Mediocre Teachers Breed Mediocre Schools = Mediocre Education. (June 20, 2009)

You'd think it was belabouring the bleedin' obvious, but the topic is once again in the semi-popular media, i.e. The Australian's Higher Education Supplement.

The Rudd government's $14.7 billion school infrastructure program is a much needed injection of funding but as Curtin University's head of education, Jenny Nicol, said to the HES' Nicolas Perpitch: "The thing that seems to be missing from the focus in the education revolution is a focus on quality of teaching. There doesn't seem to be a lot of money being redirected into the support and recruitment of talented pools of people into the teaching professions."

Robyn Ewing, Sydney University's acting Dean of Education and Social Work also makes the point: "We need massive resourcing of early childhood education, of primary education, which is often left out, and secondary - but also teacher education, both initial teacher education and ongoing professional learning for in-service teachers," and went on to make the point that effective mentoring was also and area that was needed if promising young teachers were going to be retained in the system.

Then Acting Dean of Education at Monash, Ilana Snyder, while agreeing that both the best infrastructure and best teachers possible were requisite, said: "We need to help make teaching a more attractive profession, and perhaps that's by rewarding them with higher salaries so we get the best and the brightest into the teaching force and they don't all just become doctors."

However, the fact of the matter is that constructing the physical plant and providing it with modern technology is simple, it's a SMOP (simple matter of money). Developing the foundation and superstructure to entice good individuals, then to educate and train them well, and finally to have them maintain their interest, is a long term and difficult undertaking which has to be developed from the level of the universities, right through to primary schooling. Unless and until a bipartisanship is forged and is prepared to make a long term and solid commitment, it won't happen.

So far the government has got the easy stuff entrained but setting up the far reaching "evolution" of the nation's educational structure is hardly begun.

Not to worry, we can obsess over the mystery of the lost, utegate email - as in perhaps -- "this email will self-destruct in 30 seconds"?