VC's Colloquia transcript
11 September, 2009
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: how universities create failure and how they might create success instead
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00:00
Paul: Welcome to the first colloquium, to start a series of reflections, discussions and reflections within the university particularly around how we deliver our teaching, how we think about teaching, how we improve the opportunities for learning for students and how we address many of the issues that many of the, I suppose, aspirations of the federal government has set out for us and all universities.
How do we get better student outcomes, how do we increase participation overall, how do we increase access for disadvantaged groups, how do we interact more effectively with other educational providers - whether those providers be in the TAFE sector or in the school sector.
00:52
To start this series of colloquia, I'm very pleased to be able to introduce today Professor Richard Teese, who is director of the Centre for Post-Compulsory Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of Melbourne. As many of you know Richard has written numerous studies of inequality, including academic success and social power which was a study of 50 years of curriculum change in English, Chemistry and Mathematics in Victoria.
And Richard now works closely with education systems across Australia on their funding models on curriculum achievement and transition patterns. And I think that word curriculum, we're going to see today is a very important word because it comes to one of the fundamental issues, one of the fundamental problems that the higher education sector faces in terms of increasing access for students.
01:58
Richard has done a lot of international work. He lead the OECD review of equity in Spain in 2005, was rapporteur for the review of equity and quality in Scottish schooling in 2007. As I was learning today, has done a lot of work in France and indeed with French academics and has worked with Pierre Boudoir and translated one of Boudoir's books into English. So a very significant range of connections and understanding of what happens in other countries.
Richard has just completed a major investigation of curriculum provision and student achievement in the northern and western suburbs of Melbourne. Suburbs of course from which we recruit a significant number of students but not as many as we should. And he's now beginning a longitudinal study of school improvement in this northern region.
02:57
And though everything Richard says today is of course going to be an objective academic assessment, he no doubt gets some information about what's happening at La Trobe University because his son is currently studying here, I think, as a student in Law and Economics. That's one for everyone from the faculty of Law and Economics to bear in mind I suppose.
[Laughter]
Over to you Richard.
Richard Teese: Thanks Paul. I'm armed with numerous microphones. There's two on my lapel and this other microphone here so I guess you should be able to hear me well and truly. And I note that very few people have come to the front tables even in this distinguished university. I gave an earlier version of this paper at my university. And those who were there, well, forgive me if many of the slides is similar. But I've changed it because this is La Trobe.
03:59
And so, I've had to look up some data on your venerable institution which I've incorporated in the presentation and I hope that will make it more accessible and relevant to your own particular challenges. And also there's been a lot of feedback so I've reacted to it. So, let me begin by setting the background to the concerns here.
As Paul mentioned we're in an age of very significant reform though the Bradley review and the adoption by the Rudd government of a number of targets for improving both overall participation in higher education sector and participation for low SES groups. And there's a great buzz of excitement, we have a review being led by Kwong Lee Dow at the moment in Victorian Universities about well, can we do something better in the selection area.
04:58
I take a very critical view of the focus on selection because I think it's secondary and that will come out here. So, let's go to Bradley. Here is a map of the enrolment shares of low SES groups over the period since the early 1990s. And it's the intention of the Rudd government to boost that share of enrolments from around 16% to 20% by the year 2020.
Do we want to bridge the gap? Yes. The Rudd government says. Well, researchers who were interfering in this say, “Well, I hope you can explain the gap because if you can't explain the gap, how do you propose to close it?” So that's the first issue I want to address and the second issue is there is another gap which not very obvious. But it's the gap favouring high SES kids.
05:59
For example in Go8 universities, about 54% of enrolments and I'm not sure what enrolments we're talking about. But 54% are from high SES groups which is a big overrepresentation. And I just made a note of where you can find that James, Baldwin, Coates et al.
So, first explain the gap. Well, does Bradley help us do that? It's certainly a useful if somewhat modestly written document but are there answers in it to the question, “How come we've got a gap?” And we need the answers to the questions in order to see whether the ways of closing the gap are meaningful.
So, Bradley certainly highlights that stability as an issue, and comes up with a series of demand and supply factors that are the culprits. On the demand side, well there not enough young people who know about higher education so we have to educate them. And their aspirations are frequently low. And that's astonishing and we need to deal with that.
07:09
I wonder why they are low in their aspirations. Very significantly they're failing at school. “Why should they want more?” Bradley is alive to these issues. And we have to be, in the higher education sector, at least as alive. And then there are direct and indirect costs and I know that people say since HECS, "That's all gone away." But when you talk to students themselves, young people themselves, there's a range of economic factors that still weigh heavily on their decision. Debt aversion, fear, etc are still there.
On the supply side, what higher education institutions do, well, there is the notorious problem of selection and its apparent arbitrariness as far as social background goes. There is a lack of extension activities or proactive work with schools that really would build better relationships so they're not there. So, the conduits to getting kids through are actually not being created by the very beneficiaries, the institutions that should have them. And of course there's a lack of financial support to help with poorer students.
08:21
There is a funding model that is entirely insensitive to student characteristics and there's no change on the way for that. Well, standing back from that class of issues, demand and supply issues, can we focus on what are really the most important issues?
To me, biggest thing affecting low SES participation in higher ed is underachievement in school. Big, big issue. If you can't fix that, the tension will continue to be low and relieved only by the occasional recession which will drive up retention but actually drives down rates of offer in higher ed, as you will have noticed in today's age.
09:12
There are institutional policies and behaviours that contribute to these patterns and we're going to look at those. They're not just selection but in more fundamental ways, which I want to consider and this is something that Bradley doesn't do. Bradley tends to assume that the universities are clean, and neutral when it comes to achievement at school. But they're not. Let me highlight the significance of the achievement gap that is holding back so many low SES kids.
09:48
I'm going to start with achievement pattern in mathematical methods. Now, we'll all know I imagine, that this is a gateway subject to a vast array of higher education courses. It's a preparatory maths subject. If you want to do up market business courses or even down market ones, you will need methods. If you want to do medicine, you will need methods. If you want to crash through a high stakes subject based on high aggregate score, you need demanding subjects in which you can score well. Methods is one of those subjects. Very important subject.
