Sky News Showdown

SUBJECTS: Education policy; Labor leadership

E&OE…………

Peter Van Onselen: Christopher Pyne, thanks for joining us on Showdown.

Christopher Pyne: It’s a pleasure.

Van Onselen: You hardly get to talk about education because you’re the Manager of Opposition Business. What is the backbone of the Coalition’s education policy?

Pyne: It is three parts. Firstly and last night at the Sydney Institute I spoke about one of the most important parts, which is teacher quality, but it’s also about a robust curriculum and vitally importantly it’s about principal autonomy and local control of schools by their local governing councils. Last night I talked about teacher quality because it’s important to have good infrastructure, it’s nice to have good infrastructure, but if you don’t have good teachers who are teaching a useful curriculum, then basically you are wasting your money and your time. You can have a great teacher in a poor infrastructure school and still have great outcomes. I think one of the things we’ve lost sight of in this country is the importance of supporting and developing our teaching staff.

Van Onselen: So do you think that teachers are generally low quality?

Pyne: Well, I was shocked in researching this speech to find that surveys of year 12 students have said that they were choosing teaching because it was cheap, because it was easy and because it wouldn’t extend them much beyond their year 12 studies. Now that is not the cohort of teachers that we need in the pipeline teaching our young people. It’s exactly the opposite. Now I’m the teacher’s best friend. I think we need to put a lot of support and resources into professional development of teachers and training them in the first place so that when they get into classrooms, they know exactly what they are doing. Can I just give you an example? I know one person in Melbourne who went to the University of Melbourne for four years and did a Bachelor of Education, by the time they had left, they had never been taught how to teach reading to young students. Now what exactly are they being taught if they are not being taught those basics.

Van Onselen: We will get into the issue of teaching the teachers a little bit later, but how do you attract people into the profession and I’m talking about how do you make it financially attractive, how do you make people think there is enough respect there for teachers to really draw the right kind of person into the profession?

Pyne: Well I don’t think it’s that hard. I mean, I think it’s the same old way that every profession that is attractive to people becomes attractive to them, and you have to return value to being a teacher and you have to create career paths for teachers that they find attractive. You have to remunerate people on the basis of their success or otherwise. We have accepted in this country for decades because the teachers unions have run education in this country for so long that the worst teacher should get paid the same as the best teacher. Now why would any young person in generation Y, who have so many offerings of careers they can choose, choose a career where they are not going to get paid anymore, no matter how hard they work, if they get to work early, if they get to work late, or if they stay at work late, if they take out the debating team, if they coach the rugby team. It doesn’t make any difference, and one of the other things I learnt in researching this speech was that nine out of ten teachers in a survey said that they realised it didn’t matter how hard they worked, their work would not be acknowledged in school and seven out of ten said that even the worst teachers in the school, there would be no penalty for being the worst teacher in the school. Now you can’t build a profession and you can’t attract high calibre people to teaching if teachers think there is no value to how hard they work.

Van Onselen: Are there other countries that we could learn from or perhaps the private system to try and put some these elements in place?

Pyne: What we have learnt is over the last ten years, money is not the issue. Teachers unions will always say we need more teachers, we need higher pay, we need smaller class sizes. What we have actually learnt in the last ten years is that none of that makes any difference. We put 44 per cent more into Government schools and spending over the last five years, in the last five years, our student outcomes have declined.

Van Onselen: So what does a teacher earn?

Pyne: Typically teachers can earn sort of $80,000 a year, rising of course to over a hundred thousand of dollars a year and some teachers at the earlier stages get less than that, but that’s about the average. But that’s not so important, what we have learnt from East Asian economies, what we’ve learnt from European countries is a focus, relentlessly on teacher quality, on professional development of teachers on paying our best teachers more and our worst teachers less, and in fact managing those worst teachers out of the system produces much better results than simply paying everybody more which is all the union ever seems to talk about.

Van Onselen: So how do you work out who is a good and a bad teacher, student evaluations, or peer reviews, what’s the process?

Pyne: Well the Grattan Institute, which is a relatively new think tank here in Australia have actually done a lot of work on that and they have come up with a model of how you evaluate teachers, which is essentially about a peer review, principal review, student review and parent review, obviously a different weighting is given to all of those depending on – I mean my 12 year olds probably wouldn’t be able to evaluate their teachers as well as the principal would be able to do so, but it’s a review process.

