In response to yesterday’s posts:
1. The Gonski recommendations are the existing Victorian funding model (as I said they would be before they were made - http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=13226&page=0), so I am not surprised that Victoria gets to keep its existing funding models.

The funding totals have not made sense to me since the government announced them at the start of the negotiation process. After all, if the Gonski SRS of $8,000 per primary student and $10,500 per secondary student was estimated to cost $5 billion, how can the government’s decision to choose a $9,271 per primary student SRS and $12,193 per student SRS cost only $4-5 billion in the last of the six years? It should cost substantially more.

2. Whenever the government grants tax cuts, higher income earners get larger amounts and people complain, but higher income earners pay more tax in the first place so the fact that their cuts are larger than those of lower income earners is neither here nor there. The same applies with funding changes in relation to school size. The mere fact that schools of one size get a bigger change than schools of another is neither here nor there. Larger schools in Victoria have been financially penalised since the phasing out of base funding was introduced in 2005. Were that phasing out to end, larger schools would benefit, and it would be perfectly just that they did so.

That’s is not to say that the particular schools in your example are treated justly, just that the difference in funding due to size does not of itself mean anything. My own submission provided a base of around $250,000 for all but the very smallest primary schools and almost $1million for all secondary schools.

The method for determining the SRS was nonsense, and I said so in my response (http://foi.deewr.gov.au/system/files/doc/other/curtis_chris20110524.pdf) to the Emerging Issues paper. However the resultant figures were very good, and I have concentrated my current campaign on one matter only - the continuation of the SES model) in the belief that it will be the hardest mistake to correct in the future..

In summary, the Gonski plan is better than what we have now, but not as good as it should be. I remain convinced that the scheme I proposed is far superior to the one that the Gonski panel recommended, but a retired school teacher does not have the political power of the various interest groups in the country. Nor can he even get published in a media dominated by the likes of Kevin Donnelly, Scott Prasser, Judith Sloan and the rest.