School systems in England and Australia

Many people reading this book will know a lot about education in England or in Australia, but perhaps not about both. This chapter sets the scene.

In an era of international ‘policy borrowing’ and ‘policy convergence’ (Ball, 1999, 2019; Sahlberg, 2015), there are many similarities between their education policies. We argue that politicians in both countries have made the same wrong turns and are dealing with some of the same consequences. Yet there are important differences in the structures and organisation of the systems themselves. These enable, or constrain, particular policy choices, creating so-called ‘path dependencies’ in the policy process, and they mean that policies play out in different ways. So, we start by setting out some of the essential characteristics of these education policy landscapes.

A fundamental issue is who makes decisions about schooling. England has a highly centralised system. Central government, in the form of the Department for Education (DfE), sets teachers’ pay scales and professional standards. Systems of assessment and qualification are national, as is the curriculum, and school inspection, although these functions are managed by semiindependent organisations (see Table 2.1). Until relatively recently, there was also a strong role for local education authorities (LEAs). This has been much reduced by the creation of autonomous schools that all report to the DfE. The funding system is now also based on a single national formula. So, the system is simultaneously becoming more centralised and more subject to hyper-local variation as schools can make more of their own decisions.

The Commonwealth of Australia is a federal system of government. The central – or national – government has no specific constitutional responsibility for school education. The six state and two territory governments have historically had responsibility for administration of government schools; development and delivery of curricula; and the regulatory conditions to ensure quality standards across all schools (including non-government schools). However, the constitution allows the national government to provide specific-purpose payments that enable central influence over areas that the states administer. In recent times, these powers have been activated in ways that have greatly extended the influence of the national government over education.

One thing about which there seems to be near universal consensus among education policy makers is that education systems should provide equally for all children and provide the opportunity of success for all.

This holds whether you start from the position of the United Nations (UN) goal to ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’ (United Nations, 2015) or from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 29, which states that ‘Education must develop every child's personality, talents and abilities to the full’ (UNICEF, 1992). It holds if you start from goals to reduce inequalities, enhance social mobility and foster social justice, or if you start from economic aspirations to increase human capital, maximise productivity and spend less on welfare. Inclusive and equitable education is, in theory, a ‘no-brainer’.

But it isn't happening. In fact, in far too many cases, children and young people who need the education system most are actually getting less from it than their more advantaged peers. That uncomfortable fact has long been recognised, at least by sociologists of education if not always by politicians. But there is also evidence that the system is increasingly marginalising children who in different ways rely on it most. Instead of compensating for other injustices, the education system may increasingly be making them worse.

Unequal access to schooling

One major factor in the production of educational divisions is the structure of school systems, including differences between and within sectors that make up these systems. This may seem too obvious even to state. Yet it is striking how reluctant policy makers are to recognise these differences. Instead, they put a lot of emphasis and effort into what individual teachers and leaders can do rather than taking action to level up young people's access to schooling resources. So, it is worth restating these long-term features of schooling before moving on to more recent developments.

In England, the ‘elephant in the room’ in discussions of education policy and inequalities is the private school system: small, politically hard-to-touch and incredibly influential in the production of the elite (The Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Commission, 2019).

In Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of this book, we identified three major things that are wrong with our education systems in England and Australia: the dominance of tests; the ways in which the least advantaged children and young people are often least well served by education; and the ways in which the work of teachers and school leaders is changing so that we are making less good use of this valuable resource.

In Chapters 6 to 10, we described five major policy mistakes that have come together to create these problems: a reliance on markets; letting test scores drive policy; over-prescribing teachers’ work; misunderstanding educational inequalities; and failing to draw enough on knowledge of education in education policy making. We explained how these big ‘wrong turns’ have contributed, in combination, to the problems identified earlier.

In this chapter, we sharpen this analysis to show how the mistakes have combined to produce a particular policy, one that currently attracts dispute and controversy in both England and Australia – the practice of synthetic phonics (SP) and the Year 1 phonics check. Unpacking this example in detail helps illuminate what is going wrong and how it might change.

