Structures

10 APR 2014
Nigel Cohen

The quality of education suffers where governments micro-manage education.

Influences

The skill set of successful politicians require neither experience nor expertise in teaching. Their horizons are invariably set by the electoral cycle of two to five years. Much of their policy is driven by the desire to attract votes at a coming election. Education policy is unduly influenced by a desire to attract votes. This encourages policies that sound exciting and profound, simple to encapsulate for people with a short attention span and attractive to people who have no expertise in the structure of education. The nuances of evidence-based policy are frequently lost, to the detriment of proposed policy.

The desire to influence voters results in continual reassessments of the fundamentals of education, without sufficient time to research fully the impact of changes before the next changes are proposed.

Over the last thirty years, fundamental curriculum and policy changes have increased in frequency. In the current environment, we see fundamental changes to aspects of education two or three times during a student's lifetime at school.

Consequences

There are two key consequences.

Policy is implemented without having taken sufficient care to tailor policy to research and evidence.
The proportion of time available for teaching time has been considerably diminished, in favour of time needed to consider, learn and implement the new policy.

It has proven prohibitively expensive to quantify the consequences with any degree of reliability. Yet costs of fundamental changes include leaving teachers with less time to teach; disproportionate amounts of teaching time spent not teaching; reducing the opportunity for teachers to progressively improve their skills and teaching plans over their careers; increased stress on teachers and students; measures of student performance which are inconsistent between students who were educated at different times; and implementation of policy whose cost-benefits have not been appropriately evaluated.

Nigel Cohen
IVET Associate, Values Based Education

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