The long-awaited Gonski report has the potential to boost educational outcomes and equity in the school funding system, but only with the recommended $5 billion cash injection according to a senior Anglican educator.
On February 20th, businessman David Gonski unveiled a series of recommendations including the one-off boost to address what the report describes as imbalances and lack of co-ordination in funding and a "significant gap" developing between low and high-performing students.
Other measures would include collecting national data to boost resources for students with disabilities, encouraging philanthropy in schooling, and establishing a Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) as the basis of the funding model for state and private schools.
The Principal of St Andrew’s Cathedral School, Dr John Collier, was at the report launch in Canberra. Dr Collier is the Chair of the Association of Heads of Independent Schools in NSW/ACT and a member of the Anglican Education Commission.
He says the document, two years in the making, contains several promising initiatives including the SRS scheme.
“The notion is a good one in terms of a base that applies to all schools, with loadings for indicators of disadvantage which are open to non-government schools as well as government schools. The methodology for assessing school achievement is more problematic as it would be based on the NAPLAN testing, which is a narrow method of assessment and was never meant for this purpose.”
Dr Collier believes that overall non-government schools, including church schools, could benefit if the entire report was adopted. “At the top end I doubt there would be any increase at all in funding, quite possibly a reduction. But bear in mind that most of the schools in our sector, despite the stereotypes, are not high income schools. Most independent schools in Australia, and many Anglican schools are included in that, are not at the most affluent end of the range and students in those sort of schools could expect to benefit by having more resources available” Dr Collier said.
No funding boost
Already School Education Minister Peter Garrett has ruled out a mutli-billion dollar injection to the system but the government says it will now begin work on the next stages in developing a new funding model for schools. Based on the Gonski report it will take a set of funding principles to the next meeting of the states and territories.
Dr Collier believes that is a disappointing result considering the amount Gonski argued for is only a 15 percent rise in the education budget or .05% of Gross Domestic Product. Already, Australia ranks near the bottom on the OECD scale of comparable countries, in terms of education spending.
The Chief Executive of the Sydney Anglican Schools Corporation Dr Laurie Scandrett describes the report as 'a great step forward' but is also worried the government will delay providing the extra funding needed to back the Gonski findings.
"We're concerned the government will not in the foreseeable future implement significant parts of the report such as the introduction of a schooling resource standard and the recommendation to fund a greater proportion of school capital works.
The government has pointed to the expenditure on the Building the Eduction Revolution (BER) school hall program as evidence of its significant contribution to capital works for schools.
“They’ll really need to be prepared to put dollars towards it or it defeats the purposes of the equity measures contained in the report” Dr Collier says “There’s a mismatch between politicians’ demands that we be the clever country and the resourcing that is available to make it so."
