Karen Andrews (McPherson, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Vocational Education and Skills) Share this | Hansard source

where people are able to embark on education through early childhood, through school and into vocational education and higher education. So I am very keen to discuss in detail vocational education, but today we are here to discuss schools, and I am very happy to put on the record, yet again, some very important facts.

The coalition government is going to commit an additional $18.6 billion for Australia's schools over the next decade, starting from 2018, and it is going to be distributed according to a model that is fair, needs based and transparent. Under what is clearly a landmark in school reforms, the Quality Schools reforms, Commonwealth funding for Australian schools is going to grow from a record $17.5 billion in 2017 to $30.6 billion in 2027. This includes more than $2.2 billion in new funding over the first four years to be included in this year's budget, following on from an additional $1.2 billion in last year's budget. It is a record $242.3 billion that will be invested in total schools recurrent funding from 2018 through to 2027, including $81.1 billion over the period 2018 to 2021.

We are going to do a number of things with our reforms, but, critically, we are going to end Labor's 27 special deals with states and territories, unions and the non-government school sector. The changes we are making are going to ensure that all of our schools and states transition to an equal Commonwealth share of the resource standard in a decade, unlike the 150 years of inequity that current arrangements would entail.

There are quite a few stats that I would like to go through today that are important in the context of this debate to make it very clear that states and territories are responsible for the overall quality of school education in their jurisdictions and also the major funder of schools, providing around 66 per cent of total public funding in 2014. At the sector level, current government funding—Commonwealth, state and territory—accounts for 94 per cent of funding for government schools, 73 per cent for Catholic schools and 42 per cent for independent schools. All schools receive funding from the Australian government and from state and territory governments. Over the last decade, Australian government per student funding for government schools has been growing faster than state and territory government funding. Government funding per student, recurrent funding, to government schools increased by 72.4 per cent in real terms over the 10 years to 2014-15, while comparable state and territory funding grew by only 9.4 per cent over the same period.

Those on the other side are often keen to talk about funding for individual schools. So I took the opportunity to have a look at the funding for the electorate of Sydney. The electorate of Sydney has 23 government schools with 6,664 students and four Catholic schools and 13 independent schools—totalling 40 schools with 14,072 students. I looked at the government school statistics for each school and at what the total Commonwealth funding over the period 2018 to 2027 was. For the government sector, Ultimo Public School receives $8,402,600, Conservatorium High School receives $5,917,700, Darlington Public School receives $7,229,700, and Burke Street Public School receives $9,812,200.

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