Richard Glover Drive ABC 702

SUBJECTS: School autonomy; Gina Rinehart

E&OE………

Richard Glover: Christopher Pyne? 

Christopher Pyne: Well, the New South Wales Teachers Federation, Richard is somewhere between East Germany in the 1950s and the current North Korean regime in terms of their understanding in terms of their understanding for the need for reform and change.  I welcome very much the move by the New South Wales Government.  I think it’s long overdue.  Countless studies indicate the more autonomy a school holds locally with principal power and governing councils making decisions, the better the student outcomes.  The only purpose of education of course is to education our young people and so we very much think this will be a positive step in the right direction and lead to a real revolution in schools where the student is the focus of all of our attention rather than other issues. 

Richard Glover: They seem to be worried about on one side the department or the government using it as an excuse to cut funding.  I know Mr O’Farrell has denied that.  Of course it is a problem of vulnerable schools not being able to compete for the high quality staff as well as perhaps an inner city school leading to the most vulnerable kids being in the worst situation. 

Pyne: The New South Wales Teachers Federation always come up with reasons why things can’t be done and they really want to put a bubble over education and leave it as its always been.  I think parents and most teachers recognise the need for reform and change, that Australia can’t keep going backwards on its outcomes.  Our outcomes are worse than…..

Richard Glover: Are we going backwards? 

Pyne: Well our outcomes are worse today than they were 10 years ago in terms of literacy and numeracy, maths and science.  So we do need real shake up of the system. 

Richard Glover: That’s in comparison to other countries, in absolute terms though it’s just that others have got better.  Is that the point? 

Pyne:  No, no, we’ve actually gone backwards and the figures are pretty clear.  South Australia is just one example, but 44 per cent of students were passing maths and science in 2000 and 37 per cent of year 12 students are passing maths and science today.  We’ve gone back in absolute terms and relatively.  The New South Wales Government has made it abundantly clear this won’t lead to less money.  It just means that money that is available now will be better spent and targeted where it’s needed.  Disadvantaged students, students from low SES backgrounds, children struggling with numeracy and literacy will actually get money spent on them to improve their outcomes rather than a lot of central bureaucracies in New South Wales and around the Western World.  This is the direction every education system is heading in and I very much welcome it.  I think it will be a very important change. 

Richard Glover: Tim Hawkes, private school principals have long had the ability to run their own schools.  Do you see it as an advantage for the state school system to join you in that? 

Tim Hawkes: Yes I do.  I think this is seriously good news Richard.  I commend Barry O’Farrell and Adrian Piccoli.  I think it’s a great initiative.  In many ways I should be hating it because it’s going to be more competition for us in the non-government schools sector.  Linking salaries to performance is really necessary.  I think we’re dragging the teaching profession kicking and screaming into this world of accountability and unfortunately it’s been divorced from that for some time.  Certainly in the non-government schools sector they’ve had this New South Wales Institute of teachers and we’ve had this – you could be a graduate teacher, you could be a competent teacher or a (inaudible) teacher, or a leading teacher and you had to demonstrate certain competencies to move from one level to another.  A brilliant model. 

Richard Glover: That’s precisely the problem with it.  In Britain where they’ve already got this a teacher might spend their time training up to do this one fantastic lesson to do in front of the assessor and the rest of the school year goes to blazers. 

Tim Hawkes: And if indeed you put in place an evaluation system which is so simplistic and so easily rorted like that, you don’t deserve to do well.  But I actually don’t think that’s the model that they’re going to introduce here.  It’s going to be much broader I think, much more accurate, much more searching.  And certainly the idea of devolution of responsibilities is a great idea, but having said that.  

Richard Glover: Is a poor old principal distracted by what he or she should be doing which is looking after the children when he’s looking through the yellow pages when he’s trying to ring a plumber or trying to get the best price on a roofing consultant? 

Tim Hawkes: Well, I think that certainly what’s going to have to happen is that principals are going to have to be trained to be able to handle the IR responsibilities, the HR responsibilities and the OHS responsibilities are going to have to be trained certainly to handle – to read PNL sheets and so forth.  When I was ad ed-101 at Durham University I did not actually learn how to run all of these sorts of things and certainly we’re going to have to have a training program which is going to develop skills in that particular area.  Fiduciary…..

Richard Glover: But that does sound as if it’s going to take this principal off the subject of education. 

Tim Hawkes: There are a lot of principals in this land who are off the subject of education who are still great educators and just about every principal at a non-government school, they seem to manage it Richard. 

