Julia Irwin (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, I am not one of those members of the House who always sees actions by governments as the thin edge of the wedge. That tendency is more often found on the other side of the House. Any intervention by government is often seen by government members as a step down the slippery slope to socialism. But, as each year goes by, we see another ideologically driven change by the government in the field of education. I am becoming more and more concerned about where it will end. I think most Australians are like the frog left in the saucepan which is very slowly heated; it only realises when it is too late that it is being boiled alive. It might be a good time to test the temperature of the water to see how far things have gone. Or, to quote the words of Professor Max Angus, of Edith Cowan University, in his paper entitled Commonwealth-state relations and the funding of Australia’s schools:

The negative consequences of the current funding arrangements are a bit like concrete cancer in a large building, or changes to the ozone layer in our atmosphere. The degradation is slow and almost imperceptible. The net effect is a growing differentiation between those government and nongovernment schools that serve the families on high incomes and those who are not well off. The Australian education system, taken as a whole, is evolving into something but we don’t know what.

It is time for us to stop and consider Professor Angus’s question: what is our education system evolving into? Or are we too far down that slippery slope to regain our footing and get back on track for a fair and effective education system in Australia? The measures contained in the Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Amendment (2007 Budget Measures) Bill 2007 only lead us further down that slippery slope to where education is, once again, the privilege of an elite few. So it is definitely worth looking back up the hill to see how far we have fallen. If we go back to the beginning, when the Commonwealth delivered the first significant grants for school education, under the Whitlam government in 1974, 70 per cent of funding went to government schools and 27 per cent to private schools. That roughly reflected the fact that two-thirds of students went to public schools. But today we find the figures for funding are reversed.

In this year’s budget, which this bill brings into law, private schools will get 69 per cent of funding, while public schools will get only 31 per cent. There has been some increase in the proportion of students attending private schools, but two-thirds of students in public schools still only get 31 per cent of Commonwealth funding. In recent years we have seen Commonwealth funding for private schools growing at three times the rate for public schools. The Commonwealth’s per student grant for what is defined as the least needy private school is far greater than the per student grant for public schools.

Of course, we hear the government countering the advertisements of the Australian Education Union, saying that the total amount of money spent by state and federal governments is 75 per cent of total funding, while only 67 per cent of students attend public schools. In part, the Minister for Education, Science and Training answers her own question in the measures included in this bill. As the minister knows only too well, public schools must accept all students, wherever they live and whatever their disability or their disadvantage. In this bill, the minister introduces additional funding in the form of a loading linked to recurrent grants for non-government schools in rural and remote regions. These are defined as moderately accessible, remote and very remote. But this funding will only be provided to non-government schools. Public education systems, which have the primary responsibility to provide education for all Australian children, regardless of where they live, get absolutely nothing. The minister even has the hide to demand that state governments provide an equivalent increase in their funding for regional and remote government schools. The minister definitely wants to have her cake and eat it too.

On the one hand, the minister says that students in public schools get more funding in total, if you add together the Commonwealth and state government funding; but, on the other hand, she acknowledges that there are reasons why, because of remoteness, some schools may need extra funding. To balance the equation, she gives extra funding only to non-government schools, but demands that state governments make up for what the Commonwealth government will not provide public schools. The same could be said about the additional cost to the public education system of catering to the needs of new arrivals in Australia, yet in the same bill the minister acknowledges the need to fund both public and non-government schools. On the one hand, the minister sees the need for additional funding for remoteness but only gives additional funding to non-government schools; on the other hand, she sees the need for additional funding under the humanitarian settlement initiative. The minister, in her second reading speech, said:

For humanitarian entrants in Australian primary and secondary schools, intensive support to improve English language skills is one of the best ways to improve the educational outcomes and future employability so that they can participate more broadly in Australian society.

I could not agree more with that statement. The Fowler electorate has, until recent years, had perhaps the greatest funding need in this area. The burden of providing not only English language programs but also other school-based assimilation programs has largely been carried by schools often classified as disadvantaged. This funding is welcome, but it only serves to show how lopsided the whole issue of Commonwealth funding is. The government appreciates the additional cost of meeting the needs of students under the humanitarian settlement initiative funds for both public and non-government schools. The government also appreciates the additional cost involved in providing school education in remote areas but only funds non-government schools. This move makes a mockery of the government’s claim to be a good economic manager. As anyone who has visited schools in remote parts of Australia could tell you, these schools require more resources than city schools for much smaller class numbers.

The challenge for remote secondary schools in recent decades has been to find ways of providing face-to-face teaching while providing some degree of subject choice. This measure by the government will only serve to spread resources even more thinly. Providing greater choice in remote areas will not make for better education outcomes; it just flies in the face of good economic management. Of course, that just serves to highlight the whole issue of what the Commonwealth’s role should be in education.

What we have is a Commonwealth government following its own narrow ideological agenda at the expense of efficiency. The government has so much money to give away to private schools that it looks for ways to justify its assistance. But you cannot justify an agenda of school choice when that same agenda will in fact restrict real choice—that is, how to provide for the wide needs of a small number of students in a remote school. To put it into the reality of remote areas, the public system will be required to maintain its responsibility to provide school education in remote areas but it will only be able to do so less efficiently. This government is running around spending like a drunken sailor, throwing money at the non-government sector. Instead of looking at a cooperative model where a sharing of joint facilities and programs between public and non-government schools could improve both choice and access, this government goes down its ideologically driven path and takes us further down the slippery slope.

