Chapter Synopses

Introduction

Preliminary Pages

Index

Chapter 1 - Education, science and innovation

Terry Moran, head of the Prime Minister’s department in Canberra, overviews the challenges and issues facing Australia in the twenty-first century global knowledge economy. With telling comments on each sector in turn—schooling, vocational education and training, higher education, and research and development—Moran provides a grounded rationale for investment in human capital and innovation. He identifies capacity constraints and key policy issues, including the structural and political challenges arising from shared federal–state responsibilities.

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Chapter 2: Imagining and implementing policy

Maxine McKew, who replaced former Prime Minister John Howard in the federal seat of Bennelong at the 2007 election, sets out a reasoned and passionate argument for renewed policy attention to education and training, focusing especially on schooling and early childhood education. McKew catalogues the outcomes of a decade of national neglect that has defined the task now facing the Rudd government. In the first Rudd government ministry Maxine McKew was named as Parliamentary Secretary assisting the Prime Minister with a special responsibility for early childhood education.

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Chapter 3: Challenges for early learning

Collette Tayler focuses on the greatest of all challenges facing Australia in education and innovation: the creation of a world-class system of early learning and child development. Tayler, Professor of Early Childhood Education and Care at the University of Melbourne, shows that given the influence of early learning on human capacity later in life, and given the cost of early learning compared to that of remedial education (not to mention the cost to the community of the failure to educate all citizens well), a better early learning system would be highly cost effective.

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Chapter 4: How good is Australian school education?

Barry McGaw, former director of education programs at the OECD and now director of the Melbourne Educational Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, provides a state-of-the-art summary of the standard of Australian schools and students compared to other nations. Using the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) data he finds that, contrary to some claims, our schools do very well overall. But learning in Australia is more uneven between socioeconomic groups than certain other countries, and there are disturbing signs that our performance is declining in some respects.

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Chapter 5: The global challenge for universities

This chapter is from Shih Choon Fong, until 2008 President of the National University of Singapore, one of the world’s most dynamic universities. Shih describes the global university landscape and the strategic issues facing nations and individual universities, drawing out the implications of the growing importance of the Asia-Pacific region in the emerging global knowledge economy. He emphasises the challenge before us if we are to match our awesome capacity in science and technology with more advanced human ethics and cross-border relations.

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Chapter 6: Global setting, national policy and higher education

Simon Marginson, Professor of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne, analyses the issues and problems generated by a decade of under-funding in higher education, coupled with frayed government–university relations and the growing dependence of Australian institutions on the international student market, which provides more than a quarter of all student enrolments. A key part of the policy solution is the creation of an Australian Tertiary Education Commission able to operate at arm’s length from day-to-day politics.

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Chapter 7: Confronting challenges for universities

Michael Gallagher, former head of the federal government’s higher education division and now Executive Director of the Group of Eight research-intensive universities, explores the potential for new policy mechanisms in higher education to transcend past neglect, forge new political goodwill and meet the need for long-term thinking and global effectiveness. He emphasises the need for better policy-oriented research.

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Chapter 8: Research, innovation and knowledge transfer

RMIT University Vice-Chancellor Margaret Gardner from RMIT University works through the policy issues involved in upgrading research and innovation to the level of comparable international countries. Margaret argues that Australian research policy has been unduly focused on allocation mechanisms for a constant cake and that we need a greater emphasis on capacity-building if we are to keep pace with other nations.

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Chapter 9: Putting research on the policy agenda

In this chapter the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University, Ian Chubb, calls for a renewed emphasis on long-term policy planning (a recurring theme through all chapters), draws out the crucial importance of building capacity in our strong research universities on the global stage, and explains how we can strengthen national performance by addressing gaps, distributional anomalies and perverse incentives in current research policy.

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