The Federal Government has announced the release of the long-anticipated Gonski review into school funding in the country, finding that a comprehensive overhaul of funding is required to delivery the best results for students.

 

The Review of Funding for Schooling, chaired by David Gonski, released the report which found that new arrangements are needed to:

  • Make sure that Australian kids do not fall behind the rest of the world, and keep Australia competitive, after a decline in education standards in the past decade.
  • Stop the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students growing wider.

 

The report’s key recommendation is the establishment of a Schooling Resource Standard, which would set investment per student and additional top-up funding to target disadvantage students.

 

The Federal Government has announced it will implement the model provided it satisfies the following objectives:

  • Support higher achievement for all students;
  • Deliver equity in access to high quality education;
  • Deliver excellent teaching and learning outcomes;
  • Support school choice for a diverse range of schools, allowing parents to choose the school that is right for their child;
  • Provide fairness, transparency and accountability;
  • Support continuous improvement and innovation in school performance;
  • Deliver financial sustainability, to ensure that schools can be financed properly into the future;
  • Stability and certainty for schools about their funding, ensuring that no school loses a dollar of funding per student as a result of any changes.

 

In response to the review, the Federal Government has announced it will:

  • Take a set of funding principles to the next meeting of COAG for agreement.
  • Seek the commitment of states and territories to work through the reform proposals and options for implementation. This will include detailed development and modeling of the elements of a new funding system, including costs, and how they could work in practice.
  • Establish a number of working groups under the COAG council system that will engage across sectors and with stakeholders in key areas to test specific elements of the recommended model, including additional funding to target disadvantage.
  • Establish a Ministerial Reference Group to ensure there is ongoing consultation and dialogue with key stakeholders and the public through this process.

 

The report also makes a number of other key recommendations, including a new approach to capital funding, strategies for promoting philanthropic partnerships with schools.

 

Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett released a damming assessment of the report, claiming that recommendations amount to a federal takeover of the state run system.

 

"This is the Commonwealth trying to say we want your money, we want to pool it and we want to now administer state government run schools," Mr Barnett said.

 

The full report can be found here