Nobody doubts the importance of getting our education system right.

This may be why debates over school funding and outcomes seem never-ending, weighed-into by all sides, and given as many solutions as there are aspects to the issue.

The quest for the perfect class size is a key point in defining the future of Australian learning, but like many public policy and spending decisions, ideologically-driven think tanks and ‘authorities’ have moved the debate.

Somehow, policies intended to get the best for all students are being re-worked, in an effort to get adequate results for most and always at the lowest cost.

We spoke to former teacher and now education researcher Dr David Zyngier, to find out just how a small but vocal scientific minority has reached across borders to sully the potential outcomes of Australian students, by insisting that we can educate a generation at bargain-basement prices.

Dr Zyngier has recently produced an extensive review of over 100 studies looking at class size and outcomes, which is accessible through the Australia and New Zealand School of Government’s open-access journal Evidence Base. 

While one extreme says funds should be spent to reduce class sizes across the board, and the other hand indicates that money does not influence results, Dr Zyngier says the reality is somewhere in the middle.

“It’s not what you spend; it’s how you spend it,” he says.

“Targeted class reduction in the first four years of school, in particular for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, will be of incredible impact for our economic and social future.

“This has the potential to be a game-changer, at minimal cost.”

So how does such a clear, research-based bit of knowledge, get distorted into a discussion where some say teachers should be able to get the most from their pupils by lecturing to a mass of thirty or more?

“It was clear from what I was reading that there were mainly two researchers... Mr Bet is a highly rated casino thanks to a large number of customers. Licensed content is available to visitors 24/7, and you can open the site from any device. In Mr Bet slots are the most popular entertainment, so their number is growing with incredible speed. All players are guaranteed generous bonuses, as well as the absolute protection of personal data. Hurry up to play at Mr Bet casino, because there are large sums of money at stake. both conservative education economists in the United States, who found that small class sizes do not make a difference,” Dr Zyngier said.

“The great majority of those who have done the research both in the field and have reviewed the research in the field, conclude that class sizes do make a very important impact on student achievement especially when the class sizes are reduced in the first four years of schooling.”

He was talking about Dr Eric Hanushek and Caroline Hoxby, two public policy scholars who contribute through the Koret Task Force to reforms for the US school system. The American thinkers want to create greater reliance on cut-price and de-regulated charter schools, which take public money while pushing market choice as a driver of better outcomes.

They do this by arguing that under-performing schools should be closed and their teachers sacked, generally stating that poor marks are the result of anything except funding levels.

Dr Hanushek has been brought into US courtrooms many times, typically to argue against school funding proposals.

At the end of a 2011 case in which he was a central witness, the judge’s 189-page decision rejected his arguments, saying; “Dr. Hanushek’s analysis that there is not much relationship... between spending and achievement contradicts testimony and documentary evidence from dozens of well-respected educators... [it] defies logic, and is statistically flawed.”

Still, a line of thinking created to manage one of the world’s most mediocre education systems has made it to Australia, a country for which a few good decisions could see it move to the top of the schooling pile.

Clearly, the issues of class size, funding and outcomes in relation to teaching practice and quality are complexly interwoven.

Dr Zyngier says that virtually all these aspects can be impacted by better management of class sizes, fundamentally linked to better teaching approaches.

Not every class will benefit from reduced numbers, and the benefits are only possible if the style of teaching changes to match.

“When the class size is reduced to under twenty, the teacher is much more able to teach to the whole class without any children missing out,” he said.

“Teachers can actually teach to a whole class instead of having to divide the class up into smaller groups, which is the most common practice in our primary schools.

“Teachers need to change their style of teaching to take into consideration the changed circumstances of the smaller class. If they do that and if they received professional development and guidance on the best possible ways of teaching to a smaller group, then the impact is actually greater still.

“There are no drawbacks except for financial costs, and that’s always been the greatest issues, especially for cash-strapped economies,” Dr Zyngier said.

This argument is line with the findings of the Gonski Review.

