The mis-education of Julia Gillard

Julia Gillard is trying to shift attention to education and training as the theme of this year's federal budget. That's far firmer ground for Labor than the two more obvious themes – how it will balance the books with not enough revenue coming in; and the bewildering lack of accounting for the carbon and minerals taxes due to commence operation in 2012.

So the 'education budget' it shall be.

On Monday Julia Gillard named the amounts the nation's best teachers could expect to see in the budget as performance bonuses. Depending on their individual level of remuneration, teachers will get between $5,000 and $8,000 for being in the top 10 per cent of teachers. The scheme will cost $425 million over the next four years, and the first cheques will change hands (during smiling photo-ops) in 2014.

This is in addition to funding announced with the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook (MYEFO) of $164.8 million over four years to provide "reward grants to government and non-government schools that have shown the most improved performance over twelve months". That plan was created as part of a deal struck with independent Rob Oakeshott during negotiations to form a minority government last September.

Both schemes have been criticised for relying on simplistic measures of achievement. The US-inspired national literacy and numeracy tests, or NAPLAN tests, which allow comparison between schools and teachers, don't measure some of the more important attributes that students will later need at university or in the workforce, such as critical thinking and creative approaches to problem solving.

Those criticisms are valid enough, but some kind of benchmark against which to incentivise schools and teachers is surely better than nothing. Labor aims to continue expanding the university system – it wants 40 per cent of 25 to 34 year olds holding a degree by 2020 – and so needs to keep working at a federal level to find ways to improve the skills of secondary school leavers feeding into that system.

Bonuses and achievement-based grants are "divisive" according to critics, but that is a cultural attitude many business people would find alien – there's nothing more 'divisive' than comparing the salaries and bonuses of junior managers and CEOs, but such disparity is also the incentive for junior staff to excel in their work and climb the salary scale.

In recent years I have met and interviewed many educators within the tertiary system who privately lament that overcrowded and under-resourced universities turn out graduates with competencies that should be achievable at a good secondary school. Likewise, alumni of the best private schools have told me that they consider their expensive secondary education to be "as good as a degree".

Whether or not that's true, secondary schooling can't leave the 'real learning' to universities or further education. It must be seen as an end in itself, not least because 60 per cent of graduates won't go on to complete degrees. Their reading, writing and thinking skills must be as solid as possible before they take jobs, apprenticeships or pursue vocational training.

Each year Australian workers are having to support a relatively larger retired population, meaning that long periods of tertiary study before joining the workforce will be harder to pay for with each passing year. That's very sad. One of the great cultural traditions of the post-war years, the kind of extended university career that so many of our political and business leaders enjoyed in the later decades of the twentieth century is being overtaken by demographic forces.

Julia Gillard did good work as Kevin Rudd's education minister and under her prime-ministership the government is taking on major reforms – including this week's announcement of $200 million for programmes to assist students with disabilities, and a controversial "root and branch" review of how non-government schools are funded that will report by year's end.

But will it be enough to take voters' minds off the many spending cuts that will be necessary in this year's budget? Not likely. Australians are still too well educated to be so easily distracted.