THE FUNDING WARS Nothing shows Australia’s ongoing obsession with class privilege like schools policy. While many disadvantaged schools get by on the smell of an oily rag, wealthy private schools are building rifle ranges and Olympic-sized swimming pools. Under successive Coalition governments, independent and religious schools have been winning, while the bulk of Australian students educated in government schools have been missing out. Australia has slowly slid down the international rankings, as the gap between our most advantaged and disadvantaged schools widens, mirroring the growing inequality in Australian society. Underlying this inequality is a perverted funding system that sees far greater federal funding flow to private and religious schools than to public schools, even though the majority of students are educated in the government system. Reforming this bizarre largesse has been one of the longest and most bitter struggles in Australian public policy. A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to see my mum’s retirement speech. After 51 years in education, at the age of nearly 70, she was finally handing in her teacher’s registration. Starting out as a student teacher in a one-classroom school in
10
Colac, she taught in Victoria, London and rural Queensland before finishing as a principal of a primary school in Ipswich. For someone about to begin teaching tertiary students myself, it was a special moment. My mum had never really talked to me about her views on pedagogy or her philosophy of schooling – but, from her, I had managed to absorb something pretty special: a passion for teaching. I learned another lesson from my mum in her final years as a primary school principal: the importance of funding. As Labor’s Gonski reforms started to roll out at the end of the Rudd-Gillard years, I once asked her whether she had noticed a difference. Yes. The Gonski money really did make a difference. For her school, in one of the most disadvantaged districts in Queensland, the extra needsbased funding was worth more than a million dollars extra annually. She was able to hire more special needs teachers and use the additional resources to address stubborn problems. Last year, Malcolm Turnbull’s education minister Simon Birmingham attempted to defuse Labor attacks on his party’s private school bias by announcing his “Gonski 2.0” deal, which ostensibly promised a
form of needs-based funding in line with Julia Gillard’s intentions for the original Gonski deal. Approximately $18 billion was promised over a decade, but most of that money was back-loaded in the years well beyond the life of the current government. The AEU – among others – was quick to criticise the deal as disingenuous. While it claimed to address the underfunding of public schools, Birmingham was actually subtracting billions from the level of funding that Labor had pledged back in 2011. Under the new plan, $1.9 billion would be cut from public school funding in 2018 and 2019. By 2023, only 13% of public schools will receive enough funding to reach the minimum Schooling Resource Standard (SRS). Turnbull subsequently struck a deal with private schools that delivered them an extra $1.7 billion in funding. Other backroom deals followed, undermining any claims Birmingham made to adopting a needs-based model. Even if the formula claimed to be needs-based, the quantum certainly was not. As it stands, many state schools around the country aren’t getting their full allocation of the supposedly needs-based SRS – and they still won’t, well into the next decade.