Thanks to all contributors for keeping discussion on track. To BN at present funding for pubic schools comes primarily from states and for private schools primarily from the federal government. There may be one system in a distant future, but for all Godo’s reasons, at this stage co-ordination is best. For a brief, but excellent summary of the issues can be found at http://www.austcolled.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3291
To Keith’s list of subjects I would add History and certainly some form of Philosophy for Children. For Australian organisations involved in this go to www.fapsa.org.au.
Hello again Chris. In our present system salary is more complex than I have implied but in an ideal world we would turn things on their head: good highly paid teachers in the classroom would be served by a bureaucracy. No harm in dreaming.
Keith – unions have to be part of the mix but for a broader professional organisation see www.austcolled.com.au

Ian Keese

Foyle said-Our education system should be aimed at teaching students to think, to use language and mathematics effectively and to understand the importance of science, ethics and politics in their daily lives.

Mate, you are something out of the 1950s and 1960s! How the wheel turns. That's what they did to my generation, and my parents' generation. We also need to regain respect for teachers, through disciplinary measures if necessary, in our classrooms and in our community. And that is how it used to be back in the 1950s and 1960s.

We need to start kids on their second language (preferably an Asian tonal language) at 3 years old, when they can soak such things up easily until the age of 8 or 9. We can if, we want, teach reading at 4 years old. Starting at primary school at 6 is one year too late and probably 2 years too late. We need to teach English grammar so that kids understand the structure of our language. We need to get calculators OUT of the classroom to give our kids some mental agility with numbers. And we should stop funding private schools with public money, particularly Catholic schools-the Catholic Church is richer than Bill Gates and the Pentagon's war budget put together. And we need to get our stupid self-perpetuating, illiterate bureaucrats and business managers out of education.

Keith,

There aren’t that many bureaucrats (c2,000 centrally employed in Victoria, compared with c40,000 teachers and c10,000 student support officers in schools), most of them are not qualified to return to schools as teachers and they do work that has to be done by someone.

Ian,

I don’t regard timetablers, subject coordinators, level coordinators and such as members of the bureaucracy, but as school leaders who can make as much difference to student learning as a single classroom teacher because the effect of the former is across the school while the effect of the last is confined to one classroom in a primary school or several classrooms for only a small part of the week in a secondary school.

I will give an example. When I arrived at my last school, I inherited the worst timetable I had ever seen. Among many faults, it allocated sport to anyone who was otherwise underloaded. I gradually re-worked allotments to replace those teachers with PE and PACE-qualified staff, thus improving staff morale overall and the level of knowledge in sports classes.

In the long run, I set about changing the school curriculum with the following objectives in mind:
provide students with a range of educationally valid experiences which maximise their learning opportunities,
distribute workload across staff in an equitable manner,
ensure properly qualified teachers teach in their preferred subject areas,
encourage a team feeling and focus in each subject,
expose students to a limited number of different teachers,
support an even spread of classes between the two weeks,
maximise the number of cases in which teachers in the junior school can double up on their classes.
use a standardised allotment system that fairly allots all staff,
provide the maximum preparation and correction time consistent with covering the required classes,
limit the number of different classes each teacher has,
provide teachers with a minimum number of different classrooms.

Any timetabler achieving goals such as these is adding to learning throughout the school and is deserving of recognition in pay scales.

The same can be said of other teachers in administrative leadership, including vice principals.

Ian,

Hello again. My earlier responses may have sounded perfunctory, for which I apologise. I actually think that a lot of what you say is logical and necessary, such as a co-operatively developed national curriculum, improved teacher education, a serious attempt to tackle equity issues and even rewards for the best teachers, the last of which brings me to another point.

One of the most lasting and inequitable legacies of the previous government of Victoria was the conversion of an education system into a chaos of 1,600 competing small businesses. The continued existence of this arrangement has undermined efforts by the current state government to improve results for disadvantaged students because it still operates on the bucket of money under the principal’s desk principle when it should centrally set up staffing profiles, promotion schedules, statewide key selection criteria, etc so that the system can be rebuilt and can then direct its efforts to dealing with the problems education still has. In other words, there is not point in a system that rewards the best teachers for staying in the least challenging schools. The system needs to intervene and create set numbers of positions for the best teachers in disadvantaged schools so that those teachers will be willing to move there.

I leave to one side the method for identifying the best teachers because it is not easy at all, and the various Victorian experiments with performance pay were total failures, while the proposals of the previous government would have been a disaster.

Another key difficulty in fixing education is the lack of commitment so many teachers have to their profession. So, we can expect to see an overwhelming majority of primary teachers and about half of the secondary teachers in the state at work on this week’s strike day despite Victorian teachers having the worst pay in the country and conditions, which, while not the worst, are much worse than they were 20 years ago. If the people in education won’t fight for it, who will?