this other life

The long-awaited Gonski review into school funding will be released on Monday week.

Of all the scars the Labor Party carries from Mark Latham’s turbulent 13-month reign as leader, perhaps the most visible ones can be seen in its approach to school funding. On September 14, 2004, Latham announced a plan to slash funding to 67 of Australia’s wealthiest private schools and redirect the money to less-well-off schools.

”Labor has a very, very different approach to the funding of schools than the Howard government,” Latham said then. ”We fund schools on the basis of need, we want equity in action in the Australian schools system.”

The move was intended, and read, as an act of class warfare; private schools saw the announcement as an attack on parental choice, while the Australian Education Union and then Victorian premier Steve Bracks said the policy would institutionalise fairness.

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But the policy proved politically disastrous and much of Labor’s efforts in education since have been aimed at convincing the non-government school sector that it means it no harm.

When Kim Beazley regained the Labor leadership after Latham’s implosion, he promptly discarded his predecessor’s Robin Hood approach, arguing it was based on the ”politics of envy”.

When Labor, with Kevin Rudd at the helm, went to the 2007 election, it promised to preserve the Howard government’s arrangements for a further four years while it conducted a review of the funding model.

But this review was not launched until April 2010 and, when Julia Gillard rushed to the polls months later, she sought to neutralise the issue by promising to extend the current arrangements until the end of 2013, guaranteeing there would be no change in this term.

That the Howard-era system they hate survives untouched more than four years after Labor came to power is a sore point for public education advocates.

But the end of their anxious wait, and that of independent and Catholic educators and others with an interest in the nation’s schools, is in sight. The review panel, led by businessman David Gonksi, took more than 7000 submissions and handed its final report to School Education Minister Peter Garrett before Christmas.

The panel’s work – the first comprehensive review of school funding since the 1970s – will be released on February 20.

But it is likely to be some time before the implications of its recommendations are clear. Garrett told The Age that the government would issue only an ”initial response” to the report on Monday week, and that it had further work to do on ”an issue that lies right at the heart of our prospects as a nation”.

The federal government didn’t provide any funding to the states for schools until 1964, when it gave both government and non-government secondary schools grants for science laboratories. Then, in 1970, the Commonwealth began providing recurrent funding for schools.

At first, the assistance was aimed at the struggling Catholic school sector, at the rate of $35 per primary school student and $50 for every secondary school student. A turning point came in 1973, when the Whitlam government extended Commonwealth recurrent funding to government schools.

Today, only about a third of Commonwealth schools funding goes to government schools, which receive most of their funding from state governments. The Commonwealth gives government schools 10 per cent of the Average Government School Recurrent Costs, a measure of how much government schools are spending on each of their students.

It’s a different story for non-government schools, which receive about a third of their income from the Commonwealth and little over 10 per cent from the state (the rest comes from parents).

Under the current model, introduced by the Howard government in 2001, non-government schools are allocated federal funding according to the socio-economic status of the areas in which students live as determined by census data.

Each school is given a score based on the income, education and occupational characteristics of its school community. This score determines what proportion of the Average Government School Recurrent Costs the school gets.

Schools serving the least disadvantaged communities receive 13.7 per cent of this amount. Those serving the most disadvantaged communities, as well as special schools and majority indigenous schools, receive 70 per cent of this amount.

At least that is the way the model was supposed to work. Confusingly, more than 1075 schools have had their entitlements preserved and fully indexed at the levels they received under the previous system, because the Howard government promised no school would be worse off under its system.

Due to this quirk, two schools serving comparable communities can receive vastly different funding allocations simply because one existed before 2001 while the other did not.

The federal Education Department projects the difference in annual cost between funding schools in this way and funding schools according to their SES score will exceed $700 million this year. Garrett has declared there is ”no sound policy basis” for this, and Gonski told education ministers last year the panel viewed it as a historic anomaly that had to be corrected. Even non-government school representatives have conceded that the provisions are unlikely to survive the review.

This complexity, and the consequent lack of transparency, is one of the most common criticisms of the model, and Garrett is determined to address it.

”The main thing that I’d be saying about the review is we know we’ve got a funding model that isn’t transparent and clear,” he says. Others say the model has not delivered on the Howard government’s predictions that it would extend choice to lower-income families by making non-government schooling more affordable.

