The biggest problem families and schools face is the power imbalance generated by unions.

Unions do not have the cure for ailing Australian schools. Unions are the ailment.

Decades of ‘silver bullet’ reforms have failed to clear away the decay entrenched in our school systems. The solution? We could try dismantling union control over every Australian family.

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures indicate more than 4 million students are currently enrolled in approximately 9,500 schools nationwide. The approximate number of teachers in Australian schools is a little more than 303,000.

Despite that, the working conditions of teachers responsible for the school education of 4 million Australians lie firmly in the hands of unions.

In other words, the controlling force in every school in Australia is not the parent body, a Minister of Education, or the Prime Minister. The balance of power lies squarely in the hands of the union movement.

Unions work on numbers. They love numbers – the bigger, the better.

There is a reason why decades of silver bullet reforms have been unsuccessful. We can’t afford them. The same tired old complaints about class size, curriculum, workload, and fear of parents have to be challenged. The guarantee of an income and a healthy superannuation payout on retirement – despite performance – is essentially theft of the self-employed.

Union-orchestrated reforms have little do with care and concern for teachers, and even less to do with student welfare. The real benefit is to the unions themselves, in the form of numbers. Each reform requires more employees, which equates to more union members, and therefore more power and income for the unions.

Imagine the introduction of a ‘reform’ to combat workload and administration burdens that provided one support person for every teacher. The role would be a ‘non-teaching’ one but, because the work would be carried out in schools, these new employees would become members of and represented by teacher’s unions. Double the 300,000 membership and what do you have? Union control over the 600,000 employees who influence the future of our nation.

Unions argue that time-poor teachers cannot manage to prepare individualised plans to cater for the varying needs of their students. Yet unions are silent on teachers not being respected as individuals; the unions only value a teacher as one of many, ensuring collective bargaining and acceptance of ‘lowest common denominator’ standards.

These two features – collective bargaining and ineptitude – fuel the unions’ power base. But who is speaking out against them?

Any doubt about the unions’ encouragement of teacher ineptitude can be quelled by worldwide rankings. Australian schools are below 10 on the World Top 20 Project for school education, and they sit well below 10th place for Mathematics, Science, and Reading on the PISA worldwide ranking.

Schools are intended to be places of teaching and learning. Education is intended to afford every citizen a sense of belonging, responsibility for economic contribution, and an opportunity for personal fulfilment. Schooling is paid for by the taxes of the Australian citizen via the government of the day.

Governments and leaders come and go. Unions remain.

Educators provide a service to American families. Unions do not.