Shorbe: Let's not talk about the exceptions, the demographic of parents at elite schools is not overwhelmed by the working poor struggling to find the $20 k for annual school fees. They have the option of cheaper private schools, it is their choice, but I don't have to subsidise it.

If you have paid your taxes and the Government then gives you money for school fees how is that not welfare ? While how much tax they pay is not relevant I don't see how we would know that they have paid twice as much as they are getting back. It certainly wouldn't be your Puritan battlers

Such ridiculous rhetoric they throw around about elite private schools - today's Herald Sun editorial is a pearler. Supposedly the subsidies will help the "aspirational" (Clear that word from the dictionary! NOW!) working class to at least have a chance at rubbing shoulders with the blazered toffs at St Megabucks'.

It's a ridiculous argument - those schools DO NOT WANT YOU THERE if you are not the right type. Principals at some of those schools have stated quite unambiguously that they are aiming at a particular market share and will not lower their fees (with the generous government subsidies shelled out to them) if you aimed a gun at their collective heads.

Dad's a brickie (even if he's earning over $100 000)? Forget it.

Dad's a lawyer (and preferably an old boy)? Come on in!

And with regards to teachers' merit pay? Dead in the water. Don't even try to pursue it. It's deader than school vouchers. Been done, doesn't work.

My own experience, my own observations and the comments of colleagues in several schools convince me that principals should not be permitted to determine hiring, firing or teacher pay. There is need for a study on why the wrong people get promoted. It may have something to do with the qualities needed to get a job being quite different from the qualities needed to actually do it.

Nor do I see any merit in the idea that some teachers would choose performance pay while others stay where they are. Given the decline in teacher pay and conditions over decades, this proposal would simply reward some teachers with the return of some of the pay cuts all teachers have suffered.

It is also the case that teachers can work in dysfunctional schools in which their individual efforts will make no headway in the chaos that surrounds them. They will be putting in the time and effort, but good results will elude them for reasons outside their control. For example, the disaster of the open classroom that died through its failure in the 1970s is being recycled in Victoria, even though Ken Rowe from ACER has pointed out there are 500,000 studies which show students learn better when they are actually taught.

The government has an obligation to ensure that all schools provide a decent education to all children. Performance pay for some teachers will not achieve this.

My experience is that schools in which teachers have the greatest say work much more effectively than those in which the principal acts as a dictator. It is also my experience that etchers were able to be more effective as teachers before the current accountability and review processes were introduced. Teachers used to concentrate on doing their job. Now they have to devote effort to showing that they are doing the job, which actually detracts from the job itself.

The success of the IPA in having business jargon imposed on schools is an extraordinary story. Performance pay is just another business fad being pushed onto schools by people who know nothing about teaching.

westernred: Many of the APS schools (which I suppose would be considered the elite schools in Melbourne) do draw their students from a wide range of backgrounds. Look at Haileybury College. It has its original campus in Brighton (a very wealthy suburb), but it also has a campus in Springvale (a pretty working class suburb with a high immigrant population) and draws students from surrounding areas. Likewise, Mentone Grammar (which is in the AGS) draws many students from Beaumaris (a wealthy suburb) but also draws plenty from places such as Springvale or even Cranbourne (which is a long way away). I would suggest that part of the reason inner city elite schools don't draw people from such suburbs is because of travelling times (which could be up to a couple of hours in one direction), although many still draw students from the northern and western suburbs.

I don't consider the government taxing you and then giving it back to you to be welfare. Welfare is when they give you someone else's money.

petal: That's ridiculous. By your own argument, none of these private schools would have kids who were the children or grandchildren of Vietnamese boat people or Greek peasants (who had come to this country and been successful) because they weren't part of the blue blood and had names that didn't sound like Baillieu. Get over your own class envy for just a second.

In The Age today http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/rudds-alp-is-selling-out-public-schools/2007/03/21/1174153156079.html Kenneth Davidson writes about Rudd's education policy. In part he says

"According to a study by University of Canberra educationalist and former federal education bureaucrat, Professor Louise Watson, average annual education spending per student in 2004 on non-government schools was $9000 in primary schools and $12,000 in secondary, compared with $8000 primary and $10,500 secondary for government schools. It would cost an extra $2.1 billion a year to bring recurrent government funding up to non-government standard. No comparable study has been done since. Why? The answer may be that Watson believes the funding differential has widened since."

"According to the OECD's 2004 Program of International Student Assessment, "the gross effect of school resourcing, which includes an assessment of how the socio-economic background of students and schools reinforces the distribution of the quality and quantity of school resources, is sizeable in many countries, most notably in Australia …"

And dicking around with the pay scales of government school teachers isn't going to pump any more money into education. but will have the effect of encouraging experienced teachers to carefully consider working in the private system, thus reinforcing the belief in areas like Beaumaris, that state schools are child minding centres for delinquents.

Senior managers like carrot and stick motivation because they end up with more carrots themselves. Those at the delivery end pay for grander and grander remuneration packages for senior managers devoid of leadership skills.

The quality of management is the problem and what is the bet the same incompetent and self-serving senior managers will be there to implement any merit based system when it is introduced?