The Productivity Commission, AI and schools

By Chris Bonnor, former President of the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council and Director of ASPA. He is co-author (with Tom Greenwell) of Lessons from Canada – an equal school system is possible.

As a school principal, I spent a lot of time acting as a gatekeeper, filtering the endless demands on my school from those elected or appointed to govern it. It was probably easier back then – as every generation of retiring principals has forever claimed.

But today’s principals are certainly leading schools in a hectic era. Over the short time I wrote this article, various news reports told us that teacher shortages are among the worst in the OECD, schools will have just two days to respond to bullying, deep fake image abuse is on the rise, and the Federal Education Minister has announced the next steps in school education reform.

Some of those challenges come and go, but school reform goes on forever, often created by those far removed from the daily lives of students, teachers, and principals. The smart reformers keep at least one eye on what schools are like, the challenges they face - and the multiple communities and indeed purposes they serve. They think about how schools might cope when last year’s priorities have to give way to the latest good ideas, or response to ephemeral crises. 

For these reasons alone, proposals such as those on the way from the Productivity Commission’s current inquiry, Building a skilled and adaptable workforce, should be carefully managed and must reflect a full understanding of schools. But progress so far, as suggested by the Commission’s interim report, seems to suggest that this is not happening.

Yes, the report shows a commitment to improving school access to high-quality, accredited curriculum and lesson planning materials and diffusing the best innovations in educational technology across the country. But good intentions are not enough. While the final report is not due until December, the interim report on the section most relevant to schools, Building a skilled and adaptable workforce, suggests that, by itself, the strategy may fall well short of expectations.

The problem lies in the interim report’s opening commentary on the best resources to improve school student outcomes. This section reflects a range of assumptions and beliefs about school education in Australia that don’t match the reality on the ground.

There is little that is uniform across Australian schools. They form complex socio-educational hierarchies, which are evident in almost every Australian community. These hierarchies both create and reflect differences between schools in terms of who they enrol, the obligations they are required to meet, the opportunities they provide to their students, and their learning outcomes. Such differences reflect the unequal capacity of schools to determine who enrols, and in terms of accepted measurable outcomes, who succeeds and who fails. They certainly affect the capacity of schools to respond to reform initiatives.

In particular, the substantial and increasing concentration of disadvantaged students into low SES schools, combined with the well-researched peer impact on student achievement, is neither acknowledged nor seriously considered by the report. Over time, this impact has increasingly diminished the success of reforms targeted at schools, while ignoring the need to reform the wider framework within which schools operate. The assumption, that a school is a school is a school...doesn’t add up.

Unless our framework of schools is restructured in ways that reduce the impact of enrolment differentiation and discrimination - and create a more level playing field - the contribution of schools to building a skilled and adaptable workforce           (or indeed to anything else) will remain limited and very unequal.

Significantly, the Commission itself has previously acknowledged such wider barriers to progress. In its 2023 Review of the National School Reform Agreement it identified that the concentration of disadvantaged students into disadvantaged schools is a systemic inefficiency impeding student learning. It acknowledged that peer effects have a significant impact on student outcomes.

The subsequent Review to Inform a Better and Fairer Education System stated that the current system entrenches educational disadvantage. In the light of such revelations, Building a skilled and adaptable workforce risks joining a succession of reform interventions which fail to recognise the extent to which the current system falls short in its equity, efficiency, effectiveness and efficacy. This reality makes it, in the words of the review, “less likely that other reforms will realise Australia’s longstanding ambition of equity and excellence” (Page 73). This statement needs to be stamped on the forehead of anyone tasked with designing school reform.

The barriers to progress which have arisen in the school education sector – and limit the success of reforms - are explained in the following diagram. The diagram is adapted from Choice and Fairness: A Common Framework for all Australian schools.

This regressive cycle is reflected in the hierarchy of schools in just about every Australian community. In overall terms it has a dominant impact, inhibiting the achievement of equity or excellence, while acting as a drag on otherwise well-intended interventions such as those proposed in Building a skilled and adaptable workforce.

The scenario depicted in the cycle is driven by a very unequal (and arguably non-educational) competition between schools, fuelled by family anxiety about securing a place in a ‘good’ school...and delivering a rush of enrolments from low to high SES schools, regardless of sector.

The schools likely to win can enrol the students who will enhance the image of the school in the superficial measures of quality. The schools left behind are those which, as Richard Teese described in 2006, are “condemned to innovate”. But regardless of outstanding innovation their students are increasingly ‘in a class of their own’ in rapidly marginalising schools and communities.

At the very least, the architects of the final Building a skilled and adaptable workforce report need to acknowledge that the impact of final proposals for schools is certainly influenced by their socio-educational status and where they lie in the hierarchy. Differences in school and classroom learning culture, ‘time on task’, teacher experience, expertise and expectations, curriculum focus and diversity, as well as resources all influence learning outcomes – and will affect the adoption of artificial intelligence in the classroom.

In conclusion, artificial intelligence doesn’t level the playing field – it exposes and amplifies existing inequalities in schools. The challenge (and opportunity) is for systems and policymakers to design AI reform that narrows, not widens, the gaps.

How did I come to that conclusion? Easy, I just asked ChatGPT.