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The Forum > Article Comments > Another Gonski deadline …. > Comments

Another Gonski deadline …. : Comments

By Dean Ashenden, published 3/7/2013

Even in the event of a Rudd miracle, and in the event of all states and sectors getting on board, and even in its now-attenuated form, Gonski will face serious obstacles.

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A good article, but like all previous stories it assumes the proposed new 'funding model' actually works. If you track down the online school-level public funding figures drip-fed to the media by Garrett and Gillard in their final month of Gonski propoganda, and match them against online student and school characteristics on the myschool website, it is plain as day that the majority of additional public recurrent funding would be directed toward large metropolitan schools that can achieve economies of scale. For smaller, more isolated (and more disadvantaged) schools it's 50/50 luck of the draw as to whether they would benefit or in fact be worse off in real terms. This is an issue that the Queensland and Victoria governments have pointed out - but the media have missed their key issue - many of the schools that would receive the minimal level of indexation are not awash with cash and in many cases are catering to the most disavantaged students, including some special schools catering to students with disabilities. In contrast, large schools with high achieving students, which for equity reasons deserve the least amount of additional taxpayer resourcing, are the ones that would most benefit under the proposed 'model'. The Australian Government should have a think about how simple and effective its existing model is for distributing Federal money, and stop trying to tell the States and Territories to change their funding models to something which doesn't work and has never been subjected to independent analysis or public scrutiny.
Posted by Phaedrus, Wednesday, 3 July 2013 9:16:47 AM
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Phaedrus,

The funding model does work. It is the system Victoria has used for its government schools for the past eight years.

Do not for a moment believe the Victorian government’s propaganda about any of its schools being worse off. It remains free to allocate the government schools’ share of the extra $4.2 billion according to its own rules (which, despite the claim in the article above, is what the Gonksi panel recommended), so the only way any government schools could be worse off is bad management by the Victorian government.

Many private schools would be worse off for the same reason that they became worse off under the Howard government’s SES funding model; namely, that the Gonksi plan keeps the Howard SES model in place. These schools were worse of because they were low-fee schools that took students from middle class areas. Suddenly, their low fees were to be ignored and they were to be funded according to the wealth of their students’ neighbours. These schools were compensated by being left on Labor’s education resources index, then dishonestly labelled “overfunded” by the public education lobby. Similarly, they will be compensated under the new scheme by not being on the Gonksi model but keeping their existing per student funding, indexed at 3 per cent.

The Gonski is plan is seriously flawed. I sent the government and the systemic school authorities the solution to this problem last year. Perhaps they will pay attention now.
Posted by Chris C, Wednesday, 3 July 2013 3:13:53 PM
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99.995 per cent of the population does not understand the current funding system or the Gonski plan. It does not help that reporting on Gonksi has been very poor. Important and relevant facts have never been mentioned in any article in The Age since the report was released 16 months ago, while The Australian has only once in that time had an article that revealed the Gonski SES plan is the Howard SES plan rebadged.

Most people can’t be bothered doing any research on this issue or even thinking about it. It’s just the same old slogans at 30 paces. Those few who are interested will find lots of useful information at
http://community.tes.co.uk/tes_opinion/f/31/t/576719.aspx?pi2132219857=1.

My many submissions deal with various aspects of the matter:
http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/ReviewofFunding/SubGen/Documents/Curtis_Chris.pdf
http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/ReviewofFunding/SubGen/Documents/Curtis_Chris_Attachment_1.pdf
http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/ReviewofFunding/SubGen/Documents/Curtis_Chris_Attachment_2.pdf
http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/ReviewofFunding/SubEip/AtoF/Documents/Curtis_Chris.pdf
http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/ReviewofFunding/SubResearch/AtoM/Documents/Curtis_Chris.pdf
http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=ee/auseducation/subs.htm (No. 46)
http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=ee/auseduconseq/subs.htm (No. 3).

