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Thank you very much Glenn for having me here today, and for all of you for coming along. Most importantly, I want to thank you all for getting me out of Tasmania. When I landed in Sydney this morning, I checked the weather back home, as you do, and it’s sort of a thing I’ve learnt to do over time because my darling wife, one thing she hates about living in Tasmania is the weather. And when I looked at the BOM app, it said 8.6, feels like minus 0.3. So I’m pleased not to be there for the weather, and the coldness of my wife’s love toward me as a result of the weather at home.
But I’m also equally grateful for the work that the Centre does, the advice that it can provide through some of the work that it does, but most importantly, the clarity of thought and the common sense that comes from a lot of the work. I mean, you’ve talked, Glenn, about some of the things that you are actually doing out in the community, those things that make a difference. And so in my previous role as Shadow Environment Minister, but now as Shadow Minister for Education and Early Learning, the work of the Centre for Independent Studies is valuable and something that I know my colleagues and I value very much.
I think it’s important to note at this point, the election was only a little over four months ago, so I didn’t want to have anyone’s hopes up today that I was going to come along and tell you all exactly how we’re going to answer the problems that we’ve just had read out to us that face the education system. So in case your hopes are dashed, I’m sorry. But more, it was an opportunity to come and give you a bit of an early insight into what we in the Opposition are thinking about policy in the education space. And probably more importantly, to extend an invitation to you all to engage with us.
As I’ve said very clearly from the beginning, I am not an educator, I am not an educational professional. I was a very average student and an even more average university student. I’m a parent of three boys going through school now, so I have that end of the situation in terms of experience. But I think there are people in this room who have an interest or some expertise that we in the Coalition could benefit from.
So I think that was really one of the most important things I wanted to highlight today, this willingness for us to, as part of our job in Opposition, because I fundamentally believe a government is only as good as its opposition, engage with you so that we can get the policy settings right.
I think we can all agree though that education represents the most fundamental source of opportunity in Australia. That’s for individuals, but also for the nation as a whole as a collective. High quality education builds for individuals. It builds knowledge, it develops character, it provides perspective and confidence, and allows, of course, each individual to reach their potential. It provides foundational life skills, things that we take for granted when we have an education under our belt, the ability to read a lease agreement or to understand what you’re signing when you’re signing up to a bank loan or an insurance contract.
But importantly, of course, it also provides a foundation for further learning and for careers, your ability to make your own way in the world and pay your own way as well.
So the system, as we know, as we’ve heard, is under strain and we know that there are declining national results, and we’ll talk a bit more about them throughout the course of this afternoon. Teachers tell us, and I think not without good cause, that they’re overworked, they’re frustrated, they’re sick of reform and not well supported. Parents, as you’d appreciate, are very anxious about their children’s futures. They want to ensure that their kids have the best start in life and have been given the best education possible. And in a country like Australia, it does baffle me that that isn’t what we’re providing. Will their children max out their potential? And that’s a live question many parents have as a result of their engagement with the education system in this country.
And of course, the private sector tell us that those that come out of our education system, be it the end of secondary or indeed higher education, that school leavers and university graduates are less job ready than ever before. Certainly more than past generations. And of course, we saw the interim report from the Productivity Commission entitled Building a Skilled and Adaptive Workforce, which showed that students were just not equipped with the foundations required to get on and get the best out of them in higher education.
For too long though, our national debate on, and the national debate to, education has been hijacked by the wrong questions. And I think Glenn alluded to this before. And that, namely, is how much money should we spend and on which of the various already failed strategies should we spend it – that is instead of what works, what we know to work.
The deployment of failed strategies has been guided by the wrong priority, obviously. And of course, it’s a cycle that’s been repeated time and time again, not necessarily with the same strategy, but ones that are not dissimilar to ones that already failed. We have spent billions of dollars, taxpayers’ money, over the last two decades. But of course, the results, as we know, in literacy, numeracy and science, they’re all still declining. Twenty years now, spending more than ever before. The decline is visible against both regional and of course global peers. And it’s our young, of course those students in our system now who are competing against their peers overseas, that are missing out.
The workplace is a globally competitive one when it comes to what jobs will be available here in the future. Companies make decisions about where they base their research firms, their manufacturing bases, administrative centres, based on the type of workforce they can attract here, amongst other considerations. And of course, if we’re falling behind, then we’re not going to attract those places of work. So we are letting our young down.
So, given there is record amounts of money, twenty-one thousand dollars per student per year has been quoted quite a lot in recent times, being spent on students. I think the word inefficient doesn’t really sum it up.
One in three year 9s is below the minimum reading and writing standard under NAPLAN. Our fifteen-year-olds now perform, on average, more than a full school year behind their peers in countries like Singapore in mathematics, and of course behind the average across OECD countries in science. As we already know and have said, PISA results are falling and have been doing so for twenty years. And that result is only worse in regional communities and amongst disadvantaged cohorts.
