Funding failure is Julia Gillard's fault

JULIA Gillard's mishandling of her signature reform started in February last year on the day she released the Gonski report.

The report forms the basis of her new school funding model. But despite an encouraging response to the report's recommendations from school systems, Gillard failed to endorse the Gonski report, damning it with the faint praise that it provided "good insight".

Negotiations on new funding arrangements with the state, territory, Catholic and independent school systems did not start until September last year, when the government provided a "modelling tool" to allow sectors to run their own numbers to test the model.

But without the details of how much extra the commonwealth was prepared to provide for schools, it was largely a hypothetical exercise.

The government did not start negotiating in earnest until late January, when it began discussing the share it would bear of the extra $6.5 billion a year to be spent in schools. A firm offer was not made until last Sunday, when Gillard stood up in a press conference to announce the "two-for-one" deal, which was the first that the states had heard about it.

The failure is firmly at Gillard's feet. Negotiations on funding have been conducted by a working group of officials led by her department, and the strategy has been determined by her office.

The government has effectively wasted a year since releasing the Gonski report. Funding should have been settled and tied up with a ribbon to present to the electorate during the election campaign. Instead, Ms Gillard will enter the campaign with at best some states signed up, and the extra funding for schools as a "high-risk" policy: vote Labor or lose the money.

Worse, in states that refuse to sign, she will have to defend funding cuts in schools as targeted federal spending on education is withdrawn. Schools, not state governments, will bear the brunt of the funding cuts. And Gillard at the ballot box.