11 August 2026

Explore the future of public education in South Australia with Tom Bentley, Vice President for Strategy and Community Impact at RMIT University. This episode delves into the purpose of public education in the 21st century, reflecting on lessons from the Gonski review and addressing the ongoing challenges facing schools today. Learn how education reform can foster equity, strengthen community relationships, and build learner agency. Listeners will gain insight into the evolving role of public institutions, the importance of inclusive approaches, and how schools can support resilient, engaged communities.

Show Notes

Transcript

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to the Teacher podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today I'm joined by a very special guest, Tom Bentley. He's the vice president for strategy and community impact and the vice chancellor's innovation professor at RMIT University in Melbourne. Welcome, Tom.

Tom Bentley: Thank you for having me.

Dale Atkinson: Can I ask an existential question first? What is the point of public education in the 21st century?

Tom Bentley: Wow, that's a good question. It's to develop people and their potential, and to support an inclusive and resilient community.

Dale Atkinson: And when we talk about education reform, as we have, we've been fortunate to have you in a few different forums with us over the last couple of days speaking to some of the senior executive group and others and we're talking about education reform. When we talk about that, what are we actually looking for within our systems currently?

Tom Bentley: Yeah. That's another great question and a challenge 'cause education reform, often the way that we're used to it, I think is often, ends up being about whether it's gonna be huge new policy document and maybe a restructure of something that we do. But reform actually means to reshape, and I think what we're looking for in education reform is both ways of achieving the activities and the responsibilities of our existing schooling and education systems in more effective, maybe more efficient ways, to find better ways of using the limited resources that we have. That's, the people and also the, the money that goes into public education. But what we're also trying to do through reform is to find ways of meeting those new challenges. We're all very aware that society is changing around us, and that's a daily reality for educators and of course for students. And so, I see that in lots of jurisdictions, the reform is about trying to find new and better ways to meet those changing expectations or those new pressures and opportunities and to fold those into the way that our existing systems work.

Dale Atkinson: Now, you were involved in the initial Gonski review, which is now passing 20 years ago, I guess - in that space. What did you get right in that space as a process and what didn't you anticipate that you would have loved to have known back then?

Tom Bentley: Yeah, I do very remember the days and the nights in 2009 and '10. I think we announced the terms of reference for that first review in about April of 2010, and then the review kicked off and then a whole bunch of other things kicked off. And Julia Gillard became Prime Minister overnight just a few months later. And it turned out to be the beginning of a very turbulent time, but also then a very extended period of time for school funding reform and for the kind of question of investment and equity in the resourcing of schooling. I think one thing that we got right was we set up a review process which sought to address the issues across the community. So, it had panel members who had expertise and credibility for different schooling sectors and different parts of Australia. And we had terms of reference which started off relatively simple and basic about how to meet the, effectively meet the schooling needs of Australians and to think about the role of school funding in doing that, including in equitable ways. There were some additional terms of reference that were then further developed. But we tried to ask the basic and important questions rather than try and get the school funding review to come up with a total comprehensive policy blueprint, if that makes sense. I didn't anticipate, we didn't anticipate that it might take more than 10 years to get to a kind of landing point, even from the initial findings of the initial review, and I didn't, certainly didn't anticipate that it would take more decades ultimately to implement a national school resourcing standard across every jurisdiction around Australia. But we did know that it was gonna be complex and potentially drawn out. And I think another thing that we managed to get right or that the process eventually got right was that partly through the guidance of the panel and the, particularly the leadership role that David Gonski played, but also the relative independence of the review process itself – it was an independent review panel, and it had the, the federal department was supporting it as a secretariat, but it wasn't for the federal minister or anybody else just to own or try to implement their own version of a solution. The only way to get to a better accepted and more equitable model of resourcing for all schools in all parts of Australia was to accept that we needed some way of creating a community standard. It wasn't about one government, it wasn't about one school sector, it wasn't about one moment in time. It was actually about a shared definition and then an independent set of measurements and assessments in order to try and implement this over time, and that was an extremely complicated political conundrum. How do you... It was a bit like... And when I was building up to working on this problem, I had a lot of different people very legitimately say to me a version of that, that kind of old line where they said, “you wouldn't start from here." And lots of people thought it was impossible to crack this nut, and that's because it was so contested. It's so complex, so fragmented. It had been politicized. The questions of school funding and competition within, between school sectors had been politicized in a way that I think were incredibly unhelpful to the community interest overall. But the slow answer, although it was painstaking to try and get there, was to work through a process of review and then consensus building and then negotiation about who would fund the solutions, which led to a different acceptance of an independent standard and an expectation or an entitlement that every student should be able to access, whoever they were and wherever they might be around Australia. I guess the other thing that I didn't anticipate was that this would end up resting partly or helping to be delivered through a public campaign, I Give a Gonski... which the Public Education Union really took on to champion and advocate, so there were a lot of twists and turns along the way.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, what a process and still ongoing as a process.

