The New Politics of Education

 These amateur educationists are everywhere intolerable bores. So long as their exertions are limited to spouting in Parliament or other congenial localities, I am inclined to class them with certain insect tribes—not dangerous … But when they are ambitious for power and find an opportunity for applying their knowledge, or want of it, to some practical purpose one longs for an extinguisher of some kind to make them suffer total eclipse.

—William Wilkins, Secretary, New South Wales Council of Education, to Thomas Stephens, Chief Inspector, Tasmanian Board of Education, June 24, 1875

We kept an unhealthy distance from the captains of business and industry … we acted as if resources for education were limitless … Well, now the tide has turned and the determination of educational policy has slipped largely from the hands of the professionals … to reside firmly with governments, political parties with their educational policy committees, economists, management experts and their major advisers …

—Fenton Sharpe, New South Wales Director-General of Education, address to New England Regional Group, Australian College of Education, November 1988

The late 1980s and early 1990s brought a new phase of political intervention in education. Long-established conventions governing the determination and implementation of public education policy in Australia evaporated. Politicians—ministers for education and premiers and prime ministers at the state, territory and Commonwealth levels—introduced their own policies on a scale previously unknown. Labor politicians often sought to apply “social justice” and “inclusive” criteria. “Essential learnings” became another favoured nostrum from 1999 onwards. Liberal politicians usually endorsed neo-liberal principles, such as devolution (self-managing schools) and greater central control of the curriculum. As the proportion of students staying on to Years 11 and 12 grew, politicians in Tasmania, Western Australia and South Australia organised new experiments.

Politicians sometimes had their own firm if simple philosophies of education, but they frequently accepted the guidance of unobtrusive advisers. No longer did they rely on education administrators for advice and policy. Politicians with a clear vision of what they wanted usually achieved some success. This was particularly the case with exponents of neo-liberal principles, such as Terry Metherell, the New South Wales Minister for Education, and Don Hayward, the Victorian. Ministers experimenting with dubious nostrums, such as Paula Wriedt’s over-enthusiasm for “essential learnings” in Tasmania or Ljiljanna Ravlich’s pursuit of “outcomes-based education” in Western Australia, lost their portfolios under embarrassing circumstances.

The increased weight of politicians in determining educational policy accompanied an unravelling of the Westminster system of public administration and the growth of a form of corporate management. Traditionally the permanent head of the department identified desirable changes and recommended them to the minister, who normally accepted them. After all, most ministers held office for a brief time; the permanent administrators had more experience. Occasionally an interventionist minister determined specific items. But now two innovations greatly curbed the inclination of senior administrators to offer frank advice: the introduction of contracts rather than permanent appointments, and the inclusion of a “performance component” in salaries. Only a brave administrator would challenge a policy favoured by his minister.

While political intervention increased at top levels, a policy of devolution conferred greater responsibility for educational decision-making on the individual school. This increased autonomy further reduced the authority of the department. The politicians concentrated their attention on the curriculum, standards and testing. A subsidiary though related change was the diminished influence of teacher unions on departmental policy. But the teaching background of many union officials and their close contact with teachers led them beyond “industrial” issues (salaries, working conditions) to more general ones of education policy.

A detailed study of developments in one state should illuminate the general picture of the new politics of education. In New South Wales the 1990 Education Reform Act provided an outstanding example of successful ministerial intervention.

Early instances of politicised education in New South Wales

The Public Instruction Act of 1880 introduced compulsory education in New South Wales, ended state aid to church schools and established a Department of Education under a minister of the Crown. For nearly a century thereafter, the permanent head of the department was the key figure in the development of education. From 1911, however, the increasing number of academic public high schools meant that the University had a strong hand in determining the secondary curriculum. As the scope of government schooling grew a few politicians began, on occasions, to intervene. David Drummond, Country Party Minister for Education 1927–30 and 1932–41, and himself educated in government schools, took measures to improve educational opportunities for rural children and to foster technical education. Clive Evatt, an eccentric barrister who was Labor Party Minister for Education 1941–44, tried to implement some aspects of progressive education; ultimately cabinet tired of his adventures and dismissed him.

