Too often it’s too easy to criticise our schools and teachers, but this week we see our education system in all its glory: children working together, having fun and showcasing real talent, while teachers and parents work feverishly behind the scenes to bring all the routines and costumes together to ensure everything’s “all right on the night”.

The looks in the young dancers’ eyes and the smiles on their faces is enough to know just how much they draw and learn from these experiences, and how much of the experience they will take with them on life’s journey.

This is what society expects from its schools; that they will help fuel the hopes, dreams and aspirations of our young people and send them out into the world with a sense of purpose and resolve.

This is why the education sector is fighting so hard to restore the levels of fundings initially promised under the Gonski reforms, but drastically revised in the last federal budget.

In the words of one local principal, an investment in our schools is an investment in our future we can’t lose.

Schools are about so much more than bricks and mortar and the billions that were to flow under Gonski would have provided so many more opportunities for our youth.

But if that’s not enough, that same budget also flagged massive changes to the nation’s tertiary sector, shifting more of the financial burden onto students as it proposes massive funding cuts to universities.

To pay for increased course fees – the government’s solution to funding cuts – students will become more heavily reliant on the government’s loan scheme, which has also been overhauled to the detriment of graduates who face the prospect of paying off the debt for the rest of their lives.

Our politicians tell us we can no longer afford to invest in our tertiary sector, that the “age of entitlement is over”, which sounds somewhat hollow coming from the very men and women who got their degrees for nothing.

But if these reforms result in university becoming only a goal for the rich, and our primary and secondary education sector is failing to keep pace with the rest of the world, then we will have failed this generation – those Kinders on stage at TRECC this week – and eventually our nation will pay the price.