Looking into Australia Together - Part 5
Strategies for ensuring prosperity for everyone through lifelong educational opportunities.
In this series of articles I’m providing brief summaries featuring some of the Targets and Strategies in Australia Together.
Australia Together is the nation’s first long term, integrated plan for a better future for everyone. It is being progressively developed by Australians for Australians so that we can tell our governments what we want them to do for us as a cohesive, democratic community. You can read the latest draft of Australia Together - Issue No. 7 - here.
In Parts 1 to 4 of this series I summarised the Targets and Strategies in Australia Together for:
fixing Australia’s housing crisis;
reforming Australia’s Constitution;
stopping climate change; and
achieving peace, security and independent defence of Australia.
But if we are to succeed in meeting Targets for these and achieve the economic prosperity that should follow, nothing less than full and unimpeded access to lifelong education for every single Australian will be required. For instance, in Issue No. 7 of Australia Together there are more than 60 Targets and Strategies aimed at building an economy that is sustainable and supports rewarding opportunities and continuous improvements in living standards, wellbeing and security for everyone. None of these will be met without a significant shift in policies that provide for lifelong access to education.
So today I’ll set out the main Targets and Strategies in Australia Together for education and the rationale for how they are selected.
As I’ve noted in the earlier parts of this series, Australia Together is a map through time of the safe routes to a destination of wellbeing and security for every single Australian by 2050 or sooner. Every Target and Strategy has a coloured map reference number. You can follow the map by using the references or simply by searching on keywords which relate to your topic of interest.
How are Targets and Strategies for our education selected in Australia Together?
Like all Targets and Strategies in Australia Together, those for education are selected on the basis that they will help Australians make the Vision for Australia Together a reality. Strategies which might drag us away from that are excluded.
A central aim of the Vision for Australia Together is that:
Everyone can realise their full potential in life, as individuals, members of a family and citizens through unlimited opportunities in education and employment of choice.
It is assumed that everyone must be able to access the education that will allow them to play to their individual strengths and lead a life that is personally fulfilling for them. This is assumed on the basis that unless everyone is fully able to contribute to society in accordance with their natural talents and preferences, the wider economy will be smaller and less efficient than it otherwise could be. Unless we can all play to our strengths the national economy will never be big enough or properly composed to sustain all of us, even with the bare minimum of our physical needs let alone personal fulfilment.
Inequality of access to education has already embedded low productivity in Australia. This is a fundamental factor determining our standard of living and the strength of our economy. Continued growth in labour productivity is essential if we’re to be able to create and get more of what we want faster and for a lower price. If it is accompanied by more efficient use of natural resources (another key tenet of the Vision for Australia Together), it can also ensure consumption remains sustainable and that we do not outpace the capacity of the planet to sustain us.
As it stands in 2024, however, the world has already come very close to outstripping the capacity of the planet to sustain us. As the Stockholm Resilience Centre reported in 2023, six of the nine planetary boundaries have already been have transgressed and the Doomsday Clock is currently set at 90 seconds to midnight. Pulling the world back from this brink will require unprecedented cooperation among nations, all of whose entire populations will need to be very well educated and informed, especially wealthy nations like Australia. Nothing less than full and unimpeded access to lifelong education for everyone will suffice.
This means that at home in Australia we will need to shift to a system of free education for all, from early childhood and throughout the rest of our lives. Unless ongoing high quality education is free for everyone the quality of life for Australians in the face of climate change and attendant international tensions will be destroyed. We will be headed away from the Vision for Australia Together, not towards it. In Australia Together, this is taken as obvious.
Targets and Strategies for lifelong educational opportunities for everyone
Targets and Strategies in Australia Together to achieve the necessary shift in educational policy to fully funded, free education appear mainly in Chapter 5 under the headings, Society 5 - Education and Society 11 - Early childhood care.
At present the Targets and Strategies focus mainly on funding for education at pre-school, primary, secondary and tertiary levels. Another core Strategy focuses on necessary reforms in governance of higher education but the main barrier to meeting the Vision for Australia Together, as far as education goes, comes from the way governments counterproductively limit and inequitably distribute funding for education. Hence the critical Targets and Strategies currently featured in Australia Together for the nation’s education are predominantly about funding.