SP and the phonics check

In England and Australia, there have been long-standing concerns that literacy levels are too low, failing to meet the needs of employers. Low literacy achievement is also strongly associated with disadvantage, both in the sense that children from low-income homes are more likely than their more affluent peers to struggle with reading and writing, and in the sense that poor literacy skills hold people back in adult life, perpetuating intergenerational disadvantage. So literacy is often central to ambitions to increase educational equity, social justice and social mobility.

In the past decade in England, and more recently in Australia, a key policy response has been the teaching of reading through SP. Phonics involves the relationship between the sounds in speech and the letter patterns in written words. For example, the sound ‘ee’ can be represented by the letters ‘ea’ and also by ‘ee’, ‘ie’, ‘ei’ and ‘e’. There are different ways of teaching phonics systematically. SP is a method of teaching in which learners sound out letters and groups of letters and then blend them to make whole words.

The end of an era

The educational policies discussed in this book are often described as constituting a distinctive era in which the principles of market liberalism have framed and structured education systems and practices around the world, often in tandem with social and cultural conservatism. A broad political consensus, within and between countries, has supported the development of market-driven systems characterised by standards-based education reforms, test-based accountability, reduced teacher autonomy, and back-to-basics curriculum projects.

This era is coming to a close. In the decade following the 2008 global financial crisis, as the fragility and failure of the neoliberal economic model came into sharp relief, cracks in the educational consensus began to show. Referenced throughout the book, multiple inquiries and reports, including those from parliamentary committees and government-appointed bodies, began to point out that in various ways the twin goals of excellence and equity were not being achieved. England and Australia were not improving in international league tables either of education or economic performance. Places and people were being left behind as governments struggled to manage rapid transitions and shocks fairly, leading to increasing political and social divisions. Social mobility was barely increasing and inequalities in educational experiences and outcomes barely reducing. Social stratification seemed built into systems. Markets and tests were producing more negative than positive effects overall. Schools were becoming less positive and productive places for many young people. Ideas of what might entail a ‘fair and equal education’ that privileges the interests of all young people in diverse contemporary nations seemed to have been lost (Hattam et al, 2018). In England in 2019, for the first time in decades, the major political parties presented radically different education manifestos, with opposition parties proposing scrapping tests, broadening the curriculum, replacing Ofsted, giving more power to local authorities, preventing the expansion of grammar schools, and taking steps to bring private schools into the state system. In Australia in the same year, at the federal election, Labor tentatively attempted to more firmly distinguish its funding policy from that of the coalition, testing electoral political support for a more needs-based approach to federal funding. It lost too, but the tide was starting to turn in both countries.

Many teachers say they joined the profession to make a difference, perhaps because they themselves experienced the transformative influence of a good teacher or tried their hand at a less fulfilling occupation. Whatever the reason, making a difference in the lives of young people is widely valued as a reason for joining and staying in a challenging profession. Take, for example, Belinda Lyons-Lee (2019), who took a year off teaching and became a published author. Despite the fewer demands and less pressure of her writing career, she returned to teaching because ‘I needed to reconnect with my passion of introducing these teenagers to the power of a narrative to change a life and then introduce them to the skills so they could write their own powerful narrative that would change lives’ (Lyons-Lee, 2019).

One of the most important functions of schooling is to help each young person to develop the narrative of their life, even when there are interruptions and when they face barriers beyond their control. Teachers’ work fundamentally affects young people's experiences of schooling, but more than this it affects the likelihood that they will enjoy and succeed not only at school, but also in life.

In this chapter, we argue that in England and Australia, teachers are making less of a difference than they could, because of the ways in which their work is changing. Instead of concentrating their efforts on teaching, and on reviewing and developing their pedagogical practice, they are burdened by administrative demands associated with monitoring and demonstrating the performance of their students. These activities are described by a teacher in Comber and Nixon's (2009) study as ‘meaningless bullshit destined for a cupboard in someone's office’ (p 339). Within the classroom too, their teaching is increasingly prescribed, following a script or formula. In Chapter 3, we showed how ‘teaching to the test’ is making for a narrowing of learning opportunities for students. Here we unpack that further. Drawing on large-scale surveys of teachers conducted in England, Australia and across the globe, as well as in-depth studies of schools and classrooms, we relate teachers’ widespread concerns with forced over-compliance, superficial regulations and the erosion of professional autonomy. We show how the practices associated with increasing accountability are constraining teachers’ pedagogical repertoires and skills, diminishing trust in the teaching profession and, ultimately, making teaching and school leadership a job that fewer people want to do.

