State Govt no longer wanted a teacher in charge
Debate about the lack of teaching qualifications of new education department boss Tony Harrison misses the point of his elevation to the role.
The Government had clearly decided that it no longer wanted a teacher in charge of the Department for Education and Child Development.
After years of grappling with the mega-department’s culture – which the Government has only recently admitted is a problem – Premier Jay Weatherill and his education minister Jennifer Rankine have decided to put a dose of salts through the place.
Harrison comes without any professional baggage in this field. He doesn’t have friends and colleagues out there in the school system or within the department. He doesn’t have a sense of obligation to the shibboleths of the teaching profession. He doesn’t have any history with any of the key interest groups. As such, he is free to cast an objective managerial eye over the place.
The bureaucratic core of the education department is an odd space – but so too, in my experience, is any department where staff from the professions run the show. A good professional is not necessarily a top-shelf public sector manager.
It’s not hard to understand how teachers in the bureaucracy develop the view that their ideas are better than their political bosses – we’re the experts, they argue, probably reasonably on many occasions. Health, from time to time, has suffered from a similar issue. Both departments require firm ministerial and bureaucratic leadership.
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In making the move to a non-teacher as the departmental boss, the Government is hoping he will be able to shift the culture quickly, and implement changes to be recommended by former Victorian education department chief Peter Allen, who is fast-tracking an internal review.
If it is unfortunate that Harrison is a police officer, it is only because it accentuates the sense of crisis surrounding the department.
It doesn’t mean that he is incapable of doing a good job. He might do an excellent job – time will tell.
Garry Costello, a former principal who will essentially run the education policy side of the department, will placate many teachers’ fears. The unions and the principals have praised his role as Head of Schools.
However, the departure of Keith Bartley is a transformational moment.
Bartley, hand-picked by Weatherill in 2011, is a heavy-weight of the English school system and a teacher through-and-through.
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Weatherill says he’s leaving due to “health and family reasons”, and there’s no reason to doubt that. Weatherill also said he was happy for him to stay on.
But it’s clear that with Bartley leaving, the Government saw a chance to make a statement not only to the community, but also to the department, with the appointment of the new CEO.
Bartley grappled, apparently unsuccessfully, with “a culture of disconnectedness” in the department. Addressing this will be Harrison’s first job.
“I’ve found a number of units within the department that were operating in isolation from each other,” Bartley said. “I’ve found poor communication between departments and, as Mr Debelle’s report has indicated, poor communication upwards within the department.”
In the early days of his appointment – before the Debelle inquiry had thrown the department’s problems into the public glare – Bartley was considerably more optimistic.
He wrote down his early reflections on South Australia’s school system some six months after taking the job here , and it’s an educational policy wonk who reveals himself – another indication of the profound culture change about to hit at the top of the department.
Published by the UK National Education Trust, Bartley’s “Postcard from Adelaide”, talks about his “powerful impressions” of our school system.
He writes about the fact that the public and private education sectors are “more discrete, and more distinct”, with 60 per cent of students in state education and 40 per cent in independent or Catholic schools.
“So rallying public education and care and the provision of universal and targeted services to children and young people has a particular meaning here when so many parents elect to have their educational provision made outside of the state system,” he writes.
“But, as a consequence, a powerful and unifying sense of moral purpose and the obligation to meet the needs of every child, all of the time and without exception is tangible across the public education system. So, too, is an eagerness to engage with research and to learn from practice elsewhere in the world.”
After praising the system, he also raises concerns, noting that Australia’s international performance in school education had stalled. He said there was “considerable work to do” to catch up with the highest performing jurisdictions in reducing the effect of low socio-economic status on educational outcomes.
“Our challenge is to ensure that high educational equity sits alongside high educational outcomes. And it appears that to achieve a more meritocratic system we need to focus on two key determinants within our teachers. The first is to examine more deeply a teacher’s understanding of their own epistemology – do they teach ‘stuff’ or do they teach how to learn? And the second is to examine their optimism – do they believe, deeply, that all children can achieve?”
Imagine what a postcard home in the past few weeks might have said.
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