Now just on funding, I think it’s important, given the political party I’m a part of, to stress that when we talk about funding and failing to get the results we need as a country, this isn’t code for looking at ways to cut funding. This is about how we spend the money that’s there. This is an investment in the future of our country and each of the individuals that go through our education system. It’s not about taking money away, it’s about using it better. And I think that’s what the next two and a half years needs to be about.
For a long time, there’s also been way too little policy attention paid to the underperformance of boys in particular, relative to girls in Australian schooling. And I think that’s something we need to change urgently. That is a massive cohort in our education system and, bizarrely, it’s a controversial topic to deal with, but it is something that is glaringly obvious in the results that we have before us, the data, and we need to deal with it.
By that I refer to issues such as boys’ lower Year 12 completion rates, their lower participation in universities, and their much higher tendency toward bullying and classroom disruption, and a much greater likelihood of being affected by a disability. Amongst many similar indicators, boys are also around as much as twice as likely as girls to fall into the lowest performance bands of NAPLAN in areas such as reading, writing, spelling, grammar, and of course punctuation.
Now these stats, it’s important to remember, aren’t just stats. They are individuals in our community who are depending on us today to get it right for them. And the fact that these numbers tell the story they do means we are failing our young, the next generation of leaders we want to tackle these problems and grow our country into an even better place.
We know what the problems are. And I know that there’s not much more frustrating than sitting here talking or listening to a politician whinge about what’s not working, rather than focusing on what we can do to make the change that we need to, to get things right. And it is imperative that we do get it right.
As I said before, good educational outcomes are in the national interest. They are the foundation stone for a strong future, again, not just for individuals, but for the country as a whole. And to that end, we need to have a constructive approach in federal politics around education. As I’ve said a number of times publicly now, I could spend the next two, two and a half years saying it’s this government’s fault, reflecting on the last three years about how terribly they’ve got it wrong, and as a result, here’s where we are today.
Well, what would happen is we would retreat to our ideological corners and take potshots at one another for two and a half years and nothing would happen. We would make no progress.
We have an opportunity in this period of, in this parliamentary term, in the next two and a half years before the next election. And we also have a Minister who I have to say I’m quite pleasantly surprised by, that is open to collaboration. And I think it’s important to have the two major parties of Australian politics working together to ensure we get the best outcome. And I intend to, over the course of the next two and a half years, take advantage of that golden opportunity we have now – a Shadow Minister who wants the right outcomes for our country, for the young people in our education system, that’s me. And a Minister, Jason Clare, who is open to working with us and has accepted the invitation to work where we can. We won’t agree on everything, of course not. We have different priorities in some areas than they do and we have to accept that. But in the national interest, we don’t have to be an Opposition for Opposition’s sake. We can actually work together on things and, in the national interest, get some good outcomes.
Just on funding, we’ve already touched on this, Funding is important, but it’s not automatically linked to outcomes, as we know. We’ve just gone through the data there. Spending more than we have ever before and we have declining outcomes. That is not good. It’s not right.
The government’s Better and Fairer Schools Agreement raises some, of course, critical questions. I’ll probably deviate from what Glenn said here a bit before. I mean, the focus on the right inputs, money is one input, of course, we need to ensure, though, with those inputs, that we are getting the right value out of them. So yes, I agree with Glenn on that. But I think there’s a problem on the way through, which I’m sure we’ll come to in questions and answers. The outcome is defined by what we do with the input on the way through. And I think that’s where the real reform can occur. The question I’ve been asking is, is the system into which more and more money is being poured actually working? And the reality is, it’s not.
On parental choice, we need to ensure that we protect the right for parents to choose where they send their children to school, the type of educational institution that they choose to have for their children. We need to ensure that teaching is of foundational skills which is backed up and founded in evidence. We need to, as a result of that, ensure that we’re delivering improved outcomes and we need to reject divisive tactics of pitting government schools against independent schools, against Catholic schools, when it comes to the funding debates that we’ve seen. There are many in the sector that would like to see that happen. We need to resist that and ensure that the right outcome is reached when it comes to funding and how it’s allocated, to ensure that all students, no matter what school they go to, what type of school they go to, get the right supports and, indeed, therefore, the best outcomes.
On the curriculum, I think it’s fair to say, without sounding glib, that the curriculum has become politicised. It is well and truly overloaded and, of course, very unclear. The fact that our national curriculum is 1,700 pages long, and of course that covers the gamut. I was trying to figure out, would you believe ChatGPT, which is something I’ve become familiar with in recent times, told me that the National Curriculum is almost exactly the same length as War and Peace. But on a more relevant note, one of our most complex pieces of legislation in this country, the Corporations Act, which governs nearly everything the private sector does, is 1,800 pages. And that’s litigated within an inch of its life every day in courtrooms across this country, and there are very highly paid people paid to navigate it, both in the form of lawyers and judges, yet we expect teachers to be able to navigate a 1,700-page curriculum, which is frankly cloudy and unclear for teachers to be able to educate effectively.