The fourth mistake that we identify is a failure to understand the causes of educational inequalities.

As described in Chapter 2, the period covered by this book has been one in which, although living standards overall have risen, inequalities have widened, labour market insecurity has increased, economic opportunities have narrowed in certain ‘left-behind’ places, and global conflicts and disasters have brought new disadvantaged populations to under-resourced urban neighbourhoods. In these circumstances, educational inequalities would be expected to widen.

Policies to create more equitable systems have featured prominently at some points in English and Australian policy history. But the approaches taken have been inconsistent and sometimes contradictory. Mostly what has been done has been insufficient, sometimes misdirected or counterproductive. In this chapter, we describe what has been done and why, and explain why overall it has failed to achieve the desired result.

Policies to tackle educational inequalities

In England, policies to address inequalities have a long history but have taken very different forms. One distinctive strand, favoured by Labour governments, has been top-up programmes and funds directed at disadvantaged places and/or groups. These started in the 1960s with Educational Priority Areas (EPAs) and additional funding to support education for EAL pupils. They were substantially increased during the Labour government's 13 years in power from 1997, with Education Action Zones (EAZs), Excellence in Cities (EiC) and City Challenges, as well as additional grants for interventions such as learning mentors and reading catch-up. In 2002, Teach First was established to attract high-achieving graduates into teaching in disadvantaged schools (see Lupton and Obolenskaya [2013] for a fuller review). However, this Labour government also deployed mainstream policies to target the most challenging areas and close gaps. As described in Chapters 6, 7 and 8, Labour's academies programme, replacing ‘failing’ schools in ‘deprived’ areas, was explicitly badged as an attempt to even up school quality, as was its National Challenge initiative and its use of floor targets and inspection. Standardisation of teaching was also motivated by making sure that children received the same input wherever they lived. Under Labour 1997–2010, redistribution of mainstream funding also became a major tool. Revenue funding for schools was increasingly bent towards those dealing with greater need, as was a new programme of school rebuilding: Building Schools for the Future.

Our fifth mistake relates to the nature of education policy making and the characteristics of policy processes.

Our central argument is that for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, educational policy making has become increasingly divorced from knowledge of educational theory and practice. This is not to say that the knowledge of teachers, school leaders, academics and researchers who study teaching, learning and other aspects of the educational day-to-day is the only kind of knowledge that should count in education policy. As with many of the issues we have discussed, the problem is not that everything that has happened is bad, but that the balance has tipped too far in one direction, making it more likely that the wrong decisions will be made and that established policies will continue to be followed even when the evidence is clear that they are mistaken.

In this chapter, we draw on research about policy, rather than about specific policies as we have done in earlier chapters. We describe some of the problems with education policy-making processes in England and Australia, how they have come about, and why we think they are getting in the way of making education better and fairer.

Long-standing problems in education policy making

In their book on social policy mistakes in England, King and Crewe (2014) identify 12 factors that lead to ‘policy blunders’. Five of these come under the category of ‘human errors’: cultural disconnect (policy makers not understanding that other people's lives are not like their own); group-think; prejudice and pragmatism; operational disconnect (policy makers not understanding how policies will play out on the ground); and panic, symbols and spin. The others are ‘system failures’: the independence of Whitehall departments; the rapid turnover of ministers and civil servants; the increasingly activist role of ministers; lack of ministerial accountability (particularly for the long-term consequences of their actions); the weak role of parliament in the English system; asymmetries of expertise especially with private sector partners; and a deficit of deliberation in the making of policy. System failures make human errors more likely and more damaging.

Education policy research points to education being particularly prone to some of these human errors, not least the commonly recognised problem of ministers relying on their own knowledge of schooling and their own prejudices.

The second policy move that we describe as a mistake is the over-focus in the education system on producing ever higher test scores.