In 1964 both state and Commonwealth politicians reintroduced state aid to non-state schools. The New South Wales government established scholarships for pupils in the last four years of non-state secondary schools and for pupils in state secondary schools living away from home. The Commonwealth government offered financial aid for science laboratories and scholarships to state as well as non-state secondary schools. At the state level the politicians responded to the voting power of Catholics; at the Commonwealth level the Democratic Labor Party, aligned with the Catholic Church, exerted pressure on Prime Minister R.G. Menzies. But as yet politicians did not intervene in the core of education, the curriculum.

During the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s many Australian education departments surrendered their powers to the schools, where neo-progressive ideas fostering “open education” and informal teaching, or radical (neo-Marxist) sociological approaches to the curriculum made headway. While these activists had most influence in Victoria, South Australia and the ACT, the New South Wales department also relaxed much of its control. The Teachers’ Federation pushed the department to abandon long-established functions. It ceased issuing detailed syllabuses for primary school subjects, abolished traditional inspection, and replaced the externally set and marked School Certificate exam at the end of Year 10 with a school-assessed one. These changes reduced its ability to scrutinise what was going on. In the late 1970s the identity politics of a multicultural society and the associated growth of special interest groups added new confusions.

In the 1980s the department tried to reclaim some of its powers, with only partial success. In April 1986 the Director-General, R.B. Winder, admitted that many people had the feeling that “no one is in charge”. He believed this flowed from the attempts of schools to respond to the vast range of demands from a variety of groups. The department’s difficulties in controlling schooling, the complaints of employers about the educational quality of youngsters, and parental unease (expressed in a drift in enrolments to non-state schools) encouraged political intervention. The Public Service Act of 1979 made the Director-General responsible to the Minister for Education for the management of the department, rather than to the Public Service Board. The Premier’s Department was now responsible for reviews of the Education Department. In due course politicians curtailed the independence of the senior administrators by introducing appointment by contract rather than permanency and by inserting a performance component in salaries.

Winder’s successor, Fenton Sharpe, recognised the change soon after his appointment in April 1988: “the determination of educational policy has slipped largely from the hands of professionals … to reside firmly with governments, political parties … economists, management experts”. Committees investigating education policy and practice were no longer dominated by educationists. The minister and the department became the sources of policy. Politicisation, ministerial power and managerialism had arrived. The “Westminster tradition” was breaking down.

Three interventionist ministers

The transfer of power began under the Labor Party minister, Rodney Cavalier. In May 1984 he told parliament he would preserve all existing selective high schools; up till then the department had steadily weakened these schools. Two months later he told the Teachers’ Federation it had lost its privileged status with the department. In 1985–86 Cavalier rejected the special education lobby’s suggestion that one in five children was in need of special education. The minister’s power was strengthened in July 1985 when, for the first time, a director-general (Bob Winder) was appointed on a five-year contract.

From the late 1980s ministerial advisory staff became important, albeit shadowy, figures in the political control of education. As Cavalier has remarked, when J.J. Cahill was Premier in the 1950s his staff consisted of one. The Whitlam government invented personally appointed ministerial staffs. Previously the New South Wales Minister for Education’s liaison officers and private secretaries were Education Department officers, not political appointments. Under the new dispensation the politically chosen head of staff in a minister’s office began to exercise more power than the director-general.

Terry Metherell took office after the Liberal victory in 1988 determined to shake up the education bureaucracy. Neo-liberal principles led to devolution of power to school principals, competition between public schools, and central control of the curriculum. Metherell relied for advice not on the department but on his ministry, which had grown in size. As Lesley Lynch, a member of both the department and ministry between 1985 and 1996, later noted, “He ordered three major reviews into the system, but none under the aegis of its department, a painful break from past practice.”

The 1990 Education Reform Act and the newly created Board of Studies reintroduced supervision of the primary school curriculum. Testing of basic literacy and numeracy was introduced in primary schools, bringing some improvement in standards. In the late 1990s mandatory external tests were also introduced for the School Certificate, while the senior secondary school curriculum was refurbished.

Metherell’s reforms mirrored similar changes in New Zealand, the UK and the United States. The new educational philosophy put a heavy focus on applying business ideas and a market ideology. The reforms ushered in an era of school-centred education in which schools were meant to develop their own ethos, with parental choice ensuring that the best schools prospered. For a variety of reasons this ambitious goal was never fully realised. The specialised curriculum of many high schools in well-populated areas attracted students who might otherwise have been lost to non-state schools. However, some comprehensive high schools did suffer. Complaints were heard that “the growth of selectives has wrecked the comprehensive system”. But other factors, particularly the drift to non-government schools, both helped cause these changes and exacerbated their adverse impact on some schools.

Metherell’s successor, Virginia Chadwick, took over in 1990. She was the first woman to hold the New South Wales education portfolio and had the relatively rare advantage of being a former teacher. “Her public profile,” Lesley Lynch wrote, “emanated warmth and charm. This did not initially extend to her senior bureaucrats. She was as tough as Metherell in her dealings with them.” In 1991 the Coalition almost lost the election, forcing Chadwick to relax the firm Metherell agenda. The appointment of Ken Boston as director-general in 1992 gave her “the nation’s smartest and probably toughest” chief executive, a new breed quite comfortable in accepting that “governments, not bureaucrats, set the policy frameworks and make the big decisions”.

Politicised education often involved getting rid of defenders of the old regime. One recommendation in the June 1989 Schools Renewal Report by Brian Scott, a leading businessman, had been that the number of departmental staff concentrated in Head Office be reduced by more than half. Between 1993 and 1996 membership of the Senior Executive Service fell from 202 to ninety-seven. Some of the administrators moved to the ten new regional offices, where they were directly involved in assisting teachers.

The Premier’s guiding hand

Bob Carr was Labor Premier of New South Wales from 1995 to 2005. When he retired, the president of the Teachers’ Federation, Maree O’Halloran, remarked that he had “controlled the education portfolio to such an extent that Ministers and Directors-General exercised virtually none of their decision-making capacity without reference to the Premier’s office”. Carr was anxious to restore some of the features of his own “traditional” education in the 1950s in a public high school. He was particularly anxious to encourage the teaching of grammar in primary schools and history in secondary.

Carr’s first Minister for Education, John Aquilina, held office from 1995 to 2001. He fully embraced Carr’s objectives in education. His appointment marked the quiet passing of a long tradition: that no Catholic could be Minister for Education. This veto originated in the controversy accompanying the 1880 Public Instruction Act which introduced compulsory education and ended state aid to church schools. Catholic Archbishop Vaughan and his three suffragan bishops issued a Joint Pastoral Letter to “instruct, warn and direct” Catholic parents to withdraw their children from government schools, which were described as “seed-plots of future immorality, infidelity, and lawlessness, being calculated to debase the standard of human excellence”. Popular resentment of this condemnation persisted for many years.

Exclusion of Catholics from the Education portfolio raised no problems for conservative governments, though the Labor Party often had difficulty finding a non-Catholic education minister. Aquilina was the first of a series of Catholics to occupy the post. By the time of his appointment religious intensities had diminished. The Catholic Church and Catholic schools had also changed. Staffed from the 1870s until the 1960s by teaching orders of brothers and nuns or, in some instances, priests, Catholic schools with their large classes, strict discipline and separation of the sexes offered little preparation for a career as a minister responsible for public schools. By 1995, however, Catholic schools shared many of the features of state ones. They had lay teachers, co-education, smaller classes, and more relaxed discipline. As the steady drift of non-Catholics from public to non-government schools suggested, they seemed to offer a better service.

