Given that Australia’s government education is characterised by less autonomy than comparable countries, this could be a good place to start to understand why heightened competition in Australia isn’t necessarily “lifting all boats”.
There are several reasons why autonomy is regarded as key ingredient for strong school performance: • First, we know that independent schools do the best in Australia and they are the most autonomous.
However, we also know that there are a variety of other factors – average SES of the student body being the main one – that account for higher performance by most independent schools
• Second, autonomy, fuelled by an incentive to improve (or compete) delivers innovation. The difficulty is that it is hard to assess the extent to which innovations driven by sheer competition (i.e. between schools or school districts) are more valuable than innovations that result from centrally- driven changes to curricula or pedagogy
• Third, the principle of subsidiarity tells us that decisions should be made at the lowest level appropriate to the recipients of a product or service. Decisions made through the exercise of autonomy ‘at the coalface’ should better reflect the needs and interests of the direct client group or constituency. In an education context, this means more responsive schools adopting more
appropriate approaches to better effect. It also creates an environment for ‘bottom-up’ innovation – in this case motivated by a response to local need rather than a response to a competitor.
But autonomy can manifest in many ways and contexts, and can be driven by different objectives. In Australia the independent sector is generally autonomous at the school level, in the sense that each school controls fund-raising and budget management, employment of staff and selection of students. The Catholic system has more limited autonomy at the school level, as funding allocation is determined by the State Catholic Education Commission.
School autonomy is a relatively recent phenomenon in the public sector. In the late 1980s Victoria began to devolve decision making over use of a given budget to principals at the school level. Western Australia has effectively adopted this model for its ‘Independent Public Schools’ and South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT have indicated plans to move school financing in this direction.
Three key factors have tended to put limits on the degree of autonomy traditionally enjoyed by government schools, and it is these that are being challenged in various ways by the states:
The mandate to provide education to ‘all-comers’ within a school zone – modified by the ability to accept children out of zone (where there are places) usually at the school’s discretion
The centrally negotiated terms and conditions for teachers via enterprise bargaining agreements – still a major constraint on autonomy in attraction/retention of and reward for teachers but under some pressure from those who would advocate performance-based pay or bonuses The central management of the employment of principals and, at minimum, considerable influence over the recruitment and deployment of teaching staff – giving way to more localised decision-making but still within a centralised policy and planning framework.
In other OECD countries, the trend towards school autonomy has been evident in the growth of private schools but the degree of autonomy of these schools varies. Private schools that receive no or few government payments tend to have high levels of autonomy, whereas those that are fully publicly funded such as the Swedish ‘free schools’ do not have autonomy over such matters as enrolments. The Charter Schools in the USA and the Trust schools and City Academy schools in England are all based upon the principle of greater autonomy at the school level. Typically these schools are given greater
autonomy over the selection and deployment of staff and other resources, the general running of the school as well as the projected image of the school. However, unlike strictly private schools, they do not have complete autonomy in their student enrolment practices.
It is important, therefore, in assessing the impact of autonomy on performance to be clear on whether it is autonomy over budgets, human resources or enrolments that is in play. Also we need to understand the extent to which autonomy is being ‘traded’ and what the degree of ‘relative’ autonomy is within the schooling system that differentiates different providers.
There is a rich supply of data on the impact of autonomy but the overall findings are generally equivocal and not all variables of autonomy are readily able to be isolated and observed separately. For example, there is a large volume of literature on the impact of charter schools, much of it contradictory. On balance though, there does seem to be a positive impact on scores, but it is difficult to isolate the causes for this. Is it because parents have made the conscious decision to send their child to a charter school which in turn implies higher parental expectations and support, or is it because of the way the school is run? Studies that have sought to answer such questions have not produced a compelling conclusion.139
Autonomy in enrolments
It is reasonable to hypothesise that autonomy, where it leads to selectivity in enrolments, does increase school performance. However, three important considerations flow from this:
The ability to be selective in enrolments both reflects and expands market power
In a closed system with unequal distribution of autonomy, there will always be ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ as selectivity leads to the concentration of advantage in some schools
Therefore, at the system level, autonomy in this context does not necessarily ‘lift all boats’. This is consistent with the findings of Ben Levin who suggests that school autonomy does not have a discernible impact on school performance and when it is implemented through greater marketisation it actually leads to greater inequity.140
In Australia, we have seen the emergence of differentiated market power in the public sector due to the popularity of some high performing government schools. Schools that are in high demand and a capacity to utilise this demand can be more selective in their enrolments – that is, their decision-making in this respect becomes more autonomous. This is occurring in most states and territories across Australia. Figure 70 below demonstrates the correlation between selectivity and educational outcomes. The cluster of government schools at the top of the figure below are mostly selective entry schools or government schools that have achieved high levels of market power.
