Education bilateral agreements extended despite ‘urgent and critical’ warning

Aussie schools will see little to no funding relief in 2024 after old bilateral agreements were extended by another 12 months. Here’s how it affects the NT.

NT schools will continue to struggle well below the minimum funding standards in 2024 after the education bilateral agreements were extended late last year.

Negotiations between the federal and state and territory governments will go forward in 2024 but funding arrangements that were previously due to lapse at the end of last year have been quietly extended by another 12 months.

Australian Education Union federal president Correna Haythorpe said the extension meant 98.7 per cent of the nation’s public schools would remain below the Schooling Resource Standard for another year.

Australian Education Union federal president Correna Haythorpe.

“It effectively pauses the increase in financial contributions not only of the Commonwealth, but all state and territory governments,” Ms Haythorpe said.

“The NT is a jurisdiction which has the greatest need in terms of the student cohort, and yet the Territory’s share is far less than anywhere else in Australia.

“Effectively, we’ve got almost a 40 per cent gap in terms of the funding that’s provided to the Northern Territory.”

Education Minister Mark Monaghan said federal and state and territory governments extended the agreements because many of the nation’s education ministers were “relatively new” to their roles.

“It was more of a case of, ‘let’s take the time to get it right’,” he said.

“If you don’t get it right, we’re locked in five to 10 years going forward with the wrong model.”

The extension came just weeks after the Improving Outcomes for All report was delivered to the nation’s education ministers in October and published in December.

The report found it was “urgent and critical” that schools be fully funded as soon as possible.

AEU NT branch president Michelle Ayres said the report made it “really clear” the Territory’s effective enrolment funding model needed to be changed.

“The report makes it extremely clear that federal government support for the Northern Territory is imperative in order to raise outcomes in the Northern Territory and fill that gap that’s been left by the 80 per cent funding (benchmark) for the last 10 years,” she said.

“The main concern that we’ve got is that we don’t want to see any one-size-fits-all solutions proposed for all of Australia.

“We need to be really careful that we don’t have someone from Sydney or Canberra saying to us, ‘this is the way that education works in a Melbourne school, so therefore it should work in a Territory school’.”

Australian Education Union NT president Michelle Ayres.

Ms Ayres said the solution should not just be about “throwing money at the problem”, but empowering teachers to build tailored programs around what their students need.

“We’d invest in an engineer or a doctor to have that professional knowledge, to go in and say, ‘hey, I know what needs to be done to build that bridge so that cars can go over it’, or ‘I know what needs to be done to fix that sore back’,” she said.

“There could be any number of thousands of numbers of different things that cause a sore back but a doctor is going to be able to ask the right questions and adjust the right things.

“That’s what we need to be investing in; teachers do have that kind of knowledge.”