Divert fund to less-well-off rural schools, educators say

Federal government funding for schools is on track to rise to $32bn by 2029.

University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education dean Jim Watterston. Picture: Liam Kidston

Federal government funding for schools has doubled over the past decade to nearly $20bn and is on track to rise to $32bn by 2029.

This has seen federal funding per student increase from $2851 in 2009 to $5097 a decade later.

The commonwealth funding increases are on top of contributions from state and territory governments increasing from $28.4bn in 2007 to $40.6bn a decade later.

Despite the funding increases, Australia has fallen in the PISA global education rankings.

Experts say the teaching curriculum has become too cluttered and want a greater proportion of funding for regional schools.

The dean of the University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education, Jim Watterston, said state governments didn’t distribute money “exactly on the formula” of the Gonski model of needs-based funding.

 

“That is how the systems ­accrue the money but they don’t have to give it out in the same way,” Dr Watterston said.

“So if you are a remote school in the Northern Territory there is no guarantee you will get the exact loadings that were included in the formula in the first place.”

Dr Watterston said the difference in quality between city and regional schools was “massive”. “In metropolitan Australia we are not doing too bad ... we can improve, but they are OK,” he said.

“When you get into the rural schools, which is about 45 per cent of all schools in Australia, then the performance drops off.

“So if we are going to allocate resources we need to allocate it to where it is needed and we need to be able to get some of the best teachers in Australia to go to ­regional and remote schools.”

University of Sydney professor of education Anthony Welch said the easiest way to bolster the international results of Australian schools would be to “lift the performance of the bottom 20 per cent” of students. He said the funding should be diverted from private schools. “That would lift the overall score substantially and would make us much more likely to show a substantial improvement from the last decade or so.”

Professor Welch said teachers had too many extra responsibilities compared to a generation ago.

“What you are getting now is teachers often saying we don’t have enough time to teach anymore because we are spending a lot of time filling out reports and responding to demands for ­accountability and performance and whatever have you,’’ he said.

“It leaves less and less time to attend to individual kids’ needs.”