Look to classrooms for a productivity boost

In the long run, brain power drives economic growth, which makes classrooms one of the most important engine rooms in the nation. The Productivity Commission has underscored this point.

Among the recommendations in its workforce report, released on Monday, is the proposal to ensure all schools have access to high-quality classroom materials. This is such a common-sense suggestion it risks getting lost in the debate. But Grattan Institute research confirms it deserves a big tick of approval at the roundtable.

Productivity pundits should be alarmed by Australia’s recent NAPLAN results. Despite much hand-wringing and even more money, one in three school students do not meet proficiency benchmarks in literacy and numeracy.

Australia’s educational underachievement is a handbrake on the capability of our workforce. In a recent survey, nearly three-quarters of Australian businesses said poor numeracy and literacy skills had an adverse effect on them. Mundane tasks – such as completing workplace documents – were a challenge commonly cited.

This is a real worry. The type of higher-order cognitive skills Australians need to make the most of a high-tech future require strong foundations.

If we want children to learn more, we need to improve the quality of classroom teaching. But great teaching doesn’t just happen. It relies on a robust, coherent curriculum that establishes strong foundations and builds learning logically over each year of school.

High-quality classroom materials are an essential part of the equation. Unfortunately, Grattan Institute surveys of more than 7000 teachers found that few work in schools with an established set of high-quality curriculum materials for all their subjects.

At least once a fortnight, two-thirds of teachers spend time hunting for curriculum materials online, with more than a quarter scouring websites such as Facebook. What they find is often of questionable quality.

Without reliable information on the quality of curriculum materials, it is no surprise that many take matters into their own hands. This creates a huge workload burden – a quarter of teachers spend more than 10 hours a week creating classroom materials.

One teacher told us all this individual curriculum planning was about as useful as asking teachers to reinvent the wheel. It also creates a lesson lottery for students, where what is taught depends a lot on luck, leaving no guarantee that students’ skills and knowledge will develop systematically from week-to-week, let alone year-to-year.

Teachers will face an increasingly powerful incentive to turn to generative AI for help.

But while using AI models can save time, quality still varies enormously. The PC points to the potential for generative AI to streamline teachers’ workloads, including lesson planning.

The PC is right to recognise the opportunity, but there are also big risks that relying on generative AI for lesson planning could make the challenge of delivering a quality education even bigger. If individual teachers look to AI for one-off lessons rather than taking a co-ordinated, whole-school approach, the lesson lottery could get even worse.

Making sure all teachers have high-quality curriculum materials is imperative. Several countries, including the US, Poland, Singapore and Japan, have robust mechanisms in place to quality-assure curriculum materials. This typically involves bringing together curriculum experts and trained teachers to assess comprehensive sets of materials, including textbooks, instructional programs – and EdTech – against rigorous and evidence-based criteria.

Australia should follow suit. An independent curriculum materials quality-assurance body, empowered to conduct frank and fearless reviews, would help policymakers and teachers make better decisions. Governments should only subsidise curriculum materials assessed as high-quality. And teachers could confidently spend less time scavenging materials from the internet, taking a punt on AI, or writing lesson plans from scratch.

The most cost-effective option is to establish a single quality-assurance body that reviews materials aligned to the Australian Curriculum and state-level variants. We calculate such quality assurance would cost about $1 to $2 per student per year across the bulk of the foundation to year 10 curriculum – a drop in the ocean compared to the roughly $90 billion Australian governments spend on schools each year.

Genuine independence will be critical. Governments across the country have invested millions in creating curriculum materials in-house, which also vary in quality. To maintain credibility with teachers, there must be no temptation – or ability – for political masters to interfere in a review process to avoid an embarrassing finding.

Thankfully, there are ways governments can chip in to fund the establishment of a quality-assurance body while still ensuring rigour and independence. The effective Education Endowment Foundation in the UK, a rigorous education research charity supported by an endowment from government, is a powerful example.

Backing a curriculum materials quality-assurance body would be a rare win-win – it would help reduce teachers’ workload and boost students’ learning. That’s a large productivity dividend for very little spend.