Parents who look at the curriculum say that core skills of children are not being prioritized, the skills they want for their kids. And teachers, as I said before, say the content is too voluminous and unfocused. Experts who know a thing or two about educating say the curriculum in its current form confuses and can harm students as well.
I also have major issues with the cross-curricular priorities embedded in our curriculum as well, such as sustainability, First Nations education, and the concept of where Australia sits in the Asian region. How you can embed some of those issues in a curriculum for maths or science, I find baffling. There is no clarity around how teachers are to deploy some these concepts as part of the curriculum. So they are left on their own trying to come up with content, and the end result is what we are seeing borne out in the numbers.
The curriculum has to be knowledge rich. It must be evidence based. It needs to be apolitical and not loaded with rhetoric and propaganda, which takes away from the core aim of what we are trying to do here. Prioritize the fundamentals around literacy, numeracy, science, history, civics, a very important topic which gets forgotten all the time. It must also provide clear progression benchmarks for parents and teachers to be able to assess what is going on with their students.
We as a Coalition hope to work constructively with the government on the creation of the new super agency, bringing together ACARA, AERO, ESA, and AITSL. Broadly speaking, the idea of a singular, unifying focus within these agencies coming into one, with less confusion, less duplication, and less overlap, is a good thing. But we want to make sure that the gains that have been made in agencies, particularly AERO, are kept and protected and at the end of the day, we aren’t just slamming together four agencies doing the same work in the same way with the same bureaucrats shuffling paper. We need to make sure we are getting the right outcomes here for students. That is the critically important thing, and we are very clear in wanting to work with the government to ensure we get this right.
On teachers and training, I think that teacher shortages are obviously acute, particularly in regional communities. There is a high rate of dropouts before people complete a Bachelor of Education. We see all too often, I caught up with one of the state education ministers just yesterday around situations in their state education system where people have been churned out of a Bachelor of Education after four years are only seeing out one year, in great numbers, of being an actual teacher. Having done all that study, they could not go on because of the ill-preparedness of the education they were receiving for the classroom itself.
Many education graduates sadly lack a grounding in evidence-based practice and familiarisation with the classroom. We do need to focus on things like explicit teaching or explicit direct instruction and find a way to aspire for excellence in what we do in the classroom. Reforms need to be evidence-based, focused again on the fundamentals we want our students to carry with them in life. We need to provide flexible entry pathways for experienced professionals who may want to transition from accounting, real estate, or what ever it might be into education. We do not have enough of that at the moment.
We need not reinvent the wheel. We can learn from international best practice and expand on successful domestic models. There are a number of them we can point to, and I am sure many of you in this room are familiar with models we should be considering. One idea of course is to consider a National Institute of Teaching to consolidate teacher training quality in this country. However we end up doing it, we need to get it right, and we need to get our skates on and do it quickly.
As I said before, I want to pay credit to Jason Clare, the Minister, who has indicated his willingness, and I think it is imperative that we do this, to approach these things in a bipartisan way. Already, we have heard encouragement from him on progress in phonics and numeracy screening. I also want to pay tribute to some of my predecessors in the Coalition who have obviously done some great work in the education portfolio. People like Chris Pyne, Simon Birmingham, Alan Tudge, and Dan Tehan who as Ministers, undertook a lot of the heavy lifting that got us to where we are today and set us up for where we need to be.
It is important to recognise that while there are many things that need improving, there are some who have tried, and some green shoots among the grim outlook we have been discussing here. I think there is a shared recognition, and we agree with the government on this, that funding needs be tied to outcomes. There is no point churning money out the door when we do not see improvements in the areas we want to see in our education system.
We need to ensure that parents are empowered. They are the first educators of our young and they must have a strong voice in all of this. As we approach 2027, discussions around the curriculum need to be focused on foundations and effectiveness.
I want to close by saying education, the debate on it does not need to be driven by politics, partisanship, or self-interest. It needs to be about one priority, and that is educating our young to a better standard than ever before. We must ensure we have conducive teaching and learning environments, fundamentally stronger outcomes for students, and better support for teachers and those wanting to teach.
Australia’s children only get one chance at a school education. We owe it to them, to their parents, to teachers, to communities, and to every other Australian to get this absolutely right. We need to develop an education system that respects choice, supports teachers, trusts parents, and promotes and delivers excellent results that Australia’s children deserve in a first-world country like ours.
That is why I said before I was baffled when you think about our country, what it is in the global context, and the results we are talking about here. These are the decisions that we need to make together, all leaders in this debate. That is our commitment, the Opposition’s commitment is to strive for excellent outcomes in education in this country.
We can’t do this from the ivory tower in Canberra, in Parliament House. We cannot do it without input. So we want your feedback. We want your advice. We want your input. And I look forward to engaging with you through the afternoon.
Thank you, Glenn.