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For example, showed that, even when the ‘parent effect’ was removed, mathematics’ scores especially at Charter schools were higher. But the same data was used to show that reading scores were considerably lower. See Kevin Drum “Winners and Losers in the Charter School Lottery” in Mother Jones, http://motherjones.com, 2 June 2011
140
Levin, B. (2008), “How to change 5000 schools: a practical and positive approach for leading change at every level”, Cambridge, Harvard Education Press.
Figure 70: School mean ICSEA value and mean reading score141
The result of this trend is an increasing stratification of the schooling system, which we discuss further below.
Autonomy over resources
Salary payments effectively lock up the vast bulk of school budgets, leaving less than 10% in
discretionary budget for most government schools. This is also the case in most Catholic schools. Even in independent schools, whose budgets are not set at the State level, salaries still consume the bulk of expenditure leaving relatively less room for discretionary programs and investments.
The most fruitful area in which resource management autonomy can improve performance therefore, is in employment of staff. Australia’s government school systems retain central employment policy (terms and conditions) and a central staffing service. This service varies between the states - limited in Victoria and extensive in NSW for example.
Because of the requirement to provide universal access to schooling, education departments need to plan and ensure the deployment of staff across the system. This requirement cannot be fulfilled through school-based appointments alone. For example, Queensland uses a central appointments system to staff schools in rural and remote areas.
Under enduring employment arrangements for teachers in the public system, most of the staff being deployed have permanent status. This makes it more difficult to manage the workforce flexibly and, many would argue, deal effectively with under-performance.
Autonomy over staffing is therefore widely seen as a key variable in school effectiveness as well as (but to a lesser degree) a contributor to more meaningful budgetary discretion. And unlike the case with
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autonomy in selections, where we have observed a trade-off in outcomes between schools with larger or smaller amounts of market power, increased school-level autonomy in staffing decisions should contribute to ‘lifting all boats’.
Without a significant shift in traditional approaches to managing and remunerating the teaching workforce in Australia, however, the most practical alternative has been to focus on lifting teacher quality and performance through levers. This is discussed in more detail elsewhere in this report.
Distributed and collective autonomy
So far we have been focussing on types of autonomy at the school level, and we started with the underlying notion that ‘subsidiarity’ improves decision-making and promotes innovation. The converse argument to pursuing local solutions and autonomous management is that such differentiation means a potential loss of economies of scale. This not only makes autonomous schools more resource intensive (hence private resources are needed to supplement government funding or vice versa) but it creates unevenness in standards and outcomes across the system as we have seen. In short, autonomy may bring benefits but it comes at a price – in both dollar and equity terms.
As a result, the predominant model among OECD countries is one of ‘distributed autonomy’. Distributed autonomy is where all schools have similar degrees of autonomy over pricing and fundraising, resource allocation and enrolment policies. To achieve evenness, there is centralised decision on standards. The reach of the central control is managed via a trade-off between government funding and higher degrees of autonomy. The degree of autonomy enjoyed by independent schools in Australia, notwithstanding the significant public funding they receive, is unique in the OECD.
The concept of collective autonomy starts with a proposition that the sovereignty of the state over schooling is or should be limited. A corollary to the subsidiarity principle, the notion of collective autonomy has been adopted by most Scandinavian countries over the past few decades and resulted in the devolution of responsibility for schooling to the municipal level where forms of collective provision have been developed.
In Australia there have been some examples of schools working together to achieve forms of collective responsibility. However, they have generally existed within countervailing cultures of market
competition. An alternative form of devolution to the one most evident in Australia (which is based upon the principle of market competition to drive efficiency and quality), would be to create a system for collective responsibility for delivering strong education outcomes at the regional/local level supported by greater autonomy over the assemblage, use and sharing of resources and assets.