Richard Glover: Look at the grey hair Tim.  You’re only 23 years old. 

Tim Hawkes: And never been kissed by the way.  Absolutely right. 

Richard Glover: Simon Sheikh, these two chaps are all singing the praises of this system.  Do you?

Simon Sheikh: I think if we’re going to ask our principals to do more.  If we’re going to give them more responsibility, then we must match that with not only training, but more funding to put in place in our schools the capacity to actually deliver here.  There are two separate points here.  On performance pay, I should put the caveat on that this was an area where I spent some time working on for the New South Wales Government.  Some of that work probably got into what’s been announced. 

Richard Glover: I’m relying on you to stick up for the teachers federation here.  You’re not going to? 

Simon Sheikh: I think the reality with performance pay is that if we rush into it what we will see is more teachers teaching to the tests.  Surley that’s what we don’t want.  There is world leading research going on right now on how we might execute a performance pay metric that might work.  That’s being done by the Gates Foundation and the way in which they’re doing it tells you everything here.  They’re putting videos in classrooms and they’re filming what happens in the classrooms. 

Richard Glover: All the time? 

Simon Sheikh: All the time. 

Richard Glover: That would freak out people in many workplaces. 

Simon Sheikh: They’re doing this to analyse what good quality teaching actually looks like, because test results, and that’s what a performance based pay will inevitably be based on here, is a very poor driver of what we’re actually trying to form out of our public school and a private school system and that is fully formed human beings who are ready for anything. 

Richard Glover: You’re never going to get the Teacher’s Federation to agree to perpetual filming of the class room are you? 

Simon Sheikh: But what we should be able to agree on right now is that the kind of system that is likely to be implemented in New South Wales will drive more teaching to the test and therefore more likely take us backwards.  That doesn’t mean we should shut off performance pay forever, but it does mean is that we have to get this right if it’s going to be implemented. 

Tim Hawkes: I don’t think it is going to be test based.  From the readings I get from this, Richard, and this might be some comfort to you Simon I actually don’t think we are just going to say well if you get eighty percent of your students in the top percentile or something like that then you will be paid as a leading teacher, I really think that we are going beyond that.

Simon Sheikh: It will be about Bill going and visiting you in the classroom and seeing what is (inaudible)

Tim Hawkes: But the reality is we don’t know to look for just yet because more work is going in to what actually drives quality teaching and we just have got it (inaudible).

Richard Glover: A fine letter in the Herald today from a teacher librarian – how do you assess what I do she asks.  I sit in the library pretty much alone and I have these intense conversations with kids and direct them to good books – how do I get assessed?

Tim Hawkes: I think it is possible.  I tell you what, all you have to go is go into the playground and ask the students ‘who are your good teachers’, and ‘who are the good librarians’ and they’ll tell you and I tell you what, it’s pretty accurate.

Richard Glover: Your pay is dependent on what kids say, come on!

Tim Hawkes: Yes.  Don’t knock it, Richard.  It has a lot going for it.

Richard Glover: Christopher Pyne, you’ve been listening in to all of this discussion.  What do you think of the arguments that Simon has been putting of the difficulties of doing performance pay under the current system?

Pyne: There has been a tremendous amount of work done in this area over the many years and I would say to Simon and your listeners that the NSW Government both Labor and Liberal in NSW have run trials of principal autonomy.  This has been looked at in every possible direction and it has already been done in Victoria and Western Australia with tremendous results.  There Bracks Institute which is a new institute in Melbourne which published a paper last year which showed exactly how teachers could be assessed based on their performance.  Parents know that unless you have high teacher quality you simply aren’t going to get good results in students.  Spending in infrastructure and all sorts of other things are important but nothing is as important than teacher quality. It sounds trite to say it but you can have a school under a gum tree and as long as you have a marvellous teacher who is teaching in a quality way you will get good students.

Richard Glover: I think everyone agrees with that but I think those who are on the other side of this argument is whether it is possible to measure and whether the process of measurement is skewing what you are trying to do in education.

Pyne: I think it is more than possible to measure it.  In every profession there is measurement of whether people are successful or unsuccessful.  Teaching are a profession and should be treated maturely and seriously and I don’t believe the system in NSW has been operating with central office makes every single decision like how many tennis balls could be purchased and where from and to the process when one person moves from grade to another is working.  Had it been working, parents would be happy, students would be getting good outcomes, and universities wouldn’t be running bridging courses for children about how to write an essay.  So obviously something needs to be done.  It is not hard to test this.  I agree with Tim Hawkes and Simon however that it shouldn’t be based on the outcomes of students alone that would be very bad.  Because as Tim would know often he would give his more difficult students to the better quality teachers and that doesn’t necessarily mean you get the best outcomes.  But that child individually that child gets the best outcome they could get.

