BYNER: Prime Minister, thanks for your time.
PM: Good to be with you Leon.
BYNER: Your education revolution is based, to a large extent on a New York model that Julia Gillard investigated. Can you explain to the people of this state how it will, work bearing in mind that the education union find any notion of any comparison - and this is their word - “odious”?
PM: Well we think it's time for the union to get into the 21st century. Because what's at stake here is the future quality school education of our kids. And the people who deserve transparency, public reporting on this, are our kids and their parents, that's what this is all about.
You ask what are the elements of this. Basically there are three parts to what we are putting forward. The first goes to teacher quality. We want to make sure is that we have an ability to provide greater support fo paying teachers to stay in the system who are first class teachers.
Secondly, to provide greater support financially to make sure we get the best university graduates into teaching and to do it what we can to keep them there. The other thing we are doing, apart from teacher quality, goes down to school leadership and that is to make sure that our school principals - those who are the leaders of our school communities - have as much autonomy as possible to make decision to improve badly performing schools.
And the last thing is this; the only way in which we have to measure all of this in the future is to make sure that we have got a proper school performance reporting. I understand the argument put forward by some in the unions and elsewhere that you can't have simply arbitrary league tables or crude league tables which compare the most elite private school with the most struggling Government schools.
I understand that. But you can compare, however, apples with apples. And that means schools which have similar challenges in similar socio economic environments, which have similar school populations, similar challenges, can be compared with each other. And the purpose of that is to make sure we work out which schools are facing the biggest challenges so we the Government can provide more resources to those schools.
But if in the end schools are not performing well, parents need to know that, kids need to know that and action then would need to be taken.
BYNER: Prime Minister you would know that the Coalition had a very similar policy which was resoundingly rejected and poo-pooed by the States. Are you expecting the same reaction, even though you have made a perfectly logical justification as to what you want to do and why?
PM: Well, the problem with the previous Liberal government in Australia, they had 12 years to do this - 12 years to do this. They brought down report after report, some 24 reports on the quality teaching and quality education. But when you look around and find what actually happened with this, the conclusion you have got to reach is not much, not much at all.
Therefore, what we are proposing to do with the States and Territories and many of them are doing good things in these areas already is to partner with those States and Territories on the basis of a new funding agreement with Canberra.
Therefore on quality teaching we are proposing what we call a new policy partnership with states and territories on quality teaching, a new policy partnership with states and territories on providing additional funding to the most disadvantaged schools, but again on the basis of performance.
And with our new national education agreement, which priovdes billions of dollars to the states and territories over the years ahead, to make sure that one of the conditions of that is appropriate school performance reporting.
These are the negitations that we are going to have with the states and territories in the three to four months ahead. It will be a tough negotiation and i think you are right to anticipate there will be some flak from some of the unions, but not all the unions -
BYNER: Well the bureaucracy in South Australia are wedded to a bygone era of this what they used to call ‘care, share, grow' and there's no such thing as fail, everybody gets a prize almost for turning up.
(inaudible) one of our leading academics, has for some time been calling for a restoration of good standards not a dumbing down in the curriculum and this is something which is also controversial. What are you going to do where you may find states such as South Australia whose education bureaucrats, and indeed, whose minister may not agree with some of the fundamentals that want to put in?
PM: Well look, what we are doing is putting a proposal on the table and it will be a matter for states and territories whether they take the proposal up. We are prepared to put a large amount of new funding into this against the objective of raising the quality of teaching and performance in our schools.
We want to get behind our best teachers. But it's not going to be a blank cheque Leon. It has got to be with conditions attached and those conditions go to school performance reporting, quality teaching and greater powers for school leadership.
We think that's the right way to go But at the end of the day this will be a decision for the states and territories. We believe that this can be very effective partnership for the future, but mate, I'm not going to stand around and just write a blank cheque, I don't intend to.
BYNER: I didn't expect that you would do that. So, in the sense is it fair to say Prime Minister that what you want to do is rest away a central control from an educational bureaucracy and give independence to schools to do what they think is appropriate including hiring and firing?
PM: What I want to see is part of this quality schools reform package Leon is this: In those schools in particular were we have got lots of evidence and lots of data saying that a school is not performing well, that school leadership in those particular schools at least are given more autonomy to make decision about the teachers, about the overall use of resources within the school. But we are not going to simply just wave a stick at them. We want to give them more money to do that as well.
