The penny is about to drop for the schools lobby, and Christopher Pyne is having a good time giving it a push.

The contrast on last night’s Q&A between Pyne’s real politic and the wishful thinking of the audience and panellists (with the partial exception of always-sensible Nicola Roxon) was almost painful to watch. The facts they refused to face are as follows.

First, there can be no big pay rises for teachers. There are so many teachers in this large-scale, labour-intensive, government-funded industry that even small across-the-board increases hurt budgets

Second, there will be no big or lasting improvement in the academic standing of new recruits to the profession. Teaching can’t compete with other options, not on pay, not on career structure, and in many schools, not on the job satisfaction either.

Third, there will there be no further reductions in class sizes, and nor should there be. Educational gains from class size-reduction hit the law of diminishing returns long ago. Almost any other way of spending new money would be more productive.

Fourth, there will be very little new money. Most state governments, with the possible exception of WA, are strapped, and the feds are in no position to bail them out.

The hope of the side is Gonski, but it was obvious from the release of his proposals earlier this year that they represent a big political and financial ask.

The weekend’s news was that the financial ask has increased by a billion or so dollars. Today’s news — that NSW is breaking ranks to introduce its own new funding scheme — suggests that Gonski is getting out of political reach as well.

In any event, even a fully implemented Gonski would at best reduce the problems schools are running into, not remove them.

That is what Pyne was saying last night, either directly or by extension, and that is what no one wanted to hear. But where will that take Pyne or one of his colleagues as the new federal minister for education in a year or so?

The overarching fact is that the big reform strategy of the past 50 years and the consensus that supported it are exhausted, but work on a new strategy has scarcely begun, not by Pyne, not by anyone.

Such a strategy would require new sources of money; a levelled-up funding and regulatory playing field; technology-rich work processes for students and teachers; a much greater division of labour in the schools workforce; new kinds of industrial agreements; and a complete rejig of the hugely cumbersome and ineffectual decision-making structures of Australian schooling.

In the absence of any of that, what will Pyne do? My prediction: preside over a continuing acceleration in the unintended consequences of the Whitlam/Karmel reforms of 1973 that see the educationally rich getting steadily richer, and the poor poorer.

*Dean Ashenden has worked as an academic and a political adviser/consultant to many national and state ministers, agencies and organisations. He has been presenter of Radio National’s Education Issues program and has contributed as a commentator and as compiler/publisher of The Good Universities Guides and The Good Schools Guides to many radio and television programs.