Chris, this is the one I used.

www.rba.gov.au/calculator/

$8115 in 2000 = $10,601.44 in 2009

$13544/10601 = 1.2776 or an increase of 28% over and above inflation. Or in Layman's terms OVER and above the increase in cost of living.

If this is mostly going to teacher's salaries and there is no improvement in teaching, then why will Gonski's suggestion of more of the same change anything?

Shadow,

I used the same one. I see what you have done. You have used the annual calculator and put in the 1999-2000 figure as if it was for the year 2000 and then calculated the result for 2009. But the comparison is for financial years. You need to use the quarterly calculator and put the 1999-2000 figure in for December 1999 (the mid-point of the 1999-2000 financial year) and get a result for December 2008 (the mid-point of the 2008-09 financial year). This gives my result.

Insofar as this increase has gone into teacher salaries it has done more than preserve teacher salaries in relation to other salaries in the community and thus prevented an even greater drain from teaching by the most able people in it. We are much better off than we were in 1999-2000. If teacher salaries fall behind other salaries, teaching becomes less attractive and those who can leave for a better paying job elsewhere do so. In other words, we have to increase spending in real terms just to stand still.

I could speak at great length on why there has been no improvement in learning. We have had fads like the open classroom resurrected. We had savage staffing cuts in Victoria in the 1990s, only some of which were reversed in the 2000s. We have had a massive misdirection of school resources into competition, marketing and bureaucratic accountability requirements. We have had a huge increase in short-term contracts. As teacher salaries have fallen dramatically over 35 years, we have had a long-term decline in the entry scores for teacher training. See http://community.tes.co.uk/forums/t/449991.aspx?PageIndex=31.

The current funding model is absurd. The Gonksi proposals, imperfect though they are, are to make it more rational. If you read the link I gave in my first post, you will see why.

Did the calculation as you asked and got 24.9% increase in spending over and above the cost of living in 9 years or about 3% p.a. increase over and above the cost of living.

If shifting the terms of reference 6 months gives 3% difference, the 15% difference can easily be found with a different time reference, and other factors.

The net result is the real expenditure per child has increased, with no change to the results. Doing the same again is lunacy.

Shadow,

The Grattan Institute’s 44 per cent is complete nonsense. You need to look at the increase per student, and even that is not the whole story. Secondary schooling costs more per student than primary schooling. If in one year you had 3,000,000 students, 1,700,000 of them in primary schools and 1,300,000 of them in secondary schools and nine years later you still had 3,000,000 students, but with 1,600,000 of them in primary schools and 1,400,000 of them in secondary schools, the overall average cost per student would increase simply because the proportion in the more costly sector had increased. If over a nine-year period, the percentage of students learning English as a Second Language had increased because of changes to the migration program, the overall average would increase. If over a nine-year period, the percentage of students with a disability had increased, the overall average would increase. If over a nine-year period, the percentage of students in year 12 had increased in those jurisdictions which fund year 12 at a higher rate than year 7, the overall average would increase.

But the main point remains the one I have repeated more than once: if you do not increase spending per student in line with overall living standards, the best teachers leave because the pay differential between teaching and other jobs has grown.

The Gonksi report does not propose “doing the same again”. It proposes a different funding formula (which is a separate issue from the amounts to be paid under that funding formula). The current system is ridiculous for reason already outlined. Even the Coalition should support reform – if only if would put its long-term political advantage ahead of its short-term political advantage. It is so fixated on attacking the government that it can’t see that under recommendation 22 of the report it could no longer be attacked for spending the majority of federal funds on private schools.

Chris the statements made all cover the increase in real expenditure, not on a per student basis. The 44% is completely valid. Your figures show that the real increase in spending per student increased over 9 years by 25% over and above the real cost of living. Your point is of semantic value only.

Given that the cornerstone of Gonski is a redistribution of funding, my point still stands.

Shadow,

Your claim that “the statements made all cover the increase in real expenditure, not on a per student basis” is wrong. In the quotes I give above, Judith Sloan claimed that there had been “a more than 40 per cent” “increase in real-per-student spending” “over the past decade” (“ALP’s school zeal will have to wait until 2525”, 4/9/2012, The Australian) and then that there had been a “close to 40 per cent increase in per capita spending on schools” in the past decade (“Gold-medal clunkers on the road to nowhere”, 22-23/12/2012, The Australian). She says “per student” and “per capita”, though whether the “per capita” means “per student or “per head of population” is not clear.

But to claim an increase in spending without mentioning the increased numbers it has to cover is misleading, if not dishonest. Otherwise, we might as well claim that no matter how many extra people use a service its total cost must not increase. That would be absurd.

You have to increase spending over the cost of living increases if overall living standards are rising. Imagine that you were paid in your job today what you would have been paid in real terms in 1900. You wouldn’t stay in that job. You would expect to keep up with the rest of the working population. That is what has happened in teaching. To cut the starting pay to $47,696 would drive even more able people out of it.

In any case, as I explain in the link I gave earlier, the 44 per cent is not valid, even on a total basis.

The cornerstone of Gonski is a different funding model. We ought to discuss it on those terms. Should we continue to fund schools on the basis of how well off the neighbours of the students are? Should we continue to have the feds overwhelmingly fund private schools and the states overwhelmingly fund public schools? Should we continue to base the funding of specific schools on an average cost irrespective of the needs of the individuals who attend them?