Submission to the Review of Funding for Schooling

Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations

Prepared by Richard Letts
March 27, 2011

This brief submission concerns more effective use of the available recurrent funding.

Implementation of the National Curriculum will require that teachers are competent to deliver it to students. Especially at the primary school level, leaders from many disciplines complain that the current workforce is not capable of delivering the present curriculum in their respective areas. The introduction of a new curriculum will only add challenge to teacher competency.

We take the area we know, the arts, as an example. A National Curriculum will be available for each of five art forms: dance, drama, media, music and visual arts. The proposition is that all primary school children should have the opportunity to learn all five art forms throughout the primary school years.

Since in all states except Queensland and Tasmania, teaching responsibility in public primary schools for all subjects is assigned to the classroom generalist teacher, therefore all primary school generalist teachers must be competent to teach each of five art forms across seven, or eight, grade levels. This is not a realistic proposition because very few people have such diverse abilities even if training is offered.

We note in passing that the ability to teach many subjects in the curriculum depends upon the application of literacy and/or mathematical skills to a particular body of content. However, the ability to teach, for instance, music-making requires that the teacher is able to make music and that involves many skills additional to literacy and numeracy, such as movement and listening skills, skills in the precise manipulation of time, pitch, loudness and more, and expressive and creative skills. Particular non-literacy non-numeracy skills apply also in the other art forms.

From the viewpoint of music educators, the solution is that music should be taught by music specialist teachers. However, if the similar concerns from experts in other disciplines are addressed by provision of specialist teachers, by extension, primary school children would then spend their days with a succession of specialists as in high school, and the opportunity for necessary pastoral care disappears.

The Music Council draws the attention of the Review to a solution suggested by practice in Hong Kong and Singapore, both of which, it could be noted, exceeded Australia's performance in the PISA rankings for outcomes in all three PISA areas - reading, mathematics and sciences.

We are informed that there are no primary generalist teachers in those countries. Instead, each primary school teacher specialises in a small number of subjects. If these specialisations were grouped so that they are complementary and between them cover the full range of subjects in the curriculum, then children would see say three teachers during the week, as in Hong Kong. The children benefit from competent teaching in all subject areas and also receive pastoral care. Indeed, pastoral care may be improved because not dependent upon the success of a relationship with only one teacher.

Such a system could be implemented over time in Australia. Obviously, it would require major revision to university education programs and the organisation within schools. However, it does appear to solve problems arising from increasingly complex and diverse subject matter and the crowded curriculum which are not now being addressed effectively and which are set to become worse.

There are no obvious reasons that this solution would add to recurrent costs. The same number of students would be taught by the same number of teachers, potentially with improved outcomes across all subjects.