Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has encouraged parents to use the My School website to hold schools and teachers to account.
We, too, joined the rush last week to look at what all the fuss was about. After digging around the website for just a few hours, we would humbly like to suggest that accountability could go a little further up the food chain.
Here's what a few hours work uncovered. According to enrolment and staffing stats for a selection of more than 20 large (mostly 1000-plus enrolments) metropolitan schools taken from the My School website, to get a teacher at a large, metropolitan non-government school you need to have about 10.1 students. To get a teacher in a large, metropolitan government school you need 14.8 students.
Primary schools A-Z
Secondary schools A-Z
Top of the class - the 50 top primary and secondary schools by key measures
In terms of non-teaching staff in schools - those employees who relieve teachers of administrative and other support tasks - you need 21 students to get a support staff member in a large, metropolitan non-government school and a staggering 84.4 students in a similar-sized government school.
But, like all comparisons between schools, these stats - while revealing - must be taken in context. The schools compared are similar in total enrolment and geographical location, but many of the non-government schools are K-12 schools that cater for boarders.
To check for this, Hurlstone Agricultural High School, a government boarding school, was included in the selection, even though it is a little smaller in enrolment size. It has 14.1 students for each of its teachers and 60.3 for each of its support staff. A smaller non-government school that also caters for boarders, Tara Anglican School, has 10.6 students per teacher and 16.3 students for each non-teaching staff member. And, as a further check, Australian Bureau of Statistics data on student/teacher ratios back up these statistics.
So, if, as Gillard advises, there are any lazy teachers needing a kick up the proverbial, don't look for them in a government school. Clearly if the website is correct and government schools are, on average, outperforming many of their fee-charging equivalents, then government school teachers must be working very hard indeed, against the odds. They not only teach more students, they are given vastly less support to do so.
The urgent question is: how long can they maintain this performance in the face of such skewed staffing handicaps?
Some may point out that it may be private resources that are going into paying for this extra staffing in non-government schools, but that still raises the question of why we continue to generously publicly subsidise such well-endowed schools when so many government schools are doing it tough. Private funding drives divides between schools the world over but, as the My School website so tellingly points out, should it be the role of government to continue adding fuel through its funding policies?
Public school supporters and communities should be grateful that the My School website, despite its anomalies and limited perspective, has shone a bright light on to this glaring inequality.
It provides a clear and transparent direction about what needs to be done to maintain, support and improve Australia's education performance, particularly for the 70 per cent of students who attend public schools - a direction that is not about bricks and mortar or even technology and computers, but about teachers and the support they need to do their job properly and help kids learn.
Government schools urgently need not just more teachers, but more support staff.
Given the comparisons above, even if we doubled the number of support staff in most public schools tomorrow, they still would not come within cooee of many of their large private school neighbours.
Given such clear information and their stated commitment to an education revolution, we confidently expect the Rudd government to make correcting this glaring staffing imbalance its first priority. Otherwise, all Australians should hold them to account.
Jane Caro and Chris Bonnor wrote The Stupid Country: How Australia is Dismantling Public Education.
Email a friend
Favourites
Del.icio.us
Facebook
Digg
StumbleUpon
MySpace
Reddit
Newsvine
LinkedIn
Kwoff
Twitter