Transcript - 2GB - 7 April 2011

SUBJECTS: Press Gallery Address

Alan Jones: I have asked Christopher Pyne to join me in the studio, good morning

Pyne: Good morning Alan

Jones: Congratulations, outstanding speech yesterday, the sums don't add up do they?

Pyne: Well, Alan, you know we could come up with just another program, we could spend another few hundred million dollars of taxpayers money on designing new programs that are going to address the issue of literacy and numeracy and the preparedness of students for the workforce, but what we really need to do is completely overhaul the way we teach students in our schools and we have to return, I'm afraid to say it, and I know it's not popular, but we have to return to traditional methods of teaching and we need to give principals the autonomy to run their own schools because that is the only way we are going to have a real change.

Jones: Just before I come to that, you made some very significant comments about that yesterday; it's no different for people entering a trade as it is for people studying at university, is it?

Pyne: No, not at all, I mean there are universities around Australia that are running bridging courses for their students in English and commerce and economics and arts and so forth because they can't write a sentence, a paragraph or an essay, now there are universities in my state of South Australia which are saying to the State Government if we can't have any confidence in the students that are coming out of year 12 to go to university, we'll run our own entrance exams, which is what universities used to do of course decades ago, we'll run our own entrance exams and anyone can sit them and we'll determine who has the skills and what courses they should be able to do.

Jones: Well this report by the Skills Council is called No More Excuses as you know, but basically they are saying that the basic maths and physics competence of the 15 to 16 year olds seeking trades in the sixties was superior to those of the 18 year old today.

Pyne: They are and they have belled the cat in many respects, but they've also said something I think we've all known for a long time but nobody really wants to admit it, and that is children coming out of year 11 or year 12 or even year 10 if they leave school at that stage, don't have the necessary skills to do what is required and we have lowered expectations of what we expect from students.

Jones: But this is spelling, equations, sentence structure, ability with the language; I thought we were building an education revolution.

Pyne: Well there's been no revolution, the government's revolution has been more like a one man sandwich board protest outside Parliament House, that's not exactly a revolution. What we actually do need is a complete overhaul without the hyperbole, without all the raised expectations, without the cleverly named programs that cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Jones: And education isn't about buildings, is it; I mean you can teach people, if you're a good teacher under a tin roof

Pyne: Well, we need good teachers, and we don't need a situation where teaching is the lowest score to get into to go to university. We need good teachers who are paid well who actually feel that they're getting rewarded for being good teachers. It is an absolute scandal that you can go into teaching and reach your peak in terms of pay at 30 and nothing will change for the rest of your teaching career. No matter whether you take the debating team, whether you coach the rugby team, if you come in on Saturdays and help with the school carnival, you can do all those things and you'll get paid exactly the same as the teacher who doesn't do any of those things. So of course people say why on earth would I want to go and become a teacher now we need to completely reform the way we deal with teachers and pay teachers and train teachers, but more importantly the cultural change that needs to occur at schools is that principlaes in government schools need to be given the same capacity with their leadership teams as principles in non-government schools.

Jones: This is a very important point that Christopher Pyne made yesterday because we talk about independent and private schools but Colin Barnett in Western Australia, and you spoke at length about this yesterday with the proposal for independent public schools, just elaborate on that for me.

Pyne: Well, Western Australia have gone down the track of establishing independent public schools which are a bit like charter schools where the government continues to pay per student to the school but the principal and his or her leadership team and a governing council actually run the school. So they choose their staff, they spend their resources within the school, they make the decisions about curriculum about extra-curricular activities, about what building programs are a good plan for the future, what capital they need, and they run essentially like a non-government school. There are about 100 in Western Australia and the really interesting thing about it, I expected what would happen in Western Australia is that schools in affluent areas who felt confident they could run their own school would apply to be independent public schools, but what actually happened is that principals in a lot of struggling areas, in tough areas, who stayed in public education because they have a commitment to it, they're the ones who have applied to be independent public schools because they're sick of being told from central office what needs to be done when in fact they are the ones on the ground that know what needs to be done. At one such school I went to in Don Randall's electorate, they're running programs not just for students, and this is a school where one of the students was just out of juvenile detention, this is a primary school, this was a very tough school, they're not just running programs for the students, they're actually running programs for the parents for literacy and numeracy for good parenting, for how to get a job, and they understand the needs of their community and they should be given the freedom to do that, and find it within their budget.

Jones: People want to run their public schools.

Pyne: That's right. They look down the road at St Theresa's and they see this non-government school where they're running their own school, they're building their own buildings, they're getting value for money for their BER projects, they're making their own decisions about the kind of teachers they want and how many. And they look at their government school which is run like East Germany in the 1960s and they think why on earth can't we have what they have?

Jones: Extraordinary. Just one thing you didn't raise yesterday, but I increasingly get correspondence here about parents concerned about for example their children being taught that carbon dioxide is a pollutant or that they should reject Work Choices. I mean there's a very strong political element inside these classrooms.

Pyne: It's interesting that it goes to kind of our whole social development over the last kind of 40 years where the left decided that getting involved in the teaching profession and controlling teaching was going to have the long term benefits they wanted for controlling our political dynamics in this country. And to a very large extent they have been successful, particularly in New South Wales might I add; in other states less so. There is a very strong political element run from the Australian Education Union and various teachers federations around Australia which have inculcated young people with often high self esteem and self confidence, but if you get a student that comes out of school and they come to your office to write their first letter and it's starts "Hi Carol, thanks for coming in yesterday" when you were expecting a letter to be written to a constituent. And you say to this person, "You can't start a letter this way. This is not how a letter is written, without any punctuation and one block paragraph." It doesn't do much for their self esteem. And you can give people all the confidence and self-esteem when you're 17, but if in their first job their employer says, "You can't write a letter and you can't structure a sentence," it doesn't do much for their self-esteem.

Jones: Just one final point. We could talk forever about what you had to say yesterday and congratulations; an outstanding presentation. But you did say the MySchool website runs the very significant risk of dredging up again all the divisive debate about public schools and private schools.

Pyne: Look, the MySchool website is a good tool to find out how parents, principals and teachers to find out how their school is going in comparison to other schools, how their children are going and that's not a bad thing. I have seen no compelling evidence at all and the Government still doesn't provide any as to why the MySchool website should publish the financial data of non-government schools. There's no basis for it whatsoever. All of that data is available in annual reports. The only reason you'd publish that data is because you wanted to create the politics of envy in schools again and you wanted to create divisive debate this year because there's a review of non-government school funding going on. It is a clear strategy to dredge up the old sectarian politics of envy that many people who oppose non-government schools talk about already and I don't support it. And if the Government could give us some compelling evidence as to why private financial information needs to be published I'd love to see it. But so far they just remain mute about it. MySchool's website is a useful diagnostic tool, but it now has become a weapon to be wielded against non-government schools. And there's one thing your listeners need to know, it's that if every student in a non-government school went to a government it would cost the taxpayers 32 billion dollars over the next four years.

Jones: We'd be broke. We wouldn't have the physical resources or the money. Well done; a very significant contribution to the debate. Unfortunately it doesn't receive the kind of treatment from the media it deserves and I'm glad we were able to speak to you.

Pyne: Thank you, Alan.

ENDS