Call for wider debate on education accountability

NEWS RELEASE - For Immediate Release

Wednesday 15 February 2012

Call for wider debate on education accountability

The new national president of the Australian College of Educators (ACE), Professor Robert Lingard, has called for a wider public debate on accountability in education.

In an interview in the latest edition of Professional Educator, Professor Lingard said ACE intends to play a leading role in debating Australia's accountability push and national education agenda.

"All of the accountability pressures on all the sectors and levels of education now are quite reductive and this pushes us to questions of the purposes of education and how we can develop rich forms of accountability, which don't only work through metrics and test results," Professor Lingard said. "We also need to consider how we can pull the community into those debates."

"We've got the Melbourne Declaration, which is quite a good statement of the broad national goals for schools, but it seems to evaporate and disappear when we look at accountability and schooling at least constructed around test results on NAPLAN and My School only.

"We need to think more about how we can articulate accountability in a broader way, a more progressive way, with the broader purposes of education in mind."

Drawing on his experiences working in the UK education system, Professor Lingard cautioned against borrowing rather than learning from policy overseas.

"We can see the negative effects of accountability when it is reduced simply to high stakes testing on the width of the curriculum and issues of trust of the teaching profession. The centralised pressure on teachers can get us to a point of accountability meaning mistrust of schools and teachers", Professor Lingard said. "Those systems that value and invest in the capacity building of teachers are those that get where we want to go."

"What we need is a debate on richer forms of accountability developed at school and community levels to take proper account of the broader purposes of schooling to doing with citizenship development and the like. Schools that make a real difference are those that complement quality teaching with collaborative relationships with their communities".

Professor Lingard became ACE national president and chair of the board on January 1, 2012 succeeding Lyndsay Connors.  He is Professorial Research Fellow in the School of Education at the University of Queensland.

ENDS