Australia

Basic Data
Official Country Name:	Australia
Region:	Oceania
Population:	19,169,083
Language(s):	English, native languages
Literacy Rate:	100%
Academic Year:	January-December
Number of Primary Schools:	8,123
Compulsory Schooling:	10 years
Public Expenditure on Education:	5.4%
Foreign Students in National Universities:	102,284
Educational Enrollment:	Primary: 1,855,789
	Secondary: 2,367,692
	Higher: 1,041,648
Educational Enrollment Rate:	Primary: 101%
	Secondary: 148%
	Higher: 80%
Teachers:	Primary: 103,774
Student-Teacher Ratio:	Primary: 17:1
	Secondary: 12:1
Female Enrollment Rate:	Primary: 101%
	Secondary: 148%
	Higher: 83%

History & Background

Australia became a country in 1901 as a federation of former British colonies inhabiting the continent of Australia. At Federation, six states emerged out of the six colonies, and they retained the establishment of policy and funding for education. Progressively, the states voluntarily surrendered some of their powers so that by the end of the twentieth century, the federal government played a major role in the educational system. Each state has carried on separate educational policy development, teacher training, and registration procedures.

The Australian population was 19,222,000 in 1999, spread across 7,713,364 square kilometers of land. Australia is closely knit into the world economy and is an active middle power in world politics. Its social policies are driven by an aging population and declining birth rate. Australia is trying to sustain national population growth through migration, which has meant a more diverse population towards which education has to be directed from a tax and income base that is undergoing radical changes in the face of globalization.

The first period of Australian education was dominated by the social and moral needs of a convict society which, from 1810, began to develop a free minority. As an exiled society of adults, the problems were conversion and moral restraint. Consequently, the Anglican church provided the first schoolmaster in the colonial chaplain, Reverend Richard Johnson. His educational efforts came in the form of sermons and bible readings, the literature that came with the first fleet, and a variety of moral and biblical tracts. He also oversaw the first hut schools, one in Sydney in 1789 and another in Parramatta two years later. There was no real model for financing or organizing religion outside of the United Kingdom. Therefore, glebes were established (400 acres for support of a minister and 200 for a schoolmaster) in each developing center. Later, this arrangement was formalized in the Church and School Corporation established under Thomas Hobbes Scott in 1825, as part of an attempt to extend to Australia the Anglican monopoly in England by deeding it one-tenth of all surveyed land. The problem with the model was that most land was still unsettled or, if settled, unsurveyed, leaving available finances well behind the expansion of population and demand for education.

The arrival of the Second Fleet increased the number of women in the colony, leading to an ever-expanding number of children to be raised. Female convicts, for whom there was less call for as manual laborers, also tended to be the first teachers in local schools. It was not a promising beginning for education. Scarcity of labor drove up wages and land was easily obtainable, often by grant. A masculine society had good economic and cultural reasons for despising learning, an attitude that remained common enough in the anti-intellectualism of the culture into the post-World War II period.

In 1792, the funding and fortunes of education varied with government patronage. The advent of a number of missionaries fleeing Tahiti in 1798 further strengthened educational endeavors in the colony. They also reinforced the assumption that religion was education. This attitude remained the case for much of the nineteenth century, particularly on the edges of settlement. The clergyman was often the most educated person in the locality. Wherever churches went, schools followed. Local groups out of the growing centers turned to the voluntary society as a model.

By 1814, the state was wholly or partially funding 13 elementary schools in the vast arc from Moreton Bay in the north to Hobart in the south. The spreading edge of settlement (and the dangers of a masculine, frontier society) soon created boarding and girls schools. While student numbers were small, individual instruction and private study was the preferred method. The increase in the number of children (by 1810, there were more than 3000 children, 26 percent of the population, in the colony) meant the adoption of different methods. Crook's Academy, for instance, adopted British charity school methods such as the Lancastrian monitorial system. Larger numbers of students also meant more variety and pressure to provide non-denominational forms of religious instruction. As the formal structures of denominations became more firmly established, however, there was contention over the shape of education, particularly education paid for by public funds. Free settlers who were nonconformist and democratic by spirit came into conflict with the assumptions of the imperial state, wealthy colonialists, and merchants.

The state's aim for education was to inculcate obedience to Christian church principles. For the churches, the definition of Christian implied was questionable, and the order of priority was to be reversed. For the state, religion was an instrument for social and moral order; for the churches, religion was a prime objective from which social and moral order were desirable, but not essential side-effects. The Church Acts of 1836 made Anglicanism, Catholicism, Methodism, and Presbyterianism the main forms of Christian worship.

With the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813, and the extension of settlement north to Moreton Bay (later Brisbane) and south to Hobart, the far-flung edges of pastoral empires and the accumulation of wealth also raised the need for residential grammar schools to which children could be sent away from their isolated station. These first began as private schools in the classics, largely run by clergymen for additional income, preparing genteel ladies and men who would be capable either of running the family business or returning to Britain to take a profession. The Australian College was founded in 1831, and King's School was founded in 1832. The former folded, but King's lasted, and the Scots school was founded in 1838, beginning a long-running tradition of Presbyterian grammar schools perhaps best typified by Scotch College. St Mary's Seminary, a mixed Catholic seminary and secondary school, was founded by Bishop Polding in 1837. In Tasmania, Queen's School (Anglican, 1842), Launceston CGS (Anglican, 1846), and the Hutchins School (Anglican, 1846) led the way in a system which, under the energetic Bishop Francis Nixon and by the direct intervention of W. E. Gladstone, came to be dominated by Anglican schooling. In Queensland, grammar schools were publicly supported under the Grammar School Act of 1860 in order to fill the rural educational vacuum.

