Anger rising over Turnbull school funding plan

Our decade-long campaign with the Australian Education Union to secure fair federal funding for all students in all schools has had an impact.

The only real Gonski model has seen the federal government contribution to government schools increase from 8.9 per cent in 2005-2006 to 17 per cent today. Federal government investment in education in Queensland has increased by 78 per cent which, coupled with an 8 per cent increase in state contributions, represents many millions of dollars that have benefited students that would not have been available otherwise.

The Turnbull school funding plan has been passed into legislation after a complex deal struck with the Senate in the dead of night (see my article in the July edition of the Journal). This new school funding model will ensure that by 2023, 87 per cent of public schools will receive less than 100 percent of the school resource standard (SRS) and that 65 per cent of private schools will receive more than 100 per cent of the SRS. Our ongoing analysis of the new legislation and the deals done to get support from the Senate cross-bench is revealing much more of the dastardly nature of this attack on schools.

Two areas stand out from our initial analysis: side deals to smooth reduction in funding to non-government schools and funding for students with disabilities.

There are five separate arrangements, struck to secure votes from senators. They are:

• maintain system-weighted average payments (a benefit to private schools) in 2018 at a cost of $46.5 million
• maintain ACT private school funding for four years at a cost of $57.9 million
• transition funding for overfunded private schools at a cost of $39.8 million
• Northern Territory assistance package at a cost of $78 million
• Tasmanian (Jacqui Lambie) assistance package at a cost of $20 million.

The disproportionately positive outcomes for non-government schools are the result of the combination of existing excessive funding and side deals to offset or prevent planned reductions in funding under the new model.

There will also be substantial changes to the support for students with disabilities package, but not for the better. The nationally consistent collection of data (NCCD) has revealed tens of thousands of students with disability who have not been receiving support through government funding. The Turnbull school funding plan recognises this by increasing the number of identified students with disability from 212,000 to 470,000: a 122 per cent increase.

Unfortunately, this is not matched by the allocation of sufficient additional resources, with the Turnbull government adding just $95 million to the budget (a 6.2 per cent increase). This failure to allocate sufficient additional funding accounts for a new model for students in mainstream schools that will remove the loading for disability through a flat rate of 186 per cent of SRS and replace it with a sliding scale across three levels of adjustment differentiated for primary and secondary students:

• supplementary: primary = 42 per cent of SRS; secondary = 33 per cent of SRS
• substantial: primary = 146 per cent of SRS; secondary = 116 per cent of SRS
• extensive: primary = 312 per cent of SRS; secondary = 248 per cent of SRS.

The final, and frankly unbelievable, injustice, is that all states and territories are expected to sign up by December 2017 to an agreement to implement the whole of the Turnbull school funding plan from the middle of 2018. These agreements will be subject to the states and territories implementing the outcomes of the Turnbull plan’s “Review to achieve educational excellence in Australian schools”: outcomes that will not even be released until at least March 2018.

The anger over the Turnbull school funding plan, and the deal done with the Senate, is growing. QTU members have resolved to take a strong stand to oppose the Turnbull plan and we will work closely with any state government that is ready to stand with us to protect students in all schools.

Kevin Bates                                                                                                                       President

Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 122 No 6, 25 August 2017, p8