No school to miss on funding: Shorten

PUBLIC schools in Queensland, WA and the Northern Territory will continue to receive extra funding under a Labor government.

PUBLIC schools in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory will continue to receive extra funding through a national partnership for targeted education programs under a Labor government despite not signing up to the school funding reforms.

The decision to honour the targeted funding program under the Low Socio-economic Status partnership reverses the position taken by former prime minister Julia Gillard and schools education minister Peter Garrett , who had said state governments that failed to sign up to the plan would miss out on any targeted funding.

But in an interview with The Australian yesterday, Education Minister Bill Shorten said "you can't penalise" schools in states that had refused to adopt the new funding model, and the Rudd government had taken a "deliberate decision" to honour the national partnerships.

Mr Shorten also nominated teachers as one of his main priorities, particularly in terms of instituting pay rates that better valued their contribution to the community. "Senior teachers are lucky to earn $80,000-$90,000. When you think about the importance of what they do in society, there's no doubt they're undervalued," he said.

"I cringe when I hear people say 'those who can, do, those who can't, teach'. Teaching was a profession that was a way out of the working class in Australia for a long time but somewhere . . . we ceased to value teachers as much as other occupations."

Mr Shorten dismissed the idea of performance pay -- paying teachers extra based on student performance -- as a "sterile debate" but said he was interested in having "a more generous debate about the remuneration of teachers that goes towards recognising the importance of their profession, skills and capacity".

"I'd like to do more to lift the profession of teaching. It's an honourable calling . . . and I think it gets too caught up in the usual tug of war of industrial relations.

"The profession of teaching is fundamental. If a teacher has been a maths or science teacher for 10 or 15 years, they're barely lucky to have enough money to scrape together for a mortgage.

"And they're teaching Year 7, Year 8, Year 9 students. It's hard. We need those Year 7, 8, 9s, that's where we're losing our future generation of engineers."

But Mr Shorten said the expectation placed on schools to overcome social disadvantage and make up for dysfunctional families or communities was unrealistic.

"We cannot expect teachers to be parents; if a parent is not engaged in their child's education, we shouldn't expect the teacher to fulfil that gap," he said.

"Children look at the adults in their world and judge from them what is important. If Mum or Dad aren't interested in the child's education or it's a very desultory, apathetic engagement, the teacher can't replace that value setting."