In the 1830s, the central administration was just beginning to struggle with these issues. Its first step sought to break the stranglehold the Churches had on education. As the price of government support for the largely stretched denominational schools each committed to a British geographical parish model, the government proposed the funding of a parallel public system modeled on the Irish National system. Delayed by fierce church-based opposition in the 1830s, and the deep colonial depression of the 1840s, a Board of National Education was set up in 1848 to parallel the Denominational Schools' Board, which administered state aid to the big four denominations. In Tasmania, under Eardley-Wilmot and then William Denison, the dominance of Anglicans in a more homogenous population matched with government cost-cutting meant that denominational schools continued to overshadow the public schools. By 1849, there were only 10 public schools (compared to 25 in New South Wales), but 72 Anglican schools and 4 Catholic day schools.

The growth of population in areas too distant to be governed effectively from Sydney introduced even more variety. The 1820s saw Tasmania separate, and the 1830s saw new colonies in Western Australia and South Australia and the urban centers of future Victoria and Queensland founded. These colonies moved more quickly to urban development and equalitarian values in comparison to New South Wales. The cessation of convict transportation to mainland Australia in 1842, while leaving a generational backlog of continuing and former prisoners in the population, firmly declared the colonies for free development.

Some colonies, such as South Australia, never relied on income from convict transportation. Later, the shift to land sales rather than grants also provided colonial governments with the money to expand public infrastructure. In Western Australia, lack of an immediate revenue stream, and a stagnant population, hobbled the development of a public system for more than a decade. The colonial depression further flattened growth through the 1840s, leaving educational initiative in the hands of resurgent, missionary Irish Catholic religious orders.

By 1846, almost all the schools in Perth were Catholic. This led to vigorous educational rivalry by the new government of Andrew Clarke, the foundation of colonial schools in four centers of the huge, underpopulated territory, and a free grammar school in Perth. A similar reaction to Catholic success in Adelaide was, in the 1870s, to produce a centralized State Council of Education, and then a Department of Education along the lines of the one already established in Victoria. These were extended over time and brought under the direction of a General Board of Education, causing the virtual disappearance of smaller private schools. In 1849, both systems received government funding on a population, producing a binary system of education unique in the continent.

By contrast, South Australia was considered to be a "paradise of dissent," reflecting a lower proportion of either Anglicans or Catholics. Its uniqueness lay in the fact that it had a voluntarily-supported school system planned through the South Australian School Society before it was founded. Unfortunately, membership levies did not go through as expected and, without government support, the school was privatized, leaving private schools as the only alternatives in the colony for some years.

The failure of South Australia to produce a stream of philanthropy disappointed the dissenting bourgeois, and government funding, controlled by the Anglicans, was only available on a denominational basis. The public dispute over government funding was so bitter in this colony that the Governor resigned amidst the public turmoil, and "state aid to religion and education remained the single biggest political issue in the colony until its discontinuation in 1851" (Barcan 1980).

German migration saw the opening of a seminary and school in Lobenthal in 1845, and St. Peter's CECS (Anglican) in 1849. By 1850, elementary education and various forms of state aid were functioning successfully in most colonies. High schools or their equivalent were less evident, and advanced education of this type was in private hands in the form of academies or grammar/collegiate schools. Most education suffered from lack of funds and population, competition between church systems in a small market, economic cycles, and popular neglect of educational priorities.

The review of education by Childers in 1851, for instance, found that Victorian schools were not reaching up to a third of children in towns and did not reach up to half of children in suburbs (Barcan 1980). On top of this, Australia was at the other end of the earth from institutions from which either a flow of talented teachers or quality teaching supplies relevant to colonial conditions could come. Private education or sending children back home was an option, but only if one had the money; quality education was a right only for the wealthy.

Two of these problems were solved by the discovery of gold in Victoria and New South Wales in the early 1850s. The population of both colonies virtually tripled, creating movable towns of gold seekers, new domestic demand for foodstuffs and building materials, and new infrastructure, including schools and Mechanics Institutes. The problem was that many professionals, including teachers, abandoned their posts for the goldfields, and rising costs made living difficult for those, mainly women, who stayed. In Tasmania, which had no rush, many towns were decimated, and the dominant Anglican schools struggled to keep their doors open as people left for Victoria.

Funding via denominational boards favored the majority Anglican population, and so re-enforced the status quo. South Australia was the first to discontinue funding in 1851, followed by Tasmania and Western Australia, then Queensland, Victoria, and finally in 1872, New South Wales. With the support of non-conformist Christians, especially Congregationalists and Baptists, State educational policy shifted into the hands of liberal idealists, precisely the sort of ideals that were anathema to the Catholic Church in the wake of Vatican I and the Syllabus of Errors. Reports attacking the quality of denominational education by the Anglican Rusden, and liberal William Wilkins, seemed to support their fears.

Universities did not overcome their distance from the schooling system until the rise of public examinations made their services central to public life. The Oxford and Cambridge examinations were used by many schools, and continued to be used in the Theological colleges, as a way of determining entry and matriculation standards. Without a local demand for a large number of public servants, the British universities continued to have the advantage. The University of Melbourne followed the University of London's model, establishing a Matriculation Examination as early as 1855. Sydney established the Junior and Senior Public Examinations in 1867, opening examination centers around the state in succeeding years. The opening of these examinations to women in 1871 acted as a spur to educational provision for women, and girls grammar schools thus spread across the countryside as a precursor to the opening of university courses to women from 1879. Such schools were part of the great surge in institution building that swept across eastern Australia in the long economic boom between 1865 and 1890. Even the universities, though planted in the 1850s, did not begin to grow significantly until this period: their move into examinations thus made them de facto Boards of Examiners for much of the secondary sector from this time on, cementing a critical place in the development of Australian education. The role of public examinations, and the lack of a Catholic tertiary alternative, was a major element in uniting the various systems of education as they developed separate lives from 1880.