So, who succeeds and who fails in methods? And remember if we don't boost achievement in methods, any growth on the part of low SES kids, it's going to be skewed into inoffensive areas off the mainstream. No science. Many business studies excluded and so on.
So, here I've got on the bar chart, the proportion of kids from different SES backgrounds who are getting a mark less than 24 out of 50. You have to work hard to get merely less than 24. It's a fail.
11:06
And what we see is a very tight social pattern, a linear trend. Failure rises as social economic status descends. This is despite the fact that the participation rate rises as we go up the social scale. So, what we see is amongst children, young people from poorer backgrounds, low enrolment but punished by high risk, double jeopardy.
At the high end of the social scale, high enrolment, low risk, double advantage. Now, the reason I put this up here is, we want poorer kids to have a chance at university. We've got to fix up the maths side. Cannot walk away from this.
12:03
But even if you're not obsessed with maths, let's look at a broader indication of achievement. So, here I'm using the notorious general achievement test. Make of it what you will but it's highly correlated with ENTER and it's the only general indicator of achievement we have.
So, what is the profile of different SES groups? That's the high SES group? 34% are in the highest fifth band of gap another 25% in the next band. At the bottom, yes there is low achievement amongst high SES kids. It does happen, every tenth. All right it does happen and it's a serious issue. But as I go down the social scale, what I find is a reverse of these categories. 30% of low SES kids bomb out on the GAT.
13:00
I sat the GAT in 2005. I was the last person to leave Hawthorne Town Hall. It is a gruelling subject, a gruelling experience. This is a real measure of the barriers that are faced by children from poorer backgrounds. Only 11% score highly in the GAT. One-third of the proportion from high SES backgrounds.
Is that a basis for expanding higher participation on the part of children from poorer backgrounds? Is that the basis? If you don't improve achievement, you will lower, automatically, aspirations.
Here we have sector of first preference for school leaver applicants coming into universities in 2007 broken out by ENTER band. So, what you see is a predictable decay in demand for places in university as we descend the ENTER hierarchy. Backfilled by a proportionate second choice behaviour on the part of the applicant.
14:10
"Well, I'm not going to get into university. They don't want me at least TAFE will have me." So, very structured pattern. Of course if we then took this off and said, "Don't tell me about applications, tell me about offers and enrolments." we would drop all of these bar charts would drop after about the third band. And what this charts don't tell you is just how many kids reject offers that are made and never come to university. And the social pattern behind the rejection of offers which is enormous.
Well, we need to face basic theoretical questions before we plunge into policy. And the basic question and I've only got one slide on the fundamental question, “Why is there a social pattern in failure? Why isn't it random?”
15:06
Here we've got a chart which shows what happens from early in childhood, in schooling with low SES kids. This is reading on the NAPLAN. The horizontal axis set to be equalled to zero. It's the state-wide mean all schools included. The red band, the lowest SES kids from government schools between year 3 and year 5. Their mean school falls relative to the state-wide average? Whereas high SES kids continue to grow.
Now, what we see is a gap that widens from this time all the way through to the VCE and indeed beyond. Why? Rising cognitive demand? Yes. Things get harder and harder at school. Kids do algebra. They do languages. That's what school's for. Can't object to that.
16:10
But parents have in relative terms, declining cultural capital to manage those increasing demands. They don't know algebra. They don't understand it. They don't understand foreign languages. They can't help their kids even if they're committed to their kids and they are.
The poorest schools in this region, the poorest schools lack the concentration of professional resources and still more so and your country campuses would experience this. "Where are the specialist maths teachers?" In the Mallee, for example. So, they lack the pool of cultural and financial resources. Whereas richer schools, massively concentrate resources. And I just don't mean money, I mean, the cultural capital of the kids.
16:56
Failure is cumulative. We see the start of that in this chart. And as we get to the end of school, a curriculum becomes highly discriminating and that's what universities want. They want a discriminating curriculum. They want the best and brightest.
If they don't get a curriculum like that, they go on the warpath. As they did in the late 1980s and 1990s and you'll remember the intense struggles over discrimination, grading, … My vice chancellor at the time, thumping the table, "We will win changes, we will retain a discriminating curriculum against the dumbing down of the VCE." The great dumbing down that was supposed to happen.
17:54
These are the emergency times when the rules of the game look like they're going to be broken. But that's not really the way universities work routinely. That was an emergency time. What about the routine way in which universities work? And keep in mind, this is the time when the universities are saying, “I want the best and brightest. But! I also want to be equitable." So, I want to work through that dilemma.
You may not agree with everything I've got to say here, that's fair enough. But this is my view on it. How do universities influence success and failure? The social patterns of success and failure. Well, they demand chemistry, a minimum of 35. They prescribe content in the maths area. The prescription is very heavy. They decide what they will teach and what schools will teach.
18:56
Division of labour is very intense, very clear. “We will not teach certain things. That is for the school to teach.” Concentration of content, assessment methods, I've sat through the literature course and sat for the exams and did all the assessment in 2005. That was one subject. I don't know how kids cope with four or five.
Pace of learning is intense. Schools naturally take refuge in a narrow teaching practice because they care for the kids. Universities select by school, not because it's an indicator of achievement. They have never claimed that but because it predicts success.
Traditional teaching practice, you may think it's gone but in my institution, I don't think it is. We still have pre Gutenberg types of lectures with overheads copied directly out of books and so on. And of course we at Melbourne, used to send a bus to Brisbane to get the best students.
20:07
All of this contributes to structuring a relationship with schools that is adverse to the aspirations and achievement of poorer students. Don't take my word for it, talk to the VCE coordinators in public schools. Here are some of their views very quickly.
