Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister representing the Minister for Education, Minister Watt, to questions I asked today relating to public schools.

Over a decade ago, we had a review into our primary and secondary education in this country. That review told us that we had an equity problem, and that review provided a road map for how to develop a needs based, sector-blind funding model for our schools. It's now over a decade since that review, and in that time we've seen the funding to our private school system increase at double the rate of funding to our public schools. Over a decade after that review, 98 per cent of our private schools are still overfunded according to the Schooling Resource Standard, and only 1.3 per cent of our public schools are at the minimum standard of funding. That's another generation of kids who've paid the price and another generation of teachers and principals in our public schools who've had to carry the burden of that underresourcing.

This week, we've seen the public release of NAPLAN results, and no-one should be surprised at what they tell us. They tell us that we now have an equity problem on steroids. The gap between the kids at the top and the kids at the bottom is getting wider and wider, and the kids who are most impacted are those who are socioeconomically and educationally disadvantaged: rural and regional kids, kids living in remote locations, young people with a disability, First Nations kids, kids who are housing-insecure and whose parents are on income support and kids from families where parents and carers haven't had the benefit of a tertiary education. This is the system that successive Liberal and Labor governments have entrenched in this country. We now have the most inequitable education system in the OECD, and this is after a decade of having a road map on how to fix it.

It is understandable that teachers and parents and carers of kids in public schools were hopeful when Labor went to an election saying that they were going to fully fund our public schools. Yet, since they've come to government, it has been disappointment after disappointment. Instead of getting on with the job when they got into government, they had another review. We've had 30 of those, or more, since the first Gonski report. We know what the problem is. If you systematically underfund a sector for over a decade, it's not surprising that results go down or stagnate. If you systematically deprive the kids who need the most support of the biggest increases in funding, it's no surprise that their results don't improve.

The minister likes to keep saying that all of this funding needs to be tied to stuff. Well, teachers are drowning in testing and surveillance and reporting and admin, and all of that increased accountability and surveillance and admin hasn't done a jot to improve kids' results over the last decade. So it's hardly surprising that we are sceptical that, without the adequate funding, it's going to change going forward.

The Greens went to a federal election saying that the federal government needed to lift the contribution to public education in this country to 25 per cent. It's not a big ask. You give 80 per cent to private schools. Teachers want increases in funding, principals want increases in funding, the unions want an increase in finding, and the minister is holding states to ransom with a dud offer of 22½ per cent. It's not good enough. It needs to be improved, and you need to get it done.

Question agreed to.