Ghosts from the past

Most of the challenges Australia faces have their roots in poor educational experiences. We need to invest in a new approach that recognises the multitude of skills children need to thrive, writes Elaine Henry.

There is an old Chinese proverb that says: “When planning for a year, plant corn; when planning for a decade, plant trees; when planning for life, train and educate people.” As common sense as this may seem today, 10 years ago very few recognised the importance of education in breaking the cycle of disadvantage. In fact, with the focus squarely on record employment within the burgeoning Australian economy, many disputed the very existence of disadvantage in our “lucky country”, beyond the persistent and more visible challenges of our indigenous communities.

The 700,000 children living in jobless households at the turn of this century appeared all but invisible to the broader psyche of prosperity – a “tail” of disadvantage that would somehow be resolved through the welfare system or the trickle down effects of the market economy.

Moreover, while our consumer culture continued to grow, spurred on by relentless advances in technology, we failed to ensure that the 19th century education system that had supported the blue collar economy kept up with the changing demands of the 21st century knowledge era we were entering. Parents with capacity voted with their feet and moved their children into fee-paying private schools, while those left behind continued to struggle with a state system that remained static and significantly under-resourced.

Only now have the impacts of this neglect been brought into the sunlight through the benchmark reports compiled by the Council of Australian Governments. Today, 43.5 per cent of working age Australians have literacy skills below the minimum level COAG considers is required to meet the complex demands of work and life in modern economies (the figure is even higher for numeracy at 49.8 per cent). The people with the lowest basic skills are those in disadvantaged areas, where three out of five Australians of working age have poor literacy skills and two-thirds poor numeracy. We have now usurped the US as the most obese nation in the world, and the mental health of our youth has deteriorated to such an extent that suicide has become the single greatest cause of death for those under 35. Worst of all, we now appear to be going backwards, with the life expectancy of Australian children alive today predicted to fall two years by the time they are 20 years old, reverting to levels not seen since 2001 for males and 1997 for females.

These statistics would be a serious worry in a developing country, but in a rich country such as Australia, they are alarming. Our social mobility has stalled, and with our ageing population predicted to reach 35 million by 2050, the implications of this situation on our future social and economic prosperity as a nation are considerable. As the French poet and philosopher Paul Valery put it: “The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be”.

On the positive side, the solution remains clear, thanks to the examples set by other countries in our region that have taken pains to embed a culture of education and inclusion in their population, policy and practice over many decades. Most, if not all, of the challenges Australia now faces have their roots in poor educational experiences and the breakdown of first, the extended, and then the nuclear family units. To right past wrongs, we need to invest in a new approach to education that recognises the multitude of skills that kids need to thrive in a modern society, and the relationships they need to support them in their learning across the life course, from birth right through to lifelong learning. As Stephen Heppell, a leading innovator and thinker around education from the UK said: “In history, what our grandparents did with medicine transformed the world. We now have the opportunity to do the same thing with education, if we are brave enough to do it.”

Just over a decade ago, The Smith Family underwent a comprehensive organisational transformation to ensure those we were supporting would not be left behind in the new knowledge era. International evidence and the families with whom we were working had made it clear that a very different, preventive approach would be required, moving from a welfare-oriented model to that of a social enterprise, focused on unlocking opportunities for kids and parents using education as the key. Over the course of seven years, we developed a suite of literacy programs known as Learning for Life, to provide disadvantaged children and their families with the opportunities to develop the skills and capacities they needed to succeed, using evidence of best practice from across the nation and overseas.

These skills include comprehension literacy (traditional reading and writing) but also emotional, health, financial and digital literacies – even an understanding of how to respect and embrace cultural differences in an ethnically diverse society through what we call intercultural literacy.

Today, more than 65,000 individuals participate in these programs from birth all the way through primary, secondary and tertiary education and into lifelong learning. And, most importantly, they are connected to a cascade of relationships with significant others from the broader community, who contribute their time, talent or dollars as sponsors, donors, mentors and volunteers that take them across the line to a better future.

Inside the classroom, things are also changing, with federal and state governments now beginning to explore new models of schooling that reflect the importance of connecting and leveraging the skills of stakeholders across the community to support a continuum of learning beyond the school gates. The issue of education is also now firmly on the policy agenda and uppermost in the public mind, with the considerable numbers that logged onto the recent launch of the My School website clearly demonstrating the unprecedented level of interest Australians now have in the future of education in their country, and the many divergent views around the kind of change that is required to move us forward. As US President Barack Obama affirmed last year: ‘Education and innovation will be the currency of the 21st century”.

All Australians need to play their part in ensuring children today, and our future generations, do not continue to fall through the cracks as they have done in the past. To enable them to thrive, rather than survive, we need to give them the ability to recognise, nurture and express their talents in a globalised, fast-paced world.

As one of our many sponsors put it: “Education is the most important gift that we can give our children. Being a sponsor is, in a small way, a direct investment in the future of our children and our nation”.

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