Federal budget 2018: Catholic backlash builds over funding concerns

The Catholic education sector has ramped up its campaign against Education Minister Simon Birmingham.

Nicole Pena, Shanae and Keira Blizzard, Sarah Price and Kaitlyn Stathakis at Mount St ­Joseph Girls College, Altona. Picture: Stuart McEvoy.

The Catholic education sector has ramped up its campaign against Education Minister Simon Birmingham, taking aim at the budget for ignoring its funding concerns that threaten to see school fees rise across the country.

While the national and Victorian Catholic education commissions took aim at Tuesday’s federal budget, Victorian Labor criticised the government for spending more than $6.1 million to promote its Quality Schools reforms, announced last year.

With the commonwealth not expected to come to agreement with the states until later this year, and awaiting a report from the National School Resourcing Board on the method of allocating funding to non-government schools, the education budget brought little in the way of new spending announcements.

The National Catholic Education Commission’s acting executive director, Ray Collins, said the key issue for the sector remained inequity in the current model of funding, which relies on the use of socio-economic status scores to assess the capacity of each school community to contribute to school running costs.

The Catholic sector has long ­argued that the system is biased against it. “While Minister Birmingham has indicated that he is awaiting the report from the National School Resourcing Board on the SES, there needs to be a significant boost to school funding across the board for all sectors if the vision for quality schools across Australia is to be achieved,” Mr Collins said.

While the budget reiterated the government’s commitment to its Quality Schools package, critics say the funding boost falls short of the original Gonski package that was backed by the states but never fully funded.

Catholic Education Commission of Victoria executive director Stephen Elder yesterday accused Malcolm Turnbull of snubbing Catholic school families.

He warned that any tax cuts would be eaten up by increases to school fees.

Melbourne’s Trish Stathakis is concerned uncertainty around funding could push some families in her community to pull their children out of the school they have grown to love. The mother of two, who sends her 14-year-old daughter Kaitlyn to Mount St ­Joseph Girls College, noted that there was little relief in the budget for Catholic school families.

“I know there are families in our school community who do have difficulty paying fees,” she said. “I have friends who wait until the tax returns come in each year to pay.”

Ms Stathakis and her husband, Steve, were both products of the Catholic education system and wanted to educate their daughter at a single-sex school.

Fees at the Altona school range from $4908 in Year 7 to $5428 in Year 12.

John and Cheryl Price’s desire to provide their daughter Sarah, 13, with a good education led them to the same school and while the threat of rising fees was a concern, they would have weathered the impact.

“At the end of the day, there’s no better gift to give your kids than a good education,” Mr Price said.

“If there are sacrifices to make and budgets to be tightened in order to keep them at a good school, then so be it.”