Van Onselen: Isn’t there a risk of their being a playing of favourites that goes on with; you know with one teacher backing another teacher that they’re friends with, or that they get along well with.

Pyne: Well there is a risk in doing anything. But one thing I do know that doing nothing will continue the decline of student outcomes and it will continue the decline in the attractiveness of teaching as a profession. Now, doing nothing stasis is not an option. Somebody has to say enough is enough, the emperor has no clothes. It’s not good enough for the New South Wales Teacher’s Federation for example to simply say, you leave it to us we know what we are doing. Clearly, an obsession with school class sizes which the Prime minister has continued today, an obsession with class sizes is clouding the real issues in our schools.

Van Onselen: What about the university side, in terms of what teachers are learning at university. It strikes me that this is the most important issue that you need to get right, isn’t it?

Pyne: Well Peter that is an area the Federal Government can actually have a real influence over because we have university compacts with every university, and that means because we are the biggest funder of universities we can actually talk to universities about their teaching colleges. I gave you one example before which I think is startling, but most teachers will tell you that they don’t feel that they have been properly prepared for teaching through teachers colleges at universities, and principals will say that they don’t feel that the offerings coming out of university are up to standard and then they spend a great deal of time and money developing their teachers. In the government system they do that, and then the non-government system comes along and offers them more money and they go and work in the non-government system. So it is completely hopeless. What we have to do in government, I have planned to establish a ministerial advisory board to give me some advice, but I think what we need is more practical teaching at the university level, more placements or practicums as they call them in schools at the university level and importantly after students leave university we will require universities to have a mentoring roll and an evaluation roll that lasts years into the future, so they don’t just wave their students goodbye when they leave the university and say you are on your own. What is happening in East Asian economies, what is happening in places like Finland is that there is a requirement for post undergraduate study, evaluation of the students in classes and mentoring of students in schools.

Van Onselen: I’ve taught at university, but I’ve never taught at school, one of things that wouldn’t attract me to being a teacher at school is that you have to deal with discipline, you’re also dealing with some students that may not even want to be there, at least at university you know that they want to be there. How do you overcome that to make people interested in being a teacher and to be supported in that way?

Pyne: Teaching is a vocation, a little bit like politics I think sometimes, and the great joy of teaching is often turning a student around and pointing them in the right direction and instilling in them a love of learning. My brother is a teacher and my grandfather was a principal and the stories I have heard about from those people, well not my grandfather he died before I was born, but certainly from my brother is that the great joy of teaching is instilling in young people a love of learning. So if you have problems with issues of discipline, it’s those students you can turn around it’s so rewarding..

Van Onselen: It strikes me that the teachers don’t get the support they need form the system in that respect.

Pyne: That is absolutely right. Unfortunately creeping into our education system is a fear in teachers of disciplining students because the pendulum has swung so much toward the rights of students or young people, rather than the importance of teachers having control of their schools and their classes. Now, that is an issue and in the non-government school sector principals have a great deal more power over disciplining their students, in the government system that’s not so prevalent.

Van Onselen: So you don’t think money is the issue, you don’t think that teachers don’t need to be paid more. Does that mean you think you can achieve the sort of reforms you are talking about on the same budget, or can you even perhaps find cuts in the education budget and still achieve you are looking to achieve?

Pyne: Well the Federal Government doesn’t run any schools, but we do run the university compacts. So if I’m the Federal Minister for Education, if I’m lucky enough to one, have a government elected that I’m a part of and two, get this portfolio we can immediately influence the curriculum in teachers colleges in universities. Now that is not a costly exercise for us that is simply sitting down with universities and saying we think this is how you should be doing it.

Van Onselen: It’s step one isn’t it to go into these universities and to change the way that they teach the curriculum, the way that they teach the teachers isn’t it?

Pyne: Well Peter, the two groups that are screaming for reform are the parents, who think, well, recognise a lot of their students aren’t getting the best education they could and teachers. I mean teachers are the ones who have been responding to surveys that indicate that they are feeling undervalued and not being taught properly at university, so my views are not an attack on teachers, quite the opposite. I’m trying to support teachers.

Van Onselen: But you are critical of University education academics?

