Today’s announcement on the replacement of ‘Local Schools Local Decisions’ (LSLD) with ‘The School Success Model’ continues the recent history of the abandonment of support for schools and the shifting of responsibility and blame away from the government and the Department onto the local public school.
Despite the constant rhetoric of support for teachers and schools, the 800 officers of the Department who were cut at the introduction of LSLD in 2012, have never been replaced. They worked directly with schools to support the learning of students in curriculum, welfare and other equity areas. The system has never recovered from that loss, their work dumped on the local public school to take on without the required expertise to assist schools to address specific areas of need.
Nothing in today’s announcement seeks to address or acknowledge that systems failure.
The School Success Model continues to deny teachers and principals the systemic support required. It supercharges the collection of data and compliance regimes, now based on systems targets, to ensure administrative burden and increasing workloads associated with these tasks continues to suffocate teachers and principals and distracts them from their core business of teaching and learning.
The centrepiece of the newly named LSLD devolution policy, The School Success Model, focuses on the systems improvement targets mandated for schools by the government and Department through the Premier’s Priority of Lifting Literacy and Numeracy Standards.
These targets, originally known as ‘stretch targets’, require schools to improve student performance in NAPLAN bands as well as lifting results on the Tell Them From Me (TTFM) survey.
The underpinning of targets by the discredited measure of NAPLAN, will certainly lead to local public school teachers and principals being blamed, yet again, for ‘failing to meet performance targets’.
In an opinion piece on 31 August this year in The Australian, Minister for Education and Early Childhood Sarah Mitchell acknowledged NAPLAN was no longer fit for purpose, stating:
“For too long the debate around diagnostic testing has been hampered by NAPLAN’s obvious flaws… We must have diagnostic testing in our schools. And we must accept NAPLAN — now 12 years old — is considerably out of date and no longer up to the task.”
Wellbeing targets set by the TTFM survey each year locks out the voices of teachers and parents and bases its data on students alone. While clearly critical to the outcomes of students are students’ views, a system wide performance target based on around 60 per cent of student participation without triangulating with teachers and parent data, does not capture a whole of ‘system’ outcome, nor stand up as a valid measure for improving performance in this area.
The Local Schools Local Decisions Evaluation Final Report in June this year highlighted the failure of these reforms. Some of their findings are quoted below:
• LSLD did not specifically aim to improve student outcomes
• NSW Treasury (2011) first announced its plans for public-school reform in the 2011- 2012 Budget Statement, under the heading, “Delivering on structural fiscal and economic reform
• LSLD lacked policy clarity, effective guidelines and adequate support
• The administrative burden for schools has increased during LSLD
• LSLD had reduced its (the Department’s) capacity to provide system-wide support to schools due to the loss of centralised positions, particularly curriculum consultants
The government and Department’s own findings and recommendations have been ignored and no renaming of the damaged brand of Local Schools Local Decisions’ reincarnation in ‘The School Success Model’ will fix this. Until such time as the government prioritises systemic support for teachers and principals through additional time to focus on teaching and learning, expert teachers to work directly in schools and the funding of public schools to 100% of the Schooling Resource Standard to meet student need, the status quo will likely remain.
Today’s announcement is spin without substance. It is a continuation of Local Cuts – Local Blame that sees devolution of responsibility remain.