Government funding for private schools in Australia has increased at nearly five times the rate of public school funding over the past 10 years according to new analysis, with predictions of a $74bn shortfall in money for public schools this decade despite the shift to a needs-based scheme.
The analysis compared combined commonwealth and state government funding for schools in 2009-10 to 2019-20, based on the Productivity Commission’s report on government services, released earlier this month. It was conducted by the public school advocacy group Save our Schools.
In that decade, funding for private schools – including Catholic and independent institutions – increased by $3,338 per student, adjusted for inflation, compared with $703 per student for public schools.
Trevor Cobbold, an economist and national convenor for Save Our Schools, disputed claims by state and commonwealth governments that all schools had enjoyed increased funding.
“In nominal terms, that is true, but when you take account of inflation, the funding hasn’t kept up with costs, so that means they’ve been cutting the real resources in public schools – and this has been happening for a decade right across the states,” he said.
While commonwealth funding of state school students increased by $1,181 over the decade, state spending dropped in that time by $478 per student, the analysis found.
“At a state level it’s also been disastrous for public schools, because state governments are the primary funders of public schools and on average, across Australia, they have cut funding,” Cobbold said.
In 2017 the Turnbull government passed needs-based education funding legislation based on the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS). The benchmark is an estimate of how much total public funding a school requires to meet its students’ educational needs, and is based on recommendations from the 2011 Gonski review.
Under the reform, overfunded independent schools would have their funding brought down to the SRS benchmark by 2029 while underfunded public schools would have their funding increased.
However, Cobbold said there was an average shortfall in public school funding of $6.7bn per year between now and 2029, a total of $74bn since the 2019-2020 financial year.
Meanwhile, he said, successive Coalition federal governments had increased funding to private schools such as through the $1.2bn “choice and affordability fund” – designed to soften the financial impact for nongovernment schools during the transition to a new funding model.
“The projections are that until the end of the decade, private schools will be overfunded – [that is,] funded over 100% of their Schooling Resource Standard – and public schools won’t even be funded to 91%,” he said.
The Australian Education Union’s pre-budget submission has called for an “urgent” and “bold” investment in public school funding, including calling for the commonwealth to fund schools to a minimum of 100% of the SRS.
Margery Evans, chief executive of Independent Schools Australia, stressed that the “vast majority” of enrolment growth in the independent school sector in the past five years was in low to medium fee schools.
“These are the schools that receive higher levels of government funding overall due to their communities’ lower capacity to contribute,” she said.
Under the current school funding agreement struck in 2019, the commonwealth contributes 80% of the SRS for private schools, while state governments are responsible for the remaining 20%. The split is reversed for public schools. But Cobbold said the states’ “formal target” for public schools was only 75%, contributing to the under-funding.
Additionally, he said the current funding agreement also allowed states to include in its SRS contributions spending on items not originally deemed part of the Gonski benchmark such as depreciation, transport and payroll tax.
New South Wales’ education minister, Sarah Mitchell, said because the figures in the Save Our Schools analysis were not taken directly from the Productivity Commission Report they were “unable to be validated by the Department of Education”.
Mitchell said growth in the state’s expenditure for each student from 2010-11 to 2019-20 had exceeded all other states and territories and was more than double the national average.
Victoria’s education minister, James Merlino, said since 2014-15 the state had increased its recurrent spending for government school students by more than 30%.
“I have repeatedly asked the commonwealth to do its fair share and fund the final 5% of the schooling resource standard for government schools – and it has consistently refused to do so,” he said.
Overall, in 2019-20 the commonwealth spent $3,246 on public school students and the states spent $11,935, for a total of $15,181. Meanwhile, the commonwealth spent $10,211 for each private school student and the states spent $2,978, a total of $13,189. The figures exclude user cost of capital, depreciation, payroll tax and school transport as these items are not included in the funding figures for private schools.
Cobbold said the upcoming federal election provided an opportunity to recast education funding as a key policy area, or else inequalities in funding would worsen over the rest of the decade.
A spokesperson for the acting education minister, Stuart Robert, said the government services report showed the commonwealth’s investment had grown faster for both government and nongovernment schools compared with states and territories.
“The Morrison government is proud of providing record school funding to all schools to meet the educational needs of Australian students now and into the future, with $315.2bn to be provided to schools between 2018 and 2029 under the government’s Quality Schools package.”
The federal opposition’s education spokesperson, Tanya Plibersek, said a Labor government would work with states and territories to ensure every public school was “on a path to its full and fair level of funding”.
