A is for Autonomy, B is for Bad

Autonomy: a harmless enough word, but it’s caused raging debates in education for decades.

Under Premier Nick Greiner, the Liberal Government developed its ‘school renewal’ program, a pseudo-privatisation campaign aimed at breaking up the school system in NSW.

The Greiner Government wanted to give school principals the power to manage their own school budgets, including the hiring and firing of teaching staff: self-governing schools.

Hard campaigning by the Teachers Federation knocked it off the agenda, but the thinking has never really gone away.

Recently, one of the Deputy Directors of the NSW education department told a conference of public school principals he wanted to launch a pilot program similar to Greiner’s school renewal program.

He wanted to give 30 primary school principals the funds to manage their own schools.

I strongly oppose any such program.

I accept principals need a measure of autonomy over the way they run their school. A balance is needed and we recently supported a move to give principals control over the way they organise maintenance and repairs in their schools.

But I don’t accept that principals should be given complete autonomy over managing a school’s budget and staffing.

• Principals are educational leaders, not business leaders. They are experienced teachers whose role is to guide and oversee their school’s learning program.

• What of the schools who fall through the cracks? Inevitably, principals and the schools they lead will have different capacities to attract experienced teachers, manage their budgets and attract external resources. In a free market, there are winners and losers. When it comes to public education, we need all of our schools to be winners.

• ‘Autonomy’ is code for cutting funding and shirking responsibility. No doubt a pilot program would be properly funded, with the money progressively squeezed once the scheme was rolled out. And if there’s a budget meltdown at Campbelltown Public? Not the Department’s problem.

A devolved system doesn’t produce a better education for our kids. Rather it would foster inequity across the system – a bad outcome for the families of NSW.

The idea of breaking up our public education system – producing 2,200 schools competing against each other – is still alive in the corridors of the education department. If we have a change of government at the next election, we can expect it take on a new life.

Our campaign for better education in NSW schools not only calls on government to properly fund education – it also calls on government to take responsibility.

We are calling for investment and a commitment to the system as a whole, a public education system which is not just a safety net but offers excellence right across the state.

John Irving
General Secretary,
NSW Teachers Federation