Education reform

Victoria's school education system generally performs well by Australian and international standards. However, despite a significant real increase in expenditure on school education in the past decade or so, there has been no marked improvement in average literacy and numeracy achievement across age groups - although there have been some small to moderate gains for particular subgroups. In addition, the lowest achieving students are well behind their high achieving counterparts.

The Commission's draft recommendations identified a number of key areas for attention including (1) the quality of teachers (2) school governance, leadership and management (3) performance information (4) prioritising funding and resourcing to students with the greatest need and (5) addressing youth disengagement. See pages 39-48 of the draft report for more detail.

In your view, what are the key areas the Victorian Government should focus on? And, more specifically, what actions should the Government take in these areas?

Response by Sanjeev Sabhlok On 1/12/2011 12:22:43 PM

Not having time to look at this draft report at the moment, may I suggest that the suggestions on school education reform %28about 4 pages in all%29 in my book, Breaking Free of Nehru %28available at http%3A//bfn.sabhlokcity.com/%29 be considered.%0D%0A%0D%0ABasically there is NO point in tinkering at the margins with micro-reform without a basic re-alignment of policy to incentives.%0D%0A%0D%0AA total revamp is needed, and that means government should get out of managing schools. The productivity dividend of such reform will be 100s of times more than the minor benefits from tinkering with a few incentives here or there.

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