School funds model 'favours affluent'

THE federal government's new school funding model was criticised yesterday as being fundamentally flawed.

THE federal government's new school funding model was criticised yesterday as being fundamentally flawed for failing to take account of students' family backgrounds in calculating the base amount of money allocated to every pupil.

In a policy brief issued by the Melbourne Institute, education economist Chris Ryan argues the funding model fails to differentiate between the educational advantage high-scoring students bring to school and the impact the school has on their results.

The paper's release comes ahead of the meeting of the Council of Australian Governments tomorrow where Julia Gillard will ask state and territory leaders to sign up to the new funding arrangements, under which the commonwealth will pay $2 for every extra $1 invested by the states and a higher indexation rate of 4.7 per cent if the states commit to increasing their school budgets by 3 per cent a year over the next six years.

While the government is pushing hard for states to sign up at the meeting, the Prime Minister set a deadline on Sunday of June 30. Tomorrow's meeting is now being viewed as the start rather than the end of the negotiation process.

"We've said we'd keep working until June 30 if that is necessary, but premiers and chief ministers can come along and sign on on Friday. If they don't we will keep working beyond Friday," she said.

Ms Gillard also yesterday confirmed that the states had no prior knowledge of the two-for-one offer before she announced it on Sunday, despite the government insisting all week that the states had been given all the information.

The model proposed by the Gonski review of school funding sets a standard amount per student supplemented by six loadings for disadvantage, size and location of the school.

The standard amount is based on the costs of a group of about 1600 reference schools in which 80 per cent of all students met the minimum standard in reading and maths for three consecutive years in the national tests.

Associate Professor Ryan said these schools would all be affluent schools and a better reference group would be schools achieving surprising results.

The paper says: "Only when the effect of student background is subtracted from the nominal school effect, in identifying 'good' or successful schools, can the relationship between resources and school performance be meaningfully investigated."

A spokeswoman for School Education Minister Peter Garrett said the panel had used this group of schools to avoid entrenching the notion that students from different social groups were expected to perform at different levels.