Test scores should have a place in education policy. They can tell us about what is being achieved and how it matches up to what our societies and economies need from schooling. They can highlight groups of students who are doing less well out of the system and indicate where extra investment is needed. They can inform decisions about the effectiveness of different educational practices and help teachers to work effectively. Most people also acknowledge that students’ scores can also serve useful purposes in holding schools to account, representing the interests of children, young people, parents and communities and ensuring that public money is being spent well and wisely.

However, over recent decades, test scores have come to dominate education policy decisions. They have become the reasoning arguments or ‘logos’ of educational policy making, in a shift described by policy sociologist Professor Bob Lingard as ‘policy as numbers’ (Lingard, 2011, p 356). In this chapter, we trace this shift in England and Australia. We explain why it has come about and why the evidence demonstrates that it is a mistake.

‘Policy as numbers’ in England and Australia

In his key book on education policy, The Education Debate (Ball, 2017), Professor Stephen Ball identifies the start of the ‘policy as numbers’ phenomenon in England in the creation of the government's Assessment of Performance Unit (APU) in 1975. APU was tasked with developing methods of assessing and monitoring achievement and identifying the incidence of underachievement – a controversial move at the time as it was seen to erode teachers’ responsibility for curriculum development and assessment. But it was the 1988 ERA that gave tests and their outcomes a much more central role in education policy. ERA established the national curriculum and its SATs. In Australia, this move to a national curriculum and assessment programme came in 2008 with the establishment of NAPLAN. Prior to this, states and territories conducted literacy and numeracy testing programmes for all students in at least Years 3 and 5, but results were not used for the purpose of comparing schools – not publicly at least.

Time to hit reset in education policy

This book is about the mistakes that have been made in education policy in England and Australia since the 1970s and how we can begin to put them right.

England and Australia are very different countries, with different education systems, histories and governance structures, but they have been following similar education policy trajectories. We argue that in many respects, these trajectories have made schooling in both England and Australia less rather than more able to meet the educational challenges our societies present.

In particular, as economic, social and spatial divisions have grown, the evidence is mounting that our education systems have become increasingly unfair in terms of access, opportunities, experiences and outcomes. And this is despite repeated political claims, over decades, that a major objective of education policies is to achieve greater equality of opportunity and greater social mobility based on more equal outcomes.

As we enter a new period of rapid technological, environmental, demographic and labour market change, super-charged by the COVID-19 pandemic and its disruptive effects, it is imperative we find ways to make our education systems work for all.

In this book, we argue that positive change is possible. There is no shortage of contemporary international examples that help point the way. But we need big policy changes, not policy ‘tweaks’. Taken-for-granted assumptions and well-established structures must be challenged, and a new consensus built for substantial change.

This will require changes in the nature of policy debates and a greater willingness to set aside whims, prejudices and longstanding antagonisms. We need to reclaim some of the common ground that exists in collective aspirations for children's and young people's wellbeing and success. It will also require changes in policy processes and timescales, and in the ways that policy makers draw on research and practice expertise. But above all, it will require willingness to confront the mistakes of the past, regardless of who has made them. Transformational change will not be achieved without a strong shared understanding of what has gone wrong as well as what has gone right, and why decades of policy effort have not produced education systems that are effective and fair.

Our third mistake is the over-prescription of teachers’ work.

There is no doubt that teaching is the central activity of schooling – the ‘flipside’ of learning. It is rightly a major focus of education policy, not just because teachers’ salaries are by far the biggest budget item in school spending. The value of good teachers to children's learning is almost universally acknowledged and they are critical to the functioning of society. This was patently demonstrated during the global COVID-19 pandemic when teachers rapidly pivoted to support children learning from home, while also keeping schools open for the children of essential workers.

In the past three decades in England, and for a shorter time in Australia, the overall direction of policies to improve the quality of teaching has been to standardise both what is taught and how it is taught. These moves have had some beneficial effects, including the explicit naming of valued learning outcomes and knowledge, and the potential for the breadth and complexity of teachers’ work to be identified and recognised. However, combined with the effects of market pressures and ‘datafication’ (Chapters 6 and 7), they have limited the professional judgement of teachers and narrowed their pedagogical repertoires so that teachers can make less difference, not more. In this chapter we explain what has happened and how the balance came to tip too far.

