There was plenty of excitement across the political divide when the Gonski review into educational funding was released in February 2012.
Led by businessman David Gonski, and commissioned by the then-Gillard Government, the review was designed to reform school funding and lift outcomes for less privileged students through a new needs-based funding model.
It contained 41 recommendations, including an increase of $5 billion per year to schools funding with one third of it to come from the Commonwealth, and a fairer funding framework, including a "per student" funding standard.
Ten years on, some are saying the Gonski review has failed and that, since it was commissioned, educational outcomes have gone backwards.
"Across reading, literacy and numeracy, Australian 15-year-olds are a year of learning behind where they were in 2000," says Chris Bonnor, former teacher and principal, and one of the authors of Waiting for Gonski: How Australia Failed its Schools.
"To be able to see this and measure this decline … really flags a big warning," Mr Bonnor tells ABC RN's Saturday Extra.
"It's the consistency of results, longitudinally, that I think makes it unrealistic to bury our heads in the sand on this."
So what's happened since all the excitement over Gonski? And what went so wrong?
An 'truly remarkable' new consensus
In 2012, Waiting for Gonski co-author and teacher Tom Greenwell was "caught up in the hope and optimism" of the Gonski review.
He says that for the first time, the 2009 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) tests showed a "real decline in the way Australian 15-year-olds were performing and the gaps between the most disadvantaged kids and the more privileged kids [were] really growing".
"A needs-based, sector-blind funding formula seemed like a really rational approach to advancing the common good."
Mr Greenwell was excited by the "unprecedented political breakthroughs with all sectors welcoming the report".
"David Gonski seemed to personify a new national consensus. So I was definitely optimistic at the time."
The decade prior to the Gonski review was "riven with disputes between the sectors and between the Coalition and Labor as to priorities for schools [and] methods of funding", Mr Bonnor says.
A solution to the problem of education inequity being embraced by groups on all sides was, he says, "truly remarkable".
'Escalation of inequality'
Australian Education Union federal president Correna Haythorpe says the Gonski review was "very thorough" and that its recommendations came after "nearly 7,000 review submissions from schools all across the nation [and] nearly 80 public consultations".
Yet she too says the review hasn't lived up to expectations.
Mr Bonnor says the gap "between higher achieving students and the strugglers" has continued to increase, and that publicly available data from the My School website backs this up.
Furthermore, results from the 2012, 2015 and 2018 rounds of PISA tests show a "continued decline" in educational outcomes, Mr Greenwell says.
Gary Marks, honorary principal fellow at the University of Melbourne and researcher of educational outcomes, agrees that the Gonski review's aim of reducing educational inequality has failed.
He says "the whole rationale" for the review was to reduce the relationship between socio-economic background and performance.
"It hasn't happened," he says.
Mr Greenwell agrees.
"David Gonski and his panel looked at our school funding system and said, to improve results, we need to allocate funding on a needs basis, we need to provide funding loadings to disadvantaged students.
"But that simply hasn't happened," he says.
Disagreement on cause of failure
While there's some consensus over the undelivered promises of the Gonski review, there's plenty of disagreement about how we got here.
Mr Greenwell argues that, at least in part, the Gonski review hasn't worked because it hasn't been implemented.
He points to a school in Innisfail, south of Cairns, that is "overwhelmingly populated by disadvantaged kids, Indigenous kids; just the kind of school that Gonski was meant to help".
"In the years following the review, [that school's] funding was cut by $1,000 per student. Even today, in real terms, it's no better off," he says.
Ms Haythorpe says that, since the original Gonski review was handed down, "governments have failed to put in the policy settings and the funding settings that could actually bring those recommendations to life in the way that they were intended".
But Mr Greenwell says there's been another issue at play. He argues the Gonski review was more effective at identifying problems than proposing solutions.
"The differences between schools, and the SES [socio-economic status] gaps between them, are built into the system. And you can't keep reforming schools on the inside without fixing the stuff on the outside that's creating these big gaps.
"Our system is … widening this gap," Mr Bonnor says.
He says within-school reforms are important, however "the flip side of the coin is to fix the stuff in the structure of schools that's jamming disadvantaged kids more in disadvantaged schools and advantaged kids into advantaged schools".
He believes the Gonski review didn't adequately address the "drivers of concentration of disadvantage", such as unregulated fees, "which are often prohibitive for low-income families", and selective enrolment practices.
"These kinds of structural features of our education system are engendering these concentrations of disadvantage, or at least making them worse."
An education department spokesperson told the ABC that the Gonski review has "informed the design of the needs-based school funding arrangements we have in place today" and that the arrangements "are providing record funding of $315 billion from 2018 to 2029 for Australian schools in all sectors".
"Students with the same needs within the same sector attract the same support from the Commonwealth, regardless of the state where they live," the spokesperson said.
But the AEU's Ms Haythorpe says that since 2012 there's been "a massive escalation of funding to the private sector".
"We now have much greater inequality in our school sectors, and we have a much greater disparity of funding in terms of the divide between the public and private sector."
ABC reporting has shown that thousands of public schools receive less public funding than similar private schools.
A flawed beginning
Dr Marks argues that the Gonski model was always going to fail as it was flawed to begin with.
He says the recommendations should have focused on individual student performance.
"If you wanted to actually have an equitable funding system, what you do is focus on how well the kids are doing, rather than their sociological characteristics.
"So for the kids who are behind in the early years, [for example in] year 3, you make provisions that they can catch up, whether they're Aboriginal or white, or from a rich area … or they're from the back of beyond and Bourke. It doesn't matter. If the kids are behind, then that's where the funding should go."
He considers "correlates of performance" such as socio-economic status – a fundamental part of the Gonski review's recommendations – to be weak and "not thought out properly".
"It's all out of whack," he says.
"You have to be thinking about all different types of kids of all different types of abilities, and what's best for them, rather than have this one-size-fits-all [approach]."
Ms Haythorpe says she doesn't support funding following an individual child or voucher systems.
"We're a sector, we're a system … We're not a series of individual schools, which are left to their own devices," she says.
"Systems have to step up and provide the funding and the policy settings for our schools to do the job that they do, which is teach our children."
Where to from here?
Mr Bonnor says not doing anything to shift the current education funding situation carries with it a significant risk.
"If we do nothing, our higher SES schools are growing, and they're accumulating their portions of higher SES kids. And lower SES schools … are increasing the proportion of strugglers.
"There's a huge cost if it doesn't stop. There's a cost to individuals, young people and kids at school. And there's a cost [to the] community. But there's also a national cost, because the cost of picking up the kids that are falling behind rises considerably, not only during the school years, but also after school."
We should be "energised and inspired" by international examples, Mr Greenwell argues.
In Ontario, Canada, Catholic schools are "fully taxpayer funded and free to the user. So they're actually a lot more accessible to Catholics then than they are in Australia, where fees often exclude poor Catholics from our schools", he says.
"But it also means social disadvantage is spread much more evenly across their school system. And lo and behold, they have much greater equity, and their students consistently outperform ours."
The Independent Schools Australia was unavailable for interview.
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