Australian Public Schools Remain Dangerously Under-funded

I have spent a large part of my professional career advocating for educational equity. I believe that educational opportunity and advancement is one of the most important strategies – probably THE most important – Australia has to create and sustain a resilient, cohesive, democratic and economically successful society. Core to our educational attainment is the success and quality – and consequently, proper funding – of our public primary and secondary schools.

(Full disclosure: I am a graduate of public schools in the USA. Below is a photo of my high school.)

The World Bank is unequivocal: “Education is a human right, a powerful driver of development, and one of the strongest instruments for reducing poverty and improving health, gender equality, peace, and stability. It delivers large, consistent returns in terms of income, and is the most important factor to ensure equity and inclusion…. Globally, there is a?9% increase in hourly earnings for every extra year of schooling. For societies, it drives long-term economic growth, spurs innovation, strengthens institutions, and fosters social cohesion.”

And, Australia approaches the end of yet another record-breaking heatwave summer: “Education is … a powerful catalyst to climate action through widespread behaviour change and skilling for green transitions.”

Almost 90% of Australian parents believe education is essential for their children to thrive. Numerous reports (Centre for Future Work, Centre for Professional Learning, SA Government, Public Education Foundation) have emphasised the value of public education funding, and the importance of providing equitable public education funding. The ground-breaking Gonski school funding report (July 2014) recommended instituting “a national needs?based and sector-blind school funding model [which] would provide a level of base funding to all schools and additional targeted funding to disadvantaged students in order to remove inequities and minimise the identified performance gap.”

The Gonski report anticipated funding equalisation would take six years to transition to a nationally consistent “Schooling Resource Standard” (SRS), thus all to be completed in 2020. We are no way close to that, after subsequent governments – led by Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison and even Albanese – have not fulfilled the original Gonski promise, or even come close.

Exactly a year ago (8 February 2024), the Australian Education Union reported “private schools are funded at 105.7% of their SRS,” although “the actual over-funding is much greater, because the funding model ignores other lucrative sources of income – for example, donations and investments.” (Read recent reports by Trevor Cobbold of Save Our Schools.) Remember most of these donations and investments are also tax-free for the institution or tax deductible for the donor, meaning the Commonwealth supports them through foregone tax revenue. Despite the recommendation by the Australian Government’s Productivity Commission – anything but a radical left organisation – to remove private school building fund tax deductibility ($1.23 billion in 2022), the Albanese Government killed the proposal.

In the last week, two articles have illustrated the woeful state of Australia’s efforts at equitable public school funding.

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“In the 13 years since that review, an entire cohort of public school students have gone from kindergarten to Year?12 without receiving the funding and resources they needed to get an adequate education according to the Gonski report’s recommendations. Every public school in Australia, bar a handful in the ACT, has been underfunded according to its agreed SRS. Every private school, bar a handful in the Northern Territory, has been overfunded, according to its SRS over the same period,” writes Jane Caro in The Saturday Paper.

“Because of politically poisonous politics…, [the Gonski Review’s] intentions have been either ignored or warped to the point where public schools, particularly those serving the children with the highest needs, are much worse off than they were in 2011. Teacher shortages have become chronic and other preventable problems have become intractable due to lack of the resources needed for early intervention,” Caro writes.

The 2023 Improving Outcomes for All report revealed that concentrations of public-private school advantage and disadvantage are mirror images of one another. Lyndsay Connors highlights the issue clearly: “In the public school sector, 28.9% of schools had concentrations of disadvantage; while the independent schools sector had precisely the same 28.9% of schools – but with concentrations of advantage!” writes Connors (emphasis is hers).

“Another decade of dribbling out small increases in schools funding leaves every public school, especially the 30% serving the children with the highest needs, vulnerable to the biases and vested interests of successive governments,” writes Caro, who indicts all governments of complicity: “Labor and Coalition governments alike have participated in this distortion, though some have trampled over the opportunities of the poorest children with more enthusiasm than others.”

In the lead-up to this year’s Federal election, Caro’s conclusions are worth noting – and acting on – by a future government:

“Tragically, even if all public schools received full SRS funding next year, the inequalities at the heart of our system would remain. We would still be supporting two publicly funded systems of schools, one of which shoulders all the responsibilities while the other enjoys all the rights. Only public schools are expected to fulfil Australia’s commitment to universal, compulsory education. Private schools, despite the enormous sums of public money they receive, bear no such responsibility. They can accept and reject students at will. Indeed, the justification many private school parents use for their choice – that private schools have better discipline – is entirely because they can expel underperformers and troublemakers and dump them onto a public school…. Surely, if you accept public money, you should also accept some sort of public responsibility beyond just obeying the law and teaching the curriculum?”

I give Lyndsay Connors the last word: “Unless and until our political leaders find the courage to embark on an informed debate about the consequences of decades of policy decisions and compromises, our school system will remain on a slippery slope with declining student outcomes and school completion rates. There is an urgent need for all governments in Australia to start working together to develop a legal and policy framework for schools planning, funding and operation within which all schools contribute to an open and just democratic society; and for safeguarding the quality and the social representativeness of public schools that are open, without fees or religious tests, to all our children and young people.”