Colleen Harkin on Mornings with Tom Elliott 3AW – 16 June 2026

Tom Elliott:

Joining me is Colleen Harkin. She’s Director of Education Programmes at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Colleen, good morning.

Colleen Harkin:

Good morning. How are you?

Tom Elliott:

Based on what you’ve seen of this dealing principle, should teachers be agreeing to it?

Colleen Harkin:

Look, I want to say first up, I’m a huge supporter of teachers. They obviously do a great job. They’re the most important people in the world. But a 32% increase in salary is clearly a significant bottom line to the Victorian budget. But you’d have to look at then what are we going to get for our money from that, right?

So all of the research would say that if you reduce class size from say 35 to 25, you do see a measurable change in academic outcomes. But reducing it from say 24 to 21, the changes are absolutely negligible and definitely not worth doing it in relative to the cost bottom line.

So just reducing class sizes is not actually the issue. Over the last 20 years, the budget towards education has doubled. Australia-wide it’s now at about $100 billion a year. We used to spend about $11,000 per student and we now spend about 23 to $24,000 per student, but we’re not seeing the academic achievement as a result of that increase in expenditure.

So just decreasing class sizes and just increasing teacher salaries is not actually the problem. It’s not addressing the problem at all.

Tom Elliott:

So what is the problem at the crux then, Colleen? Because we often talk about the bureaucratic BS that comes out of the Department of Education. And I’ve long been passionate about teachers being able to teach off a little bit of intuition, not having to write down every lesson plan, record everything within an inch of its life. Is that the problem for teachers at the moment?

Colleen Harkin:

It is most definitely part of it. The proliferation to pathologize childhood has a lot to answer for. At the moment across Australia, we have 16% of all six-year-old boys on the NDIS and 70% of new entries into NDIS are students under 15 years old. So what that does to a classroom is it places extraordinary demands on teachers. For example, in a year one class, any average teacher would probably have three or four students on the NDIS and the administrative burden that places on them, they’re often-

Tom Elliott:

Hold on. Sorry, Colleen. The average grade one class would have three to four students on the NDIS?

Colleen Harkin:

Correct.

Tom Elliott:

What for?

Colleen Harkin:

We’ve got 16% of all Australian six-year-old boys on NDIS and 7% of girls, which gives you an average of around about 11% of all of our six-year-old children are on NDIS.

Tom Elliott:

What are they on? Do you have-

Colleen Harkin:

In any class that’ll give you a couple of kids and the demand’s on teachers to do individual learning programmes, case conferences, liaising with therapists, support workers, funding applications. It’s extraordinary.

Tom Elliott:

Do you know what in most cases the kids are on the NDIS for and require the support for?

Colleen Harkin:

Well, there’s a high proportion of students who have been pathologized with ADHD or autism. Now I would argue that we have commercialised and incentivized that scenario, so it’s people’s interest to get their child on it, but the consequences of it are extraordinary. And I think to your actual point of this conversation is we’re not actually addressing the real problems that are going on and what the demand’s on teachers and where we actually should be focusing because what we want is capable and competent learners, proficient in literacy and numeracy, and that’s exactly not what we’re addressing.

Tom Elliott:

And I think that’s the key. And again, I don’t want to keep going back to in my day, which wasn’t actually that long ago, but you would go to school, you would learn, you would have a class of 25. There would be kids excelling. There would be kids in the middle. There would be kids who are struggling. If kids were really struggling, I struggled in a couple of subjects. I would get extra tutoring, whatever it might be. Did it all fall on the burden of the teacher and this idea, even from a teacher themselves that, “Oh, I have to teach to every individual student and that the government should be giving me the ability to teach to every individual student” seems ridiculous to me.

Colleen Harkin:

Well, it is literally impossible to do. The demand and the expectations on teachers is literally impossible. So I’m a great supporter and I have great –

Tom Elliott:

Absolutely.

Colleen Harkin:

For the work environment, but we keep piling on more and more things that are irrelevant to what the school should be doing. What we need to make sure is that we have proper teacher training so that they are well-trained to manage a classroom and actually know how to teach. We’ve got to remove and reduce the administrative burdens. We’ve got to have evidence-based curricula, remove the ideology that actually takes teachers away from subject integrity. There’s a whole lot of areas that we’re just not looking at. And so just throwing more money at it is not going to solve the problem.

Tom Elliott:

Colleen, I appreciate your insights this morning. Colleen Harkin, Director of Education Programmes at the Institute of Public Affairs.

This transcript of Colleen Harkin on 3AW Mornings from 16 June 2026 has been edited for clarity.