The period of 1880-1900 was the period of implementation for these strategies of free, secular, and compulsory education. Making education compulsory did not necessarily mean that students would attend, but the legislative strengthening of education departments in pursuit of the goal of universal literacy was the result. With the extension and bureaucratization of government services generally in Australia, came the irony of democracy producing a stronger and stronger center. In time, education and health would be swept up into an effective welfare system.

The economic boom of the period had several effects. It gave money to the universities with additional resources (often in the form of religiously based colleges) flowing from the great pastoral fortunes made in the period. The same fortunes also endowed the great private grammar schools, even while the small private academies were eliminated through advancing government regulation and service. The systematic expansion of Presbyterian and Methodist Ladies Colleges was a major contributor to the expansion of the grammar school form. They were a concern of the State because they contributed to the provision of advanced education in rural areas. These, together with state agricultural high schools, some of which were residential, began to push the regional country private academies out of existence, though they could never replace correspondence education for the more remote areas. Australian primary and secondary education thus took on a threefold form: Catholic, low-feepaying, private; Catholic and Protestant grammar schools (such as Trinity and St. Ignatius in Sydney or in Brisbane); and an expanding state system that was finally able to reach out to the distant rural towns. The boom also allowed the rise of a wealthy urban professional class, feeding more pragmatic university courses such as economics, law, and medicine for which schools were founded in all the major universities.

Constitutional & Legal Foundations

The provisions of relevant Commonwealth and State or Territory Anti-Discrimination and Affirmative Action legislation are set out in the Affirmative Action (Equal Employment Opportunity for Women) Act 1986, The Disability Discrimination Act 1992, The Racial Discrimination Act 1975, and the Sex Discrimination Act 1984. Following the path of teacher education, the process by which other sub-professions (such as nursing) reached the status of professions (through the status of university entrance), was accelerated by the 1990s. This process has further strengthened the links between vocational and professional education and makes the offerings of universities, in many ways, connected with the technical system.

Vocational Education and Training (VET) authorities by the end of the 1980s sought a new formula in Competency Based Training, which effectively stripped teaching of its content-orientation. It reoriented vocational and technical education away from disciplines and towards the needs of particular employers. The focus was outward, on standards rather than content, and on the transformation of knowledge into a commodity in order to sell it into a market. The construction of an Australian Qualifications Framework may be seen as the logical outcome of these trends, whereby the formation of a single great federal system (called, under the Dawkins' scheme, the Unified National System) embracing technical, vocational, and university education, assumed the continuity of all forms of learning in fitting national industry-specific standards. For such discipline- or community-specific areas as clergy training or the human relationship end of medical practice, it has generally been acknowledged that the imposition of such external standards was not always successful and led to considerable heat and public discussion in Australia through the 1990s.

Though Australia has not used monetarist policies to the extent that trademarked the Thatcher government in Britain, there is a simmering discontent over the so called "economic rationalism" evident in handling national and intellectual assets on both sides of politics, the Liberal-National Party Coalition, and Australian Labor Party. The rise of non-establishment parties, such as the Greens, Democrats, and even the One Nation Party is further evidence of the fragmentation of Australian opinion over issues such as education. The one common denominator is the opinion that education is important. In 1999, about 88 percent of respondents to a Commonwealth Bank survey put "ensuring everyone has access to good education" at the top of all issues surveyed (Australian 19 June 2000). Meanwhile, the debate over how to rebuild the social status and effectiveness of teachers within the education system continues, in seeming ignorance of the fact that it is the progressive rationalization of education into an objectified system that assists in the destruction of such social status and effectiveness.

Educational System—Overview

Education is compulsory in all states of Australia from K-10 (between the ages 5 to 15). Effectively, almost all Australian citizens have access to elementary and junior educational provision, under state legislation in the six states (New South, Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania) and in the Australian Capital Territory, while citizens in the Northern Territory obtain education under Federal funding provisions channeled through the Northern Territory administration.

Education is in English, though most primary schools now have access to community language programs. Italian, Japanese, and Spanish are among the most common in state schools, French and German in several of the international language schools in the capital cities, and indigenous languages in Aboriginal schools, particularly in Western Australia, northern Queensland, and the Northern Territory.

Most states, along the lines of a resurgent return to basic policies operate basic skills tests in elementary schools (called primary or public schools in most states). In New South Wales, basic skills tests are run for year 3 and year 5 students. Access to state selective schools is possible in some states through special examination, and there are regular examinations for entry on scholarship to the larger private schools. Internal assessment governs progress through years 7 through 9, and in year 10, there is the equivalent of New South Wale's school certificate offered in most states as a entry point into technical education, apprenticeships, and other vocational training alternatives. Year 12 ends with a higher leaving certificate examination—in New South Wales called the Higher School Certificate, in Victoria the VCE, and in Queensland the Core Skills Test.

The Academic Year runs from the end of January (mid-summer in Australia) across 4 terms, ending towards the middle or latter end of December, allowing for a 5 to 6 week holiday in what are the hot months in most Australian states. Curriculum in most states is set by the State departments of Education, against which (through the system of public examinations at the end of year 10 and year 12) inspectors also assess registration requirements in privately run schools.

The shaping influences on Australian education have been distance and time. Distance, because it was distance that has dictated the economics and socio-cultural development of the country. Time, as both the newness of the country and the time to travel for ideas, has been critical in the formation of education policy and thought. Distance and time, significantly, are also the key axes underlying the processes of globalization which are driving educational agendas in Australia.

In the first instance, distance from the expanding centers of world civilizations meant that, until 1788, Aboriginal peoples in Australia could follow traditional mechanisms of customary education unhindered for thousands of years. Aboriginal learning patterns tend to be directed towards community survival, de-emphasizing the individual in favor of customary law, through knowledge of the intricate Aboriginal social system, and ensuring the passing on of communal history and culture in an often difficult natural environment. Their culture emphasized group work, daily vocational skills, and in-depth knowledge of the natural environment. From white settlement in 1788, these values brought Aboriginal children into a direct conflict with individualistic-, time-, and achievement-oriented white education systems.