"It would be good to be allowed to teach according to the Victorian Essential Learning Standards and Principles of Learning. We need to get rid of the archaic learning style of the VCE with its teacher dominated delivery" What we in universities have to ask is, “If this true, are we getting the kinds of students we want? If this is true. Are we really getting the thinkers, the engaged learners that we want, if this is true?”
20:55
"I consider the VCE to be outdated, archaic. It's content oriented. The pace is inflexible. Goes against everything we know about learning." If this is what 60% of the VCE coordinators think, there is a possibility that it's true. And we would need to think about whether a system like that delivers to the doors of the university, the kind of learners that you want and can support.
Well, universities have a big stake in maintaining this system. And it's a stake in curriculum, not just selection methods. Of course it's perfectly legitimate. We want to prepare students for the arduous demands they will experience when they enter a university. But there is another thing going on here which is pretty obvious. The search for institutional distinction. Really a very big part of the game.
22:00
It's not so much what students you want, but how you're going to look once you get the students. It seems crude and vulgar but we get plastered with it at my university. We are constantly told that we have the best students and the others have the rest.
My alma mater, Monash is engaged in exactly the same line of thinking. As if it really matters who your students are as distinct from what you do with them.
Paul: Sorry I have to fix your microphone.
[Laughter]
Well, the PowerPoint hasn't fallen over yet. So, the search for institutional distinction that's going on in the behaviour of universities adds to the problems that low SES kids experience.
23:00
It drives schools in the direction of what the VCE coordinators call an ‘anti learning strategy’. We get them to sit the exams and it's the kids in government high schools who are over selected because they haven't been drilled in the same examination techniques.
This is from 1954. Have we really moved on much? Even if the exams are now conducted in a school hall. There's still exams. There's still superficiality. There's still complaints even from the very people in this room about the level of preparedness of your students. Is it surprising?
A key part of this is if you operate the system, you build a bridge with selective schools, not non selective schools. Now, that might be your business. But it becomes difficult if at the same time you're going to say, “We love the poor and we would like to recruit more of them.” Where is the consistency in this? The best universities get the best students. Who are the best?
24:12
The best schools we're going to see, tend to monopolize the best universities. Who's in control of the game? Is it really the universities or is it the selective schools? Have they been colonized? Well, that's an empirical question. So, let's investigate it empirically.
So, let me start with my university, which is the best, in 2005, and always intends to be the best. Whatever critics from the mere Education Graduate School might say. So, here I've said, “Well, tell me about the share of offers that you made, in this case in 2005, that you made to students school either candidates from different schools and tell me what the average social level of those students is.”
25:09
Because my contention is, there is a monopoly and all monopolies are evil and this one is evil too. But is there any evidence that there is a monopoly? Well, there are my public high schools. On the horizontal axis, I've got the SEFA-SES index used by the Bureau of Statistics. The population mean is arbitrarily, not arbitrarily, but it's set to be equal to 1,000 and on the vertical axis the percent of incoming enrolments or deferments from a given school.
25:50
You'll notice above the 3% line, you will see two schools that are absolutely outstanding. How can that be the case, because it's in the public high school system? That is obviously an error in the data but it's not. It is Melbourne High and Mac Rob. So, between them, they've got 7% of all undergraduate enrolments coming into the University of Melbourne.
So that is the public high school system. The green is the catholic secondary school system and the blue are the private non Catholic schools. Now, I say this is a form of colonization. And I will be comparing La Trobe and V.U. a little bit later to see if you also suffer from this economic disease.
But once you establish that relationship, who are you working for? And can you then say, “We love the poor, if only they went more often to private schools?”
[Laughter]
27:03
57% of places gained by 15 by 57 or 15% of all schools. So, I won't dwell on this because we have more exciting stuff to look at. How do they do this? They work with engines of economic, of academic power. Engines. If you can command 7% of places in the University of Melbourne, you are a machine. And if you can do it year after year, you are a bureaucracy.
It is of course a little bit different from the days when the principal of a very distinguished non catholic, non government rolled up to see my vice chancellor and up raided him because my university had failed to hand over the usual percent of medical places to his school.
28:00
How dare he breach the implicit understanding that there would always be about 7% of medical places going to his school and about the same to the sister school? We are actually multiplying these schools. And here is the words from a principal of the new Nossal high school out the back of Monash, which will emulate this, the wisdom from Mac Rob in Melbourne is that they cover twice the depth. Twice the depth, think about it, at twice the pace.
Because I'm going to keep asking, “Are you getting what you want from this system? Are you getting what you want?” But we don't pressure cook.
[Laughter]
We do not pressure cook. No, we wouldn't dream of doing that. We have sport. We have ballet etc.
29:03
To suggest that there is a monopoly, we need a contrast. So, I've chosen Victoria University on whose council I was for a number of years. There's their pattern? Notice it hugs the 1,000 parallel and is almost normally distributed and there's Melbourne. Now, I say this is a monopoly and I say that this has a big impact on SES access because we created engines of selective schools which will defeat the poor anytime. And the beneficiaries of that system are not going to yield on curriculum or on selection. So, it creates a big challenge for all the other institutions, especially those who've got rural campuses.
30:02
Here's the way it seems to me, that it works in terms of splitting the higher education sector so that we don't all have the same agenda. The high prestige institutions are cashed up. Even today after taking a hammering, they're still cashed up. They want the best and brightest. So, they must have an academically discriminating curriculum, which they'll go to war in the streets over, if it's threatened.
That produces success of a certain kind. But even at my university, we fail students. So, it can't be completely satisfactory. And until recently, we sent them off, the ones who failed maths. We sent them off of Kangan Batman TAFE, to be fixed up because we were not strong enough in teaching terms, to do it ourselves.
30:52
The best and brightest go to the older universities where they have the strongest possible incentives to finish their courses even if they hate them. They will do them.
[Laughter]
I know that because I've asked them. They will cope with the university teaching of the worst kind because "so what?" The university could be largely pedagogically neutral. They are determined young men and women. They will put up with it because the economic benefit is there waiting for them and it's huge.
