Federal Budget 2022: $19 million plan to teach Aussie kids consent and ‘respect’
Forget reading and writing. Students are set to be taught all about respect and consent as part of a $19 million push in Australian classrooms.
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The three Rs have become four: reading, writing, arithmetic – and, now, respect.
About $19m will be spent teaching Aussie kids respect in the classroom, while a national survey will be undertaken asking students about their views on consent.
Under the Engaged Schools program, $7.2m will be “invested in measures that support inclusive, respectful school classroom environments so teachers can help their students to achieve their full potential and improve education outcomes”.
Another $5m will be given to the Australian Human Rights Commission to undertake a national survey of secondary school-age students on important issues related to consent education.
The federal budget papers also reveal that $10.4m will fund more projects that assist school communities to respond to emerging priorities, including recovery from Covid.
Meanwhile, there will be $17.3m to help Indigenous boarding schools to better support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander boarding students and improve their educational outcomes.
A new $10.9m Commonwealth Regional Scholarship Program will assist up to 200 families from low-SES communities with the cost of boarding school fees.
The government boasted it was spending a record amount of funding for schools, with $25.4bn in 2022 and $318.9bn over the period fro 2018 to 2029.
However, critics said the majority of that would go to private schools, including Catholic and grammar schools.
They will get $15bn, compared with public schools that will get $10.4bn.
Save Our Schools campaigner Trevor Cobbold said the Morrison government had shown blatant favouritism to private schools and had “washed its hands of any responsibility for public schools and reducing the inequity in school funding”.
He said private schools were funded over the 100 per cent of its Schooling Resource Standard – an estimate of how much total public funding a school needs to meet the educational needs of students – and that is set to continue until the end of the decade.
“Public schools are funded less than 90 per cent of the SRS and there’s no prospect they will be properly funded until the end of the decade,” he said.
Mr Cobbold said Australia’s slip in the international education rankings showed that “funding does matter, despite all the arguments”.
The budget papers also show that funding for higher education will be $20bn in 2022-23, a record level of annual funding that will continue to grow over the forward estimates.
Acting Education Minister Stuart Robert said a new $37.4m research translation program to be delivered through the CSIRO added another critical element to the government’s $2.2bn University Research Commercialisation Action Plan to accelerate economic and employment growth in Australia.
“This budget confirms our strong commitment to supercharging university innovation and industry collaboration, with more than $1.2bn to be invested in research commercialisation opportunities over the next five years alone,” he said.
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Originally published as Federal Budget 2022: $19 million plan to teach Aussie kids consent and ‘respect’
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