Research by the Australian National University’s Chris Ryan found that while enrolments in low-fee private schools had grown strongly since the model was introduced, the private school share of enrolments grew fastest at the top half of the income distribution, leading to a situation in which most students in the public sector attend schools where the average socio-economic status of their fellow pupils is below average.

Rather than using their increased subsidies to lower fees, private schools have tended to put their resources into lifting quality by employing more teachers and lowering class sizes.

The New South Wales government highlighted the impact of such concentrations of disadvantage in its submission to the review, citing research which showed that the backgrounds of a student’s classmates had a significant influence on that student’s chances of success at school, regardless of their individual circumstances.

While Australia’s overall results in international tests place it among the top performing nations, equity is a weak point. There is a much stronger relationship between a student’s background and their results in Australia than there is in nations such as Finland.

The panel has made equity a focus of its work, writing in an emerging issues paper in December 2010 that ”differences in educational outcomes should not be the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possessions”.

The Coalition worries the review’s focus on supporting ”equity in educational outcomes” is too narrow.

”In schooling, one size does not fit all,” Coalition education spokesman Christopher Pyne argued in his submission to the review.

”If the idea of ‘equity in educational outcomes’ were to result in schools becoming equally poor then the panel would agree that this concept is counter to the aims of this review.”

Pyne has accused the government of waging ”ideological war” on private schools and has said Garrett’s promise that ”no school will lose a dollar in per-student terms” will amount to a cut in real terms.

“Coalition estimates show there could be a $4.2 billion shortfall over four years if indexation is not maintained at current levels, which schools will be forced to find through higher school fees or staff cuts,” he said.

Garrett says Pyne is ”making mischief” and says that since coming to office Labor has delivered billions in extra resources to private schools, including for new buildings and computers. ”I think both our actions and our delivery, our legislation and our financial commitment speak volumes,” he says.

However, Bill Daniels, executive director of The Independent Schools Council of Australia – which represents 1100 schools that educate 1.2 million of the 3.4 million schoolchildren in the country – gets little comfort from the government’s assurance. ”School costs are rising every year,” he says. ”If funding isn’t maintained in real terms, you’re cutting funding.” And in tight budget circumstances, he says ”it would be extremely difficult to have a no-losers strategy”.

The Catholic sector has argued against an undue focus on the socio-economic characteristics of school communities. In its submission to the review, the National Catholic Education Commission warned of the danger of making erroneous assumptions about the capacity of parents to pay fees.

”It effectively assumes a homogenous population with each parent having the same capacity to pay,” its submission says.

Unlike independent schools, the Catholic sector believes a school’s resources, including income from fees, should be taken into account in determining its funding allocation, although it says this should not be done in a way that deters private investment.

The Catholic sector says it sets fee levels low to keep its schools affordable, but receives similar grants to other schools with greater resources.

The Australian Education Union says nothing less than an overhaul of current funding arrangements, and greater investment in public schools, is needed.

The union’s federal president, Angelo Gavrielatos, says the current funding arrangements have caused standards to fall and led to an increasing divide between the performance of children in rich and poor schools.

Gavrielatos hopes the review will recommend a new model that will better target resources to where they are needed most. At present, governments cannot boost funding to government schools without also boosting funding to all private schools, because private school funding allocations are calculated as a percentage of spending on government schools.

Gavrielatos expects the panel to recommend the creation of a ”resource standard”, which would specify how much funding a school would need to achieve certain outcomes. Additional funding would be provided for special circumstances, such as for remote schools, or those teaching indigenous students or those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The feasibility of such a model was the subject of a report the review panel commissioned from the Allen Consulting Group.

As insiders speculate on what the panel has recommended and what the government will do, public education advocates take heart from Prime Minister Gillard’s maiden speech to the House of Representatives, delivered in 1998.

”The students from my electorate are not any less intelligent than those from [the wealthier electorates] Higgins or Kooyong but their educational opportunities are not the same,” she said.

”Certainly, this massive discrepancy would be lessened if we as a nation were prepared to seriously tackle the inequality of opportunity that exists in our education system and create a high-class state school system.

”My predecessor, Barry Jones, used to say that unfortunately postcodes are probably the strongest factor in determining a person’s expectations of success in life. It will be one of my priorities in politics to ensure that in the Australia of the future the famous quizmaster is, for once, wrong.”

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