Andrew Refshauge, whose early career was in medicine, worked closely with Bob Carr. Indeed, he was Deputy Premier from 1995 to 2005, as well as Minister for Education and Training from 2003 to 2005. In 2003 Refshauge criticised the focus of his own department in an address to the Teachers’ Federation Council: “The Department seems not to realise that its prime responsibility, apart from to the Government, is to schools and TAFEs; that it should be actually there to assist the work that is being done in the classrooms.” But reconciling government wishes with school and TAFE college needs was a challenging task!

A multiplicity of ministers

Political control worked quite well under politicians with clear, achievable aims; those enchanted with will-o’-the-wisp theories could wreak disaster. Another recipe for trouble was a rapid circulation of office-holders. In the early twenty-first century New South Wales suffered an over-frequent sequence of ministers and directors-general. John Aquilina was followed in November 2001 by John Watkins, another Catholic. Watkins gave way to Andrew Refshauge, March 2003 to January 2005. Next came Carmel Tebbutt, the second woman and third Catholic to hold this office, from January 2005 till April 2007, when she resigned to spend more time with her children. As her husband was the federal Transport and Infrastructure Minister, Anthony Albanese, this would, indeed, have been a strong motive. Although Tebbutt had attended a Catholic school, she sent her son to a public one. The president of the Teachers’ Federation, Maree O’Halloran, complained that Tebbutt preferred the advice of her departmental officials, “who have no qualifications in education and no teaching experience” rather than that of teachers, and branded the minister as seeking to be “more conservative, indeed reactionary, than the federal government” by endorsing the A-to-E grading of children in every key learning area. Tebbutt had failed to consult the Federation on legislation affecting the status of teachers.

John Della Bosca, another Catholic, and husband of federal MP Belinda Neal, was given the ministerial baton in April 2007. He immediately replaced the incumbent director-general with one of his own choosing. In June 2008 he was stood down while police investigated an altercation he and his wife had with staff at a Gosford nightclub. John Hatzistergos became Acting Education Minister. Although the Director of Prosecutions found insufficient evidence to support a criminal charge against Della Bosca, on his return to the ministry in September he was appointed to Health, his former portfolio passing to Verity Firth.

The Daily Telegraph’s education columnist, Maralyn Parker, greeted Verity Firth as the seventh minister in six years. She had been in parliament only since the March 2007 elections. She was a graduate of public schools, which Parker found a refreshing change. The rapid circulation of ministers was largely a reflection of the confused condition of New South Wales politics under a party which had been too long in power. The ministers had no great knowledge of education and did not get the chance to acquire much. Almost all came to the portfolio after short-lived tenures in other roles. They soon rejoined the roundabout of change. Sometimes they relied on their political advisers, sometimes on the head of department. Unfortunately, most directors-general were also out of touch with education.

A new breed of director-general

A new type of administrator was being appointed as director-general. Under the old system, potential candidates were selected from the ranks of the teaching service by a prolonged process of filtration. Teachers of high ability could rise to the rank of school principal, then to inspectorial rank and thence to various administrative jobs, some in head office, where the fortunate few could aspire to the crown of director (from 1945 director-general) of education. They were men; the few female inspectors could hardly aspire to the top position. Further, the incumbent director-general usually primed his successor. This selection process was slowly undermined after the role of inspectors was highly curtailed in the 1970s.

The last director-general appointed along recognisably traditional lines was Fenton Sharpe, in 1988. Even so, his occupancy was less secure than in the past; the public service was becoming politicised. As the historian Beverley Kingston puts it, “the dominant management theory asserted that management was management regardless of what was being managed; specialised expertise could be relegated somewhere far down the chain of command”. This explains why some services began to lurch from crisis to crisis. In the past public servants had spent years in their professional area of expertise acquiring skills which could assist them. They had provided continuity despite political changes.

Finding a replacement for Fenton Sharpe in 1991 took six weeks. Ken Boston, director-general from 1992 to 2002, was the last director-general with personal knowledge of classrooms to be appointed to the state’s biggest department and one of the largest education systems in the world. After he resigned to become Chief Executive of Britain’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority it took more than three months to install a successor.