Tom Bentley: Absolutely.

Dale Atkinson: One of the drivers around Gonski and a lot of education reform is trying to decouple a student's background as a determinant of their future prosperity and options. And a risk I think educators and education systems fall into is perhaps, well it's easy to give up hope in some respects. So, while we still recognise the real challenges that some kids and young people face, how do we maintain the hope in that space?

Tom Bentley: We do it partly by talking to students and maintaining real relationships with educators and recognising that it's very often in our everyday experience and our lived experience of how people do great things in imperfect circumstances that's where energy and resilience and shared optimism can come from. The second way I think of maintaining hope is that, is through honesty. I think that the importance of honest dialogue, of public discussion, of ideas and a values-informed public debate is, it's another essential part of our democracy. We can't expect our societies to do well unless we are able to maintain some of those public processes together. So, I find that hope and optimism for the future and confidence about our ability to solve some of these very challenging problems really comes from investing energy in the community relationships around us.

Dale Atkinson: Community relationships is an interesting one, and that's been talked about a lot with you over the last day or two, and it's interesting when you were reflecting in the conversations about some of the situations in terms of community breakdown and a tension that's going on in a lot of areas where economically there's been decline. What is the role of public schools within society where there are those economic tensions and where there is difficulty around community cohesion more broadly, both on ethnic lines, economic lines, and all those sorts of things?

Tom Bentley: Yeah, I think it's really interesting to try and look at this in a bit of historical context and think, public schooling was, obviously, our shared education functions go back thousands of years, and they're part of culture and different civilisations. And we have also had some great conversation about First Nations educational practice and how that's embedded in a much deeper culture. Our modern public education institutions have been invented in the last two or 300 years, and so they were part of modern state building, they became part of national identity and creating modern nations and they were developed both to be economically efficient but also to be equitable and to serve the interests of everyone, including working people, if I can put it like that.

What's really interesting is that in so many countries, including Australia, we've been through this last 30, 40 years of economic change, which has been dominated by markets and in which private choice and market-based competition have had a much bigger role. And so public education is, in some respects, I think been pushed into being a kind of seen as a minority pursuit, which I think has been a mistake. And it's a very interesting one to unravel because as you said, Dale, economically, maybe many people have been getting more prosperous. There is more money and wealth in our market systems, but at the same time, inequality has been growing and actually many more people have been suffering some of the challenges of poverty and disadvantage and marginalisation. And it's become a huge problem and challenge for public education systems and especially for schools in specific communities if or, and where the result of market change and sometimes of policy change is that public schools are serving greater and greater concentrations of students and families who are grappling with multiple challenges all at the same time.

And I think what it brings us back to try and actually answer your question, is that we're coming to a new appreciation of the role of public systems and public education. I think it's still possible to recognise multiple forms of schooling and to recognise the importance and the reality of diversity and choice in schooling. But in a time when economic inequality and the erosion of trust in other institutions is having a really damaging effect, and you can see that damaging effect all around the world. Actually, public education re-demonstrating a certain kind of value, which is the value of giving everyone in a community a shared set of experiences. Not only giving them skills and knowledge and helping them to be able to participate successfully in the economy, but actually socialising us all together, developing a set of civic and community skills, developing an ability to appreciate and understand each other, developing the awareness and the learning capabilities to understand why compromise and cooperation across a diverse community are important.

