News & Views item - June 2010

 

 

Building the Education Revolution. (June 3, 2010)

Building the Education Revolution (BER) is defined by the governing federal Labor Party as a $16.2 billion investment that provides world-class educational facilities, through new infrastructure and refurbishments, to all eligible Australian schools.

 

The Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations notes that:

 

 

Over the past several weeks a number of segments of the media have cited examples of waste and bungling that have dogged the program which has committed nearly 40% of the Federal Government's economic stimulus funding to ameliorate the effect, beginning in 2007, of the Global Financial Crisis on Australia.

 

In rebuttal the Labor government, principally through the efforts of the Minister of Education, Julia Gillard, has noted that the program is supporting jobs through its "24,000 projects in 9,500 schools".

 

Unfortunately media coverage of BER has been beamed laser-like on the matter of construction efficiency of the physical infrastructure for primary and secondary schools. The matter of addressing woeful shortages of competent and dedicated staff at tertiary as well as primary and secondary levels of education is all but ignored.

 

To state the bleedin' obvious, funding the construction of buildings is relatively easy and has immediate utility in stimulating the economy through job creation, But it doesn't address the really difficult problem of first stimulating an interest in  educating the educators and then successfully undertaking the challenge to fill and maintain the required positions to appropriate levels. And that must be perceived as an evolution which at a minimum will require half a generation to accomplish, i.e. somewhere between 4 to 5 election periods, which in turn suggests at the very least the necessity of  a bipartisan approach.

 

Considering the current preoccupations of the Labor Party and the Liberal-National Coalition -- Fat Chance!