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The Forum > Article Comments > Going Backski > Comments

Going Backski : Comments

By Angelo Gavrielatos, published 17/6/2014

Christopher Pyne and Tony Abbott have confirmed what many have long suspected: they run a government which feels no responsibility for government schools.

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The Gonski plan is not a “needs-based structure”. It is not “a funding system where students were funded according to their needs”. It is the Howard government’s SES funding model under a new name – “capacity to contribute”. It will increase social stratification in our schools and has led to demands for means-tested fees in government schools, as I said it would on the day the report was released.

The AEU cannot “continue the fight for needs-based funding, which provides all children with a properly-resourced education” because it never started such a fight.

Despite my efforts via the Victorian AEU, the federal AEU did not even make a submission to the Gonski review proposing a specific funding amount or even a specific funding model for schools. It did not even advocate the view that a funding system had to be based on an explicit staffing formula because it is teachers who do the work of teaching (and make up more than 80 per cent of the core recurrent cost of running a school, in Victoria and I would think elsewhere). It did not even suggest a model for distributing the funding to students in the different school sectors. It completely missed the fact that that it was a Review of Funding for Schooling, not a Review of Funding for Schools. It thought all it had to do was adopt a “Give us more – take it from them!” approach.

It has realised its error in not proposing a staffing formula. I quote from The Australian Financial Review of 5/9/2012: “Minimum quotas for the number of teachers per school will need to be maintained even as principals are given more control over hiring and budgets, the public education union says.” (“Autonomy worries teachers” (print title, “Minimum teacher quotas must stay: union” (web title of article behind a paywall). However, it has not realised its error in not proposing a specific funding model.

The AEU has to move out of the 1950s and understand that the publicness of education does not depend on the government’s owning the schools.
Posted by Chris C, Wednesday, 18 June 2014 2:49:50 PM
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