The next three heads of the department were career public servants with relatively little knowledge of education. Jan McClelland was the first woman to be director-general. She took office in October 2002, having been deputy director-general for a decade. She had qualified as a barrister but worked mainly as a public servant. Her father had been a minister in the Whitlam Labor government; her brother was the shadow attorney in the federal Labor opposition.

In June 2003 Education Minister Refshauge announced a restructuring to reduce the department’s size and administration costs. About 300 teachers were to be sent back to classrooms and 700 of the department’s 3500 public servants would lose their jobs. In fact the number of deputy directors-general and assistant directors-general grew from nine to nineteen. The payroll for the most senior bureaucrats doubled to $4.72 million. Money was saved by reducing the number of “teaching consultants” in schools. The state’s forty education districts were re-zoned into ten regional offices. Refshauge dismissed McClelland in January 2004 after less than 18 months in her $330,000-a-year post. Her time in office had been dominated by the restructuring.

Her successor, Andrew Cappie-Wood (2004 to 2007) also lacked classroom experience. He had links with the minister from previous portfolios, including Housing and Aboriginal Affairs. When after the 2007 elections Della Bosca became Minister for Education he dismissed Cappie-Wood, appointing in his place, without public advertisement, Michael Coutts-Trotter, former director-general of the Department of Commerce and husband of the federal ALP politician Tanya Plibersek. Coutts-Trotter was publicly criticised because as a young man he had served time in prison for dealing in heroin. Another complaint was his lack of experience in education. Della Bosca initiated a forward policy in education, proposing in February 2008 the expansion of self-management of schools by allowing principals to choose which teachers they hire. The Teachers’ Federation successfully opposed the abandonment of the existing system. Della Bosca warned that state schools were losing talented teachers because they had been blocked from applying for vacant positions.

The office of director-general had become a career stage for which teaching experience was no longer necessary. He was as much an assistant to the minister as the leader of an educational bureaucracy. The post was the gift of the minister, but the occupant could resign from it to further his or her career elsewhere. Managerialism had a political as much as an educational character.

Increased intervention by Commonwealth politicians

The swift procession of ministers and directors-general deprived New South Wales education of clearly focused political control. Premier Carr’s successor, Morris Iemma, lacked ideas about education. If, indeed, “nature abhors a vacuum”, the gap was filled by other contenders in the politics of education: prime ministers and Commonwealth ministers for education intervened in the state and private school systems.

In the 1960s the three Liberal prime ministers who intervened in education did so most reluctantly. R.G. Menzies, John Gorton and Malcolm Fraser were federalists, anxious not to interfere with state responsibilities. The Whitlam Labor government of 1972–75 greatly expanded the Commonwealth’s role but it included educationists in the determination of policy. The Commonwealth Schools Commission, which made financial grants for specific programs, was a coalition of “senior State educational administrators, non-government school authorities, parents, teachers and academics”. It was abolished by the Hawke government in 1987, replaced by a new Department of Employment, Education and Training, described by Fenton Sharpe as a coalition of “big Government, big Business and big Unions (not necessarily education unions)”.

Under John Dawkins, Commonwealth Minister for Employment, Education and Training from 1987 to 1991, direct political control replaced the considerable autonomy of the Schools Commission. Dawkins advocated neo-liberal/vocational principles. While focusing on higher education, he urged that schools place greater emphasis on skills. The Commonwealth exercised its influence partly by the use of “tied” grants and partly through the Australian Education Council, consisting of the nine Commonwealth, state and territory ministers for education. The AEC steadily evolved, its latest manifestation (July 2009) being the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs.

In 1989 the Australian Education Council endorsed the teaching of citizenship, which had been abandoned in most Australian schools in the late 1960s. The Senate Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training submitted a report, Education for Active Citizenship, soon after. This was reinforced by a second Senate Standing Committee report, Active Citizenship Revisited in 1991. Paul Keating, Prime Minister from December 1991, tried to reinvigorate civic education, establishing a “Civics Expert Group” whose report Whereas the People … (1994) acknowledged the damage changes in the study of history had caused to civics education.

