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 How
do we ensure that we achieve reform?
I want to focus briefly on what I believe are some
critical observation made by the Delors committee on the
importance of having a long-term and carefully managed
approach, if reforms are to succeed.
As Delors says, ‘too many reforms one after another
can be the death of reform … past failures show that
many reformers adopt an approach that is either too radical
or too theoretical … As a result, teachers, parents and
pupils are disoriented and less than willing to accept and
implement reform’ (p. 29).
The top down imposition of reform constantly fails. Where
reform has been successful, it has been secured by a
commitment, and constant involvement in the processes by
local communities, parents and teachers, assisted by various
forms of outside technical, financial and professional
assistance. In other words, lasting reform will only be
achieved through a partnership between all players.
If we hope to make lasting changes in broadening access
to education and improving the quality of education, reform
must start with a dialogue with local communities. To quote
again from Delors, ‘When communities assume greater
responsibility for their own development, they learn to
appreciate the role of education both as a way of achieving
societal objectives and as a desirable improvement of the
quality of life (p. 29).
On this basis, the Delors Committee emphasises the value
of ‘a cautious measure of decentralisation’ as a
means of increasing both the responsibility and innovative
capacity of educational institutions.
Teachers too are critical to the reform process, or
reform will literally stop at the classroom door. There is a
considerable body of literature around now that points to
the increasing demands being placed on teachers at the same
time as their status and authority appear to be constantly
questioned and undermined. Again quoting from Delors,
‘Rightly or wrongly teachers feel isolated, not just
because teaching is an individual activity, but also because
of the expectations aroused by education and the criticisms
which are, often unjustly, directed at them. Above all
teachers want their dignity to be respected’
(p. 30).
Policy makers too have a critical role in ensuring
reform. Policy makers have a particular responsibility to
generate the public-interest debates that education needs if
its importance in improving individual and collective
well-being is to be realised.
And finally, public authorities have a role in
implementing reform. ‘They must propose clear options
and, after broad consultation with all those involved,
choose policies that, regardless of whether the education
system is public, private or mixed, show the way, establish
the system’s foundations and its main thrusts, and
regulate the system through the necessary adjustments’
(p. 31).
If I might leave you with one further thought, I believe
Australia is at the forefront of innovation in a number of
ways across the education and training sectors. The number
of international educators who visit, and the number of
students prepared to come here in order to learn in our
institutions, bears ample testament to this fact.
But to maintain our strengths, let alone enhance them, is
not easy. Public funds are finite and will remain so. Our
culture does not embrace the private philanthropy
characteristic of some other OECD nations. We have not been
long term planners in the past. Delors is telling us that if
we don’t plan for the long term, if we don’t get
our education and training right, then our prospects are
dubious at best. As my Victorian Premier insists, we must
look not to next year but to 2050 and beyond.
APPENDIX
1.
Nine linked
strategies for 21st century schools
The self-management strategy is contained in the speech.
The other eight are:
Curriculum and Standards
Framework
It is necessary to set benchmark standards, within a
curriculum framework.
For example, in the United States, the National Center on
Education and the Economy in Washington DC, has adapted a
commercial benchmarking approach for this task, ie find out
what is expected of young people in those countries where
educational performance is highest, and set out to do
better. This has led to the development of the idea of a
Certificate of Initial Mastery, based on the standards
attained by 16-year-olds in countries that did the best job
of educating their young people in mathematics, science,
their native language and applied learning. The certificate
is awarded only to students who achieve the requisite
standards.
In Victoria, earlier content-based curricula have being
replaced by a comprehensive and rigorous framework of
curriculum outcomes in eight key learning areas which focus
on the pursuit of excellence.
Literacy and Numeracy Programs
for students with special needs
It is necessary to believe in the ability of every
student to attain high standards in literacy and numeracy,
and for seriously disabled students to be assisted to fulfil
their potential.
Vicky Phillips, executive director of Children Achieving
Challenge, a program designed to raise the performance of
all students in Philadelphia, United States, told a
conference in Melbourne last year, ‘Everyone in the
school community must believe, and act as if they believe,
that all children can learn at high levels.’ This is a
fine-sounding sentiment, but in fact it is now supported by
research conducted in Melbourne by Professor Peter Hill. He
told the same conference, ‘Recent research in the field
of cognitive science has confirmed that almost all students
can engage in higher-order learning, given the right
conditions’.
