Money will not fix our education system.

As I read it, Gonski is not schools centric but rather as essentially, a needs based, means tested, student funding model?

Simply throwing more money at wasteful state government autocracies, is self evidently a recipe to entrench everything that is wrong with education, inside it?

And while throwing more money at comparatively well resourced schools will change very little? Reducing the funding to poorer school is hardly a formula to improve outcomes!

Education could be improved if more regional autonomy was the model? And given saved admin costs etc., add as much as 30% to the pool of money earmarked for education.

While money is important, given how much we can do without it? Better management and fact based evidence will ensure better comparative apples for apples benchmarked best practices becomes the standard template?

As alway we will see the ether turn blue with commentary by idealogues, self confessed experts who've be teaching since Adam wore knickerbockers and we know best elitists (welded to the state nanny teat) trying to shore up padded positions out of mere, if well camouflaged, self interest?

Simply put, our perilous financial position is the result of welfare for the rich, which until recently was costing the budget bottom line as much or more than the aged pension?

And guess which of those was earmarked by government for reduction? Even as a much as a published 60 billion may be leaving these shores annually as tax avoidance by multinationals? Which according to published remarks by no less a luminary than honest John Howard, includes as much as 95% of corporate Australia?

Moreover, if we could but eliminate state governments entirely from any and all service delivery, we could save as much as an estimated 70 billions per? And without losing any service delivery or amenity?

Why, there are different and diverse cities in the world with populations that match Australia's and individually administered by a single central council!

Maybe everyone else is smarter than our state governments?

If management teaches just one thing it teaches there's always a better way to do everything!
Alan B.

According to one of the Rothchilds, sometime back, the purpose of reducing the school age to 5 years is to separate the kids away from the parents earlier to enable the state to exercise more control over the kids but that's by the by, the real issue is which direction is Australia education system going to go.

There is a lot of concern in the US that apart from schools for the kids of the elite, the education system there is designed to dumb the nation kids down so their ability to think critically is reduced.

That's one direction we, being an ally of and being heavily influenced by the US, we might go in.

According to a world education rankings table I saw on a website some time ago, South Korea ranks on of the best the in the world. In other words, their teaching system is better and achieves more with less than is achieved by western countries. That's another direction we could go in, identify worlds best practice and why it is so and go in that direction.

One likes to think the choice is ours.

ttbn,

Though money alone won't solve every problem, there's a lot it can do. And there's a lot they'd planned to do with the money that's now under threat.

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Alan B,

More autonomy might result in some small savings, but nowhere near 30%. You'd be lucky to get 3%. The assumption that everything under state government control is inefficient is part of the problem. The old myth that we would save so much without state governments depends on some very dodgy assumptions; a more recent analysis (sorry, I don't have a link) has concluded that state governments are best place to provide services, and a lot of the inefficiency is the result of the Federal government trying to exert more control. But the Federal government has the power because it has the money, and nobody's yet come up with a satisfactory solution.

There are some things we can do to make schools more efficient, such as more use of prepackaged work for stuff on the national curriculum. But it's no substitute for proper funding.

Well yes Adian, but a direct needs based funding model has to save money. And given the comparative (30% + or _) costs of (public private) school hall rollout, I stand by my numbers, which unlike yours have some history and evidence to back them up!

Consequently I'm not surprised you can't find a link for your, typical for you, unfounded assertion!
Alan B.

One can finance anything for a finite time with a checkbook and an unlimited overdraft; it's called the Lehman Brother's model?

And it would seem, preferred by regular contributor and financial EXPERT, Adian, who seems to think we have unlimited funds to allocate all over the place? And thank heavens nobody is dumb enough to place him in charge of anybody else's money!

State governments and their armies of double handling experts are little more than a nonessential profit demanding middleman, who adds his costs to everything that passes through his hands!

Double handling State government bureaucracies are, I believe, clinically inefficient? They will always argue different!

Don't take my word, ask any large city Mayor who are as always invariably required go behind and clean up their mess and legendary mass produced waste from much smaller budgets!?

Moreover, it goes without saying, they will never add their salaries and entitlements into the costs they administer?

Given it is the federal government that raises all the money from the ever suffering taxpayer, it behooves them in the face of ever going deficits as far out as the eye can see, to investigate any and all possible saving paradigms?

They should look at a direct needs based funding model that simply deals serial wastetral state governments and their armies of ultra costly bureaucrats out, at least long enough to establish once and for all how much this endless double handling and responsibility shifting actually costs the taxpayer?

And if that sounds the death knell of an entirely non essential arm of government, so be it? And indeed, what took so long after the disappearance of the (they all had their designated roles) horse and cart, steam engines and the overland telegraph, for unmitigated pragmatism to finally prevail?

And should be applied to both health and education, as means tested best practices models?

If that means (protected species/inmates in charge of asylums) state governments (with quarantined budgets) have to seriously downsize, that's exactly what happens in any well managed comparable enterprise?
Alan B.

People believe things because they want to believe them. The idea of the huge state educational bureaucracies is just one of those things trotted out regularly. I had a look at the figures some years go for Victoria. There were about 40,000 teachers, 10,000 student support service officers (lab assistants, library aides, the school office person, and so on) and only 2,000 people employed by the central department and the regions, ands some of the latter were teachers too; e.g., visiting teachers for the deaf and so on. That makes the bureaucracy less than 4 per cent of the employment.

The story is similar with funding. The recent Bracks review reported that Victoria spent $5.74 billion in schools and $700 million in departmental support. The departmental figure was broken into $226 million for corporate expenses and $474 million for school related expenses, the latter including such things as student transport ($100 million), VCAA ($46 million), tech support for schools ($43 million), and so on. In other words, the bureaucracy costs 3.5 per cent of the total, leaving 96.5 per cent for students.

I apologies for quoting facts.

Alan B. you seem to have an extremely poor understanding both of my position and of the situation.

The Lehman Brothers didn't have unlimited credit. Nor do state governments. The Federal government does, but that doesn't mean it has "unlimited funds to allocate all over the place". Spending money has economic consequences. When the sum of public and private sector spending is too high, you get too much inflation. But sometimes (including now) we have the opposite problem: the sum of public and private sector spending is too low (which results in unemployment and economic decline). That's quite an easy problem to fix (just spend more) but the amount we can spend before it becomes too inflationary is not unlimited, so efficiency is still important.

Ditch the stereotype of the school halls scheme and look at the facts! The vast majority of BER spending was good value for money, the exceptions being disproportionately in NSW and Victoria. The government seems to have taken the Orgill report down, but a news report from when it was released is at: http://www.smh.com.au//breaking-news-national/ber-gets-thumbs-up-but-not-in-vic-and-nsw-20110708-1h655.html
AIUI the governments of those two states decided it didn't have the capability to manage the implementation of BER in state schools, so contracted it out to the private sector. In those circumstances, it would be highly misleading to use it as evidence of intrinsic inefficiency of state government bureaucracies. You can't form reliable conclusions based on the worst examples alone, particularly when their actual involvement turns out to be rather limited. Of course we should learn from the failures, but we should also learn from the successes, and what happened in WA does not support your narrative.

You're right about double handling being wasteful, but you're too quick to dismiss the suitability of state governments to the task. When I freely admitted that I couldn't find the link (to media reports I'd read or heard a few years ago) you demonstrated your unthinking arrogance in two ways: firstly by trying to turn it into a personal attack, and secondly by failing to consider the possibility that it could be correct.