Despite missionary practice that emphasized bible translation and grammar/vocabulary construction, which has since become a major source for the revival of Aboriginal languages and cultures, and high level recommendations towards bilingual education in the early 1960s, English remained the primary language of instruction for Aboriginal students until 1973. Effectively, this was part of a program of assimilation that was extended by the Australian government to all minority groups in Australia until the promulgation of official multiculturalism in November 1972. The extension of linguistic revivals, teaching in the primary language of students, support for the training of Aboriginal people as teachers, and national organization of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders has greatly assisted in shifting education away from the sort of identity stripping, residential institutions that were the norm for Aboriginal education from the foundation of the Native Institution under Lachlan Macquarie in 1815. A scholar noted:

the Native Institution was expected to de-Aboriginalise its pupils on a permanent basis. In this it failed, and that was how it was judged. Some colonists realized that Aborigines returned to their own people because there was no place for them in a society which regarded them, educated or not, as the lowest in the scale of humanity, but most colonists were convinced that the Aborigines themselves were inherently unable to profit from education. (Fletcher 1989)

With debate over "the stolen generations" and reconciliation dominating the minds of Australians at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is important to note the processes by which Australian education became a major tool for social engineering up until the 1970s, and then how it entered into a crisis period of self-redefinition until the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Primary education in South Australia extends from pre-year 1 to year 7, while the southeastern states (New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania), run from pre-year 1 to year 6. Secondary education in all states runs to year 12, with differing mechanisms for matriculation to university. Different examinations are used in Victoria and New South Wales. The development of national standards is increasingly putting pressure on these regional variations and increasing cooperation between states at all levels.

In August 1998, there were 9,587 schools enrolling 3,198,655 (61 percent K-6) students, 6,998 (73 percent) of which were government schools. In the face of a slight decline in the number of government schools (1995-1998), the non-government sector continues to grow rapidly (1 to 3 percent per triennium), particularly in the low-fee paying Christian school sector, as much as 8 percent per year (Long 1996). These trends reflect the general drift in Australian society towards private delivery and downsizing; a retreat by sub-cultures from the public sphere in the face of growing social diversity. The impact of parental fears about social trends such as violence, drugs in schools, and retention of traditional values, can be seen by the fact that such schools are strongest in years 8-10, but follow patterns of retention in government schools in K-6. The nearly 100,000 indigenous students enrolled in K-12 are, due to issues of isolation and the inability to mobilize private funding, much more reliant on government funded schools.

Most private school growth for K-12 has occurred in rapid growth, lower-to-middle-class outer suburban areas of Australia's major cities. Their ability to draw on constituency support in addition to government per capita funding of student institutions has meant that nongovernment schools have better staff-student ratios than government schools, particularly in the wealthier Anglican schools sector. Building growth has not increased at the same rate as population growth, leaving many low-fee paying private schools to struggle with accommodation issues.

Clear distinctions continue between the greater public schools, which are mostly church-based but are in fact private corporations, Catholic systemic schools, low-fee paying Christian schools, and local government schools.

With the improvement of the economy after the economic recession in the late 1980s, retention rates years in grades 10-12 have dropped, from 77 percent to 71 percent (65 percent government and 84 percent nongovernment). This trend reinforced the lack of a universal tertiary college culture in Australia (ABS, Education and Training 1999).

Higher Education was attempted a number of times through the early history of the various colonies. The Australian College in New South Wales, for instance, was meant to combine K-12 activities with the seeds of future clergy training for the Presbyterian Church. All such institutions failed, however, until the foundation of the University of Sydney in 1852—on deliberately non-sectarian lines. The University of Melbourne followed in 1853, Tasmania (in Hobart) in 1893, Adelaide (established by Act of Parliament in 1874), and Queensland in 1909 (Barcan 1980).

Enrollment figures tended to follow population growth and decline and the policy function of the universities in their home colonies/states. Prior to World War II, universities in Australia tended to be for the children of the professional classes. This status changed radically after World War II with the need to retrain hundreds of thousands of Australian soldiers for civilian life. Postwar migration added additional pressure, leading to an efflorescence of new institutions (Monash, Macquarie, La Trobe, Murdoch, and Flinders), mostly in the suburbs.

By the 1970s, universities had become a major tool for the Australian government that was attempting to redirect national effort away from commodities production and trading towards value added industries and (from the 1980s) the information industries revolutionizing large parts of Asia. Encouraging Australian students into those institutions was a more difficult task, given the lack of a generalized learning culture and the lack of obvious career paths for many of the courses offered.

By March 1998, there were 671,853 students in higher education courses in Australia (about 3.7 percent of the population), of which 72,183 (or 10.0 percent of the total) were classed as overseas students (up from 21,000 in 1989, 5 percent of the total). Some 359,225 of these students were aged 16 to 24, representing 14 percent of the population group. The vast number of the new growth among these students went into business, economics, computer sciences, media, and health. There was a relative decline in numbers going into straight humanities and education subjects. The growth in both the business disciplines and in the proportion of non-resident students, as well as the consolidation of higher education institutions through the 1980s, marked the shift of education from its position as a core community service to a position as a growing export industry that was competing in the global market.

Since 1995, all registered Australian tertiary institutions have been required to tailor their curricula according to the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF), a normative system dictating standard outcomes rather than content. The AQF replaced the Register of Australian Tertiary Education (operative since 1990). This has meant that the vocational education and training (VET) system (offering diplomas from Certificate 1 to Advanced Diploma) articulates from upper school education and to the university system, which offer knowledge based baccalaureate and higher degrees, but overlap with VET in offering diplomas and Advanced Diplomas in a unified system. It is possible to transfer credit and recognition of prior learning throughout the tertiary system.

