The Reformation of Education in N.S.W.: the 1990 Education Reform Act

The Reformation of Education in N.S.W.: The 1990 Education Reform Act Geoffrey Riordan & Sam Weller School of Education Macquarie University Paper Presented at the AARE Conference December 4 - 7, 2000 Sydney AARE Reference RIO00358 The Education Reform Act (1990) was the most significant education legislation in New South Wales in the 20th century. Prior to its assent on 1 June 1990 school education in N.S.W. had been provided under the structures and direction of a legislative framework developed 110 years earlier by Henry Parkes and William Wilkins in their Public Instruction Act (1880). The 19th century Act had been amended on numerous occasions, the last of which was in 1987. Despite these numerous amendments-many of which were notable in regard to specific matters such as the introduction of the Wyndham Scheme in the 1961 amendments-the Act continued until 1990 to impose a structure grounded in a view of society, schooling, parents and the role of the state that reflected 19th century colonial thinking. To the extent that the 1990 legislation marks the beginning of a post-colonial approach to the provision of schooling in Australia's most populous State, it deserves close study. In addition to scrutiny of its technical detail, attention should also be directed at its construction and passage through parliament as this may well reveal insights into power and policy-making in practice. Further, such a study is warranted for the ways in which the fundamental dilemmas of the provision of schooling-how a civil state deals with difference, what gets taught and who should decide and so on-were understood and settled at a particular historical time. Given the infrequency with which education legislation has been reviewed, negotiated and redrafted in its entirity, the settlement of these issues in 1990 is likely to determine the provision of schooling in N.S.W. well into the 21st century. The longevity of the provisions of the 1880 legislation was foreshadowed by Parkes himself in the following quote which, according to Morris (1969, p. 155) was directed by Parkes to his daughter: I am on the eve of a great event in my public life, the magnitude of which slightly upsets my equilibrium. The Public Instruction Bill will finally pass tonight. The . Bill was framed by myself without consulting anyone (except with Mr. Wilkins on matters of detail in school management) and it has passed through both houses without a single material alteration. The good fortune does not fall to the lot of many men to be acknowledged author of two great measures like the Public Schools Act of 1866 and the Public Instruction Act of 1880, to be in fact, the founder and moulder of the primary school system of a country. You must therefore pardon this little piece of private jubilation. Dr Terry Metherell, the Minister for Education and Youth Affairs who brought the Education Reform Bill to the N.S.W. Parliament in early 1990, also seemed to have a clear sense of the historical significance of the Act and of his own place in history: Chifley in his time was thought of as somewhat of an ogre, but now when we look back on Ben Chifley we reflect upon his statesmanship. People will eventually thank me for these reforms - this is a blueprint for education into the 21st century. (The Sunday Telegraph, April 1 1990, quoted in Gleeson, Allan & Wilkins, 1992, p. 37). The second reading of the 1990 Education Reform Bill reveals, either explicitly or implicitly, the importance speakers from both sides of the N.S.W. Parliament attached to the proposed legislation. Few, if any, of the key players could have been in doubt about the historical significance of the educational changes under consideration. The very use of 'reform' in the title of the Bill, and opposition to the term from the Labor benches symbolised the watershed about to take place in N.S.W. school education. The controversial environment created by two years of extensive and radical changes since the election of the Greiner Government in 1988, together with widespread and intensive public consultations surrounding three direction-setting reviews, ensured a heightened public interest in the passage of the Bill. All major educational stakeholders lobbied fiercely, especially as the Bill's passage through the Legislative Council was by no means certain. The parliamentary debates were clear evidence of the community's recognition of the significance of the Bill regarding the key issues facing N.S.W. education at a time of challenging economic, technological, social, and organisational changes. In contrast to the lengthy and detailed debate in Parliament and the coverage the passage of the Act attracted in the media, there has been little scholarly attention directed at the contents, origins and outcomes of the Act. A recent search of the Australian Education Index (AEI) produced 34 "hits", eight of which referred to the N.S.W. legislation. There was one masters thesis (Alaba, 1992) that addressed the issue of certification of secondary schools in N.S.W. between 1912 and 1990. In this thesis mention is made of the 1990 Act in a postscript. There were two conference papers, one on the topic of rural education which made reference to the Principles of the 1990 Act and another comparing aspects of the 1988 English Act of the same name with the N.S.W. legislation (Krump, 1991). There was a document published by the Australian Education Union (AEU) critiquing the Scott Review (1989). The remaining four documents were published by either the Board of Studies or the Department of Education and were designed to provide information to schools about specific matters of curriculum or school organisation. Twenty-five of the 34 "hits" on the Australian Education Index pertained exclusively to the British Education Reform Act. The final "hit" was on an article dealing with the Kentucky Act of the same name and year! To the best of our knowledge, the treatment of the Act (1990) in books, chapters and other works not included in the A.E.I. has also been minimal. Welch's (1996) Australian Education: Reform or Crisis? makes mention of the Act and some of the themes and issues of relevance to it. However his approach is to take a theme, such as devolution or the back-to- basics movement and examine the theme across a number of jurisdictions and policies. A possible reason that the Act, or for that matter, the Scott Review or the Carrick Report, barely rate a mention in Welch's book is that many of the arguments that Welch advances are difficult to sustain when one examines the detail of the contents and development of the Act. Barcan (1993) in his book on sociological theory and education in Australia since 1949 does make several references to Metherell and to the Reports which informed the Act (1990). Barcan's focus is national, and as such he attempts to produce a coherent account of education change across a broad historical period. Often a casualty of such an approach is detail, and unfortunately he occasionally gets superficial detail wrong, such as when he claims that the Premier Nick Greiner appointed Carrick to review school education in an attempt to mollify opposition to Metherell (p. 340). Barcan, when he does address the issues in and around the Act is also more intent on the attempted and by now largely unsuccessful changes to the Department, a matter less related to the Act than to the Scott Review (1990). In a later publication, despite the promise of its title, Barcan (1996) in his review of recent educational developments in Australia pays even less attention to the Act. Marginson (1993), despite featuring a photograph of an anti-Metherell protest on the front cover of his widely acclaimed Education and Public Policy in Australia, does not mention Metherell or the N.S.W. Act in the text! None of this is particularly surprising. What tends to happen in policy texts and articles is that little attention is given to empirical study of the detail of specific policies or their contexts. Taylor, Rizvi, Lingard and Henry (1997, p. 40) suggest that this is particularly the case in Australian research: "It is interesting that within Australia . much critical policy work has tended to highlight at an abstract level the operation of the state without investigating actual operations at local sites." Taylor et al. attribute this to the state-centric nature of our political culture. We believe that there are other reasons for this neglect. Such studies are immensely time consuming and difficult. Ball (1990) attests to this when he notes in the first sentence of his introduction the difficulty of reporting the findings of his study. From an instrumental view, such studies are not attractive given the current situation in educational research in this country with its imperatives to gain external research funding and to publish. Publications are problematic, as there would appear to be a limited local audience for such work and an even smaller potential international readership. But to return to our argument, to the extent that the Act has been mentioned in scholarly work, there has been a tendency in the literature to associate this Act - and the policies that informed it and continue to flow from it - with the global New Right/post-Fordist/economic rationalist policy ideology. While there are some benefits in this approach, it is, in our view, problematic on four counts. First it tends to over-simplify and thus misrepresent the contents of the policies being studied. Second, it tends to oversimplify and misconstrue the state.

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