Gonski – the uncertainty continues
People thinking the much vaunted Gonski Review into school funding was going to deliver new policy funding initiatives should think again.
The first major public statement regarding the funding review focussed on four major reports with the review panel and the Minister for Education failing to identity any forward projections on the still contentious issue of national school funding.
The high expectations anticipated from the Gonski Review are being progressively submerged into the mire of political influence.
Leading educationalists have always appreciated that confronting the funding imbroglio – aka, the perceived but erroneous difference in federal funding contributions between government and non-government schools – the government faces many unenviable decisions.
The government is being progressively mired in politically debilitating extra-curricula controversies involving immigration, mining taxes, data delivery and grimy issues facing some elected members. Such influences are combining to place additional pressure on a government desperately seeking a ‘good news’ policy outcome.
The Gonski Review is hardly going to deliver that miracle cure to the government’s increasing electoral worries if this first ‘report’ is an example.
After twelve months of its ‘listening tour’ of Australia to gauge views on new school funding possibilities the Review panel released four major reports that essentially confirm the status quo of opponents and supporters of current funding models.
Some reports seek additional funding for disadvantages schools to reach at least a minimal, agreed education standard. Surely the panel could not have taken twelve months to reach such an obvious conclusion.
Other reports call for funding to be based partly on a school's willingness to accept academically struggling students as a criterion to receive recurrent funding. Such a proposal squarely challenges the independent school sector that is perceived as creaming off the best and brightest and leaving government schools to pick up education responsibility for the battling learner.
But just a minute! In NSW the state government operates and finances 27 selective high schools which only enrol the best and brightest students to attend their institutions. Doesn’t this operation typify the very criticism being addressed against independent schools?
Other reports highlighted the need to develop and implement a national schooling resource standard, code for a stronger needs-based determination to allocate recurrent funding.
As always such a standard is primarily based on the supposition that quality learning primarily depends on capital resourcing levels. By this criterion the supposed ‘rich’ independent schools with significantly better resourcing levels than government schools would be deemed as not requiring current levels of funding.
Such a proposition ignores the significance of teachers and their classroom professionalism within the learning model. It assumes that merely placing an average child into an over resourced learning environment will eventually turn that student into a brilliant academic. By some form of capital osmosis how can a struggling child inculcate learning from modern educational resources alone?
Obviously adequate and appropriate educational infrastructure should be a basic expectation for every school student. Assuming capital resourcing is the only contributor to student learning is supreme naivety.
Many independent schools will also testify that the capital improvements developed over decades have nothing to do with government recurrent funding. Often such facilities have been financed through the philanthropic goodwill of school supporters across generations of enrolments.
As with government schools should such schools be penalised financially for recurrent funds that essentially contribute to teacher’s salaries?
Funding allocations based solely on notional school income levels similarly disenfranchise and disengage those schools – government and non-government – which are blessed with the ability to resource ancillary income from their communities because of location or socio-economic advantage. Such a policy surely represents a classic model of community inequity.
Other elements in the initial reports propose that funding should be determined on some form of national benchmark allocation to all schools. Proponents of such an ill-conceived idea fail to realise that some independent schools are funded at a mere 13.7% of the funds received to educate a child at a government school. Re-allocating additional funds on this basis is neither financially feasibly nor operationally acceptable.
Through all of this reporting humbug the Minister for Education continues to proclaim that no school will lose a dollar of funding when a new funding regime is finally announced.
Such gratuity fails to address the possibility that certain independent schools may see their recurrent funding held to current levels thereby absolving the government from public criticism that it is unfairly treating and financially disadvantaging any school sector.
Holding existing funding levels to certain schools fails to address that this outcome seriously disadvantages those institutions which face increasing cost imposts of between 7-9% annually in line with AGSRC published data.
Under such circumstances it is inevitable that tuition fees must increase thereby diminishing the opportunity for many families to consider an independent school for their child’s education.
Mr Gonski has been handed a poisoned education chalice by a government that already walks a fine line in its electoral mandate for school funding reform.
Whatever the Review panel finally proposes in November the outcomes and recommendations will be contentious because of the inability of competing school sectors to recognise a wider national imperative to improve learning outcomes for all Australian students.
Its first report hardly imbues confidence that an equitable, workable policy can be implemented by the government.
It is equally predictable that the government may choose to shelve that same chalice because it knows that to drink its contents could exacerbate continuing electoral division leading into the 2013 federal election.
Class action – a better deal for struggling schools. Sydney Morning Herald, 1 September 2011, p 1. www.smh.com.au
Schools fix aimed at poor students, The Australian Financial Review, 1 September 2011, p 3. www.afr.com
Gonski review pitches for new school funding model, The Australian, 1 September 2011, P 8. www.theaustralian.com.au
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