Public Accountability or Fiscal Control? Benchmarks of Performance in Australian Schooling

Abstract

The Industry Commission review of service provision in school education aims to define performance benchmarks for Australia's eight government education systems, by providing comparative measures of efficiency in education provision. Such benchmarks are likely to lead to a reduction in the level of public resources for government schools unless it is possible to demonstrate the link between expenditure on schooling and school effectiveness. If efficiency audits like the Industry Commission review are to deal with issues of school effectiveness adequately, they should avoid the tendency of previous public sector audits to focus on financial data on schools expenditure to the exclusion of data on student achievement. This paper suggests an approach to measuring system performance which would establish benchmarks that reflected both the efficiency and effectiveness of Australian school systems, and warns against the misuse of performance indicators as an instrument in the determination of funding levels for schools.