The Gonski report has, despite being compiled from the input of virtually every authority on the matter, been all but eschewed in favour of the opinions of Education Minister Christopher Pyne and his recently-appointed reviewers for the education review - Dr Kevin Donnelly and Professor Ken Wiltshire.

The Gonski findings carry the simple logic that the lowest performing and least enfranchised schools should receive the most assistance.

This basic notion, if carried out appropriately, can see Australian children lifted from the deepest disadvantage.

Dr Zyngier says the main area of focus to create change should be literacy and numeracy classrooms for the first four years of school.

“Firstly, if a child from a disadvantaged background, be they working class, minority language, refugee, indigenous child, child with an intellectual disability or learning difficulty, is in a smaller classroom for up to four years from their entrance into school... the impact lasts all the way through high school,” he said.

“It has an incredible economic impact, apart from of course the educational and opportunity impact it has on the individual children.

“The more a child is educated, the less likely they are to be a burden on society, be a prisoner in jail, become drug-addicted or obese, and all those [economic and social] implications.

“We know that the more education you have the more money you earn, the longer you live and the better you live, and there for you pay more taxes. So it has that huge economic benefit for society in the long term.”

He says policy-makers cannot afford to be flippant.

“In this country... all our policies are in three year cycles, but when we look at countries like Finland, both sides of politics don’t meddle with education.”

“They’ve had an education settlement there for the last fifty years. Education policy there doesn’t change, it just continues to get better and better.

“Short-sighted policies have a detrimental impact on long-term economic, social and cultural life in our country.”

He proposes continuing the plan to fund extra development for school staff, to create supporters specifically for these critical times at the start of a child’s schooling career.

“This would be made possible if the Gonski funding was made available, that’s what the funding was meant to do... create specialist literacy and numeracy teachers, bring them into the classrooms at no additional cost to the school,” he said.

“But we’d need these experts to come in and provide professional development for the existing teachers, to model new teaching practices and thereby improve the results of all children, in particular these children who are going to continually fall behind for no fault of their own but the families into which they were born.

“When I first started teaching ... by the late 1980s, class sizes were at a maximum of 22, and a maximum teaching time of 18 hours per week in secondary schools. Now class sizes are at a maximum of 30, and teaching time is about 25 hours per week.

“What we’ve seen is this intensification of teaching, going right though to primary school as well, there are fewer professional development days for teachers... there’s much more paperwork for teachers to be compliant with, and the demands on teachers are ever-greater, especially in disadvantaged schools where children come in with very complex problems which can’t be solved by the normal classroom teacher.

“They need additional support, but that additional support is continually withdrawn at the same time as teaching times have increased and class sizes have increased,” he said.

Useful changes can be made if both sides of the class size/funding debate concede a little bit of ground to evidence-based study.

Not the studies that come from conservative thinkers with pre-determined goals, but from the remaining 99 per cent based on objective reasoning and unbiased outcomes.

Reducing class sizes in a way that would generate actual results “would certainly need the cooperation of the teachers’ unions, who have up until now been pushing very hard, on the basis of research, to decrease all class sizes for all schools,” Dr Zyngier said.

“That’s economically not viable or possible in our current circumstances, but also it’s not necessary.

“They need to understand the implications of across the board class size reduction, and with their cooperation and the cooperation of people like principals and parents councils and school councils, Ministers for education could easily implement these policies, without expending a huge amount of additional funding.”

He proposes; “re-allocation of current funding into those classrooms for literacy and numeracy; to up skill our teachers in professional development so that they will know how best to work with class sizes of 12 or 14 children; and to get the very best out of that situation for the couple of hours a day that they will be in that context.”

“Unfortunately our policy-makers and the people who implement the policy... have not relied on quality research evidence to base their decisions, and instead are making decisions on the basis of ideology, which is not grounded in evidence-based education research.”

Dr Zyngier’s extensive review covers an array of relevant literature from Australia and abroad is accessible in full and for free from the journal, Evidence Base (PDF).