Kim Beazley, who replaced Dawkins as Minister for Employment, Education and Training, encouraged the Australian Education Council to authorise a “National Curriculum” for primary and junior secondary years to be based on a series of “Statements” and “Profiles”; the scheme was abandoned in July 1993, partly because radicals had captured some of the curriculum process, partly because the states resented Commonwealth trespassing into their territory. The Commonwealth also appointed three committees to investigate the education and training of adolescents over the age of sixteen. The Finn report (1991) wanted 95 per cent of nineteen-year olds to be in education or training by 2001 and identified six “key competencies” in vocational training; the Mayer report (1992) elaborated seven “key competencies”; the Carmichael report (1992) proposed a vocational certificate training system. These investigations produced no remarkable outcomes.

John Howard, Prime Minister from March 1996, did not hesitate to use the controls installed by federal governments over three decades. He reduced Commonwealth funding of universities significantly, gave non-government schools financial benefits, and relaxed their registration requirements. Howard and his education ministers were concerned about the secondary teaching of English and history, two subjects particularly relevant to values and good citizenship. Howard and Brendan Nelson announced in June 2004 a $31 billion education package in which funding was attached to a national values framework. Howard sparked a heated public debate on the English curriculum in April 2006 when he criticised the way students were encouraged to analyse literary works from a relativist, postmodern point of view, a trend associated with critical theory.

Howard’s strongest education minister was David Kemp, who persuaded the states and territories to conduct annual basic literacy and numeracy tests in Years 3, 5 and 7, funded by the Commonwealth. These started in 1999. Howard’s last Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop (January 2006 to November 2007), lacked Kemp’s background in education and seemed to lack his commitment to and understanding of Howard’s “traditional education” policies. Perhaps being a graduate of the University of Adelaide and the Harvard Business School, as well as a former barrister and solicitor, might explain this.

Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister from November 2007, continued many of the policies of the Howard era, including those on non-government schools, testing (national literacy and numeracy tests were extended in 2008 to cover Year 9), and an anxiety to improve the Australian history curriculum. But he also injected distinctive elements as part of his “education revolution”; he tended to favour material provision, such as equipment and buildings. His election promises included $1 billion to give a computer to every Year 9 to Year 12 student, though because the related costs of software, network support and staff training were overlooked the total cost rose to $2.2 billion. Like Howard, Rudd worked closely with his education minister, in this case Julia Gillard. They jointly launched Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in Our Schools in August 2008.

As part of moves to protect Australia from the “Global Financial Crisis” which erupted in October 2008 Julia Gillard announced a “Primary Schools for the 21st Century” program allocating $12.4 billion to improve school facilities across the nation. Each primary school received amounts ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to $3 million for new classrooms, multi-purpose halls, libraries and gymnasiums. Material improvement, however, did little to address the major areas of educational inadequacy: the curriculum, standards and teaching.

A new role for the Teachers’ Federation?

The Teachers’ Federation retained some influence, diminished though it was, on policy and practice in public schools. In 2005 its president, Maree O’Halloran, welcomed Carr’s resignation as Premier as a new opportunity for the Federation, to ensure that public education, including TAFE, was a priority. “Public education is the institution that allows Australians to embrace multiculturalism while maintaining social cohesion.”

The Federation occasionally gave signs of a professional spirit. It organised a major “Inquiry into the Provision of Public Education” chaired by Professor Tony Vinson, whose 447-page Report of the “Vinson Inquiry” (2002) was the first extensive analysis of the great changes initiated in 1989–90. Indeed, it was the first major survey of New South Wales public education undertaken by educationists since the 1956 Wyndham report. Another Federation initiative, a series of reports on the internet, “Education Online”, often illuminated the activities of the government, the ministers and the department.

