‘Disgraceful squabbling’: Students suffer as governments brawl over school billions

A stoush over billions of dollars in funding linked to sweeping school reforms has a leading education advocate warning that the row between the states and the federal government threatens to adversely affect millions of Australian students.

The Allan government is bristling at federal Education Minister Jason Clare’s approach to negotiations, after he tied reforms including mandatory phonics tests to a school funding boost for Victoria worth $3.5 billion over 10 years.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare (left) and his Victorian counterpart Ben Carroll.Credit: The Age composite image

Victorian Education Minister Ben Carroll is refusing to budge on his demand for a 5 per cent increase in Commonwealth funding – as opposed to the 2.5 per cent on offer – as the state’s teaching union warned that the Albanese government was dangerously close to a breaking an election promise.

State governments, the union and advocacy group Save Our Schools are unhappy with the Commonwealth’s take-it-or-leave-it approach. Clare has told Victoria, NSW, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT to accept the deal by the end of September or continue to operate schools on existing funding.

“This disgraceful squabbling over cost-shifting by governments threatens the future education and lives of millions of students,” Save Our Schools convenor and former Productivity Commission economist Trevor Cobbold said on Wednesday.

Save Our Schools convenor Trevor Cobbold.Credit: Stefan Postles

“It puts at risk government goals of increasing Year 12 completion rates and participation in tertiary education.

“Overcoming the effects of educational disadvantage remains the fundamental challenge facing Australian governments. The Commonwealth and state governments must come to their senses and end the stand-off.”

Clare has made the federal funding boost conditional on a raft of reforms including phonics checks for all first-graders, behaviour and attendance standards, early years maths checks and a 7.5 per cent boost to completion rates for year 12 students.

He wants the states to pick up the remaining 2.5 per cent needed to take school funding to the 25 per cent of the benchmark “schooling resource standard” as recommended by David Gonski’s landmark 2012 report into the nation’s education system.

Clare was in Darwin on Wednesday to sign the Northern Territory up for his Better and Fairer Schools Agreement, with a deal also expected to be signed with Western Australia within days.

He called on the rest of the states and territories to sign up too.

But Carroll said he was working with his interstate counterparts to fight what he described as an attempt to “short-change” the jurisdictions. A meeting in August looms as potentially the last chance to reach a settlement before Clare’s deadline.

Meredith Peace, the president of the Victorian branch of the Australian Education Union, said the failure to deliver full funding for public schools had brought the Albanese government dangerously close to a broken election promise.

She accused Clare of using Victorian schoolchildren and their teachers as “political pawns”.

Meredith Peace, the president of the Victorian branch of the Australian Education Union.

“In the lead-up to the last federal election, the prime minister promised to ensure that every public school was on the pathway to 100 per cent of funding to the Schooling Resource Standard,” Peace said.

​“An additional 2.5 per cent from the Commonwealth, or a rollover of the current agreement with no additional funding, does not deliver this and could entrench inequality in a way that we have not seen since the federal Coalition government was in power.”

Clare’s office told The Age that the election commitment had been to work with the states to achieve full funding for public schools.

He said on Wednesday it was reasonable to expect the Victorian government to contribute alongside what he called “the biggest increase in additional public school funding from the Commonwealth ever delivered”.

“If the Northern Territory can chip in, and they’re investing around $300 million extra as part of this billion-dollar deal I signed today, I think other states and territories can chip in as well,” he said.

Federal opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson labelled the stand-off an “embarrassing policy failure” by the Albanese government.

“Jason Clare is embroiled in a full-blown school funding war and has botched the opportunity to deliver the national reforms every child needs to reach his or her best potential,” Henderson said.

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