Submission on Our Schooling Futures: Stronger Together

The Salvation Army applauds the Taskforce’s broad focus on inequality within our compulsory education system and agrees with its analysis that much of this inequality is due to unhelpful competition between schools for students and the budgets which come with students.

While the Army agrees that radical change is required to address this long-standing inequality and the competition which contributes to it, we do not share the Taskforce’s analysis that these problems are mainly due to the governance model of autonomous self-governing schools run by Boards of Trustees.

The Army believes that this inequality and competition is more deeply engrained in our society. Furthermore the Army believes that this inequality is caused by a number of other factors including the values and attitudes of Boards, principals and teachers, the underlying pedagogy and values of our public education system and inadequate and poorly designed funding models.