There is very low attrition in my university, unlike all other universities, which are merely mortal. At the same time, the curriculum produces failure - of a certain kind. There's dropouts and low aspirations that flow off that. We don't see all the kids we might want to see. We lose many kids and we are standing in the urban region with the highest dropout rate in the Melbourne statistical division.
31:57
We, if universities are talking about RMIT even, but La Trobe certainly, V.U. absolutely, mixed group of students for newer universities, who experienced; weaker incentives, issues of orientation, other problems, the dropout rate at a conservative estimate in first year would be, (now I'm not saying in this institution), around about 17%.
So, the system of selection and the curriculum that sits underneath it does not protect this university and others from failure. It does not work for them in that sense. But it does enable institutions to play a prestige game. They're able to rank themselves and I want to look at the ranking. It's not based upon what they do with their students but who their students were, which is a miserable type of measure. It turns TAFE into a relegation sector, which is not the right way to deal with industry training needs.
33:06
Here I've graphed all the tertiary institutions in the state, as well as a couple of interlopers from over the border. On two dimensions, the mean ENTER of students coming into the place and the mean socioeconomic status of the students coming in. So that's the university sector.
Is it possible for people at the back to see the full print? Problem with scatter plots trying to get a font that's small enough and big enough. So, I'll just pause for a moment. At the top you have the high prestige institutions that are being kept miles apart from the rest of the pack.
La Trobe is the next highest on the ENTER, La Trobe, Bundoora. But I've broken out the campuses of La Trobe because they're quite an interesting case. Then you have Deacon, Swinburne, ACU, which is fairly small. RMIT which is a big organization. La Trobe as a university as a whole is bolded.
34:13
Sturt is largely irrelevant. La Trobe Bendigo, Victoria University and the other campuses of La Trobe bringing up the rear. So that hierarchy is a very persistent one. That's where the TAFE institutes fit.
Mostly their middle level students are not recruited through VTAC so we wouldn't lose any sleep over this pattern. But what's noticeable is that there's just about no overlap between the school leavers that they do recruit and those going in even to the lowest prestige university. The little dots are private providers who come and go.
34:56
So that's the higher education sector. And the question is, how is that maintained? And why that's relevant is because it pulls in the curriculum behind it, to serve it and support it. And to the extent that it does that, it provides a basis for selection, mechanical selection and it cripples the aspirations and achievements of many young people.
How, you might ask just two universities like Victoria University and Melbourne, which have overlapping geographical catchments, you can actually see them, you can see Melbourne University from the vice chancellor's office of the Victoria University of Footscray Park. And if you got high enough up, you could see from Melbourne to V.U.
The key mechanism isn't some kind of numerous clauses or some devious economic strategy. It's the ENTER system. So, here's the Melbourne University picture. That's the Victoria University picture. They are poles apart.
36:05
The demand for places in Victoria University is much more socially broad. But even that university is selective and when you look at enrolments and deferments, it cuts right back. It's much more choosy.
Where does your institution fit? We'll find out on the next slide. So that's Melbourne, Victoria University and that's La Trobe. I'm ignoring what the schools are.
You actually as a Bundoora campus, have a very close link with schools in the region. But it's not an ENTER type monopoly, which is what distinguishes it from Melbourne. So, La Trobe is right in the middle.
36:50
Now, you have to ask yourself a question. What if you got an instruction from Canberra to say, you will boost your share of low SES enrolments. You will do it. We'll even send you some money. We won't ask how you spend it. Typically, we won't ask you how you spend it but you have to do it.
You're going to have to dig deep on the achievement profile because most low SES kids are down on the achievement scale. You're going to have to go down market to support that effort. That's what you been asked to do. Go down market. And that is a critical issue. You are not protected by the selection regime. You are not protected by the school curriculum.
I say that this demand produces a dualism. If we had a different government, we might not agonize so much. But we have a government committed to an education revolution and that creates a dualism in institutional policy.
38:02
The universities, especially the elite ones shape and they maintain a hierarchical curriculum. Right. Promote selective schooling because parents are entitled to counteract the hazards. Buy a place in an institution in which you will pass methods, even if in a mediocre away.
There's an unequal concentration of resources in those schools that produces inequality, that produces narrow social intakes into university. But it delivers institutional distinction. Which is what you wanted. Which is exactly what you wanted. Maybe not La Trobe but other institutions wanted.
That's the Mr Hyde of selection and that's the Dr Jekyll, who now wants to compensate for that by Outreach activities. This is a very interesting dualism. And my university has been very vigorous in attempting to do this and has not succeeded. But it's a genuine concern, and we'll see a bit further.
39:11
Of course this dualism is experienced differently depending on where you are on that hierarchy. If you're Victoria University, you're going to have quite a different perspective from Melbourne. And you could say, as I put here rather mischievously that Dr Jekyll is the good conscience or perhaps the mauvaise foi, the bad faith of the university's whose Mr Hyde has starved them of the low SES students they need for respectability, for new respectability.
They have, as our vice chancellor, has painstakingly demonstrated. Failed in their efforts to extend equity. And that's because they are still looking for the best and brightest. And that's the relationship they will not give up.
40:01
So, which way forward? Both for those elite institutions, who do take equity very seriously even if they can't deliver it, and for what we call the newer universities that we're talking about here, a new university 40 years old, are we not?
How do we create a more inclusive, non monopolistic relationship with schools? And if we don't do that, we're not going to get the kids we need. Let's look at the Outreach programs that we've got. First of all, what are they trying to do, the Outreach programs? Well, reduce the cultural and financial barriers. How? Boost aspirations. Get out there to talk to kids. Send the careers, bring in the careers teacher from schools. Put in scholarship etc etc.
40:52
You could go further and internationally, we will see evidence of this. Oh no it's not enough just to arouse interest and enthusiasm and make kids familiar with the joys of university to come. We actually must make them more competitive to deal - as some Western Australian principals were telling me, “We have to compete with the private schools. So, what we'll do is build a few more Nossal high schools or a few more or we'll have special classes so we'll make the kids more competitive but we won't touch anything else.”
Is that an equity strategy? In a sense, it is. How far it gets is another question. We train them for exams. We give them supplementary classes. We preselect the students. I'm going to show some examples of that. Then we could remove and we have tried to do this constraints of provision. My university does this. Varies the admission requirements. Lowers the bar. Creates reserve places. It's all very exciting but doesn't work.
41:58
My university is genuinely committed to that. It has Access Melbourne. 20% of undergraduate places reserved for ongoing disadvantaged during schooling. The problem is that almost all the students admitted under the program would have got there in the first place because their ENTER scores are high enough to get them in. So, I'm not bagging the intention but I'm reporting the vice chancellor's own feeling that it hasn't worked. Kwong Lee Dow scholarships etc.
So, genuine effort doesn't work. I like to dip into things French and one of the interesting places in France is the Institute for Political Science. The Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Sciences Po, which is an elite Grand Ecole and it loves the poor too like Melbourne University.
42:55
And so, it is out to try to get the poor into its course, because it's a scandal and they're very embarrassed equity doesn't work in France, anywhere. So, well at least noblesse oblige. We will do a little bit.
So, we have a scheme, priority access scheme. 30 senior high schools which are deemed to be in priority zones, well, the zones are actually the schools. And we've got instructors helping to prepare for the institute entrance exam. The students are preselected by the school staff. Are tapped on the shoulder, “You'll do. You look funny. You've got an Arabic name but you'll do. We'll bring you forward. Post admission once you get in, extra classes.”
It's great. But it reaches a tiny percentage of kids. It's not making a single dent on a very aristocratic system. They also tried it in Lyon, same sort of thing, but they didn't get any business people to back them, whereas Sciences Po because it supplies the management to so many corporations, public and private is flush with money.
44:02
So, there's a genuine effort here but it's running up against the brick wall of the upper secondary curriculum and the failure of the junior high school system. Well, the limitations, they do not change the nature of the demands made on students. We're still asking for the same thing. We're just trying to make kids more competitive in addressing it. The curriculum continues to be a sorting vehicle.
Competitive performance is valued more than breadth and depth of learning. There is no time for that. There is actually no time in the curriculum. If you put on a novel like “Howard's End” or “The Leopard” and you ask the students about characterization yeah, but we need to know about the history of the Risorgimento. Oh, we haven't got time to teach it.
44:58
Can't contextualize it. Can't pursue concepts in any depth. My son was told at his school, "I'm in specialist maths. There are two types of math teachers. There are those who can teach the procedures but don't understand it and can't teach why it should be the case. And there are those who see why it should be the case. I belong to the first group so we will do our exercises and the answers are in the back of the book."
There is no time to reach depth. No time at all. I won't go through all these points. Regardless of the extent of Outreach, the basic framework is unaffected. The great majority of low SES kids are ignored. And moreover this problem doesn't deal with what happens.
45:53
Once kids of low SES, get to university which is a critical issue, equity does not stop at the door. We don't have an equity problem. One adviser to Minister Gillard told me that, “It's not the problem once you get there. It's only a problem getting there.” That is to completely misread the quantitative studies on survival at university.
More radical approaches. Well, I put those three in. You know about those. What more could we do? Well, you could change selection. But I've already condemned that and damned it as inadequate. So, you would need to move to reform of the curriculum, which is a very daunting prospect but it's still important. We need certainly to improve achievement because that's absolutely critical. And we would have to do something about school funding so that schools like the schools in the north were adequately funded. They're not.
46:54
To give you an idea this week's announcements on private school funding, the equity bucket for the 1,600 public schools in this state is about $46 million. Maybe a bit more now, with top up. That's got to go across 1,600 hundred schools. Half of them qualify for equity funds. It's just a drop in the ocean.
When we review the funding mechanism for Victorian public schools, we found the budget was about 0.1 of 1% of the total recurrent outlay. It is nothing. It is nothing. Given the scale, the magnitude of disadvantaged, the resources are just not there.
A really interesting approach I find at, Victoria University, who say, “We will work with your school to improve student success.” I find this illuminating, from a university which is really under resourced. So, I try to graphically represent it.
47:57
So, they send teams of teachers in training out to the local schools with the view to helping kids in the normal classroom program. Why? The kids going out, the ambassadors get the training but the schools get additional resources in a way of teaching assistance.
They have a context sensitive teacher training program. So, they train kids preferably those who've come from west to work in the west. Who know the kids, who know the families. Why do they do that? Is it because of pure altruism or is it possibly because of self-interest? Maybe it's both because the expectation is, we'll boost achievement. It'll benefit us in the long run. We'll get higher retention aspirations which are low in many schools, eg. in Werribee, Melton disaster.
A higher intake standard that enables us to do more with the kids once they're there. Better learning, better progression. So, there's certainly innovation in the field and it's starting to go in the direction, “Don't tell me about selection. Tell me about what I can do to help kids achieve at school through maybe a better curriculum. ”
49:11
To me curriculum is just fundamental. It's the organ through which we raise expectations on kids. We say what we want. We want you to come to university. Who should you be. We need to push for change in our expectations so that we are asking for a greater emphasis on the intellectual growth of individuals. We need to have our curriculum, which involves more space for kids. We need universities to be influencing teaching practice in schools, which assumes that their teaching practice in university is good. But if it's not, you won't be able to talk to the teachers.
49:56
So, change is in how learning is organized in universities are critical and I don't think I've got anything to teach you about that, the 'design for learning' thing is eloquent. It's a most interesting, an illuminating document that shows that La Trobe is intent on real change at a pedagogical and course design level. And as I stressed, not just initial access, it's achievement once you get there.
Do we want real gains and equity? If so, we have to start to change. We have to use our influence to change what schools do. Change expectations. Well, you have to change yourself first and they're related. What do you focus on? Deeper learning, breadth of view, greater maturity amongst our learners. Who must be given the time to learn and learn well.
