Bill Shorten

Malcolm Turnbull is losing his voice and Bill Shorten has found his. While the PM croaks about “Labor’s lies”, the Opposition Leader roars back that a re-elected Coalition government will take the hammer to Medicare.

We’re in the trenches now, folks, and it will be like this for another 10 days. Shorten has certainly proved a cannier political operator than Turnbull. And let’s say it: he’s proved far more agile. He’s jammed the PM into an all-out commitment of no change to Medicare. Remarkable, really, when the only issue is about how functional and future-ready the health payments system is and who is best placed to handle this. But does it matter? We all want our claims processed efficiently. It’s an operational matter for government. End of story.

Bill Shorten has another story and one that does matter. The funding of our education system, specifically the opposition’s promise to commit to the Gonski funding formula of $37 billion over 10 years, is part of the Labor re-election story. But to date, education has not featured as a central issue of consequence. This is surprising, considering the government’s vulnerabilities.

We’ve barely seen the Education Minister Simon Birmingham during the campaign. Where is he? Apart from the big headline figures for childcare (an extra $3 billion) and for schools (an additional $1.2 billion after 2018), we know little of what the government thinks about the critical issues of young children’s development, or ways to boost effective teaching.

[Coalition living on a prayer with yet another Gonski backflip]

At the tertiary level, it’s worse — with a government that spruiks innovation and research but, at best, can only scratch together an options paper. How about a fully developed policy position on university funding? It’s a dead ordinary contribution and Turnbull should be called out on it. So come on, Bill. You told us on Sunday at the party’s launch that we ain’t seen nothing yet. Get your act together and wedge the PM on an issue that really counts.

Here are a few tips. Take a bit of time to watch some of ABC’s TV’s four-part documentary series Revolution School. It shows, in powerful detail, through the daily lives of some challenged students and stressed teachers, why extra dollars are needed in schools like Melbourne’s Kambrya College. Listen to principal Michael Muscat, who made a decision eight years ago to use national partnership money to invest in proven strategies: leadership across the school, additional coaching for teachers and an emphasis on collaborative teams where ideas are shared about effective interventions.

The point is that Muscat spent wisely, and Kambrya’s journey — from near cot-case to success story — can be replicated in other low socio-economic status schools. We need more Kambryas, and there is no mystery about what works.

So Bill, the national broadcaster has provided a powerful visual to boost your case against the conservatives. There has never been a better time to tackle all that baloney from the right that attempts to link a decline in student performance with an argument about waste. Call it out.

Above all, listen to smart MPs on your own team like Andrew Leigh and Clare O’Neil. They’ve taken the time to familiarise themselves with the globally respected work of one of Australia’s academic treasures, Professor John Hattie. In delivering the Jack Keating Memorial lecture at the University of Melbourne this week, Hattie implored the political class to change its narrative on schools. Stop appeasing the parents, Hattie says, over issues that don’t make a jot of difference: class sizes, uniforms and choice in schooling. Instead, develop a system that values expertise.

Forget the pretence that all teachers are equal. Instead find ways to celebrate and reward the teachers who understand the key points of clinical practice: diagnosis, evaluation and intervention. Revolution School showed some stunning examples of this. The near burnt-out teacher who makes a simple but profound change by shutting up and listening to what her students are saying. One of the best parts of the TV series has been watching how young people change when the adults around them show them respect and don’t give up on them. We see the dorky disengaged under-achiever emerge as a motivated school leader. At the other end of the spectrum, we see the best stretch themselves even further.

It all plays to Hattie’s arguments that we need to be talking about personal growth, impact and school progress. Our biggest problem, and one we have to conquer if we are to make the grade with our competitor countries, is with the schools we consider to be high-achieving. Hattie maintains 50% of them are on cruise control and they need to do their own version of a Kambrya re-boot. Get cracking on this, and agile Australia here we come.

So how’s that sounding, Bill? One more tip. In these final days of the campaign, be even more shameless about exploiting your children. In particular, talk more about young Clementine. But make it a story about all Australian children. Labor is surrounded by policy wonks who know what the data tells us — that the educational future of a socially privileged child is vastly different from a child born into disadvantage.

While investment in early childhood has trebled to over $7 billion, we are getting a poor return for this. It’s expensive baby-sitting. Compared with other OECD countries, our policy mix and ever-increasing budget allocations are doing little to address inequity or close the gaps in capability. Again, this is all documented.

[Gonski reforms are vital to our ‘agile’ future]

Professor Collette Tayler’s research with the E4Kids longitudinal study shows that very young children who live with a range of risk factors are going backwards. Among many deficits, these are children who arrive at school with limited vocabularies and struggle all their lives to catch up. Every expert that looks at this, and we have loads of them in this country, will tell you that a major policy re-focus on children’s development and learning will give us the best bang for our buck.

There’s still time, Bill. We know from the Medicare scare campaign how easily Turnbull rolls over. So pick a real fight and lock in a great future for our children.

*Maxine McKew is an Hon. Fellow at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne