Real government funding to private schools has increased almost twice as much as funding to public schools in the decade since the landmark Gonski review recommended changes designed to fund Australian schools according to need.
From 2012 to 2021, per student funding to independent and Catholic schools rose by 34% and 31% respectively, while funding to public schools increased by just 17%, according to parliamentary library data provided exclusively to Guardian Australia. In Queensland, the growth in government funding to independent schools per student has been nine times greater than to public schools.
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (Acara) data shows that 98% of private schools are funded above the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) recommended by Gonski and more than 98% of public schools are funded below it.
“That money has gone to the wrong place,” said Trevor Cobbold, an economist and the national convenor of Save Our Schools. “It has gone to those least in need.”
The Gonski review was hailed as the roadmap to reducing the impact of social disadvantage on educational outcomes. But more than decade later, government policy has had the opposite effect.
Cobbold said the figures showed a “sabotaging” of the plan by successive governments, both state and federal, which has shortchanged students in the public system.
“The Gonski model wasn’t perfect, there were some flaws,” he said. “But it offered a change in terms of where funding would be directed in terms of the most in need, and that has not happened.”
The Greens education spokesperson, Penny Allman-Payne, said the gap in funding between private and public schools had created one of the most unequal and segregated school systems in the OECD.
A Unicef report in 2018 ranked Australia 30th out of 38 OECD countries in providing equitable access to secondary education.
“It’s clear that the implementation of Gonski has been a failure. By no measure can anyone say, a decade later, that our school funding model is working,” she said.
“It’s a twisted and perverse system that is widening the gap between rich and poor kids and lowering average student performance.”
The decade since Gonski
One of the core recommendations of the Gonski review when it was released in 2011 was implementing the SRS, a needs-based model to provide a baseline education to students, set at $13,060 for primary students and $16,413 for secondary students.
The federal education minister at the time of the Gonski review, Peter Garrett, said the aim was to ensure any student, irrespective of their background, could reach their potential.
“The legislation we put in place meant Australia finally had a genuine needs-based funding system for the first time,” he said. “This required a massive effort to produce significant buy-in from most of the education sector Australia wide.”
But a briefing by the education department prepared for witnesses appearing before Senate estimates and seen by Guardian Australia, estimates that schools in the Australian Capital Territory, South Australia and Western Australia will reach only 75% of their SRS this year, with the remaining states and territories also falling short of 100%. On its current trajectory, the Northern Territory will never reach it.
Cobbold said the failure to fund schools according to need could be traced back to key decisions made by successive governments after the Gonski review.
The first kick to its success, he said, was the Gillard government’s edict that “no school would lose a dollar”.
A deal was struck with the Catholic system and other private schools – which were found to be overfunded at the time – to maintain their revenue from government.
Documents released in June this year through freedom of information laws revealed more than 1,000 private schools – or 40% of Australia’s non-government schools – would be overfunded by $3.2bn over the next six years.
Cobbold pointed to the Abbott government’s 2014 budget, which scrapped the biggest increases in school funding agreed to under the Gonski reforms, planned for 2017 and 2018, the bulk of which would have gone to public schools.
Cobbold said the funding model for public schools was further undermined in 2017, when the Turnbull government introduced an “arbitrary” commonwealth funding cap of 20% for public schools, with the remainder to be covered by state governments. For non-government schools, the caps are the reverse.
The president of the Australian Education Union, Correna Haythorpe, said putting the onus on the states to implement 80% of funding failed to adhere to the Gonski review’s recommendation that the commonwealth should put in more, given its greater capacity to raise revenue.
“What we know is that over the past decade, states have not been held accountable for delivering the full share,” she said.
Former New South Wales National party MP and former state education minister, Prof Adrian Piccoli, said the Turnbull government did cap the funding increase for schools that had reached 100% of the SRS – most of which were in the independent sector – after the Gillard government had promised to increase funding by 3% a year for all schools.
“What the Gillard government did was better than what was there before, what the Turnbull government did was a little better,” he said. “But it was far from perfect.”
Cobbold said the final blow to funding schools according to need came from the Morrison government, which negotiated a $4.6bn increase in funding for Catholic schools over 10 years but no additional money for public schools.
“Morrison basically said it’s up to the state governments [to fund public schools], but the state governments haven’t been delivering either,” Cobbold said.
‘It can be a lot better and fairer’
In Western Australia and the Northern Territory, state government funding in real terms has gone backwards since 2012, falling by 5.6% and 7.75% per student respectively, according to the Acara data.
The overall funding disparities have not been spread equally across the country.
Real government funding per student has increased by more than 16% in metro areas, more than 22% in inner regional areas, and more than 20% in outer regional areas. But in remote and very remote areas it has risen by barely 14% and 10% respectively.
Garrett said the failure of federal governments to fund schools according to their need in the decade since Gonski was an outrage.
“The Coalition trashed that reform and a generation of students in public schools lost the opportunity to shine,” he said.
The federal government is now undertaking a review to inform the next National School Reform Agreement, with the aim to work with state governments to get schools to 100% of their SRS.
The education minister, Jason Clare, agreed there was a gap that needed to be filled.
“Australia has a good education system, but it can be a lot better and a lot fairer,’ he said.
“If you are a child today from a poor background, from the bush or if you are an Indigenous Australian, you are three times more likely to fall behind at school. This is what we need to fix.”
• This story is part one of a series exploring how successive governments have failed to make Australia’s education funding fairer. Next: the parents who fled public schools – and those who stayed.