The integration of previously separate spheres of education within relatively new and artificial standards-based structures raises two major challenges to education: "The first of these is 'What counts as worthwhile learning?' The second question is 'What may be accepted to confirm that such learning has occurred?' Both of these questions, and the issues they raise . . . must reignite a serious consideration by teacher education faculties of what actually constitutes knowledge." (Taylor and Clemans 2000)

Through the 1980s, most states introduced legislation restricting use of the terms like university or degree to those recognized by the state and falling within the AQF. With state universities, this has not been an issue, since those institutions are largely self-accrediting. Considerable tension developed over the recognition of private providers under the various state Acts. There is not an education equivalent to an Australian university criteria because there is so much variation in quality and approach between institutions. A provider does not have substantial credit if endorsed in one state and refused standing in another because of Acts that vary. Considerable work has gone into smoothing out irregularities in the system, and making the AQF genuinely national in scope. Other quality controls are imposed through the Commonwealth's Trade Practices Act 1974. State/Territory fair trading legislation helps protect the quality of higher education.

Preprimary & Primary Education

In most states and territories, except Queensland and Western Australia, there is one year of part-time preschool education followed by one year of full-time preprimary education. In Queensland, one year of part-time preschool is available. In Western Australia, one year of part-time preprimary education is accessible. As preprimary education is not compulsory in Australia, the teaching of preprimary teachers is not as regulated as the preparation of primary and postprimary teachers, though universities such as Curtin University and Macquarie University have flourishing early childhood teacher preparation schemes.

Primary education is largely the responsibility of the states: State governments are responsible for around 88 percent of the funding for government schools. They are also the major employer of primary principals. Federal funding tends to come back to state primary schools through general allocations such as the States Grants (Primary and Secondary Education Assistance) Act 1996; and Indigenous Education (Supplementary Assistance) Act 1989, and through the funding of particular programs (such as support for literacy and numeracy programs, book purchases, foreign language, special needs, among others).

Federal government expenditure exceeding $16 billion was spent on school-based education (1997-2000). From 1997, under a conservative government, any school recognized by a state education department (public or private) could access government funding from 12 categories of eligibility.

Shifts in funding are affected both for primary and secondary by government policy targets, and the Government School Recurrent Costs (AGSRC) and Building Price (BP) indices. An example of the former is the arrangement whereby the Australian government channels funds provided by the Italian government (through the organization Co.As.It) for the teaching of Italian (Australia's largest non-English language group) in Australian schools.

The progressive movement of federal agencies into primary education is marked by the fact that Commonwealth funding (worth $2.1 billion in 2000) is increasing at a faster rate than state funding. This remains a sensitive issue, however, as the constitution delineates states rights over these areas. The Federal government has proclaimed its interest to emerge out of:

pursuing the Government's broad national, social and economic agenda and in improving the well-being of all Australians, promoting national consistency in the provision of schooling across Australia, the reporting of nationally comparable data on student achievement and other outcomes of school education, and improved accountability by education providers for schooling outcomes to parents and the wider Australian community. (DETYA 2000c)

The priorities driven through these funding and standards mechanisms are numerous and include the following: improve the literacy and numeracy skills of all young Australians in order to articulate into higher levels of education and serve the labor market; increase focus on vocational education and training in the senior secondary curriculum; enhance teacher and principal development and professionalism to meet the ever increasing demands of educational, social, economic and technological change; support educationally disadvantaged students; improve educational outcomes of schooling for Indigenous students; support the right of parents to choose the educational environment which best suits the needs of their child, whether the school is public or private; use new technologies and scientific principles; increase focus on civics and citizenship education; teach designated priority languages other than English; and aware students of and economically cooperate with the Asia-Pacific region, through the encouragement of Asian studies and languages. Despite priority 10, Asian languages have developed comparatively slowly, with Indonesian, Japanese (the largest at the HSC level), and Chinese among the favorites.

Secondary Education

Secondary Education is provided by a mix of private and public educational institutions, relationships between which have reflected larger class and social tensions in the country. As government budgets shrink relatively, competition for federal and state funding has intensified, leading to some remarkable public outbursts. The NSW Labor government, for example, has recently supported teacher trade union calls for a review of Commonwealth spending on private schools, shifting blame for its own allocations on the basis that Commonwealth priorities have provided for a 12 percent real increase in funding to private schools and no real increase to public schools. The case of private schooling has not been helped by bitter public debates over, for instance, the teaching of creationism in some Christian schools, and several celebrated student abuse cases in a number of large and prestigious private colleges. In the larger framework, these debates should probably be seen within the context of "new knowledge" professionals attempting to push the boundaries of secularization in an age when governments are more committed to retaining diversity across the educational system and support from subcultures within the multicultural mix of Australian society.

Increasing public provision in the context of an aging population is a large budget proposition in an age of decreasing budgets. In an attempt to quell the issues of class in the debate, on May 11, 1999, Dr. David Kemp (Commonwealth Minister for Education, Training and Youth Affairs), issued Choice and Equity: Funding Arrangements for Non-Government Schools 2001-2004, which abolished the Education Resources Index (ERI) and replaced it with a measure of socioeconomic status (SES) of school communities. The means-testing of aid, however, has not stopped the criticism, since the real issue is the shrinking hold public education has on the Australian imagination and the budgetary policies, which reflect a shift in attitude to education as a relative rather than an absolute good.

In 2000, some 81,000 students enrolled for the School Certificate (year 10 matriculation) in NSW, around a core of subjects relating to mathematics, English, and science. The next most common subjects were personal development/health, commerce, computing, geography studies, technics I, history, and visual arts. The movement towards the integration of VET subjects in secondary education is evident, even to the extent that students may opt for courses taught in technical and further education colleges rather than on the campuses of high schools. This process is even more advanced in Victoria. By contrast, there were some 66,000 students who sat for the Higher School certificate in NSW in 1999, of which 52 percent (slightly above population average) were female, and most of whom sat for the Board of Studies' developed courses rather than Board endorsed subjects. The status of public examinations for matriculation to universities, though criticized as elitist in some circles, still holds considerable attraction in the market place. Some 77 percent of students received a university admissions score, indicating an offer of a place in a higher education institution attached to the Universities Admissions Centre (NSW Board of Studies 1999).