It turns out that unless we can develop together some of that, that public educational value, it's very difficult for us to work successfully across a community in all the other things that a community needs to do. And so we're coming back to the value that I think a lot of professional educators have always been aware of, which is that shared social or civic set of relationships turn out to be a kind of fundamental economic asset that, that we all need to

Dale Atkinson: One of the sort-of trends in the last, perhaps since you kicked off the Gonski stuff, but perhaps pre-dates that, is a sort of diminishment of trust in public institutions... and a sense of disengagement or disempowerment or a feeling of disempowerment around democratic process for a lot of communities. How do we build faith and trust in public institutions and agency within an education setting from, for our kids from the very earliest stage?

Tom Bentley: Yeah. I'll try and give a simple and short answer to that, and then of course it leads into a whole set of ongoing discussions that lots of people are having, but how do we rebuild trust in public institutions? I think there are two main ways. One is widening participation. Everybody needs to be able to participate in democracy every day, and that needs to start with students having agency and being active participants in their schools and their local communities. The second main way is through institutions demonstrating that they are responsive and that they're successful or that they're impactful. And so it can be very hard, particularly in the very polluted information environment that we seem to be in at the moment. But when institutions at that broader scale, whether it's cities or education departments or regulators or nonprofit institutions or sporting clubs or whoever it might be, when institutions are capable of recognising new challenges and solving for community need in a way that is really visible and impactful, then they do generate trust, especially when they do it with widespread participation. That's how the solutions come together.

Dale Atkinson: Can I talk about learner agency a little bit?

Tom Bentley: Sure.

Dale Atkinson: How do we build that without confusing it with just a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure for the kids? For the teacher experiencing that in the classroom, what's the approach?

Tom Bentley: One, I think that learner agency and student voice and learning to take responsibility and work together and to be active co-creators of your learning outcomes,

these are things that are features of brilliant educational practice, even in our compulsory subjects, and even in our traditionally timetabled curriculum. Brilliant maths teaching and learning should involve learner agency in that sense. Understanding what metacognition and emotional self-regulation mean in early years child settings are things that our fantastic educators can do. Working with parents and supporting the kind of best practice models of learning growth. But there's a whole lot that we can add to that, if you like. One of the things that we've been talking about over the last day or two is that the formal curriculum inside the 9.00am to 4.00pm classroom day and the co-curriculum that happens through community learning challenges or sporting and artistic clubs or work-related learning and industry participation, these are not two sets of things which just occasionally talk to each other. These are both fundamental elements of a rounded education. And our opportunity in developing agency is actually to build up the agency, the experience, the voice of every learner in co-constructing what's the best learning routine from them from a very early age, and then how do they reflect on and give feedback on, and then start contributing to these varied programs of learning in a way which shares honest feedback and contributes to the functionality of the whole system, even if it's just a very local system of clubs and local community participation. And a part of the value of that is that I think students and learners are continuously surprising us about what they can contribute. And when they feel proud when they feel empowered, when they feel like active participants, they can co-own some of these shared activities. We also know that they become responsible contributors, and they help, as they mature and develop themselves, they end up extending and strengthening the systems of provision that our adults are trying to offer.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah wow. Can I get you to do a thought experiment… and it's probably linked with some of what you were describing there. If you imagine a successful public education system in 10 years' time, what is it doing? What does it look like?

Tom Bentley: Wow. Yes. I mean I think it's a local network. It's not one school that you go to five or six days a week. It's a whole range of different activities, and obviously you can access it through your device, and it’s probably AI-enhanced in terms of how you can capture information about it and the voices and conversations that are going on around it.

It's actually a network of quite grounded, very place-based activities in which different people are pursuing learning activities at different times. That means that every student who might be enrolled and logged into this system is probably working on the basis of a personalised learning program, if we can call it like that. But also, that there will be more and more people of different ages and lifelong learners who are involved in sharing and delivering these activities too.

Dale Atkinson: God that sounds good. If you had one challenge for every person working in South Australia's public education and a message for them now, what would that be?

Tom Bentley: Keep the passion. Keep the fire burning for equity, but also for amazing learning growth by every student. And, I mean despite some of the immediate challenges and the global pressure, that we feel about the impact of climate change or the need to create jobs in a time of AI and the sense of worry that can come with the negative impacts of social media and the worry about economic inequality and, what might happen, actually, let's recognize what a wonderful place South Australia is and use the depth of community relationships and the educational expertise that we have to create those inclusive, resilient futures.

Dale Atkinson: That's a pretty positive message. Tom Bentley, thanks for your time.

Tom Bentley: Thank you.