There is no doubt that education has become a large industry, the second biggest in the world behind health, according to most estimates. In Australia, education spending is over 7 per cent of GDP, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (health spending is higher at 9.5 per cent).
And it is growing fast. Government school expenditure is expected to increase by 24.6 per cent in real terms from 2013–14 to 2016–17. According to Universities Australia, education is Australia's fourth largest export behind iron ore, coal and gold.
An industry it may be, but is it a 'business'? That certainly seems to be the assumption in much of the training of teachers.
Having recently undertaken teacher training after spending three decades as a business journalist (with a particular focus on management), it quickly became apparent to me that much of the language in both the teacher training courses, and the administration within schools, bears an eerie resemblance to the language of business management.
Phrases like 'intersections of pools of knowledge and expertise', 'distilling vision, strategies and solutions that can be shared/owned and driven by stakeholders' and 'ensuring quality assurance standards are maintained across the delivery spectrum' abound.
Allowing such a flimsy discipline as management to co-opt an area as important as education is as absurd as it is saddening. Education has been with us for thousands of years and encompasses some of the most profound thinking the civilisation has produced. Management thinking has been with us for a few decades and has accomplished next to nothing.
Indeed, the only distinct insight management thinkers have ever come up with that survives any reasonable scrutiny is Total Quality Management (TQM). This is an insight about randomness within any repetitive system (which most industrial systems and businesses are). It shows that if the potential for randomness is removed from the system, quality standards can be met without any additional cost.
TQM is excellent for producing cars. But it is almost entirely useless in education. Worse, TQM's spin-off, known as Quality Assurance (QA), the version that is heavily used in education administration, has been largely shown to be ineffective and more likely to increase costs and inefficiency.
Whereas TQM relies on workplace democracy — workers are encouraged to find ways of removing randomness from the system and acting early if there is a problem — QA is despotic, relying on increasing quality checks and treating workers as a problem to be solved.
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