Julia Gillard, as education minister and then prime minister, identified the Gonski Report on school funding, later renamed the Better School Plan, as one of her crowning achievements.
Backed by the Australian Education Union and Australia’s cultural-left education blob (a term coined by Britain’s Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove), her argument is that Gonski will deliver excellence and equity in education by massively increasing government expenditure. The Gonski funding model, involving a base level of funding known as a School Resourcing Standard and additional loadings related to disadvantage, is also lauded as bring clarity, transparency and consistency to school funding. Not so. As noted by the National Commission of Audit, the flaws and weaknesses in the report are manifest and the reality is those who have been critical of the ALP—inspired approach to school funding have been proven correct.
Under the heading “Complexity of the funding model”, section 9.7 Appendix Volume 1, the statement is made that “new school funding arrangements are complex, inconsistent and lack transparency”. Instead of having a national funding model, we have a situation where the states and territories and Catholic and independent school sectors have their own approaches to allocating funding to schools.
So much for the argument that the Gonski model represents an improvement on the Howard government’s supposedly opaque and insistently applied socio-economic status (SES) mode.
The Schooling Resource Standard is also criticized for not being “based on a detailed analysis of the cost of delivering education” and the formula employed for quantifying disadvantage for using faulty data leading to students” being misidentified as being inside or outside definitions of educationally disadvantaged”.
Citing international research and an analysis carried out by the ALP federal member for Fraser, Andrew Leigh, when an academic at the Australian National University, the audit report also concludes there is little, if any, relationship between increased expenditure and raising standards. Mirroring the argument put by Jennifer Buckingham in her School Funding on a Budget, the audit report argues “increasing funding does not necessarily equate to better student outcomes”.
As common sense suggests, and contrary to the Australian Education Union’s “I Give a Gonski” campaign, a more effective way to raise standards is to have a rigorous curriculum, qualified and committed teachers, strong parental engagement and schools, within broad guidelines, that have the flexibility to manage themselves.
To applaud the commission of audits analysis of school funding should not be taken as unqualified support. The suggestion that the states, and most likely their education departments，should control how funding to independent school is allocated is a mistake.
State schools, on the whole, compete against non-government schools, and allowing state governments or their education bureaucracies to decide how funding is allocated to independent schools represents a conflict of interest.
