Better Federal funding solutions needed

Public Education Alliance releases report by Dr Lyndsay Connors

On Public Education Day, the Public Education Alliance is proud to release 'Making Federalism Work for Schools: Due Process, Transparency, Informed Consent', a report by Dr Lyndsay Connors. The report examines current Federal government funding of public and private schools and proposes a legislative way forward to create more equitable solutions.

Dr Connors will present the findings at a Public Education Dinner at State Parliament this evening. The report is attached as a pdf file.

The key points of Dr Connors' report are:

1. In no other country does the provision of public funding for non-government schools dominate the agenda of the national government.

The funding of private schools is now the Commonwealth's largest budgetary outlay within its education portfolio.

Largely due to the Commonwealth's contribution, funding for non-government schools overall is growing at three times the rate of spending on public schools, far exceeding the rate of increase in the enrolment share of the private sector.

2. Pockets of concentrated and severe social disadvantage have become entrenched across rural and remote as well as suburban Australia, where high unemployment and low school participation and attainment are the norm.

It is mainly public schools that are now being asked to deal with the educational challenges and costs that others can avoid and without a commensurate share of resources.

Meanwhile, there is increasing political pressure for schools to disclose the performance of students on national benchmarking tests as part of the general push towards greater public accountability. Yet their performance is being judged without any real regard to the resources, government and private, that schools have available to enable high performance.

3. The Commonwealth now spends more on the roughly 13 per cent of students nationally in independent non-government schools, less than one-fifth of the enrolments of the public sector, than on those students in government schools.

Governments around Australia outlaid around $31 billion on the recurrent operation of schools in 2004/5. Of this amount, state governments spent more than three times the contribution made by the Commonwealth. States outlaid around $24 billion on the recurrent operation of schools, while the Commonwealth spent under $7 billion.

4. The report argues that many of the problems with federal arrangements for schools can be traced to the lack of clarity in the role and responsibility of the Commonwealth.

The present government has attempted to create by stealth, in the public mind, a separation of powers between the Commonwealth and the states for public and for private schools, a separation for which there are no constitutional, educational or logical grounds.

5. The report concludes with a proposal to reform existing federal arrangements through the development of complementary Commonwealth and State legislation.

Such legislation would provide a means of engaging all parties and interests in Commonwealth and State Parliaments. This would assist in producing an enduring outcome that could outlast the changes in governments and ministerial responsibilities over time.

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Last Modified: 18 May 2007