The education budget should be spent on vouchers for parents to pick the schools that they think are best for their children. It's not just rich people who don't want their kids educated, not brainwashed, in the public system.

Way too much of our limited education dollar is going to rich private schools.

The answer is one state or federal government funding paradigm and a means tested allocation to individual students. Directed by their parents at competing public/private educators.

And thereby, end the undue influence of the old school tie and virtual blackmail by various religious schools.
Alan B.

Almost all articles on school funding are inaccurate. The 2017 amendments to the Australian Education Act did not provide for “a fairer and more transparent system”. The Gonski funding model is the Howard government’s SES funding model with a different method of measuring each school’s SES and with SES now called CTC. That’s all it took: a name change and the commentariat went into fits of delight at this new wonder!

A funding model that has one set of rules for government schools, another set for systemic non-government schools and yet another set for independent non-government schools cannot be sector blind. Nor can a funding model that ignores school fees be needs-based.

Almost all OECD countries fund non-government community schools, eleven of them more generously than Australia does. Finland, for example, fully funds them but does not allow them to charge fees, while New Zealand almost fully funds them if they charge very low fees.

Labor Govt & wisdom lacking teachers have brought our society to what we cop now !