Achieving the full Gonski

The campaign to achieve the full Gonski funding model for schools is starting again in earnest, moving into top gear in term three and continuing until the next federal election.

From the start of term three, the AEU will employ full-time coordinators in about 20 targeted federal electorates across the country. Five of those seats will be in Queensland, currently expected to be Brisbane, Bonner, Forde, Longman and Dickson. These coordinators will run community-based campaigns in the style of the Your Rights @ Work and the recent Stand4Queensland campaigns.

The initial objective is to establish, for the first time, bipartisan support for the needs-based, sector-blind funding model of funding recommended by the Gonski review. If bipartisan support cannot be achieved, the Union will campaign in the lead-up to the federal election for parties which are prepared to support such a model.

For those who came in late

The review of school funding was promised by the incoming Rudd government in 2007. It was established under the chairmanship of David Gonski, whose name has become inextricably associated with the review and the funding model it proposed.

After widespread consultation, which included thousands of submissions from state schools across the country, the committee recommended a model based on the OECD’s notions of equity in education: not equal outcomes but equal opportunity, irrespective of background.
At the core of the model was an increased school resource standard of per capita funding for each student. This was to be supplemented by additional funding (loadings) for six factors of student educational disadvantage: socio-economic status, Indigeneity, non-English speaking background, disability, remoteness and school size.

The federal government, by then led by Julia Gillard, proposed that the scheme should be implemented by a series of bi-lateral agreements between the federal government and state and territory governments.
The proposal was for additional funding to be phased in over six years with the federal government contributing approximately 65 per cent of the additional funding required and the state or territory, 35 per cent. The funding was to be indexed, with the rate of indexation for federal funding at a higher rate than that required for the states.

NSW, SA, Victoria and Tasmania eventually signed bilateral agreements, but in Queensland, the LNP government refused. Nevertheless, the community support for the introduction of a needs-based funding model was such that the Abbott federal opposition said it was on a “unity ticket” with the federal government, to neutralise the issue.

After the election, the Abbott government announced that the “unity ticket” was nothing of the sort. The outcry of the community and state governments forced a hasty retreat, but the government was committed only to the four years of funding contained in its budget forward estimates, with no commitment to either the significant additional funding in years 5 and 6 of the phase-in, or the model itself after the four years.

The outcry over the Abbott government’s attempt to break its pre-election commitment on Gonski also compelled it to promise the distribution of budgeted funding to states, including Queensland, that had not entered agreements.

In Queensland, the Gonski money that teachers, parents and the broader community had won through a five-year campaign became the Great Results Guarantee funding distributed to schools in 2014 and 2015.

To its credit, the LNP government distributed all the Gonski money to schools; $131m in 2014 and $183m in 2015. But distribution had to be cobbled together over the 2013-14 summer vacation, and was then modified for 2015 without any attempt to move towards a transparent needs-based model.

This is another part of the challenge for Queensland schools: to move from the uncertain additional year-to-year funding we now have to a needs-based model that provides certainty into the future and addresses educational disadvantage on an on-going basis.

The QTU has already raised this with the incoming state government. It isn’t “pie in the sky” – the NSW government is in the final stages of implementing such a model – but the process needs to start now.

Graham Moloney
General Secretary

Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 120 No 4, 5 June 2015, p13