It might now be a good time to ask, as Professor Angus suggests: just what is our school system evolving into? Certainly it is nothing like anything you will see in any other developed country. No other national government has as great a bias in favour of non-government schools. No other national government provides a whopping 73 per cent of recurrent funding grants to non-government schools, which have only one-third of all students, while public schools, with the remaining two-thirds of students, get only nine per cent of recurrent funding from the Commonwealth. That distribution is not evenly balanced among non-government schools. According to one study, 27 per cent of students in independent schools attended schools where the fees paid exceeded the average level of resources in public schools. Looking at the total numbers of students attending non-government schools, 55 per cent are better resourced than public schools through the combination of fees and government grants. So that leaves 45 per cent of schools with lower resource levels than public schools. I know only too well what that means for the students in those schools.

In the Fowler electorate that means that the newer independent schools, both Christian and a growing number of Muslim schools, have resource levels below that of the average public school. So, while we have a Commonwealth government which prides itself on contributing the lion’s share of funding for non-government schools, 73 per cent of their recurrent expenditure, and while it wants to boast that it is the best friend that private education ever had, this government leaves 45 per cent of students at non-government schools with less than the per student recurrent funding for public schools. With a funding formula based on the socioeconomic status of the postcodes from which a school draws its students, not based on the level of resources that the school has—and given the overriding requirement that no school will have its grant reduced—we are left with a funding scheme for non-government schools which is not only unfair to students at public schools but also unfair to nearly half of the students in non-government schools.

What must really grate about many of the provisions in this bill is that, in spite of the fact that the Commonwealth only pays nine per cent of the recurrent cost of public schools, this government wants to call the tune when it comes to directing just how the states spend their money. I have already mentioned one of those demands in relation to funding for remote schools. If this government were paying the greater share of the cost of public education then we might see it as legitimate for the Commonwealth to demand that the states comply with certain requirements. But this government only contributes nine per cent. So what it is doing in demanding certain actions by the states, including contributing their own money, is nothing short of blackmail. I was pleased to see recently that the New South Wales Minister for Education and Training called it just that and threatened to refuse to comply with these demands by the Commonwealth. This lack of cooperation between the Commonwealth and the states can only lead to an expensive and disastrous failure of school education in Australia.

Let us look at the other parts of this legislation. The National Literacy and Numeracy Vouchers program again is an ideologically driven program which fails because there is no built in cooperation between schools and students. I know that in my electorate less than half of the vouchers are taken up because parents fail to understand the program or cannot access this assistance. The program simply does not link with in-school programs, and no funding is made available for teachers to liaise with tutors. At best the program may give some poorly directed assistance, but at worst it is a costly and ineffective measure to improve literacy and numeracy standards. Just to confuse the situation even further, the budget package offers up to $50,000 to schools which improve literacy and numeracy outcomes. The government allocates money to private tutors by way of vouchers, but holds schools responsible for the results. That is not just bad government, it is plain stupid.

The package also aims to develop common core curricula for schools. This government has had 11 long years to follow on from Labor’s progress in common curriculum development but it has not even got to first base. While this minister, the one before her and the one before him complained about the difficulty faced by students moving from one state to another, we still have not begun to address the issue of common school starting ages. Eleven years after Labor did the groundwork, a five-year-old can still start school in New South Wales, move to Queensland and not be accepted into a school. I can remember the shock that a friend of mine had when her family moved to Queensland. Her daughter had started high school in year 7 in New South Wales only to be put back to primary school three quarters of the way through the year. These things need to be fixed before we start thinking about setting standardised curricula.

But when we come to the requirements that this government wants to impose on the states from 2009, we can see its real agenda. If it thinks it can mandate performance based pay and school principal autonomy in teacher employment, it will need a lot more than just its ideological desire to see it through. These are not simple reforms. When put into practice they would overturn a raft of existing conditions and entitlements without any Commonwealth funding to compensate for their removal. Think of what New South Wales teachers have invested in the transfer points system and the incentives this has provided in staffing remote schools. Disadvantaged schools have staff turnover rates averaging 35 per cent a year, but this government thinks it can just click its fingers and its plans will come into effect. In New South Wales there is already a degree of performance based pay in the promotions system, and the selection for promotion positions includes the involvement of school principals. Our state education systems are among the largest employers in the country, yet for some dubious ideological goal this government wants to place the important issue of school staffing in jeopardy.

The Commonwealth has no responsibility whatsoever for the staffing of public schools, yet it wants to interfere in the states’ responsibilities, and it will accept no blame if it leads to staff shortages. This government thinks it can change whatever it likes to the teaching workforce of this country and it will have no consequences. It is very wrong if it assumes that it will have a compliant workforce ready to go along with whatever changes this government wants to see. Teachers possess skills much in demand in other parts of the workforce and any changes which make a teaching career less attractive will only lead to an exodus of highly trained professionals and the early retirement of some of our best and most experienced teachers. It is no wonder the New South Wales minister for education has signalled that he will not go along with many of these proposed changes. This government would be better served if it adopted a much more cooperative approach in dealing with these issues.

To come back to the question posed by Professor Angus: just what is the education system under this government evolving into? It is certainly a far cry from the free, secular and compulsory motto of the founders of public education in this country, and we are already well on our way down the slippery slope from where we were when this government came to power. From the emphasis on funding disadvantaged schools to give every child in our schools the best opportunity, we now have a system which is very heavy on compliance, with everything from flying the flag to prescribing precisely what is taught, how it is taught and who teaches it. While the government talks about improving the quality of our schools it is fast removing the equality from our schools.

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