Prelude: The Karmel report (1973)

Schools in Australia, the report of the Interim Committee for the Schools Commission chaired by Peter Karmel, was released in May 1973 to almost universal acclaim. The committee knew the newly elected Whidam Labor Government would support its recommendations, and held nothing back. Few government reports have secured such an impact. Within two years, the funding recommended by the Karmel report had lifted Commonwealth spending on schools from $364 to $1091 million and transformed the material position of all schools, private and government. The report settled the Commonwealth's role in school education and laid down a system of classifying and funding private schools that was still intact more than two decades later. Its Disadvantaged Schools Program was the high-water mark of efforts to eradicate poverty through education, and the prototype for later programs of positive discrimination and targeting to raise participation. Discursively, its reach was almost as long; the Karmel notions of quality of opportunity, diversity, choice, devolution and participatory citizenship left deep marks in schools and government.