So says Dr Lisa Denny, a workforce demographer and former member of the Tasmanian 100% Literacy Alliance, who wants policymakers and school sector leaders to stop lowering expectations and wake up.
The statistics are sobering, she says, with recent data from the Productivity Commission showing just 53.1 per cent of the state’s students successfully completed Year 12 in 2022. This compared to the national average of 79 per cent.
The state’s NAPLAN outcomes also signal a system in crisis. Last year’s results show Tasmanian students were below the national average in every category, with worse results than all other states and territories – except the Northern Territory – across 18 of the 20 categories tested.
Education Minister Roger Jaensch defended the state’s results at the time, saying Tassie schools were “doing as well, if not better than” those in other parts of regional Australia, The Mercury reported.
Denny says that despite a decade of improvement initiatives, the Rockliff Government has failed to get any traction at scale.
“What we have seen is good intentions – that’s unquestionable – but it hasn’t actually resulted in an improvement in educational outcomes. In fact, it has deteriorated,” she tells EducationHQ.
“We’ve had different policies, different approaches, over the years to try and do this.
“The conclusion that I have come to, observing all of this, and being involved in this for longer than the 10 years, has been that we just don’t have a shared vision of what the education system in Tasmania is supposed to achieve; what it’s purpose or function is.”
The state has slipped so far behind that Denny now describes the situation as ‘catastrophic’.
“We spend more money per student than any other jurisdiction in the country, we have a higher staff to student ratio than any other jurisdiction in the country, yet our results are so far removed from even being comparable with any other jurisdiction, even the NT.
“So, there is a breakdown in the way our system is working. It’s not functioning as it should.”
At the crux of Tasmania’s education problem, Denny says, is the deep-rooted competition between all the key players involved – including the independent, Catholic and public school sectors, initial teacher education, teachers’ unions and principals’ networks, for starters.
A ‘blame game’ has been established where each point the finger at the other, shifting the responsibility for poor outcomes, Denny suggests.
“In the rollouts of these (improvement) policies, each may be trying to optimise their own objective for their own vision, while not looking at achieving the overall objective of the education system, which I would say, according to our Education Act, is to educate all Tasmanian school-age students successfully,” Denny argues.
“Being a small state … they compete for the same bucket of money and support and priority, and have unintentionally or intentionally not [chosen to act] for the greater good of the whole system.”
A culture of making excuses for poor student achievement has been solidifying for years, the expert flags.
“In Tasmania we have a culture where we find excuses for low performance, and we lower the bar for performance generally.
“We now have conversations within our department that they’re going to redefine what success might be, because we haven’t been able to achieve our low expectations.
“So, instead of lowering the bar as we’ve done in the past, ‘let’s just completely change the definition of what success is’.”
A culture of making excuses for poor student achievement has been solidifying for years in Tasmania, Dr Lisa Denny says.
When flagging the high proportions of students from low SES backgrounds, or drawing on the belief that people generally don’t value education because there aren’t many jobs in the state that require higher qualifications, system leaders just aren’t owning the failures of the system, Denny warns.
“There’s always an excuse, there’s always an explanation for why. There’s no responsibility. Our education leaders do not sell education.
“They do not market and value and communicate it as a really important thing to do.”
As the parent of a child with complex disability, Denny has experienced the shortcomings of the public school system first-hand.
There are vast inconsistencies between schools in the way in which literacy and numeracy is taught, and principals are granted a problematic amount of autonomy to run schools, she contends.
“We have a problem, which is not just in Tasmania, but principals (have too much) autonomy. The responsibility for curriculum, school design and budgeting and other types of professional learning that’s offered, is up to the principal.
“It makes it very difficult for kids that are moving in and out of different schools, which happens a lot when you are from disrupted family backgrounds.”
Teachers also face a huge challenge when moving between schools, forced to grapple with an entirely new leadership, programs and instructional approaches.
“Understandably, teachers are constantly saying, ‘my workload is through the roof’, because they’re doing all the admin, the lesson planning, all the research on how they should teach … they’re paying their own money on Teachers Pay Teachers and all that sort of stuff, because they’re not being led,” Denny explains.
In June last year, Premier Jeremy Rockliff pledged to improve the state’s literacy outcomes by ensuring that one quarter of primary schools across are implementing structured literacy for K-2 in 2024, with all primary schools to be implementing structured literacy by 2026.
The Year 1 Phonics Check was also introduced in all primary schools in Term 3 last year.
The announcement was deemed a huge win for the Tasmanian 100% Literacy Alliance at the time.
But Denny says the successful uptake of structured literacy has been patchy at best, despite pockets of excellent practice by Catholic Education Tasmania on this front.
“The policy framework is good, but implementation is not happening as it should, because there’s competition, because there’s unions, because different sectors have different ideas.
“Principals don’t want their autonomy taken away from them. Some of the classroom teachers are in their late 50s, early 60s, and have been teaching balanced literacy all their lives.
“So the policy instruction is there – is the support and the resourcing and the commitment from the Department there? No,” she says.
During the COVID lockdown, Denny took it upon herself to teach her stepdaughter how to read.
“She was in Prep that year, and she actually won the ‘most improved reader’ at the end of the year in her year group, because I’d been teaching her phonics using decodable readers,” she reflects.
In the past it was thought to be a ‘social good’ to educate young people and ensure they left school with the knowledge and skills needed to pursue further education and/or work, Denny notes.
But now the economic future of the state is in peril, she insists.
“Putting my demographer hat on, we’re in a situation in Tasmania where we have more people who are of workforce exit age than we do workforce entrance age, so 15 to 24 years of age.
“Over the next 15 years, we're going to have around 100,000 people exit the workforce due to retirement, we do not have enough young people to fill the gaps that those workers will leave, let alone any growth that we might have.
“So, we need every single young person that is going to school in Tasmania to be literate and numerate when they complete school, and aspiring to pursue further education and/or training and/or work.”
With skill and labour shortages already impacting businesses, and people fleeing interstate for work, Denny says there will be huge consequences if the education system doesn’t lift quickly.
“It will have a dire economic impact on us if we do not improve our educational outcomes. That's the situation we’re in.”
Today Rockliff announced the state will go to an election on March 23, more than a year earlier than planned.
Denny says there is promise here, because hopefully all parties will drive an education reform agenda as part of their campaign.
