Increases in funding to the private education system have enabled it to attract teachers, despite a nationwide shortage, due to its ability to bump up salaries, according to the head of the New South Wales Secondary Principals’ Council.
Craig Petersen, who represents the principals of public schools across the state, said not only do public schools not have the budget to compete, but they were also restricted from lifting teachers’ salaries above the award wage.
“If you’re trying to fill a position at your nongovernment school, you can offer five to 10 to $20,000 bonuses, and you can provide other perks for them,” he said. “It’s really hard for someone to knock back that opportunity.”
It comes as Guardian Australia revealed funding to independent and Catholic schools has increased almost twice as much compared with public schools in the decade since the landmark Gonski review, which set out a roadmap to fund schools according to their need.
Petersen said teachers were also struggling under the strain of a public school system underfunded to deliver to the needs of its students.
“Our classrooms are incredibly complex because of the diversity, because we’re not adequately funded, and because we never got those final years of the additional Gonski funding,” he said.
The president of the NSW Teachers Federation, Angelo Gavrielatos, agreed the consequences of the funding increase divide between public and private schools was playing out in the hot competition for teachers.
He pointed to the principal of Sceggs Darlinghurst, an independent school in Sydney, saying at the Sydney Morning Herald’s schools summit earlier this year that the school paid “top of the scale” teachers $135,000. The top bracket in the public education system is currently $117,060.
“The answer to this lies in governments fulfilling their responsibilities to ensure every classroom has a qualified teacher, and that must be through competitive salaries and manageable workloads,” he said.
Graham Catt, the chief executive of Independent Schools Australia, said the 1,200 independent schools across Australia had vastly different resourcing and operational capabilities, with some likely being in a better position to attract and retain teachers than others.
For other independent schools which are focused on providing the lowest fees possible for parents, he said they would struggle to find the revenue to provide teachers an additional pay rise.
“The workforce issues is across every sector, and I think it’s by working together and through the review of the [National School Reform Agreement] that we have our best chance of solving that,” Catt said.
Petersen said the finding that public school funding had not increased as much as private schools was an “enormous disappointment”, but he was not surprised.
“It’s no surprise to me because this is exactly what we’ve been warning against for well over a decade,” he said.
Patrick Murphy, the president of the Queensland Association of State School Principals, said he was also seeing a downgrading of facilities across the state’s public schools, from the loss of art and music programs, to sport and language.
“Those programs get dropped because they can’t afford the teachers, where others can,” he said.
But it also meant schools have limited ability to provide other crucial staffing resources which can help build a child’s learning capability for the rest of their lives, such as psychologists, occupational therapists and speech pathologists.
He said this was a resource most critical in schools located in rural and remote areas where these services were limited compared with metro areas.
Murphy said he was also seeing the consequences of state governments not reaching their obligation to fund public schools at 80%.
“The disappointing fact is the Queensland government has not lifted from 89.6% of the school resourcing standard for students in Queensland,” he said.
“When Naplan results are not moving, we shouldn’t be blaming schools, we should be blaming a system that underinvests.”