More Targets and Strategies can be included by any Australian at any time if they will move us closer towards making the Vision a reality. You can find out how to suggest a Strategy on the ACFP website at https://www.austcfp.com.au/make-a-suggestion. But in the meantime here’s a summary of the current Targets and Strategies for education:
a) Strategies for making tertiary education affordable:
Soc05.01 – which proposes reintroduction of fee-free tertiary education by 2026 to be secured by a legislated floor in expenditure on tertiary education as a proportion of GDP, a floor which ramps up federal tertiary education funding from its baseline of 0.6% of GDP in 2018/19 to at least 1.2% of GDP by 2030. This will involve a reversal of the federal government’s planned reduction of expenditure on education (as a proportion of GDP) as displayed in the last three Intergenerational Reports.
b) Strategies for stabilisation of the structure of funding of universities and vocational education:
Soc05.01.02 – which is designed to ensure that the university education needs of Australians are securely funded at least to the level of the legislated floor by ensuring that the federal government is always required to step in and top up funds when alternative sources of funds, such as funds from overseas student fees, become unstable or disappear. Reliance on these alternative sources has resulted in a significant reduction in the quality of tertiary education for Australians and the pay and working conditions of teachers. It resulted in the loss of 40,000 jobs in universities and vocational education when the Covid-19 pandemic hit Australia. Cessation of dependency on these unstable sources of funds is essential.
Soc05.01.03 - contains funding securities for vocational education similar to those proposed for university education.
c) Strategies for fair coverage of the higher education costs of those in vital and lower paid industries:
Soc05.01.01 – which proposes cancelation of student debts for social services workers by 2026 - meaning cancelation of repayments on student loans for any graduate working in teaching, childcare, aged care, disability services, nursing, social work, legal aid and any other graduate who by 2026 is earning less than the average weekly earnings.
d) Strategies for reform of governance in universities
Soc05.01.04 – which requires a number of initiatives to reverse the effect of neoliberal and corporate external interference on the ability of universities to act in the public interest. It includes:
a royal commission to independently review the governance of Australia’s public universities under terms of reference which stress that accountability and transparency are core principles that our universities' executives and governing bodies must adhere to;
adoption of Public Universities Australia’s Declaration for Public Universities Australia, which sets out the principles, practices and protocols that should guide Australian public universities’ governance, funding regimes and praxis; and
introduction of a new act of parliament to re-establish public universities as statutory bodies owned by and required to act in the public interest (not the political, social or corporate agendas of external parties).
e) Strategies for school education funding:
Soc05.02 and Soc05.02.01 – which both propose a reversal of public school underfunding and private school overfunding. These Strategies repudiate the current distribution of funding which has now resulted in private schools being funded at more than 100% of their School Resourcing Standard (SRS) - sometimes much more - and public schools being funded at only 87.6% of their SRS, leaving them underfunded by $6.8 billion in 2024. Years of overfunding of private schools has now resulted in independent schools having a massive resource advantage over public schools and catholic schools having a significant advantage. Reversal of this is not intended to result in underfunding of private schools on a long term basis but it does suggest the need for a temporary period up to 2030 of rebalancing the distribution of funds, recognising that the private schools have access to high income from fees and donations which should be utilised in the transition period so that public schools have the maximum chance of recovering from the decades of underfunding they have suffered. The intention of the Strategy as currently worded is to reduce the chance of excuses being made by federal and state governments as to why they cannot immediately fund public schools at 100% of their SRS, for example, due to purported budget constraints.
f) Strategies for early childhood education:
Soc11.01 – which proposes universal access to free childcare. This Strategy is based on a premise that early childhood education has widespread and long lasting social and economic benefits and is vital to achieving the level of workforce participation necessary to economic growth. The proposal is that by 2025 Australia would establish free childcare for all children under school age as follows:
for those children with working parents – full coverage for those days on which both parents are working;
for those children who are 3, 4 and 5 years old with a parent who is not working – full coverage for three days per week; and
for those children 2 years old with a parent who is not working – full coverage for one day per week.
g) Strategies for educational attainment:
Success in meeting Targets for educational attainment is mainly all about the money and who gets it. But the Targets themselves are critical in ensuring that the money is well spent. Strategies in Australia Together are therefore designed to ensure that Australian students achieve:
the same or above average levels of education as their OECD counterparts; and
that we achieve the school completion rates now acknowledged by experts as necessary for achievement of the higher education qualifications Australians will need in the next two decades if workers are to have the skills necessary for “an economically prosperous, socially equitable and environmentally sustainable nation”.
