At last the eerie silence on schools funding has ended
Jan 29, 2025
With a federal election looming, leaders of two political parties have now announced plans to deal with the protracted under-funding of Australia’s public schools.
Between them, Labor and the Coalition have made schools funding a toxic political issue to be avoided like the plague. But given the importance of education to this country and its future, this was never a responsible option.
Schools funding has been less politically daunting for the Greens. They were the first to throw down the gauntlet recently, accusing Labor and Liberal governments of leaving the public education system “to rot, struggling under decades of underfunding and neglect, while private schools receive a growing share of funding”.
Then, a few days later, in his address to the National Press Club, PM Albanese announced that his government has now reached agreement with all states and territories except Queensland and NSW to lift the Commonwealth contribution to public schools from 20 to 25 per cent of their Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) by 2034; and that constructive negotiations were continuing with the two remaining states.
The Greens were blunt about their political strategy. “With more Greens in Parliament, we can keep Dutton out and push Labor to act on the issues that matter to you: saving our public schools”.
Their plan for closing the funding gap includes delivering 100% school funding ‘to give every student a great public education’. This presumably means raising government recurrent funding for public schools to the level of their full SRS funding entitlement along with capital grants for facilities (including decent ventilation systems for every classroom). Their plan also includes funding to cover the abolition of public school ‘fees’ along with an $800 back-to-school payment to help with out-of-pocket costs like uniforms, technology and school supplies.
Under both Coalition and Labor, the Commonwealth enabled states and territories to defraud public schools of their full SRS funding entitlement though a range of accounting tricks. These have been fully documented by Trevor Cobbold on this policy platform over recent years. Both Labor and the Greens have now committed to ending this swindle.
It would be naive to believe that it was the Greens that ‘pushed Labor to act’. Labor’s decision to raise the Commonwealth contribution to public schools to 25 per cent of the SRS would almost certainly have been some time in the planning. It now provides a logical component of Labor’s education commitments, along with early childhood, TAFE and higher education.
Few school systems in the world provide a level playing field because of individual, social and economic factors beyond the education system itself. But Australia has now managed to develop one of the most socio-economically stratified school systems by international standards.
To its credit, the Albanese government showed leadership in 2022 when education minister, Jason Clare, gained agreement from state and territory counterparts to join him in commissioning a report from a panel of independent experts to inform a better and fairer education system. The resultant report, Improving Outcomes for All, 2023, confirmed that, by 2015, Australia had achieved the second highest growth in concentrations of disadvantage among all OECD countries; and that, in the over 38 per cent of Australian schools most affected, these concentrations of disadvantage were continuing to increase.
The private, independent school sector is now the fastest growing part of our hybrid school system. There is an ongoing shift in enrolment share from public schools to these schools. The 2023 report reveals this has reached a point where the public and the independent school sectors now provide a mirror image of each other. In the public school sector, 28.9 per cent of schools had concentrations of disadvantage; while the independent schools sector had precisely the same 28.9 per cent of schools – but with concentrations of advantage!
As well as raising the Commonwealth contribution to public schools from its existing 20 to 25 per cent of their SRS, Labor’s bilateral agreements require states and territories to adopt reforms designed to help students “catch up, keep up and finish school”, along with specific national targets relating to student achievement and outcomes.
Welcome and necessary as these actions by Labor and the Greens are, they are far from sufficient. The fact remains that our governments are failing to confront the forces that are driving our country towards an education divide which could have serious political consequences.
There is a shift to the right happening worldwide, with governments leaving it to market forces to determine the future. This is not peculiar to Australia.
But when it comes to schooling, Australia has its own special challenge. Our federal system, with its disease of ‘vertical fiscal imbalance’ (VFI), has proven to be the perfect incubator for a market-based school system, engineered against the achievement of quality, equality of opportunity, efficiency and effectiveness.
When it comes to schools funding, the cumulative result of political decisions since the Commonwealth became a major funding partner in schools under the Whitlam government in the early 1970s is an arbitrary and lopsided system, for which there is no rational or constitutional basis. It is a system in which non-government schools enjoy the benefits of having the bulk of their public funding from the Commonwealth with its major revenue-raising capacity, while public schools are left to compete for the bulk of their funding with other essential services in states and territories.
With its neo-liberal agenda, the Howard government introduced a funding scheme designed to shift enrolments from public to private schools and to encourage consumer choice and provider competition. This unleashed the market forces endemic to schooling as well as those from outside the system, including from Australia’s over-heated real estate market. The Rudd and Gillard Labor government then chose to prolong this scheme and to delay its own Gonski Review, leaving it to the next Coalition government to manage the implementation.
By the time the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments finished their term of office, they had turned the Gonski plan from a funding scheme that was meant to be sector blind and needs-based into arrangements that are sector specific and myopic when it comes to needs. Australia now has a highly fungible scheme for funding its large private school sector. Public funding, based on proxy measures of need, is now being added to levels of private income which enable private schools to operate at resource levels which exceed their SRS; and, in a time of teacher shortage, to use their resource advantage to attract teachers away from the schools where they are needed far more.
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.