Simon Sheikh: The real debate in education isn’t what we are talking about now.  It is that right now we have a debate about how we fund our education system.  The Gonski review having been reviewed.  The Bishops, the Independents, the Catholics, ourselves and a range of over in the public policy sphere all for the first time putting down and saying you know what let’s accept what the Gonski review has found, everyone bar Christopher Pyne.

Pyne: Simon, that is quite wrong.

Simon Sheikh: (inaudible)

Richard Glover: Give Christopher a go.  Why don’t you agree with Gonski?

Pyne: I didn’t say I didn’t agree with Gonski, I said that Simon was quite wrong and simplistic to say that every single sector has signed up to it.  The Gonski review will only work if there is $113 billion of new spending between 2014 and 2025 and 70% of that $113 billion has to come from the states.  And as the independents say, “no money, no model”.  So the government has to stump up for the money.  If the money is there, then the model won’t work.  Without the money it simply won’t work.  That is the concern of the Coalition in that the Government will cherry pick the parts it likes like means testing of the capacity to pay of individual parents, or not having the indexation that is currently there which will lead to a real cut in education spending in non-Government schools in particular.  And we are right to raise those concerns and the Catholics and the Independents have raised exactly the same concerns.

Richard Glover: We should move on.  Ten to six. With Christopher Pyne, the Shadow Minister for Education; Simon Sheikh from GetUp! and Dr Tim Hawkes who is the headmaster of the Kings School.  Now the media and this show included have published the details of the family feud between the mining magnate Gina Rinehart and three of her four children.  Some feel the media should back off and it’s a family matter they say.  Others draw conclusion of wealth and its toxic effect.  What is you take on the story?  Simon?

Simon Sheikh: This is not an ordinary family and I feel we do need to analyse what they are doing. Gina Rinehart right now is making (inaudible) into the media.  She is one of the only mining magnates, bar potentially Clive Palmer in the near future but that is all just speculation.  But the only one making these types of plays therefore we should be assessing her character.  We should be assessing whether she is a fit and proper person.  Perhaps if people don’t want to be considered to be extraordinary, to have this extraordinary view of their lives – perhaps they should live more ordinary lives.  I would say that to Gina Rinehart.

Richard Glover: Give away the money?

Simon Sheikh: Well, at least not do strange things like make interactions into the media sphere. 

Pyne: Why would it be a strange thing to purchase in media companies?

Simon Sheikh: Because Fairfax is not a company with a strong financial future.

Richard Glover: It has got some extraordinary columnists which can generate income from advertising because of their popularity.

Simon Sheikh: And look let’s hope that continue to be the case because we need a strong and diverse media.  But let’s be honest, John Singleton let the cat out of the bag with the comments he made and I won’t repeat them for fear of defamation my lawyers tell me, but it is clear that Gina Rinehart is putting it out there and that if you want extraordinary power you have to accept with that power a level of scrutiny however there should be a line in the sand somewhere.  I do think that with people like politicians we do ask too much of their private lives.

Richard Glover: Christopher Pyne, it is true that some people think that Gina Rinehart is playing for Fairfax as a platform for her own views.

Pyne: Oh Richard I don’t think that the family relationships and their financial relationships of the Rinehart family are anybody’s business. I know that the media are very focused on it but honestly I don’t think it is anybody else’s concern.  What Gina Rinehart chooses to invest in is really nobody else’s business.  If she wants to buy parts of Fairfax or any other media company she is entitled to do so like any other citizen. The fact that she is Australia’s wealthiest woman should not make her a target of the press. 

Richard Glover: Well hang on, if she is right in what she is alleged to have said to her children, then if the trusts vests now then the taxpayer gets $100m of Capital Gains Tax. If she gets control of it and it doesn’t vest until 2068, then the taxpayer has to wait for a long time for its money. Isn’t that a public interest?

Pyne: Well the courts will make those decisions Richard and that’s how it should be.  The question was whether we should be delving into the private lives of Australia’s wealthiest families.  My view is that we shouldn’t be.