Higher Education

Postsecondary education in Australia is divided by the Commonwealth Department of Education, Training, and Youth Affairs (DETYA) into nine categories, three of which are public (University, TAFE/Technical College, and Skillshare or other government training) and the remaining six of which are private (business college or adult/community education center; industry skills center; professional/industry association; equipment/product manufacturer or supplier; other private training organization; and other organization or institution) (DETYA 2000a). Of the nearly 900,000 enrollments in the award sector (1997) private providers represent about 11 percent of postsecondary award enrollments. Non-award enrollments were also offered. The niche role of private providers is demonstrated by the much larger percentage of private over public enrollments involved in part-time and external study (45 percent versus 32 percent in 1997), and in programs not leading to an award.

Most universities (following the models of the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne) are state-owned, statutory bodies established under their own acts of state parliament. The Australian National University is unique, being constituted by an Act of federal parliament in 1946 as Australia's only research university. Its position in the Australian Capital Territory drove it to seek a larger student base, and through amalgamations successively with Canberra University College and the Institute of The Arts, it has since 1960 been offering undergraduate education and since 1992 broadened to include creative arts.

The rash of new universities peaked in the late 1960s, and few new institutions were created until the 1990s. The pressure of new settlement areas has been the major reason for new institutions since then—the University of Western Sydney, for instance, which combined a number of pre-existing colleges (including the venerable Hawkesbury Agricultural College) under one masthead in 1990. The latest university in this category is the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC), formed from a private university formed in the 1980s, made a university College in 1994, and was claimed a university by the Labor Party government in Queensland in 1998. It finds itself at the heart of the major growth corridor of the Sunshine Coast, Australia's fastest growing region.

USC also represents the growth of higher education with an increasing number of private tertiary institutions. Few of these (Avondale College, Seventh Day Adventist; Australian Catholic University, Catholic; and Notre Dame University, Catholic being among the exceptions) obtain government funding. The most highly profiled of these (in media terms) was Bond University, begun by a corporate entrepreneur (Alan Bond) before facing financial stringencies and restructuring in the late 1980s. It has since gone on to considerable achievements, particularly in business, economics, and law. Growth is restrained largely by the absence of large pockets of private wealth in Australia, and the size of the population. The position of these institutions as private providers included within the government funding model was a major factor suggesting devolvement of government funding on a voucher basis that could be used at the registered institution of the student's choice. If this were to happen, the private sector would receive considerable impetus, and the small start-up agencies (for instance, those hoping to building on the base provided by the large number of theological colleges and Christian schools in Australia) in formation would emerge as further competition for a public sector which is itself quickly moving to broaden the number of privately funded places offered.

Most Australian universities admit students competitively on the basis of secondary matriculation and demand for courses. In New South Wales, for instance, this is handled through the Universities Admissions Centre (UAC), which mediates student applications via an index called the Universities Admissions Index, successor to many disputed and publicly debated systems. Essentially, the UAI uses weighted HSC results to mediate between student demand and university supply. Most students are offered places in particular institutions on the basis of their UAI. Some institutions also add bonus points to applications if students live in a particular area, fulfill preenrollment interviews, or fit other desirable target criteria. ACT students obtain a score from the ACT Board of Senior Secondary Studies, and in most other states a Tertiary Entrance Rank is calculated on the basis of weighted matriculation examination scores. In Western Australia, the equivalent is a TER calculated by the Tertiary Institutions Service Centre (TISC). In Queensland, entry is determined by the Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre (QTAC) on the basis of overall positions determined through moderated internal assessment and the Queensland Core Skills Test (QCS).

Administration, Finance, & Educational Research

With federation in 1901, the Australian states retained the obligation to fund education. A federal framework gave reason for them to seek standardized approaches across the country. The emphasis was not on content so much as on citizenship, character, and the underpinnings of social democracy, the development of intelligence, faculty, and character. In addition, practical courses ran alongside academic ones, with students effectively streamed into technical, superior, and academic streams by the end of primary Qualifying Certificate, through to the Continuation, and other Certificates.

As the aftershocks of the disastrous 1891 depression settled down, improved economic conditions allowed expansion of the systems. Committees like the Fink Commission in Victoria (through the Education Act of 1901, and the subsequent Teacher's Act) and the NSW Royal Commission on Education (through the Free Education Act 1906), guided the reform of technical education, eliminated pupil teachers, abolished fees in state schools, promoted the building of state high schools, provided for teacher education institutions and registration, extended the compulsory base of education, and the centralization of education under permanent heads.

Though technical education would have to await full implementation until World War II, the cyclic nature of the Australian economy encouraged pragmatism, and militated against a leisured liberal arts tradition. Two major depressions, recurrent recessions, and war made Australians a practical people. The influence of Scots and English thought, influenced by German idealism, was particularly strong in this period, though as the Ascham School in Sydney, and the introduction of Rudolph Steiner and Montessori schools showed variety was a local possibility in the period from 1914.

Montessori became mainstream in New South Wales, and from there influenced Tasmania and South Australia, but made less headway in other states. The Jena school in Germany was a regular stop on Australian tours abroad for educational ideas, those that also filtered into Australia through the medium of journals, and British domination of the book trade. The Kindergarten movement, also German in origin, had been introduced to keep young children off the streets in the 1890s depression, and began to spread in Australia after the return of prosperity in 1906. By 1914, however, due to the period of reform through 1901-1914, children entering Kindergarten could look forward to a complete K-Tertiary education provision in their own country. The growth of a specifically Australian (as opposed to Anglo-Australian) form of patriotism was one outcome of this, as the Australian intelligentsia could now be embraced within Australian institutions. Despite the lack of demand for local authors and other creative talents, it was a trend that reinforced the deliberate attempts of history and social studies curricula to engender concepts of citizenship.

