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September 25, 2007
The OECD's Education at a Glance indicates that the Australia is doing poorly on early childhood education and public funding of tertiary education. The Report excludes childcare from early childhood education because childcare services neither embody mandatory learning programs nor are staffed by trained teachers.
Wilcox
Although most countries are increasing private investment in education the OECD notes that private investment is normally used to compliment public investment not replace it. Except in Australia, where public funding is decreasing and private investment is increasing, whilst total funding per student has increased only marginally.
From the perspective of a knowledge economy the funding of higher education looks bad---that strengthens the ALP's "education has been neglected" narrative. As the
OECD Report says:
Human capital has long been identified as a key factor in driving economic growth and improving economic outcomes for individuals, while evidence is growing of its influence on non-economic outcomes including health and social inclusion.
In a global economy people face growing pressures to go on developing skills and knowledge over their working life-time as job mobility increases and job tasks become more complex. It is the US, which is commonly seen as the number one knowledge economy in the world. Hence all the policy talk from the ALP about how education contributes to the knowledge economy and its stress on the critical role that education plays in making Australia and its citizens economically competitive.
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If government spending on education doubled today we wouldn't see any significant change inside a decade. Not only have we failed to teach the skills we need today, we've also lost a lot of teachers, in all subject areas - and not necessarily to the private schools either.
We can expect the skills shortage to get worse before it gets better. Unless we can come up with some way to get educators who have left to come back, and experienced just-about-to-retire boomer educators to stay longer, we're in a spot of bother.