In August 2009, following the decision of the federal government to spend $142 million over five years to improve teacher quality, the deputy president of the Federation, Gary Zadkovich, said the union aimed to reverse the perception that it was protecting the jobs of incompetent teachers. The money, he said, should be spent to “genuinely improve the quality of education and learning in our classrooms”, not on “gimmicky” announcements. The union said that teachers who had not improved after a ten-week program should be dismissed.

In late January 2010 the Federation threatened to boycott the literacy and numeracy tests if newspapers were allowed to publish tables identifying the performance of individual schools that was revealed when the federal Minister for Education lodged the data on the internet. The premier said she would not take action against the newspapers.

The state of the game

A Sydney journalist, Alex Mitchell, recently put the politicisation of education into a broader context. Patronage, he said, “achieved art-form status” under the New South Wales Labor governments that followed Carr’s retirement. A new wave of appointments was part of the spoils of its victory. This was nothing new, nor was it confined to Labor. What made patronage objectionable was that it “introduces favouritism, bias, nepotism, cronyism and ultimately corruption into governance”. Patronage had been a feature of nineteenth-century colonial society.

In many states the arrival of the new-style politicised education was facilitated by the need for financial savings, to be effected by the retrenchment of bureaucrats. The senior officers, unlike those they replaced, often lacked personal knowledge of educational realities. Their learning process involved trial and error. If their political sponsors had a clear grasp or concept of appropriate education possibilities the new establishment worked reasonably well. When the new administrative or political leadership lacked ability or a sense of direction the Education Department was prone to implement their fads or fancies, or let matters drift, or wasted time rediscovering the wheel.

Led by directors-general who regarded their job not as a lifetime vocation but as one of a number of transitory career moves, the New South Wales Department of Education (whose title was coupled from time to time with Training, Employment, Youth Affairs and the like), severed from a nexus with teaching, produced a new ethos. In August 2004 the president of the Teachers’ Federation, Jennifer Leete, denounced the language used by the department in order to demonstrate its “new culture”:

Those who are to be chosen for senior executive service positions are recruited by Ministerial appointees who are charged with achieving “cultural shift” in the “organisation” … Language is turned around for the purpose of putting a positive spin on any announcement and any problem. Crises and problems become “opportunities” or at worst “challenges”. Having to make tough decisions about cutting programs is referred to as “exciting” and loading principals with extra work and responsibility without additional resources is called “enhancing” roles for principals. Politically driven agendas to be imposed on schools are called “initiatives”.

The disappearance of the former clear separation of government and management in the administration of the public services fostered a blurring of ideas. The Harvard School of Business Management and other logic-based systems reiterated the fallacy of trying to live in an economy rather than a society. Harvard has much to answer for. Yet politicians often modified management principles in response to public opinion, particularly as expressed in the media.

The disappearance of the former clear separation of government and management fostered a blurring of ideas. Educational theory and professional experience had become unimportant in public education. Education had come under the dominion of political imperatives. Yet politicians often modified management principles in response to public opinion, particularly as expressed in the media.

A West Australian initiative may point the way forward. A newly-elected Liberal government intensified the neo-liberal policy of devolution by creating thirty-four “independent public schools” in 2010; a further sixty-four would be added in 2011. The principals can recruit their own teachers and staff and change the curriculum. The schools have greater control over budgets and can expel students without departmental approval. One reason for this change might be the debacle over Outcomes Based Education for Years 11 and 12 in 2006. Another could be the poor performance of government schools in the “league tables”. Seventy per cent of schools in Western Australian were public ones, 15 per cent were independent (mainly affiliated to various churches) and 15 per cent were Catholic. The State School Teachers Union said the government was expanding its scheme too rapidly; the State Chamber of Commerce said the scheme should be adopted nationally.

Alan Barcan is a Conjoint Fellow of the School of Education, University of Newcastle, having retired as Associate Professor in Education in December 1986. His book, From New Left to Labor Left: Fifty Years of Student Activism at Sydney University, will be released by Australian Scholarly Publishing this month.