50:54
If that's the case, we can do so much more at the university. We won't be held back. We will be able to offer more challenging things. So, I've taken a bit of time but now my concluding notes and they have gone on for about three or four slides so I apologize for that.
What actually is the task when we set out to improve equity? Is it to find a better way of identifying ability, no we've got a better method, we'll use a scholastic aptitude test or what if something else, some clever psychometric tool? Or is it to enlarge the social pool of ability? Well, I think it's the second one. Though there would still be implications for selection practice. I think we have to create more high achievers in school. That's a critical challenge facing universities.
51:56
Selection practice doesn't change how achievement is created and it doesn't do anything for what you have to do and what you are faced with amongst your students. Of course most of that effort is going to depend on the willingness of government to really tackle underachievement in this area. If you look at the weakest form of mathematics, further maths and you ask, “What is the probability of failure of the lowest SES kids in northern suburban public high schools?”
The probability of failure for those kids in the lowest, least demanding math subject is 49%. Every second child fails the weakest maths. And that is on top of the highest attrition rate in the state, as far as urban school, urban areas goes. And that is the fail rate of the average student in 1950, in general maths. 50 years behind.
53:09
But we think that our universities can play a role and they should remember that they are the biggest customer of schools. They have got huge purchasing power if they use it. They used it to set up a VCE that would continue to discriminate. How did they use their purchasing power today? What should they do? Oh as a personal view.
Clearly the most important thing they can do is to make their courses really engaging, challenging. You need to make the place something that students really want to go to because it works for them and it must work at a pedagogical level and not simply at a bribery level. There must be a real impact on student mentality.
54:05
Students do need support. It's absolutely fundamental. And the funding model should be backing the relative demand on student services. Articulate a clear view of the learner that the university wants from schools. We don't do that. We say, “We want someone with a high ENTER.” What the hell is a high ENTER when especially when you look at the statistical adjustments that are used to produce an aggregate score.
Who is the good student? Now, you've got your six capacities and then there are numerous other things but think a bit further. What sort of person do you want, in terms of generic higher order skills. You're going to want things like; I can interpret a pattern of data, I am creative, I can imagine a scenario, I can tell a story relating to data whether it's scientific or mathematical or linguistic, I'm imaginative, I can work well with others.
54:59
Try to get this sort of person in your mind because that's what we implicitly expect but we're not stating, obviously. We're not laying it down and saying, “We're the buyer. Where's the product?” That to me is the issue. Do we want this sort of student?
Now, I'm just about to present one or two slides about published brilliant students in the newspaper. This is a brilliant student who chose law over history once she realized that her ENTER was much higher than she thought. She actually doesn't give tuppence about law but she has come to accept it because it is more important than anything else, given her score.
Or in the French context, to be a good pupil, are we going for groups of people who are really good despite the adversity of their origins and background? Or to take the Age Newspaper's view of a brilliant student? We've got the violin and the dog and the armchair and this no doubt is a devoted student. But which one do we want? Maybe we want them all.
[Laughter]
56:14
Well, when I looked at chemistry, I looked at maths, I looked at English over 50 years, there is a view about the good thinker, the good learner. It's there over 50 years. It's part of our cultural heritage. But we are slow to articulate it when we need to.
So, we need to build. (This is, I think the last slide.) Build curriculum bridges, which we can talk about. Structure student programs. I won't go through this but the important things are we say what we want, in the way in a qualitative sense, not a quantitative or rank sense. And we start relating to the school curriculum, not as something that we've got nothing to do with but as an area where we start to structure, shape, sponsor interest from students.
57:08
I put a note we need teacher training that is context sensitive and supported by a vibrant research program because I'm conscious of the fact that having helped design the school budget model, the schools are critically dependent, not so much on the quantity of the resources but the quality of the resources they get and universities are the agents that produce the quality or don't.
This is the last slide. Sorry. If we succeed at the university, in transforming our instructional design and practice in these ways. So, if we go up, in terms of qualitative change, we reduce our reliance on prediction of success. We become better at what we do. We don't need to predict success. We can take in a broader range of kids because we can produce success.
58:03
If we differentiate our institutions, in terms of purpose, fields, industry links, how students learn, to me is the most fundamental thing. If we go up on that scale of differentiation, of teaching culture, etc, we reduce our reliance on ranking. We don't need to rank because we don't want all students on the same scale.
The way we work requires a certain group of students with certain attitudes and certain qualities. That's the group we want. We're not interested in ranking everybody on a single scale across the entire universe of school leaders.
So, we can start to move away from the problem of selection entirely because we don't need the instruments that university selection involves. We don't need the instruments, if we can get the achievement and we can get the differentiation of purpose within our institutions. Thank you.
[Applause]
59:07
Paul: Richard, thank you very much for an extremely interesting, challenging, I think presentation. (I've got to speak into the microphone.)
What impresses me about what you've just said to us, is that it really goes to the core I think, of what we do as teachers of the university. It leads me to think, I mean, I've been doing some thinking about how we reposition this university and how our approach to teaching needs to be changed so that we can create effective learning opportunities for students, so that we can provide real opportunities for everyone, every student who enters the university to succeed.
59:56
But what you've suggested here is something I think more profound than that because it goes to the heart of many of the, I suppose the sacred cows of the educational system that we currently operate. And we operate at one level but as you point out, if we're to be more successful at the level we operate at, we have to take a more encompassing view of the relationships we have with other institutions. And you can look at that, you can, I suppose you can say, “Well, we may have a, there's a public policy agenda which says we need to do this.”
… From a purely business point of view, … I look at this as an economist and think, “Well, one of the things you're saying Richard is that actually to get a better supply chain, we need vertical integration or more vertical integration.” In universities, we need to interact much more closely with schools.
01:00:51
Your presentation sparked all sorts of ideas in my mind as to how we could do that. But I think now, we've got about 20 minutes for discussion and comment. If you're happy to have comments from the audience, so please.
Audience: Thank you very much Richard. One of the things, I've taught first year for many years was, how densely compacted students are by the time they come to university. They've been honed to this fine point which is their VCE score and they need about a semester just to decompress. And in a sense, they've given so much more thought to the ENTER score.