Richard Glover: We’ve got a 100 million dollar interest in it though…

 Pyne: There is always a way for the media to find an angle as to why this is a matter of public interest, my view is that it is not a matter of public interest and that Gina Rinehart and her family are entitled to privacy. It will go through the court process and somebody will win and somebody will lose, it might even be settled and then everyone will be happy. One way or another the caravan will move on and it will be soon forgotten, but the reality is, I don’t believe she should be treated any differently simply because she has done very well with her investments. And let’s not forget the investment in Fair Fax is a drop in the ocean in comparison to Gina Rinehart’s investments in coal, and iron ore and property markets and so forth.

Richard Glover: Tim Hawkes…

Tim Hawkes: Where is Darryl Kerrigan when you need him? I get this sense, I see Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest woman and serious charges, deceit and serious misconduct, and these are serious charges of a multi-million dollar trust. I mean compelling stuff, and of course we are interested. Should we be interested? I think it’s very natural. Should it be a matter of public interest? I think it probably is, because I think public money is involved in all of this. There are very, very interesting lessons here, as to what actually makes for happiness, what makes for fulfilment and as I said, I love the castle and I think Darryl Kerrigan is sort of a person that we love because of his utter satisfaction with his lot and you just wonder with the rich and the famous that this ongoing aggravation. I mean Gina; she fought for fourteen years with Rose Porteous, fourteen years. She’s quarrelled with her son, because he didn’t change his surname. So she is a fairly competitive individual.

Richard Glover: And maybe that’s part of the reason for her success in business…

Tim Hawkes: Absolutely, and that’s where the cutting edge of success can be, but it’s also there’s the ugly side as well, and I think there are some great lessons, there is fuel here for service up and down the land on a Sunday as well, I can see it all now.

BREAK

Richard Glover: Well a documentary on (inaudible) last night featured the offspring of a single sperm donor. They had only met recently and then they shared tiny traits such as the tendency to pause when they were speaking and while someone else might scratch their nose or their chin, they would tuck their hair behind their ears as they spoke, just tiding it up. It’s an interesting thing to be carried on DNA. What are the family traits, verbal or physical, learned or genetic that you see in yourself and your relatives, Christopher Pyne?

Pyne: It’s a very funny question because I do actually see peculiar traits in, well certain traits…

Richard Glover: Voting Liberal…

Pyne: I can’t be responsible for what my kids do in the future. I come from a family of five and we don’t all vote Liberal, I can assure you, but I do notice family traits. For example one of my children was being criticised about grimacing when he was concentrating and I thought actually I grimace to when I’m concentrating.

Richard Glover: It’s the same sort of thing in the forehead, a line?

Pyne: It’s the same grimace, and I looked at him and thought we can’t pick on him, it’s not his fault, he’s got that from his poor old father. And we’ve also got the Pyne eyelid. My Left eyelid sometimes is kind of half closed, and I notice that in my children. So it’s definitely true that it gets passed from family to family; it’s genetic though, not learned.

Richard Glover: It’s complicated the DNA, it carries these tiny things. Simon, you go next…

Simon Sheikh: Well I think I have inherited my fathers singing voice; unfortunately he was tone deaf so I guess you don’t what to hear me sing on this particular show at this particular hour. But on a serious note, I think my fathers stubbornness but equally his work ethic were both handed over to me and that’s good…

Richard Glover: With those things, you don’t know if they are learned or genetic…

Simon Sheikh: That’s right, I don’t think it’s just genetic, because he spent the first fifteen years of my life hammering the work ethic, it didn’t come easily. So I think these things are usually half environmental and half genetic.

Richard Glover: And Tim Hawkes

Tim Hawkes: Well it’s interesting. I’ve got a very ugly identical twin brother, who actually lives in Christopher Pyne’s electorate there in Sturt. And I see things in Nick and I think you poor bugger and then he tells me I’ve got the same things. One of them is zoning out. My mother used to zone out, you would be chatting to her and she would just zone out, and now I do that so people to talk to me, I sort of zone out and it gets reduced to the ambient hum of the air conditioner…

Richard Glover: And every morning at assembly, 600 boys do the same to you…

Tim Hawkes: So I think it’s teaching too much year nine, that’s what it does, it builds up this defence mechanism. I know that my daughter, she gets my face; she puts her hands on the side of my cheeks to look at her. Wake up dad, I’m here, I’m speaking to you.

Richard Glover: Ok, environmental, environmental.   

Tim Hawkes: Well as Richard said, all year nines are animals…

Richard Glover: Well Christopher Pyne thank you very much, Simon Sheikh thank you very much and Tim Hawkes thank you very much.

Simon Sheikh: Thank you.

Pyne: Pleasure.

Tim Hawkes: Thank you.

ENDS