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Schooling in Queensland
Monday, 27 August 2012 22:11 | Written by Graham Young

I've polled on education a number of times over the years, and it seems that we're always dissatisfied with it. Education is more a Labor and Greens concern than an LNP one, and that is reflected in the composition of our respondents who are a bit more to the left than the general population.

The latest Galaxy poll puts the two-party preferred spread as 60% to 40% in favour of the LNP. Our sample splits 50/50, so a ten percentage point lean to the left.

There is overwhelming agreement that the current education system does not meet our needs, with Greens being the most dissatisfied (not something I expected). The qual (next post) makes it clear that what differentiates respondents is not whether they think the education system is failing to perform, but why.

Education System Serve Needs Community

Raising teacher salaries isn’t high on the agenda, but a greater focus on literacy and numeracy is, followed by expenditure on things like computers. Buildings is last. This is a problem for teachers' unions pitching for pay increases, unless they can somehow link those pay increases to literacy and numeracy.

This table looks at the factors ranked first and second for importance. It measures the percentage of respondents who nominated an issue as either number one or number two.

 Education Factors Rank Order 1 and 2

And this looks at the last two preferences from the 5. This is essentially the mirror reverse of the other graph.

Education Factors Rank Order last 2

Katter voters believe in literacy and numeracy and don’t appear to think paying teachers will help with this. (I might be being too harsh here).

In some respects it is hard to square these tables with the following one which puts teaching quality at the top. Class size and principal autonomy are at the bottom. Important to note that these propositions are all strongly supported so what we are looking at is relative favourabilities, but in no case is any proposition unvafourable.

Education Importance Other Factors

And it’s official – we all think education was better in our day, apart from Labor voters. In fact it was also consistent across ages, so that you believe it to be the case no matter whether you were 24 or 74. Katter voters see the greatest decline, and I was surprised to see that Greens were marginally disenchanted too. Labor voters were the only bloc to believe that education had improved, but still fewer than fifty per cent of them believed this to be the case.

Education Better Your Day

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