Submission:Building a skilled and adaptable workforce

This submission is a response to the interim report, Building a skilled and adaptable workforce.

The report’s strategy of improving school student outcomes – by improving access to high-quality, accredited curriculum and lesson planning materials and diffusing the best innovations in educational technology across the country – is well-stated in the report.

But by itself the strategy will fall well short of expectations. The problem lies in section one, The best resources to improve school student outcomes. This section reflects a range of assumptions and beliefs about school education in Australia that don’t match the reality on the ground.

Australian schools form complex socio-educational hierarchies which are evident in almost every Australian community. These hierarchies both create and reflect differences between schools in terms of who they enrol, the obligations they are required to meet, the opportunities they provide to their students and their learning outcomes.

These differences are especially derived from the unequal capacity of schools to determine who enrols, and in terms of accepted measurable outcomes, who succeeds and who fails.

In particular, the substantial and increasing concentration of disadvantaged students into low SES schools, combined with the well-researched peer impact on student achievement, is neither acknowledged nor considered by the report. This impact has increasingly diminished the success of reforms targeted at the level of schools, while ignoring the need to reform the wider framework within which schools operate.

Unless this framework is restructured in ways that reduce the impact of enrolment differentiation and discrimination – and create a more level ‘playing field’ of schools – the contribution of schools to “building a skilled and adaptable workforce” will remain limited.

Significantly, the Commission itself has previously acknowledged such wider barriers evident within school education. In its 2023 Review of the National School Reform Agreement it identified that the concentration of disadvantaged students into disadvantaged schools is a systemic inefficiency impeding student learning. It acknowledged that peer effects have a significant impact on student outcomes but offered no solutions.

The subsequent Review to Inform a Better and Fairer Education System stated that the current system entrenches educational disadvantage, in the process making it less likely that other reforms will realise Australia’s longstanding ambition of equity and excellence.

In the light of such revelations, Building a skilled and adaptable workforce risks joining a succession of reform interventions which fail to recognise the extent to which the current system falls short in its equity, efficiency, effectiveness and efficacy.

Read more:Submission to Productivity Commission FINAL