The Australian today reports that the new government is having a fresh look at things. One question is will the systemic school authorities, having been conned by the Howard government into accepting the SES model, be conned again. Evidence so far suggests they will, in which case we can forget about sympathising with their plight in the future.
Posted by Chris C, Wednesday, 3 July 2013 3:26:14 PM
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Chris C - you are right that some parts of the new legislation say state and territory governments would have discretion over the funding distribution... but this is subject to them convincing the Federal Minister that their existing resource distribution models are 'consistent' or 'aligned' with a Gonski-style model including minimum 3% indexation for every school and transitioning up to the Feds' mythical SRS amount over time for all schools deemed to be below that level. Victoria made a counter-proposal earlier this year based on tweaking their existing Student Resource Package (SRP) model for state schools and Funding Allocation Model (FAM) for non-states, but these existing models were rejected out-of-hand by Garrett as being inconsistent with the proposed SRS model. The fact is that implementing the Gonski/SRS approach would involve a complex redistribution of resources compared to the existing SRP and FAM models in Victoria and equivalent funding and resourcing models in other states and territories. Implementing Gonski would be less equitable, more expensive and much more complex than existing arrangements - particularly if NSW, ACT and SA were to have different funding models from all the other states and territories come 1st January 2014; and even more complex if those three jurisdictions each end up with different flavours of Gonski due to sweetener deals offered by the Feds during the so-called 'negotiations', as seems to be happening.
Posted by Phaedrus, Wednesday, 3 July 2013 4:21:32 PM
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Phaedrus,

Well, that is quite weird. After all, the Gonksi model is a based on the Victorian model (with different terminology).

Most of the current troubles would have been avoided if the Gonski panel had accepted my proposal (and the elaborations thereof), but no big player backed, it so it was ignored.
Posted by Chris C, Thursday, 4 July 2013 4:09:40 PM
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Chris C - A key difference is that Victoria's SRP is based on actual resources (staffing, maintenance, etc) whereas the SRS/Gonski 'model' is just a hypothetical construct developed using regression analysis and a healthy dose of GOBSAT. The practical difference in funding is visible from online examples - for example, Aberfeldie Primary School with a relatively wealthy community and average to above-average NAPLAN results would receive nominal per-student public funding growth of 34.0% over the period 2013 to 2019 (lucky things) whereas Airly Primary School servicing a considerably less affluent rural community would be locked to the minimum 3.0% pa level of indexation for at least the next six years, possibly much longer, resulting in nominal growth of just 19.4% over the 2013 to 2019 period. I've picked these two example schools only because they are near the top of the Feds' alphabetised list (see link below), but these are typical examples, i.e. larger city based affluent schools would benefit substantially from Gonski whereas smaller, more remote and disadvantaged schools would face a Gonski lottery. Data sources: (a) SRS funding list http://ninemsn.com.au/img/2013/Victorian_Government_School_by_School.pdf (b) school and student characteristics http://www.myschool.edu.au
Posted by Phaedrus, Thursday, 4 July 2013 7:13:07 PM
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It's a pity that such a useful article is getting buried in detail which seems quite opaque.

It's a shame that the old State schools are being assailed on many fronts. Their best students are being taken away by the selective schools on one hand, and wealthy private schools on the other.

It's also a shame that there are few people prepared to defend the State schools, apart from the ever-present teacher unions, whose arguments often seem heavy-handed and ideological ("Public Education" always being held up as some sacred idea and so on).

Educational funding is still a mess and a muddle. The Whitlam years promised fairness, but did little to simplify the systems of inequality. Howard made it easy for private schools to be set up and compete easily with the State systems, which labour under the dead hand of dinosaurs , notably in NSW and Victoria.

It makes anyone who cares about injustice want to despair.
Posted by Bronte, Friday, 5 July 2013 5:29:34 AM
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Phaedrus,

I am sceptical of long-term projections of future funding for individual schools given how circumstances can change, the lack of detail and the absence of the assumptions on which the calculations are based. It does not make sense to me why the percentage increases would be different at all, unless the new funding model is being phased in in different ways for different schools.

This issue would not have arisen had the Gonski panel accepted my submission, which set a student learning entitlement (aka, SRS) but allowed state and territory supplements.

Bronte,

The details matter. So far, we have treated with a charade of reporting in which the key feature of the Gonski plan, its endorsement of the Coalition government’s SES model, has not been mentioned in even one article in The Age since the report was released. The public cannot judge the plan unless it has the details.
Posted by Chris C, Saturday, 6 July 2013 9:47:35 AM
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