Every other day there seems to be a news story about the largesse with which public money is dispensed to private schools while the public education system falls further into disrepair and dysfunction. As reported in February 2022 by the Guardian, recent analysis by Save Our Schools shows that between 2009 and 2020 government funding for independent schools increased by $3,338 a student compared with just $703 more per student for public schools. The chronic underfunding of public education is one of those seemingly intractable crises that will probably bubble away as long as our parliament remains what is has always been: in the words of journalists Noah Yim and Daniel Carter, unrepresentative, élitist, and homogenous, and stacked with private-school graduates.

Angela Betzien, predominately a writer of plays for young audiences, turns a satiric eye to this deep inequality of funding and opportunity in her new work, Chalkface, a co-production by State Theatre Company SA and Sydney Theatre Company. Marketed as The Office meets Teachers, the play dramatises a year in the life of a group of teachers at the fictional West Vale Primary, the dilapidated staffroom of which – realised with almost nauseating verisimilitude by designer Ailsa Paterson – is home to at least one rat. The coffee, spooned out of a vat of Nescafé, costs a gold coin while the independent school up the road has its own full-time barista. As if these details didn’t paint a sufficiently squalid picture, Betzien has injury compensation-seeking teacher Steve (Ezra Juanta) inform us that ‘all primary schools smell like trapped fart’.

Thus Betzien sets up a dichotomy emblematic of our times: ever-diminishing funding and resources on the one hand, and ever-increasing neoliberal ideology and corporate jargon on the other. West Vale principal Douglas (Nathan O’Keefe), whom the other teachers refer to as ‘Thatcher’, announces at one point, his voice audibly trembling, that ‘NAPLAN prep is where we need to focus our efforts’. Douglas’s bête noire is the caustic, cigarette-smoking Pat (Catherine McClements), an old-school teacher impervious to the bureaucratic, KPI-centred turn in education that he – as well as dictatorial office manager and former banking sector worker Cheryl (Michelle Ny) – embodies. Over their enmity, which is contrasted with the enthusiasm of fresh-out-of-university ingénue Anna (Stephanie Somerville), hangs the constant threat of the school’s closure or, perhaps worse, its subsumption by a mega-school.   

For Anna, steeped in post-modern pedagogy and voguish ideas about neuroplasticity and student-centred learning, the school’s disruptive students – the most challenging of whom is the brilliant but volatile ‘Hurricane Little’ – are ‘resource-intensive’; for Pat, they’re ‘a lot of little shits’. Chalkface’s plot, thin though it is, revolves around such tensions, as well as Cheryl’s mysterious shredding of documents that seem to point to the misappropriation of school funds by a recently deceased teacher. In one of the play’s best scenes, set in the strictly off-limits stationery cupboard, Pat bemoans an education system that prepares children for a life of servitude (‘pedagogy’, she explains, is derived from the Greek ‘paidagogos’, the name for a household slave who was the attendant of a school-aged child) while Anna wonders if West Vale will end up like the schools in Chernobyl – abandoned and decayed.