According to the Final Report of the Australian Universities Accord commissioned by the Minister for Education Jason Clare to review and recommend reforms that would “drive lasting reform in Australia’s higher education system,” Australia will need to ensure that by 2050:
55% of young people have a university qualification; and
80% of the Australian workforce has either a TAFE qualification or a university degree.
However, Australia is currently experiencing a drop in high school completion rates which if it persists will make it impossible to achieve the necessary completions in higher education. Jason Clare has stated that:
We’re not going to succeed here in hitting these targets unless we make significant reform not just in higher education but in school education and early education as well.
This obviously entails an urgent need to switch to lifelong free education for all.
The affordability of lifelong free education or all
Many Australians will reject the idea of fully funding free education for all on the assumption that a wealthy nation like Australia can’t afford it. But if so, they would be selling themselves, their children and their economy short. Several other nations, most of which are less wealthy per capita than Australia fully fund free education, notably the Nordic countries and Germany, with no impacts on their standard of living. Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Poland, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Sri Lanka and Uruguay also provide free education at all levels, including college and university for citizens.
In the case of university education it’s well documented that the economic returns to a nation that are expected from free tertiary education are significantly greater than the cost. In 2015, Deloitte valued the contribution of tertiary education to Australia’s productive capacity at $140 billion, of which only $24 billion accrued to the tertiary educated themselves. The majority of benefit went to everyone else. Deloitte found that the “spillover effects” meant that for every one percentage point increase in the number of workers with a university degree, the wages of those without tertiary qualifications rose 1.6 to 1.9 per cent.
In short, investment in education pays for itself and money is not the problem. The problem is a failure to spend it fully and fairly. Like housing, education needs to be acknowledged by governments as a fundamental human right that governments are obliged to provide under international laws to which Australia is a signatory but with which it does not comply. Among other things, these international laws include an obligation for states to ensure that
higher education shall be made equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education.
The governments of very wealthy nations like Australia can have no excuse in denying citizens this basic human right to free education. Wellbeing and security are not possible without it. Until the mindset of governments shifts to a commitment to free lifelong education, Australians and their economy will suffer unnecessarily and we will fail on almost every aspect of the Vision for Australia Together. We will fail to come even close to the quality of life we want and need.
The above Strategies are the product of research by a range of experts. ACFP is particularly indebted to the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), Trevor Cobbold and Save Our Schools, the OECD PISA Program, Public Universities Australia, Professor James Guthrie, Dr Adam Lucas, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), the Parliament of Australia, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Australia Institute, Deloitte, and UNICEF.
Targets and Strategies for education are likely to expand in future Issues of Australia Together.
National Integrated Planning & Reporting - inclusive, community-driven national planning
Australia Together is generated using a process developed by ACFP called National Integrated Planning & Reporting or National IP&R. This process allows any and all Australians to select Targets and Strategies that are safe and discard ones that are unsafe or which will have the effect of disabling other safe Strategies. The plan contains 57 generic safe Direction statements for our society, environment, economy and governance. These function as a signpost system for arriving at our preferred future without excluding anyone, without tripping each other up and without slowing our progress. They chart the safe course towards realisation of the Vision for Australia Together.
Any Australian can comment on or make suggestions about the Vision and Directions for Australia Together at any time. Provide feedback on the Vision and Directions here.
Any Australian can also suggest targets and strategies for inclusion in Australia Together. Find out how to suggest inclusion of a Target or Strategy in Australia Together here.
Next week in the State of Australia Substack
Next week in the State of Australia on Substack I’ll post about: Strategies for a national accord on wealth, welfare and wellbeing, including a universal basic income for all Australians. In the meantime, the Australia Together Podcast this week will feature a conversation about strategies for ensuring every Australian has access to lifelong educational opportunities. A link will be circulated in a couple of days.
Find out all about ACFP
Become involved in building plans for a better Australia here.