Prescribing teaching quality

Education in England has long been characterised by a contest for control between government, teachers and, to a certain extent, universities and their examination boards (McCulloch, 1993). The period from 1988 to 2010 saw substantial shifts in favour of government. The first major move was the introduction of the national curriculum by the Conservative government, bringing a higher degree of standardisation to what was taught. The second was the creation of Ofsted in 1992, bringing greater standardisation of practice. Ofsted replaced a variable system of Her Majesty's Inspectors and local inspection. It brought in a common inspection framework that, as we saw in Chapter 5, effectively prescribes practice in many schools as leaders attempt to create performances that will satisfy the gaze of Ofsted inspectors.

This chapter is the first of three in which we set out the problems manifest in our current schooling systems. We put the biggest problem first – schools are becoming dominated by tests, in ways that are detrimental to children and young people and limit education rather than improving it.

In England, children do external tests from their first year of schooling. They take a phonics check in Year 1, Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) for English and maths at the end of Year 2 and again in Year 6, the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) or equivalent examinations at the end of Year 11, and Advanced (‘A’) Levels or equivalent at the end of Year 13. There are also standard teacher assessments at the end of the Foundation Stage (age about five).

In Australia, assessment regimes vary across state jurisdictions. However, in the earlier grades (3, 5, 7, and 9) ACARA conducts national assessments in literacy and numeracy through NAPLAN. The Year 12 end-of-school record of achievement is determined by each jurisdiction and may include a range of academic and vocational subjects assessed through a variety of means including examinations, performance tasks and portfolios. On completion of schooling, eligible students may also receive an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR), which ranks them relative to others in their state or territory for university admission purposes.

The ways in which these assessment regimes shape the practice of teachers’ and children's experiences of school has been the subject of numerous academic studies, enquiries and reviews by parliamentary committees, independent review bodies, teacher unions and others. They come to the same conclusions. Tests have many valid and valuable purposes but the situation is out of balance. Tests are dominating school life and creating a narrower curriculum, shallower learning, and more anxiety and unhappiness. They tend to exacerbate inequalities rather than reduce them. And, worryingly, in relation to the challenges outlined in Chapter 2, they tend to have the most pronounced effects in less advantaged schools and communities.

Narrower and shallower

In 2017, England's Chief Inspector of Schools (Head of Ofsted), Amanda Spielman, used a major speech to remind the educational establishment not to lose sight of the “substance of education” – in her words “broadening minds, enriching communities and advancing civilisation” (Spielman, 2017) – through over-focusing on tests.

The first policy move we describe as a mistake is the decision to rely increasingly on a market model of school provision. By this we mean a suite of changes including expanding the range of non-state providers, making schools self-managing, requiring them to compete for students and funding, and encouraging and enabling parents to choose schools.

Many countries have moved in this direction to a greater or lesser extent in recent decades. The results are rarely free markets. High levels of state management, subsidy and regulation limit market activity. So economists tend to call markets for schooling ‘quasi-markets’. But they still differ substantially from fully state-run models, where governments provide schools, employ teachers and allocate places.

In this chapter, we briefly describe the different paths towards marketisation that governments in England and Australia have taken, and the rationales for these changes. We also review evidence of policy effects, concentrating on markets themselves rather than on the mechanisms that have sprung up to govern them (such as performance measures), which we cover in Chapter 7.

Turning to the market

Marketising policies in England and Australia started from different points but have evolved in similar ways.

In Australia, the ascendency of choice as the driver of education markets is somewhat ironically linked to a social-democratic moment in policy making. The Whitlam government (1972–75) overcame an ideological objection to providing state aid to nongovernment schools in order to support severely under-resourced schools, mainly Catholic parish schools. Whitlam established the Schools Commission that set about classifying schools according to need. The commission did not recommend funding already adequately resourced schools but the compromises that allowed the bill to pass through parliament enabled all schools, even elite private schools, to receive some government funding. This moment was the trigger for subsequent governments, especially the conservative Howard government (1996–2007) to provide funding to non-government schools to increase their number and accessibility. Support for non-government schools has recently received an increased injection of funding by the conservative Morrison government. Since being elected in 2018, it has created a $3.4 billion ‘choice and accessibility fund’, as well as a special $1.2 billion fund for private schools, which is paid directly to Catholic and independent school authorities to distribute as they see fit.