What makes an education ‘revolution’?

Leading up to the 2007 federal election in Australia, the Labour party used reforms to the Australian education system as a key policy offering to the Australian public. Dubbed the ‘Education Revolution’, these reforms consisted of a $14.7 billion investment in education over the following three years. Much attention has been paid to these reforms; they will have fundamental impacts on the future Australian labour force, with flow on effects for workforce planners globally. Since the election however, the government has also promised over $40 billion in response to the global financial crisis, and is facing rising health care costs related to population ageing. In this context, are the proposed education reforms efficient, and how can they be improved?

Many academic studies have demonstrated that although investments in the public education system may encourage income growth and equality, these outcomes are dependent on student attendance and completion of schooling. Despite the compulsory nature of primary and secondary schooling, Australia currently ranks 20th amongst OECD  countries in terms of school completion – overall, 72 percent of 19 year olds had completed year 12 in 2006. Only just over one third of ‘very remote’ students had completed 12 years of high school, while a similar proportion had not even completed year 10. In this case, rather than simply providing more financial input to the education system, a real education revolution would target the underlying factors which prevent children from attending school, the most prominent being the requirement in some families for children to earn an income. One simple suggestion in the literature is to schedule school holidays at a time when a child’s labour is most required in the family business (harvest time for farming communities, for example).

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