High Performing
Schools
It is necessary to develop high-performing schools. One
of the world’s leading theorists in this field is
Professor Peter Mortimore, Director of the Institute of
Education at the University of London. He applies the
value-added concept for judging whether a school is a high
performer. He defines a high-performing school as one in
which ‘students progress further than might be expected
on the basis of its intake’.
Accountability
Framework
It is necessary to ensure that schools are accountable
for what goes on inside their fence by establishing a strong
accountability framework.
It is vital to establish an accountability framework
which enables parents, teachers, principals and the wider
community to have confidence in their education system and
their school.
Beginning in early 1993, the Victorian Government
introduced a new form of accountability into Victorian
government schools. This new framework focuses on continuous
improvement in the learning outcomes of students, as
illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2 Victorian Accountability
framework.
The Accountability Framework integrates three key
processes to support improvements in school performances:
the school charter, the school annual report and the
triennial school review.
This requires mechanisms for internally and externally
testing students against the standards adopted, and for
internal and external monitoring of the overall educational
and management performance of the school.
Each individual school is now in a position to establish
the standard of their learning outcomes relative to the
standards achieved by other government schools in
Victoria.
This information enables schools to identify the
strengths and weakness in their performance and to develop a
strategic approach to improving student learning
outcomes.
Student learning benchmarks are prepared by the Office of
Review for the school year levels Prep to 12, along with
other benchmarks relating to the core areas of school
operations.
The establishment and use of benchmarks for important
facets of school learning and operations also facilitates a
value-added approach to school performance, which is
fundamental for high performance schools. The success of
this approach is subject to independent evaluation every
three years in each government school.
Parent and Community
Involvement
It is necessary to engage the wider community, in
particular parents, in the education system.
The community as a whole has a direct financial stake as
a taxpayer in any public school system, but it also has an
equally important indirect interest as a potential employer
of young people. Parents, of course, must be vital partners
with schools in the whole education enterprise.
Parents have always had a crucial role as educators,
although their contribution has tended to be overlooked this
century, where monolithic systems of universal public
schooling have been assumed to take over the educational
function almost entirely.
It is now recognised that the partnership between schools
and parents needs to be reinvigorated if students are to
receive the best education and the best life chances.
Students from homes where parents take an active interest in
their schooling, where there are discussions about a wide
range of subjects, where there are books and a culture of
inquiry, have been clearly shown to do better academically
than do students from homes where these advantages are
absent.
The wider community also has an important role. In
Victoria we are involving the community in our schooling
system in a variety of ways. For example schools are
obtaining sponsorship from the community for particular
programs that local businesses see as valuable. Others are
establishing relationships that allow students to obtain
structured work experience to vocational education and
training authority standards while continuing their formal
studies.
Professional
Development
It is essential to invest much more in the professional
development of the school leadership team and in continually
upgrading the professional skills of teachers.
By and large, education systems around the world have
failed to invest in the upgrading of the full potential of
the human resources at their disposal in the way that other
fields of human endeavour have done. This has often been
because of the pressing need to provide basic coverage of
educational services to all students. Nevertheless it will
not be possible for schools to make the performance gains
necessary unless this is done.
In Victoria, three initiatives have been taken to support
leaders. The first has being the establishment of the
Australian Principals Centre to assist in the provision of a
‘life cycle’ process of professional development
training for Principals, as illustrated in Figure 3.
Figure 3 Victorian Principal leadership
training life cycle.
The second is the establishment of the Personal
Professional Development Program which enables each
principal to design personalised professional development
packages in negotiation with each teacher.
The third is the Professional Recognition Program and its
equivalent for principals, the Principals Performance
Management System, which provides for all Principals to
voluntarily contract for annual performance reviews and
either bonus tied or accelerated promotion to externally
assessed value-adding performance.
Flexible Linking of Schools and
Vocational Education Training Pathways
Future schools will need to further develop flexible
pathways to reduce sectoral and credentialling barriers for
the age group 15&endash;19 in order to overcome difficulties
with the period of transition from schools to work and from
school to vocational education training.
In Victoria, we are establishing a stronger and broader
vocational education and training program, so that students
in senior secondary school can count structured training in
the work place, while still at school, towards dual
end-of-school credential credit, and for credit towards
higher education and technical education qualifications.