Though education was a state issue, the Commonwealth became more vitally involved in state provision through the two world wars. After both wars, tens of thousands of ex-servicemen had to be retrained to enter into post-war reconstruction society. This was done through Commonwealth funding of technical and university places for returned servicemen. The cohort that emerged from Australian institutions in the early 1950s was, thus, more mature, worldly-wise, and destined to lead Australian social institutions into the 1980s. The new industries encouraged by war also demanded a flow of technically-educated men (and, increasingly, teachers were among the first semi-professionals to begin moving up), the first major step in which was the take over of teacher training by the universities that defined the field of education.

Similar processes were to occur through the 1970s and 1980s with regard to nursing, and through the 1990s with regard to policing, paramedics, business, and other social service areas. Meeting the demand for teachers in a democratic country meant maintaining or elevating the drawing power of the profession, either through social status or financial reward. As society became increasingly consumer-oriented, the two types of reward began to run into one another, relativizing the pseudo-religious roots of the so-called "honourable professions." The pluralization of society, on the other hand, was marked by rising crime rates and the decline of social security in precisely those areas where the state desired cohorts of new teachers to begin work. Increasing the leaving age just meant more uninterested students in school for a longer period of time. Fewer matriculants were offering for an occupation requiring higher levels of knowledge, ever improving teaching skills, for lower relative social and economic return. The phrase "the crisis in education" shown by rising teacher resignation rates, and global transfer of teachers to other parts of the world was to remain a key element of Australian public debate through to the end of the century. Professionalization was thus driven by the destabilization of a rapidly modernized and globalized society. The University of Tasmania took over teacher education as early as 1948 for rational economic reasons and struggled to fit teaching practicums into the academic timetable.

By the late 1950s, the prospect of the baby boom doubling the population of Australia's universities in a very short period of time was beginning to worry Commonwealth and state planners. In 1949, the New South Wales University of Technology was founded at Kensington, to articulate between the burgeoning number of Technical College students and the need for increased numbers of technical professionals to oversee post-War reconstruction. Eventually, renamed the University of NSW, it grew through a pattern of regional expansion and proliferation of degrees, as well as a marketable commodity for educational exports to the expanding economies of Asia, to become one of Australia's largest universities. But this was not enough. From 1954-1957, university enrollments in Australia rose by nearly 30 percent. From 1954, under pressure from the rural vote, the University of New England gained its independence from the University of Sydney, and entered the field of distance education. None of these universities were financially stable, and greater need again was emerging with the rising numbers of students, and academic union militancy over poor wages and conditions.

The Murray Report and the demographic bulge of the period opened a golden age of state funded university expansion. New faculties were added at the newly named UNSW and the major metropolitan universities, and new Universities were founded (Monash, 1958; James Cook (University College of Townsville), 1960; Wollongong University (College), 1962; Macquarie, 1963; Newcastle University, 1965; Flinders University, 1961-1966; La Trobe University, 1964).

Dawkins unified national scheme regularized relationships between the states and the commonwealth with regard to federal leadership over national education policy, as did the "Common and Agreed National Goals for Schooling in Australia" (the Hobart Declaration), which emerged out of the 1989 conference of Education Ministers. The high point of this golden age of university expansion, and of education for democracy was under the Whitlam government, 1972-1975. The Whitlam revolution retained the last remnants of 1960s optimism before the oil shocks of the early 1970s, and the recession budgets of the Fraser government began to function. E. Gough Whitlam broke more than 20 years of conservative, minimalist government style in the Liberal tradition by appealing to the white collar middle classes who had been the most enthusiastic patrons of the university and education sector. While retaining labor union support, he reconceptualized Welfare as the means by which government enriched the life of every citizen. In this sense, government was in loco parentis for the dissolving local communities on which education had been built in earlier years. "Any function or activity," declared Whitlam, "which can be hitched to the star of the Commonwealth grows in quality and affluence. Any function or activity which is financially limited to the States will grow slowly or even decline" (Whitlam, ALP Policy Speech, 1972). The major areas were education, health care, urban planning and social services, with equality of opportunity in each the immediate aim and equality of outcomes as a recognized unreachable benchmark for different social groups. The bold vision was in the end torn down by recession and cultural reaction from a people for whom the social costs were too much too fast. Whitlam still divides the Australian opinion today, as the proponent of the last great cause.

Universities received greatly increased per capita funding for student places. Equal opportunity and affirmative action was entrenched in the public sector well beyond the federal sphere of influence. Official multiculturalism was promulgated and the rights of minorities, especially girls, Aborigines, rural children, migrant children and the physically and mentally handicapped were protected and advanced. Funding for childcare was made available to empower working mothers—a system that existed in moderated form until the early 1990s. At secondary level, the radical experience of South Australia was extended to the federal scene by Peter Karmel through the Australian Schools Commission. The system of government grants to schools was means tested, meaning that more resources flowed to the poorer Catholic schools than to the private grammar schools. More importantly, the beneficiaries of a student generation of free university education remained beholden to the vision of democratic education, a cohort that still fills many of education's senior positions, and resents the swing to a market economy that is transforming social activism into market awareness.

As the century ended, Australians awaited the federal government's final word on whether the recommendation of devolved educational funding, such as a voucher system would be put into place. Elements of devolved budgeting are in place, such as the Howard Liberal Government of Enrollment Benchmark Adjustment (EBA) which facilitates the establishment of non-government schools, and penalizes those public systems which lose market share. The use of the EBA has also provided a way of estimating the scale of movement towards the private system in Australia: in 2000, DETYA estimated that, "the gradual movement of students to the nongovernment school sector has saved the states some $3 billion since 1983" (DETYA, 2000c). The NSW government estimated in 2000 that its public system would be losing some $50 million per year by 2003 to EBA due to the shift towards private schools (NSWDET 2000). In the same year, most states were closing surplus public schools in older suburban areas due to declining numbers of school-aged children and the growth of the private sector. Some tensions, particularly as relates to hiring policies and such issues as corporal punishment, have arisen over the fact that receipt of federal funding requires private schools to comply.

