The second article in this series concluded with the proposition that one of the most important things that Tasmania can (and in my view should) do to improve its long-run economic performance and prospects (and hence, the living standards of its people) is to “fix” our under-performing education system.
It would be really simple – and popular – if it were accurate to say that what we need to do is spend more money on our education system. Apart from the (inevitable) question of where would that money come from, almost no-one would be opposed to spending more on schools. Sadly, however, the problems with Tasmania’s education system aren’t going to be solved by throwing more money at them.
Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that Tasmania consistently spends more on schools per effective full-time student than any other state or territory except the Northern Territory. In 2018-19, it spent almost $3,000, or 22 per cent, more than the national average.
More sophisticated estimates compiled by the Commonwealth Grants Commission (as part of its annual determinations of how the revenue from the GST should be carved up among the states and territories) suggest that over the past four years Tasmania has spent almost $50m per annum (or about 5 per cent) more on schools than it would have needed to in order to provide the same standard of school education services as the average of all states and territories, after taking account of difference in the costs of providing it and other factors such as the proportion of students attending governments schools (which is higher in Tasmania than in most other states).
And yet despite spending more, we get worse results. Indeed, in most instances, the worst outcomes for students of any part of Australia except (in some cases) the Northern Territory (which of course has unique challenges in providing schooling to its relatively large but widely dispersed Indigenous population).
There is no evidence that Tasmanian children are inherently less capable of learning than children from other parts of Australia (despite the fact that proportionately more Tasmanian children come from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds than anywhere else except the Northern Territory).
On the contrary, results from the Australian Early Development Census tell us that a slightly above national average proportion of Tasmanian children are “developmentally” ready on all five key areas of learning readiness when they enter their first year of school – perhaps because a higher proportion of Tasmanian children attend pre-school in the year before starting primary school than in any other state or territory.
But the evidence also suggests that the further that Tasmanian children progress through their schooling, the further they fall behind their peers in other states and territories. The proportion of Tasmanian Year 7 students achieving above national minimum standards in reading and numeracy is lower than anywhere except the Northern Territory, as is the proportion of Tasmanian Year 10 students attaining the national minimum standard of ICT literacy.
Conversely, the proportion of Tasmanian students with below-standard achievements at age 15 in mathematics, reading and science is higher than in any other state or territory except (again) the NT, and higher than the national average by between 7 and 10 percentage points.
Things get even worse after Year 10. Only 74 per cent of Tasmanian students who completed Year 10 in 2018 were doing Year 12 in 2020 – once again by far the lowest in any part of Australia except the NT (and significantly less than the NT if the Indigenous population is excluded), and 8 percentage points below the national average. And the proportion of the potential Year 12 population that actually attain a Year 12 certificate is 14 percentage points below the national average.
This is not because Tasmania has an above-average proportion of students coming from low socio-economic status (SES) households, or from rural and regional areas (which we do). A student from a high SES household in Tasmania is less likely to attain a Year 12 certificate than a student from a low SES household in Victoria, South Australia or Western Australia; and a student from a medium SES household in Tasmania is less likely to get a Year 12 certificate than a student from a low SES household in any other state except Queensland. Likewise, a student from Hobart is less likely to get a TCE than one from an inner or outer regional, remote or even very remote part of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia or Western Australia is to attain his or her state’s equivalent certificate.
That’s why Tasmania has the least-educated work force of any state or territory in Australia – with only 23.5 per cent of 15-74 year-olds having any kind of university degree (compared with the national average of 30 per cent); and, conversely, 25.75 per cent of 15-74 year-olds having nothing beyond Year 10 (compared with the national average of 17 per cent).
It’s why Tasmanians rank lower on measures of digital inclusion than any other part of Australia (except the NT), which is an increasing problem in the post-pandemic world.
The problems with Tasmania’s education system start with the continued reliance on methods of teaching reading, spelling and writing in the first years of school, which the evidence shows don’t work, and on other curriculum fads often imported from Victoria, whose state education system was progressively dumbed down between the late 1960s and the early 1990s in a way that had never been permitted in New South Wales. (Tasmanian parents are typically less able to get around that problem by sending their children to private schools, as a higher proportion of Victorian parents now do than in any other state).
And the problems which Tasmanian students encounter as they progress through the education system are then compounded by the structural break which they, alone among their peers in Australia other than the (culturally and socio-economically worlds-away) ACT, encounter between Year 10 and Years 11 and 12.
Tasmania’s colleges do a reasonable job of imparting senior secondary education to those students, as shown by the fact that a small proportion of students switch to them from private schools each year after completing Year 10.
But the college system is a relatively expensive way of delivering senior secondary education, requiring the duplication of facilities and staff that isn’t required in the integrated systems of the other states.
More importantly, the physical separation of Year 11 and 12 students from those doing Years 7 through 10 creates puts barriers in the way of a seamless transition from Year 10 to the senior years which some students, especially those from backgrounds where there is no family tradition of higher learning and little value attached to education, are unable to overcome – barriers which don’t exist anywhere else in Australia.
Students doing Years 7 through 10 at high schools in other states can see, every day, older students doing Years 11 and 12 – and aspire to follow in their footsteps when they reach the same age. Students in Tasmanian schools can’t.
Those students who do manage to overcome whatever difficulties their personal circumstances pose to reach Year 10, with the support of teachers and other staff who have four years in which to learn about their individual strengths and weaknesses, are forced by the Tasmanian system to abandon them and – if they go to a college – start again, with teachers and other staff who will ordinarily have only two years to build relationships which may have taken twice as long to build in high schools. Students in other states don’t have to do that.
Tasmanians should really ask themselves – if our system of separate senior secondary colleges is so good, how come no-one else in Australia has ever copied it – apart from, that is, the ACT where the option of dropping out after Year 10 is as about as far away from parents’ or students’ minds as Canberra is from the moon.
As the second article in this series argued, if Tasmanians want to improve our (material) living standards relative to other Australians – if we don’t want to remain the poorest people in Australia, or even if we just want to be less poor relative to other Australians than we now are – we need to raise the proportion of Tasmanians who have a job; to increase the proportion of those jobs which are full-time; and to lift the productivity of those of us who do have jobs.
And the one thing which will help us achieve all of those goals – something we can do ourselves, without requiring more hand-outs from Canberra – is to increase our levels of educational participation and attainment, from the first year of primary school through year 10, to years 11 and 12, and beyond, whether it be trade training or a university degree or diploma.
Moreover, if we aren’t prepared to do what needs to be done to achieve those goals, then we might as well forget about attracting families with children to come from other parts of Australia, or other parts of the world, in order to make their homes and build their futures in Tasmania.
Saul Eslake came to Tasmania with his parents as an eight-year old. He went to primary school in Smithton, and high school and university in Hobart (graduating with a First Class Honours degree in Economics from UTas). Like so many in that era, he went to the mainland for work, initially at the Treasury in Canberra, before spending almost 32 years in Melbourne, working as (among other things) chief economist of the ANZ Bank for 14 years and chief economist (Australia & New Zealand) for Bank of America Merrill Lynch for 3½ years. In 2015 he came home to establish his own business, Corinna Economic Advisory. Saul Eslake is a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at UTas, and a non-executive director of the Macquarie Point Development Corporation.