And one of the things which Julia Gillard has been doing some excellent work on as Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister and who was herself educated in Adelaide, has said to me is that what we need to do is those schools who are facing real challenges is provide extra grants to them. But the condition again is that the school leadership, school principals, are given greater autonomy over the use of that money to lift performance.
BYNER: Prime Minister, you would know that a lot of young people who can graduate as teachers, with the same qualifications, can do much better in other parts of the world in terms of salary and industry. So what kind of investment, if you could put a finger on it, what kind of extra money would you be spending on teacher salaries?
PM: Well, what we are going to do with the negotiation with states and territories, Leon, is have a serious negotiation over that and that will come down to the tin tack of dollars and cents. So I'm not about to put our negotiation position on the table in an interview with you.
BYNER: I understand. Okay, but -
PM: But let me tell you what we are on about here. You're absolutely right, one of the challenges that we face is getting our brightest uni graduates into teaching. So one of the things that we are looking at is some of the progress made by the ‘teach first program' in both the US and the UK, it has slightly different names there, whereby often for three and five year periods and often in partnership with some of our best companies we take our best graduates from the universities and have them spend a finite period with a shortened education degree often, but people who have graduated with first class degree in other areas - get them into the schools, even if we can only make use of them for three or five years, and make it worth their while to do so.
It may be then that they choose to leave the school system and go to the companies who maybe partnering with us in this. Or it may be, as evidence from the US and UK suggests, a very large slab of them say this is a fantastic profession i want to stay.
That's what we want to do, as well as for all those fantastic teachers in the system right now, make sure that they have got proper financial rewards to remain in the system, to remain in the classroom and not to also be burdened down by an extraordinary additional task which is thrown in their direction which is to become part time school administrators as well.
BYNER: I don't know whether you are aware of this and you may be because Julia is so connected to Adelaide and South Australia, but right now the Teachers Union is going through quite a brisk negotiation with the State Government. They want a 20 per cent increase and Mike Rann has been very clear in saying that he just does not have that kind of funding on the table. Now that you have spoken about incentives and higher salaries for performance, how do you expect this to interact with those negotiations?
PM: Well I'm not across the detail of where Mike is up to in his negotiations with the local Teachers Union. All i know form my own experience at the State Government level in the past, because I used to work in the Queensland State Government, is these are always really tough and hard negotiations because the ultimate cost to the State Budget for the education portfolio, and for teacher salaries is huge, it is massive.
But rather than the National Government simply saying, as our predecessors did, ‘your problem mate, we're not going to do anything about it except say to you from time to time boost the quality of your teaching', we have a different approach - which is we will help you with additional funding, but here are the conditions attached. That's the difference and we think that is the right compact for the future.
BYNER: Now one, question and this really is the crux of what we are saying today. Your attitude to those who find comparisons ‘odious' and exams almost unreal. I've had discussions with many educationalists in this state and the idea of more rigorous examination or indeed any kind of benchmark accountability, seems an anathema to them.
PM: Look I think we do our kids a disservice for the future, Leon, if we don't have more and more rigour in the school system, because it is a tough and competitive world out there. The great thing that we have seen with so many of our schools in recent decades is programs designed to deal with the wider social challenges which kids face. And they are real and it's a different society to the one which you and I grew up in, we've got to understand that.
At the same time however, we have got to make sure that kids from whatever side of the railway tracks they come from, wherever they grew up, whether their parents are rich of poor or whatever, have the absolute best start in life possible. And that means that their school educational opportunities should be absolutely first class.
Now that means helping and supporting our best and brightest teachers. Helping and supporting schools attract, and the education systems attract, the best graduates from universities. And at the same time, for schools which are facing real challenges because of the disadvantaged nature of the communities in which they operate, for the Federal Government to say to the states, ‘well look based on the data these schools are finding it really tough here is an additional grant of funds for those schools individually' and Julia's spoken about up to $500,000 for individual schools in those circumstances. But again it won't be a blank cheque, we'll expect performance to improve.
So we got to have a quality education improvement, not just improvement in the quantity of what we invest. We believe that the future lies in doing both those things.
The Liberals would preach about quality but do nothing about the quantity of how much has been put in. We intend to do both.
BYNER: Prime Minister thank you for your time.
PM: Thanks Leon.