It's a bit like the marriage versus the relationship. They've been worried about the wedding but they have no sense of what's to follow. That they have very little sense of what often, particularly with our students who have a particular SES profile. They often even don't know what a degree is. So, a lot of our effort is, that they end up being immersed in something which is just one damn thing after another.
01:02:00
So, we've spent a lot of time in the curriculum task force and part of the design for learning is of course about frame working and explaining the degree process. What I'm interested in is how do we insert that back into the schools we have or should be building relationships? How to explain the university process and how, in fact, it's not like VCE at all?
We hope a very different process operating at universities in general on La Trobe in particular. How do we tackle dealing with that relationship and those questions in secondary schools? And at what point do we begin? Do we need to begin before VCE or do we try and run it in parallel by engagement through year 12?
Richard Teese: Well, the first point, is you're absolutely right about being compacted. If you look at students who don't continue in their studies. Even though they got good results but they defer, they single most important factor is, “I'm burnt out.”
01:03:02
They are absolutely and that increases in proportion to the gaps of the student. So, it's actually the high achieving students who are most stressed by the end of the year. They're the ones who just can't endure anymore.
If you took a road show into the schools in the north, for example or Bendigo, one of the first problems you will find is they won't give you the time. That's the first problem. So, you won't be able to do it in a year 12 and it's too late anyway. You would need to do it in year 10 and you would need to bring a team of your good students, your first year survivors in and you would need some really good marketing stuff. Because otherwise, what they do is they put ENTER scores, cut-off scores on the board. And that's the aim and they start VCE in year 10 now in many cases.
01:03:54
So, they're going to be gripped around, how do I beat the next person, for what? Now, if you ask students about the relative benefits of university and TAFE courses, they reveal exactly what you said. They don't understand it. For example, they think TAFE courses are as long as university courses. They think the classes are as big. They're just as expensive in terms of total debt, etc.
They don't actually understand that pedagogical universe of the university. And in a way, I hate to say this, “It's just as well they don't” because what they would do and they're very bright, they would say, well, if you have a pressure on independent learning, if you have a pressure on working together because they're quite consistent. Teamwork but independent learning. If you have a pressure on mastery of concepts and applications, using your knowledge, synthesizing from different source. All of things that we associate with a good thinker, they're going to say, “Well, excuse me, we don't get the time to do that. So, what are we doing in this school?” And your answer would be, “It's the same as any other school.”
01:05:00
So, what's the link between the pedagogical philosophy of a university and the pedagogical philosophy of a school? There's no link. So, it would actually be very damaging and a very delicate marketing job to take that tale into a school but you need to do that. You need to say, you need to send them at least the basic information that in university, you will be required to do this, to do that.
Audience: Is there a place for building a transition package that transition from secondary to tertiary to try and smooth some of those issues?
Richard Teese: The only really realistic way, short of building very good relationships with schools, which is a time consuming process, the only realistic avenue you're going to do is in your first year, itself. That is a crucial thing.
So, you actually have to book out a first semester. Not a wholly of course, but you going to have and it's going to be mainstream. So, there is an orientation phase in which you deal with learning issues, you deal with expectations of the university stuff. You deal with things and you provide support and facilities.
01:06:04
You're not going to get it established in schools in the current climate because it's a madhouse.
Audience: Shouldn't you then be making better use of the period between enrolment and beginning university?
Richard Teese: That would be a very good thing if the students had the certainty that they were welcome.
Audience: Yes. And to provide orientation right from the moment enrolment.
Richard Teese: Well why not bonus it? Your vice chancellor sits on a, presumably sits on a board of the VTAC, so you can march in and say, “I've got a price. I want orientation and I'm going to award an increment to the aggregate score. 5% for those students who front up to do an orientation program over the summer. So, you actually produce an economic incentive and these kids are sensitive to economics.”
01:07:00
So, you put it in an incentive. It's going to boost their score and they come and you get them. It's part of the more general philosophy of saying, of building a relationship with the school system. Proactive one, yeah.
Audience: I'm in an interesting perspective, and thank you very much. I'm the head of School of Public Health here. And within this university in Health Sciences, we've always been the poor cousin because we tend to have who we are, the lower SES students. We have the students with the lower ENTER scores.
We tied a common first year, this year which mixed physiotherapy students coming in with 98s, 98s(?), 90 and ours 50s and 60s in the same classes. And the interesting thing was that people at the end of the first semester, a lot of my colleagues would come up to me and said, “I was really interested to be teaching your batch of Health Science students. I expected them to be horrible and they were actually really smart and we had really good discussions.”
01:08:02
So, it just struck me the bias, you know we're our own worst enemy, really in terms of thinking through this because we have a way of thinking and it was very instructful for me in terms of when we actually had to do what you're talking about in a common first year.
Richard Teese: Yeah, yeah.
Audience: Can I problematize a little more and differentiate? You've been talking about SES as an indicator. But firstly could I ask about some of your own data and the relationships say of, languages other than English background and SES. Secondly, could I ask you to comment on the role of rurality or regionality in transition to universities because at least some of the on track data suggests that rural behaviour is not the same as SES behaviour. So, it's a different category of disadvantaged.
01:08:58
And thirdly and this is the last, could I observe that even year 5 is quite late in the process, if you consider the arguments about the role of early childhood education and Tony Vincent's comment about the role of social cohesion and wider community rather than the individual student in making achievement possible.
Richard Teese: OK. On language background other than English, the insensitivity of the measures around that has been well and truly established. And it's one of the reasons why the Melbourne programs haven't worked.
We found that looking at the special learning needs index that was used to deliver equity funds to government schools in Victoria that it had an NESB dimension which was heterogeneous and was actually positively correlated with success. So they were applying money to a dimension that was counterproductive. It doesn't distinguish between Eritrean, Somalis and Chinese.
