayer dollar/student numbers!
Now that is real competition!
As always, the taxpayer dollar is a limited pool of funds, and therefore, this universal support must be means tested and exhaust above a certain income threshold.
Means testing is the only tool available to us to ensure we fund need/the best and the brightest, rather than entirely unprincipled greed/privilege!
The future belongs to the best and brightest/most meritorious/able, rather than the already over privileged.
One simply can't create GENUINE equality, but we sure as hell can create an equal starting point, rather than the current handicappers one, where the least well of, already start from a mile behind!
Rhrosty.

Rhosty, you're scaring me, stop making so much sense!
I have long term close personal experience with the Education dept's in three states and served on school counils everywhere, as a token parent.
I almost completely agree with your proposals, as a solid starting point.

The trouble is that school choice is such an ideologically charged subject that it is difficult to discern whether any evidence presented on its effectiveness is genuinely objective, or simply rationalisations in support of one or other position. This seems to me true both of the pro- and anti- competition camps.

Garbage Chris! We were prepared to drive 100 Kilometers a day so our 2 oldest kids could go to a high with a good headmaster. One who kicked out drug kids quick time, & enforced discipline.

When he was transferred the school fell to bits over about 18 months of bleeding heart management.

Yep Rhrosty, the last thing we need is curriculum autonomy in these days of great mobility in families. I went to 14 different schools due to dads employment & it was murder. Luckily dad said no the last time, & I got the last 4 years of high school in the one place. My results would have been much less satisfactory if we had kept moving.

As it was I had to give up a language, as the German I had a year of was not available, & trying to catch up a year of French was too difficult.

The competition thing would be great, & can work in suburbia, but out here, not that far from the city the department, read union, muck about with busses to force most to send their kids where the union want them.

They built a high school on Tamborine mountain a while back, as parents up there bitched about their kids riding busses down & up dangerous roads to school on the lowlands. Next thing lowland parents were forced to send their kids up the mountain, when the school was short of students. Perhaps up down is safer than down up.

Funding the parent/student would fix this garbage, provided it applied to bus funding too.

Speaking of choice and charter schools which are all the rage in the USA especially with those who worship the self-serving "god" of the market via the mantras of choice and especially "competition" why not do a google on the topic - charter school scams.