Victoria’s latest school funding agreement freezes public schools below the Schooling Resource Standard, formalising stagnation while preserving the language of reform. Delay is not neutral – it compounds disadvantage and entrenches inequality.

Victoria likes to call itself the ’education state’. In reality, it may simply be the most visible expression of a deeper national failure and one Australians have seen before.

The latest school funding agreements were presented as progress. In Victoria, however, the new arrangement does something far more revealing: it raises no funding levels at all. Public schools are now locked into the same proportion of the Schooling Resource Standard they received in 2023 and 2024, with the new agreement freezing funding levels through 2026 and providing no pathway for improvement thereafter.

This is not reform delayed. It is reform suspended.

Across Australia, governments continue to affirm their commitment to equity, transparency and needs-based funding. Yet public schools, which educate the vast majority of disadvantaged and Indigenous students remain funded below the SRS. What distinguishes Victoria is not the existence of underfunding, but the decision to formalise stagnation in a new agreement while presenting it as responsible governance.

The commonwealth–state stand-off over school funding is now familiar. The commonwealth says it is willing to increase its share but cannot do so without a matching state commitment. Victoria replies that it would act, but only if the commonwealth moves first.

Both positions sound reasonable. Both are politically defensible. And together they ensure that funding levels do not change.

The result is a form of policy paralysis that benefits governments more than schools. Each side can claim intent. Each can shift responsibility. And public schools, particularly those serving low-SES and Indigenous communities absorb another cycle of delay.

Australians have seen this strategy before. The original Gonski reforms promised a transparent, needs-based model grounded in evidence. When the political cost of delivering it became clear, implementation was stretched, diluted and deferred until public attention faded and a revised framework replaced the original ambition.

The current treatment of the SRS carries uncomfortable echoes. Governments continue to invoke the standard, but the new Victorian agreement does not advance towards it. Instead, it locks in sub-standard funding while leaving open the possibility of future redesign.

One is entitled to ask whether this is a pause for implementation or a pause until circumstances change, attention drifts, or a new funding model quietly replaces a standard that proved too demanding.

There is a tendency in public debate to treat delay as neutral, as if holding the line simply preserves the status quo until better conditions emerge. In education funding, this assumption is deeply flawed.

Schools do not stand still while governments wait. Student cohorts move through classrooms once and do not return. The effects of under-resourcing are not deferred; they are absorbed in real time, through larger classes, reduced specialist support, higher staff turnover, and fewer opportunities to intervene early when students struggle.

A four-year funding freeze is therefore not a pause. It is a sequence of permanent decisions made on behalf of successive cohorts of children. By the time a new agreement is reached, the consequences have already been lived. And this is where the language of the ‘fair go’ matters.

In Australian political culture, a fair go does not promise identical outcomes. It promises something more modest and more profound: that circumstances of birth should not deny a child access to the basic conditions required to learn and to thrive.

That is why the contrast between rhetoric and reality matters. Education Minister Jason Clare declared, “I don’t want us to be a country where your opportunities in life depend on your postcode, your parents, or the colour of your skin.”  Yet under current funding arrangements, that is precisely the country we are choosing to remain.

When governments knowingly maintain a system in which the poorest children attend schools funded below what is required for a minimally adequate education and then ask those schools to wait that promise is broken. Not rhetorically, but materially.

As education researcher Trevor Cobbold has shown in meticulous detail, the problem is not simply how much money is allocated, but how funding is defined.

Victoria’s agreements allow the state to include expenditures explicitly excluded from the national definition of the SRS, such as capital depreciation, transport and regulatory bodies as part of its claimed funding contribution. On paper, this produces figures suggesting progress toward adequacy. Once these accounting allowances are removed, public schools remain funded at roughly 86 per cent of the standard.

This is not a technical quibble. The SRS was designed to make educational need visible. These accounting practices do the opposite: they mask shortfalls while preserving the appearance of compliance.

What makes this particularly troubling is that similar allowances are not applied when governments calculate their funding of private schools. Public schools carry the accounting burden; private schools are protected from it.

This matters because, at the same time public schools are told to wait, governments are making very clear choices elsewhere.

New research from the Australia Institute shows that Australian secondary education is now the most expensive in the developed world from the perspective of families, with average out-of-pocket costs approaching $5,000 per student per year, almost four times the OECD average. This is driven not by public schooling, but by the scale and normalisation of high-fee private education, with more than 40 per cent of Australian secondary students now enrolled in non-government schools, one of the highest proportions internationally.

Some private schools charge fees exceeding $50,000 per year, while continuing to receive substantial public subsidy. At the same time, governments now spend more public money on non-government schools than on government schools, despite public schools educating the overwhelming majority of disadvantaged and Indigenous students.

These outcomes are not accidental. They are the result of policy choices.

Public schools educate around 80 per cent of low-SES students and more than 80 per cent of Indigenous students. Over 90 per cent of disadvantaged schools are public. When funding is frozen below adequacy, it is these children, and these communities, in these postcodes who are told, implicitly but unmistakably, to wait.

Underfunding is not experienced evenly. It concentrates harm where needs are greatest and buffers are weakest. In such contexts, delay is not neutral. It compounds disadvantage.

The Prime Minister speaks often of a “fair go.” Yet the poorest children in Australia’s public schools are being asked to accept less than a fundamentally adequate education, year after year, while governments preserve generosity elsewhere and manage the optics of concern.

At some point, this stops being a question of budgets, processes or intergovernmental complexity. It becomes a question of values.

Because when governments know what is required, have the evidence before them, and still choose delay, dilution and diversion, they are making a judgement about whose education matters most.

And for too many children in public schools today, that judgement is painfully clear.