The original 2011 Gonski report was designed to clean up Australia’s opaque and convoluted system of school funding, as well as establish a new needs-based funding model.
This was to be achieved by introducing a “base rate” level of funding per student, known as the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS), with extra loadings on top based on a number of equity categories.
Instead, the former Labor Government butchered the implementation, concluding special deals with different jurisdictions and promising that no school would lose a dollar under the plan.
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Needs-based funding necessarily means that some schools will receive more funding and some will receive less. This broadly makes sense and lines up with how Australia does means testing in a range of public policy areas.
The Gonski 2.0 package, passed by the Coalition in June 2017, was meant to redirect some funding from privileged Catholic and independent schools to state schools, improving equity and saving the Budget billions in the process.
However, in 2018 the Coalition caved in to the Catholic Schools lobby, backing away from its Gonski 2.0 funding formula and promising to provide the sector with an additional $4 billion in funding, thereby creating another weird ‘special deal’.
New data from the Productivity Commission (PC) shows that government spending on non-government schools has grown much faster than funding for government schools:
The latest chapters of its review of government services, released on Tuesday, reveal that in the past decade spending per student on non-government schools increased by 3.3% per year compared with just 1.4% for government schools.
Between 2017-18 and 2018-19 the federal government spent $116 more per student per year for those in the public system, but $336 more for those in the non-government system.
Grattan Institute school program director Peter Goss said the figures showed school funding had “tilted the wrong way for most of the last decade” despite the 2017 Gonski 2.0 reforms.
“The sad reality for Australia is that funding was unequally distributed a decade ago,” he said. “While funding increases in the next decade will be tilted a little bit in the right direction, it’s not nearly enough to make up the gap.
“The federal government has locked in a model where every private school will get fully-funded by 2023, whereas very few government schools will ever get fully-funded. By 2030 we’re going to be having this same argument and it’s all predictable from now.”
An apologist would argue that the average student in the public school system receives much more taxpayer funding than a student in a non-government school, specifically $16,399 per government school student versus $11,813 per non-government school student, according to the PC.
However, it should also be recognised that public schools enroll a disproportionate share of students with learning difficulties, disadvantaged family backgrounds, special needs physically or emotionally and in remote areas. Those students cost significantly more to educate.
The fact of the matter is that the Gonski report was aimed at better balancing school funding by giving more to those that need it most and less to those that do not.
The stronger growth in non-government school funding is a clear policy failure that contravenes the intent of Gonski.
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.
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