This is part of what we call the Pathways program to
provide as many avenues as possible for students finishing
school to go on to further education and training, as well
as to get an early foothold in the labour force.
Importantly, it also allows young people to keep their
options open longer, especially during the middle years of
secondary schooling.
Under the old ‘industrial’ model of education,
students were, in effect, ‘streamed’ during their
secondary schooling into what might crudely be called the
thinkers and the doers. This streaming severely limited the
life chances of many students. In a highly competitive
world, a nation cannot afford to arbitrarily consign a
significant proportion of its young people to narrow and
perhaps short-lived career opportunities.
The Impact of
Technology
Rapid advances in communications technology already
enable us to harness technology to:
- broaden the range of educational delivery over time
and distance;
- make educational delivery more flexible and
responsive to students’ needs; and
- teach students how to use, and get the best out of,
technological advances.
This forces us to consider a very basic question: what
might a future school look like? Will there really be
changes in the configuration of schools for the first time
in thousands of years?
Technology will not and cannot replace the essential
relationship between the teacher and student. We must
command the technology to help us do these things
better.
The big technological opportunity for us in Australia is
the convergence of telephony, computer technology and
television. Schools will be able to use the combination of
these technologies to obtain access to a much wider range of
information resources.
In Victoria for example, a whole-of-government online
wide area network is available which schools can use to
obtain and transmit information from any point to any point
within the whole government system. This will immensely
enrich the curriculum resources available to schools,
streamline their administrative procedures and allow special
interest networks to develop at no extra telecommunications
cost.
The convergence of these technologies is also allowing us
to create a ‘virtual campus’ for students
participating in Victoria’s extensive vocational
education and training program. Via this virtual campus,
government and non-government providers of vocational
education and training will be able to deliver training
programs on and off campus. This will add greatly to the
flexibility of these programs and allow them to be more
easily enmeshed with workplace training.
Recent research in the Unites States shows us something
about the impact of technology on students’ educational
outcomes. Interactive Educational Systems Design
Incorporated, working on behalf of the Software Publishers
Association, reviewed 133 research papers and project
reports covering the period 1990&endash;94 in the United
States.
Even allowing for the fact that this review was carried
out for the computer software lobby and so the findings
might have had a favourable gloss put on them, the study
found that:
- students tend to do better when they use technology
to help them learn; and
- students’ attitudes to learning tend to be more
positive when they use technology.
These findings are plausible when looked at alongside
what we know independently about how students learn. It is
well established, for instance, that achievement is a
function of effort rather than just innate intellectual
capacity. It is also well established that people
‘learn by doing’. It gives the student greater
control over his or her learning, and provides a practical
focus for acquiring the necessary knowledge. With this comes
a sense of doing something ‘real’. Finally, it is
well established that students learn well when they are
actively engaged in building on what they already know, and
when they produce products and performances that have the
quality of authenticity about them.
Technology can provide a more concentrated and
comprehensive learning environment with all these qualities.
One would expect, then, that student performance should be
enhanced, all the time remembering that optimal learning
also comes from the presence of a good teacher in rapport
with the student and the topic and providing that essential
ingredient-motivation.
Importantly, technology can as never before place
education and educational resources within the reach of
students who, because of distance, disability, time
constraints or lack of access, would otherwise be denied
them.
Technology can also change the role of the teacher but
not towards obsolescence. The experience of those running
the Dalton Technology Plan in the United States is that
teachers do less lecturing and more guiding; that they have
the time to make more observations of individual
students’ progress, and that technology shifts the
emphasis from ‘adults giving answers’ to
‘students seeking answers’. Nonetheless, the
teacher retains a vital role: it has been found that you
can’t just give young people powerful computers and
powerful information and let them loose. The teacher must
design the program create a compelling set of educational
questions, and be there to provide guidance, assessment of
mentioning.
The Dalton Technology plan began in 1990. It is a joint
venture between the Dalton School, the Teachers College at
Columbia University and the New Laboratory for Teaching and
Learning. It uses high-speed digital networks, and is
experimenting with an educational environment free of the
traditional constraints of time, resources and space.
Technology will also change the role of the parent. The
Internet is already having a considerable impact on the work
that parents and children do together. Schools will have to
come up with new models of teaching in which individualised
and flexible learning play an important role.
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