Pyne: I’m highly critical of the union, which I think wants to simply put a glass dome over the way things are being done and say don’t tell us its been done wrongly when clearly it has been over the years. And I’m very critical of universities which have pumped out thousands and thousands of graduates with what I believe is not an adequate education for then going into the classroom. Certainly I intend to be very firm if I’m lucky to be education minister in implementing the policies I think will we need to do if we want to be a productive country. See education is not just about producing great people in our society, it’s also about productivity and in the last ten years, Australia’s productivity has not improved at the pace that it should. You don’t need to speak to too many business people to understand that. So education is a vital part of the productivity challenge of a future Coalition Government.

Van Onselen: What do you think of the job that the last Coalition Government did in terms of education?

Pyne: Well I think they did a very good job, I think they did an extremely good job.

Van Onselen: You can’t argue that the Coalition did a great job and then argue that there are these systemic problems now, I mean it can’t have all collapsed over just a five year period of a Labor Government.

Pyne: Well, I think a lot of the things the Labor government has done in the last five years have been very deleterious to education. For example the abolition of the literacy and numeracy tuition vouchers which were working and was totally unnecessary that they should be abolished. But ideologically the unions in the Labor party did not like them, because they regarded them as a trojan horse of vouchers, which they weren’t. They were 98% successful. I don’t think Julia Gillard is the supposed education reforming minister did anything to reform education, she simply spent billions and billions of dollars on school halls, and infrastructure is all very well, but if I had all that money to spend I would have spent a good half of it on teacher development. Because you can have the best teacher in the world, teaching in terrible infrastructure and still produce great outcomes.

Van Onselen: What about in relation to the curriculum, I mean is strikes me that you stop learning things like grammar and expression in your writing at the end of year six – there is none of it, or very little of it from year seven through to year 12. Shouldn’t the teaching of English be a compulsory subject in that area, teaching people how to write properly and then if you want to go off and learn Shakespeare or learn contemporary English and plays and so forth you can do that in a separate additional unit. But shouldn’t there be a compulsory unit so that everyone that leaves school, leaves school able to actually string a sentence together, because when I mark essays at university, some of them frankly are not up to a standard that you would expect at school?

Pyne: Well, we know there is a problem with our teaching of English at school level because universities are running bridging courses for students in arts degrees or other degrees about how to write an essay. So that wouldn’t be happening if the system was working, and I put it down to faddism; there has been a tremendous amount of faddism in education in the last few years.

Van Onselen: That’s one that I thought is really simply, that you can just mandate a change in the way that English is taught up until year 12.

Pyne: Well there is now a national curriculum which is not in place nationally even though the Prime Minister ticked it off as an achievement several years ago but actually it’s not in place in any of the states except one or two and that’s only particular years. But it any event, there is an attempt at a national curriculum, so there is a capacity for the federal government to influence that. But, of course we don’t run any schools, so if I’m to get those things like phonics accepted as the proper wisdom in teaching English and literacy and so on it’s got to be in cooperation with the states. There are now four Liberal States. I said in my speech last night that states that are recalcitrant about implementing policies that the federal government thinks are necessary will not get the discretionary funding in education we have at our disposal.

Van Onselen: One final question on politics if I could Mr Pyne, Joel Fitzgibbon has been given some free advice for the Prime Minister in relation to how she is travelling in the polls. If you had the walk through a door and your life depended on it, who do you think you are likely to be squaring off against as prime Minister at the next election? Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard?

Pyne: Well I think it’s a very good question. I think the only thing that the six pretenders to the throne can agree on is that they want t get rid of Julia Gillard and the only thing they can’t agree on is which one of them should have the job. So you have Swan and Combat and Crean and Rudd and Smith and Shorten all chasing her like greyhounds at a race meet and poor old Julia Gillard will the eventual victim. If I had to, as you say, walk through a door and say which one is going to be our opponent – I would say Kevin Rudd.

Van Onselen: That would be a more scary prospect wouldn’t it, to be facing up against Kevin Rudd, given his popularity?

Pyne: Well, Kevin Rudd has been dispatched once by the Labor Party, with Tony Abbott as the Leader of the Opposition and in February, the Labor Party carpet bombed Kevin Rudd’s reputation - they said he was dysfunctional.

Van Onselen: And yet despite that he is still far more popular than Tony Abbott.

Pyne: Well I don’t know if the Australian public will vote for a man to be Prime Minister who his own party has described at psychotic and as dysfunctional. So I think the Labor party have rather cruelled his pitch in February, but if they want to put him back in as the leader, it must mean that the others aren’t very good.

Van Onselen: Christopher Pyne, thank you very much for joining us on Showdown.

Pyne: Pleasure, thank you.

ENDS