01:10:04
The Chinese students, Australia-wide outperform the average Australian. The Somalis are nowhere. But why would you have an index that failed to discriminate between these two? And it leads to huge issues. Chinese students are highly motivated. They work really well. They've still got language issues, they're significant, but as it's being pointed out to me numerous occasions in southwest Sydney. But the Somali kids are totally different.
Now, you can't just merge all these things in. You need strategies to deal with the specific needs. That's a crucial issue. So that's the first thing I completely agree with this SES picks up on this to the extent that the Somalis are the poorest of them. So that's fair enough and I think that that is relevant to how universities are funded actually. But I would want to see sensitivity in the nature of the measure used.
01:11:04
On rurality, you're quite right. I designed the on track program and ran it for many years. The aspirations of rural kids are on the whole, lower especially middle level TAFE. They're more conservative. They're more oriented around university. The deferment rates are at least twice the rate in metropolitan areas.
There is much more poverty in rural areas and the school system is much weaker in terms of provision. So, there are a lot of specific issues and the things, if you look at you've got Shepparton, you got Albury Wodonga, you've got Mildura, you've got Bendigo. All very different contexts but the common thing is the exposure to a diverse population with multiple disadvantage. So, I think that's extremely important.
01:11:56
I can't say much about the last point you made. Achievement gaps begin very early and in fact they've been measured at 22 months and they just get worse and worse. You got to get in early. You've got to sustain the effort and universities can't turn that around although they do supply the teaching force.
Audience: You've just sort of covered my question actually which was around that. I think the most striking slide that you should to me was the low achievements of students in year three to five. And in previous talks I've attended, there's been discussion about that students in grade 4, can be identified as to whether they're going on to university or further training or you know employment or whatever.
So, I wondered if you knew of examples where universities have worked with primary school children or with their families in any way but possibly you haven't come across that.
01:12:48
Richard Teese: Well, I don't. And what I would say is the way universities reach young people is primarily through the teaching force they train. Including the early childhood teaching force which is becoming more and more professionalized now and that's critical. So, it's primarily through that stream that they can hope to reduce the achievement gaps at an early point and thus prevent this thing from growing wider and wider.
The point is not really to have 4-year olds or sorry, year fours that are 9-year olds thinking about university already. We know in middle-class households that they do. The point is to build the achievement and build the self-esteem of kids throughout their schooling.
Audience: You very convincingly took note of where students come from and how we select them. But I wonder, is it not as important to look at how we add value to them in where they go?
01:13:55
Richard Teese: That is an absolutely fundamental point. And one of the things maybe I didn't emphasize enough, we're riding on the ENTER score for the prestige but the real prestige would come of what we do. And so, the transformations that you've got pedagogically and in course design and curriculum, I mean, that's what you should be focused on, as well as building better relationships with schools.
Where you can claim credit is the difference you make, net of the intake you've got. So, the principal of the very, very distinguished Queensland Grammar School said to me, “Look we're probably just doing what our students enable us to do. We are not doing any more with those students. They're highly, they're from highly educated parents.” Does Melbourne, my university do what it really needs to do? Does it add value or is there no incentive to do it? So, the frame of an institution should be the difference it makes.
Paul: I think this will have to be the last question.
01:15:01
Audience: I just wanted to ask you Richard if you comment on, pragmatically how, say if a university wanted to move away from the ENTER score system, how it would it go about administrating its enrolment process?
Richard Teese: Well, the best way for a university to move away from the ENTER system is to prove it doesn't need it. How does it prove it doesn't need it? By the quality of the courses it runs, including special provision, bridging courses and so on.
If a university like Notre Dame says, “Oh no, no. We will have nothing to do with ENTER.” It can get away with it if it's very small and it can handpick its students. La Trobe can't do that. It's a big university. But supposing it were to run first year courses that really repaired the damage we did in the school system through our obsession with the exams and so on.
01:16:01
Supposing it did that, then you could say, “Well, look, we actually don't really need to rely on ENTER because we can produce the difference in achievement that was meant to be produced in school but wasn't. We don't need to predict success or we don't need to rely so much on prediction of success so we can have a much wider intake.”
And the wider the intake you could admit, the less meaningful the whole ranking system is. You're shifting more and more to saying, “Let's assume they're all hopeless. What do we do in first year?” And if you put stuff in place that assumes everybody is hopeless or burned out or compacted or demoralized. But imagine it, you can think of it conceptually, we have a pill called the La Trobe teaching pill. We administer it on the first of March. It has a magical effect. It undoes all the damage cognitive and more that the school system has produced and they are brilliant students.
01:17:12
And this pill is easily produced and easily consumed with no known side effects. Now, you would then say, “What'd I want the ENTER for?” I want the joy and prestige of the impact I've made through my exciting pharmaceutical, which is your teaching skill and your design skills in how you set up the curriculum.
So, everything depends upon the power of your own teaching. If you can get real power in that, you can kick the ENTER away because it is always, has been an instrument of prediction. And that's what people just overlook. It's an instrument of prediction. It is what universities say on the assumption of a constant standard of teaching quality. A constant standard which says this, “Low achievers will never become average achievers in this university and average achievers will never become top achievers in this university.”
01:18:11
It's a constant standard of teaching quality, which is basically mediocre. And that's why you need the ENTER to protect yourself so that you draw from the top rather than the bottom. But that doesn't work because most universities are forced to draw very broadly and then their teaching staff find, “I couldn't see any difference between the highfalutin physio students and the mere nurse. They seem to learn at equal paces when exposed to good teachers.” So I've been conned. I've been conned by the ENTER.
[Applause]
01:19:00
Paul: We're now going to be working very hard to manufacture that magic pill. The design for learning program is going to have a pharmacologic element to it.
[Laughter]
So that we can produce that pill. And Richard I hope, I believe that if you come back to La Trobe in a years time, you will find that some things you said to us today have not just been listened to but they've been understood. They'll be incorporated in what we do and we will be a different university with a very different approach to admissions, recruitment and first-year curriculum in a year's time. Thank you so much.