When the Gonski review was released a decade ago, it was hailed as the answer to Australia’s educational woes – a roadmap to creating an equitable school funding system, and boosting the performance of Australian students on the global stage.
But rather than celebrating its success, its 10-year anniversary last month sparked critique of the failure of successive governments to implement the report’s recommendations.
Despite record levels of funding flowing to Australia’s schools, education results have suffered a 20-year decline on international benchmarks. Meanwhile, a new analysis paints a bleak picture of a widening gap between advantaged and disadvantaged schools, with commonwealth and state funding for private schools increasing at nearly five times the rate of public school funding over the decade to 2019-20.
Education experts now warn that the vision enshrined in the review will only be realised if the commonwealth and states unite to end the “defrauding” of public schools and fully fund them to their needs-based benchmark.
Ahead of next year’s expiry of the current state-federal funding deal, the National School Reform Agreement, experts say there must be a coordinated effort to ensure Gonski’s vision is realised.
What did Gonski recommend?
In 2010, businessman David Gonski was engaged by the Rudd government to lead a review into Australia’s school funding, with the aim of reducing the impact of social disadvantage on educational outcomes, and ending inequities in the distribution of public money. The report was released in February 2012, during Julia Gillard’s prime ministership.
The reforms recommended that governments reduce payments to overfunded schools that didn’t need them and redirect funds on a needs-based model. Its key recommendation was the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) – a base rate of funding per student with additional loading for disadvantage factors such as Indigenous heritage. The SRS would determine the required funding needed for each school. But a decade on, most public schools are yet to reach their full funding according to their SRS and more funding has gone to the less needy schools, with non-government schools well above their benchmark.
Gonski said the system would “ensure that differences in educational outcomes are not the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possessions” when he delivered his findings to government in 2011.
Why did it fail?
Trevor Cobbold, an economist and national convenor for public school advocacy group Save Our Schools, says the failure to achieve the review’s goals was a result of failures by the Gillard government and those that followed to implement the report’s recommendations.
“Gonski didn’t fail. It is governments that failed Gonski, and thereby failed disadvantaged students,” he says.
“You have to construct a system that recognises both the commonwealth and state roles, and Gonski did this by designing a nationally integrated model on a needs-basis.”
Cobbold argues the Gonski reforms were only “partially implemented” by the Gillard government because the former prime minister was constrained by her own commitment that no school would lose a dollar of funding. He also points to Gillard’s deal with Catholic Church that its schools would maintain their existing share of education funding – an arrangement that was extended to independent schools.
When the Turnbull government passed needs-based education funding legislation in 2017, it wasn’t projected to be achieved for at least a decade.
The legislation was based on the review’s key recommendation of a SRS. 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 over the same period.
But the funding projections show public schools in all states except the ACT would be funded at only 91% or less of their SRS until at least 2029.
More recently, “funding deals” the Morrison government established for private schools outside of the needs-based model – designed to soften the financial impact for non-government schools during the transition to a new funding model – further undermined the plan.
Tom Greenwell, a Canberra-based teacher and co-author of Waiting for Gonski – How Australia Failed its Schools, says a “huge problem” is that the “real work of additional funding has always been delayed beyond the forward estimates, to the next funding agreement”.
“Needs-based funding needs to be delivered now,” he says.
Which funding is currently in place?
Dr Glenn Savage, an education reform researcher at the University of Western Australia, agrees that the Gonski reform never delivered the needs-based funding model that it initially set out to deliver.
“The fundamentals of the system have never been addressed,” he says. “The large amount of money that goes to the independent and Catholic schools has never really been under threat as a result of Gonski.”
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 the states’ minimum “formal target” for public schools is only 75% despite the Turnbull government originally proposing 80%.
The agreement also allows state governments to include SRS contributions on items not originally deemed part of the Gonski benchmark, such as depreciation and transport. Cobbold says these “loopholes” contribute to under-funding and further drag down the contributions to government schools.
The states have argued the funding deal forced them to increase their education budgets by hundreds of millions of dollars, and have accused the commonwealth of failing to enact a more collaborative approach to funding rather than a one-size-fits-all scheme.
What is needed now?
While neither of the major parties have yet sought to make education funding a core policy area for the upcoming election, whoever wins will be tasked with negotiating a new school reform funding agreement with the states and territories.
Cobbold says the current bilateral funding deal, which is due to expire in December 2023, must end the “defrauding” of the public school system, and require states to step up their contributions.
Savage agrees that “it’s the states that are letting public schools down”.
“We have the state saying to parents: ‘If your child goes to a private school in this state, they deserve to be fully funded under the Gonski model. If they go to public school, they don’t deserve to be fully funded.’ And what kind of message is that sending about how governments value private schools relative to public schools in our nation?”
Pete Goss, who leads PwC Australia’s school education consulting practice, says the next step must be determining how to get federal and state governments to lift funding for government schools “back up to our national promise” of the SRS.
“Lifting government schools up to the full Gonski funding would be worth more than a $1,000 per student per year,” he said.
“At all levels of government at this point, we’d need a joint commitment to lift per student funding of government schools, so that it was in line with our national promise.”
The parameters of the 80-20 state-commonwealth funding split could be renegotiated in the next funding deal.
Victoria, for example, agreed in 2019 to lift its contribution towards the SRS from 67% – the nation’s lowest per-student funding level – to 75% over 10 years. The state’s education minister, James Merlino, says the commonwealth should fund the final 5% of the SRS for government schools.
But, as Goss says, “a school doesn’t care where a dollar comes from”.