Nonformal Education

The quality of the Australian education system is protected by prosecuting misleading or deceptive conduct, including the provision of misleading or deceptive information on courses or accreditation. Similar protection is extended to overseas students through the Education Services for Overseas Students (Registration of Providers and Financial Regulation) (ESOS) Act 1991, which requires that "all providers offering education and training services to overseas students must be accredited to provide specific courses (and approved to provide these courses to overseas students) by relevant State/Territory authorities, and be registered on the Commonwealth Register of International Courses for Overseas Students (CRICOS)." Quality controls were implemented in 2001-2 through the Multilateral Joint Planning Committee (MJPC) protocol formulated through joint discussions between Federal and State ministries (DETYA 2000e).

In 1997 private providers accounted for 49 percent of external courses not leading to an award and public providers accounted for the remaining 51 percent. With the formalization of state-based laws requiring the accreditation of most awards, the amalgamation of universities, and the search for community-based support for university programs, there has been a significant reduction in the percentage of non-award courses offered by private providers in the postsecondary sector (declining from 73 to 49 percent between 1993 and 1997) and a slight rise in the market share of private providers in enrolled award students (DETYA 2000a). There are 46 tertiary institutions presently obtaining government funding as recognized tertiary providers, in addition to a widespread state system for technical education, and a great number of smaller privately run business, professional, and vocational colleges.

Teaching Profession

In 2000, almost all Australian universities prepared teachers for primary education. Most covered education in both school and non-school settings and included such areas as early childhood education; primary and secondary education; vocational education and training; and special education, applied linguistics, language education, and technology Education. With a swing towards standards-based education, there was increasing pressure for preparation for tertiary teaching. The development of standards such as the AQF has been followed by national standards development for an increasing number of areas, for instance, the National Assessment Framework for Languages as Senior Secondary Level, which allows comparison between matriculation level language curricula across the various states.

Recognition of external teacher qualifications demonstrates the existence of a general consensus that, despite variation between the various teacher registration schemes in various states, basic teacher preparation requires four year trained status, the equivalent of an Australian Bachelor's degree, at least a year's of specific studies in education and methodology, and six weeks of supervised practical teaching. The competition for positions in the state systems has pushed teacher education even further up the road to professionalization, with it being very common for teachers to pursue professional advancement through Masters degrees, one of the proliferating professional doctorates (in Educational Administration, Education, or Management), or upskilling by horizontal expansion of skills into new areas, such as computer sciences.

In the end, it was the baby boom and the expansionist government's immigration policies aimed at filling up the empty spaces of Australia that democratized the system more effectively than progressive educational policy. On the one hand, progressivism in education, as with modernism in theology and the theory of progress generally, was a dying force. During war and depression, the world saw enough to blunt its belief in humanist utopias. On the other hand, more children staying in school longer stretched resources to the limit. Increasing numbers within the primary school encouraged regular promotion from class to class and reduced the significance of the examination or other system of assessment by which pupils at the end of the primary school were allocated to secondary schools. This wave, in turn, put pressure on the comprehensive secondary schools, which were increasingly built in drawing areas located on the edge of the metropolitan sprawl developing in Australian cities, and on the teachers' colleges, which needed to produce sufficient graduates for the new educational growth industry.

Summary

In an age of rapid change, it is clear that educational standards, content, and means of delivery are under constant pressure. The challenge for Australian education is multi-leveled. At the K-6 level, the devolution of funding and organization, on the one hand, tied to increasing bureaucratic control through imposition of external standards raises serious questions about the role of the Australian Welfare state. The presupposition built up among most Australians since the middle of last century was that the State would provide the basic needs of life. That expectation has been impossible, despite government review of national taxation systems, that have led to public angst about hospitals, roads, social welfare and other elements of Australian life. One spin off of this is a declining faith in public education, as marked by steady growth in private provision at all levels of education. For those institutions in the public system, the gap created by the status of government needs to be overcome, in particular by a closer embedding of institutions in real constituencies. The sort of alumni support of institutions and culture of private philanthropy which underpins the American system of education is largely absent in Australia, a lack which will be of supreme importance as institutions are increasingly privatized and forced into competitive markets. The launching of devolution programs among primary schools was often destructive, as the communities in which they were meant to fish for support did not actually exist in sociological terms (Welch 1996).

Geographical placement of schools means little in suburban settings when most members of those suburbs are free to create private spheres unrelated to their actual location. The information age continues to exacerbate this problem, with the extension of communities into supranational virtual spaces. This is a major challenge to a public provision system based on principles of geographical saturation. While the re-orientation of the Australian tax system towards goods and services taxation has released new resources for public expenditure, it has also worsened the shift away from the states observable in financial arrangements since the 1950s. Primary and secondary education are likely to see an increase in federal supervision of their activities, despite the fact that the legal responsibility lies with the states.

This federal supervision creates significant problems in meeting local needs and in overcoming the welfare gap. As Peter Berger noted with regard to religious organizations, the vacuum created for mediating institutions by the overarching welfare state will no doubt continue to provide considerable impetus to the growth of private providers. The problem this creates is that private providers have historically been unable to unlock the sorts of resources needed to meet the huge range of social needs found in a multicultural, scattered, and geographically extensive Australian society. Public schools thus face the threat of becoming providers for special needs only.

A small player in a large international market, Australian education has much to teach the world about distance education, flexible delivery, and teaching in a first world, multicultural society. It is, however, facing significant issues in terms of retaining coherency between public policy and actual provision and social outcomes, issues which will remain with Australian education for years to come.

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—Mark Hutchinson