Last week, during the leaders’ debate, Anthony Albanese put on record what he would like his legacy as prime minister to be. “We want the universal provision of affordable childcare so that it is as natural to have your child have access to childcare as it is to have access to a public school.”

Put like that, it sounds like a grand vision. But if that’s Labor’s ambition, it’s worth asking just how well our schools are going.

If he wins in a fortnight, Albanese will have proved he can win an argument with Peter Dutton.Credit: Joe Benke

In a speech last year, the Productivity Commission chair, Danielle Wood, pointed out that compared to 2000, Australian students had lost eight months of reading gains – and an entire year of maths.

Even more depressing, for a country that boasts of fairness, the gap between poorer students and richer students remains large. We tend to think of the UK as divided by class – the gap between our students is larger.

But here is the bit of Wood’s speech that really stunned me. The learning gap between kids whose folks are highly educated and those who aren’t starts out pretty big. Over time that gap widens. Think about that for a moment: our school system takes an education gap between our students and makes it worse.

One significant dimension of this problem is the division between public and private schools – and the billions of dollars governments give to private schools. This isn’t inevitable. It is embedded in a particular vision of Australia. In part, that is John........

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