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Towards a national school funding model
Australia needs a clear national model for school funding, based on need and applying equally across the sectors, but this does not seem likely, at least in the short term. Andrew Dowling examines the issues.
In May 2008, the Federal Education Minister, Julia Gillard, referred to an ACER policy brief in a speech to the Association of Independent Schools (AIS) NSW and said that, “Australia’s school funding system is one of the most complex, most opaque, and most confusing in the developed world.” She went on to observe that “this lack of transparency has served to heighten the atmosphere of uncertainty and mutual suspicion which has characterised the politics of education in Australia over the last decade.” The next day, she announced in the daily newspapers that the Federal Government would review its school funding system in 2010-11, in time for the next formal funding model for schools that begins in 2012 (the current four year agreement ends in 2008 but Labor promised during the election campaign that the next agreement, which runs from 2009- 2012, would maintain the existing system). Gillard repeated her wish to change the school funding system to make it more open in a later speech entitled, “A New Progressive Reform Agenda For Australian Schools.” Gillard explained :
There is a shyness in this debate from some who fear information will be misused and feed a flight from government schools to nongovernment schools. I believe this shyness is misconceived. …. When we can measure need and quantify how to make a difference we will be best placed to bring extra resources to bear to deliver on the fair go at school.
However, Gillard has her work cut out for
her if she wants to make school funding
more transparent and report funding at the
school level for both government and nongovernment
schools.
The problem
Part of the problem with Australia’s current school funding system is the lack of consistency between jurisdictions. This makes the system unnecessarily complicated and it is difficult to understand how money is allocated to any individual school. Differences exist at level of government (state or federal), type of school sector (government or non-government), location (state or territory), accounting approach used (cash or accrual), and time period (financial or calendar year). Income flows into schools from several sources, but not in unison and not in a way that permits reporting at an individual school level in a timely manner.
A question often asked in Australia under the previous Federal Government was,“Is the Commonwealth giving too much money to non-government schools?” This is the wrong question to ask. It is a misguided question because there is no nationally agreed measure of need upon which to assess fairness in the first place. The Commonwealth has one measure while the states have their own measures, each of which is different from the others. The more fundamental question is, “On what basis are both levels of government, Commonwealth and state, giving money to all schools, government and non-government?”
The answer to this question is that there is no unified basis upon which governments fund schools and there is little public transparency in the reporting of these funds. Yet it is only when all sources of funding are compared against a national, agreed measure of need that the question can be asked, and disinterestedly answered, as to whether school funding is “fair.”
Rhetorical questions of fairness slide easily into a discourse about school funding that has been stuck in ideological grooves forged decades ago, between government and nongovernment school advocates.
A new debate is needed in Australia that asks questions less inflected by ideological commitment and more informed by current data that is comparable across sectors. This would involve questions such as:
- What is the relationship between school resources and student outcomes?
- What inputs have the most impact on student outcomes?
- What level of resources needs to be made available now to reach a desired goal at a particular point in the future?
- What do individual schools, irrespective of sector, actually need?
These questions cannot even begin to be answered in Australia at the present time, even though such answers would improve the efficiency and equity of the system.
In terms of efficiency, many members of
the education community believe that the
uses to which resources are put are more
important than the amount of resources themselves. But it is difficult to confirm this
hypothesis or to decide which resources
have the most impact, if true. A necessary
first step is having the data available to show
the relationship between school resources
and student outcomes. Such data do not
exist in Australia at the present time.
| Government School Advocates | Non-Government School Advocates |
| The function of taxation is to redistribute money to the neediest sectors of society. | Non-government schools are entitled to government support because of the taxes parents have paid. |
| Non-government schools are costing the government money. | Non-government schools are saving the government money. |
| If parents choose non-government schools they should pay for it, especially when they have forgone a free option. | Parents have a right to choose their child’s education and to be supported in that right. |
| Government schools do most of society’s heavy lifting. | Government schools get most of the government funding. |
In terms of equity, a common complaint
is that government schools are being
under-funded. Government schools tend
to enrol students who cost more to teach.
They are more likely to enrol students
from lower socioeconomic backgrounds,
Indigenous students and students with
disabilities. In recent years, it appears
they have been losing students who tend
to cost less to teach (for example, those
from higher socioeconomic backgrounds)
to non-government schools. Yet it is not
possible to establish precisely the extent
of this phenomenon because most state
governments cannot identify how much
particular student groups cost to teach.
Let us assume, for an optimistic moment,
that there is an agreed measure of need
(such as the Commonwealth’s socioeconomic
status (SES) model) applied
equally across all schools and that all schools
are funded according to this national,
agreed measure of need. For this system to
operate, it would be necessary to know in
detail the funding and private income that
each individual school, government and
non-government, receives as well as their
changing circumstances. This would lead
to better understanding of the level of real
need in individual schools, and be a central
requirement of any national school funding
model.
It has been argued that a national school
funding model based on comparable and
transparent data is not foreseeable, at least
in the short term. As Professor Max Angus
of Edith Cowan University has noted, simply
providing information on the actual quantum
of resources acquired by individual schools
from all sources is a radical proposal at
the present time (2007). Not only does
this information not exist uniformly but
some states are incapable of reporting at
the school level. Most states cannot report
financial information on a school-by-school
basis, much less a student–by-student basis,
even notionally. Most states do not make
public either their funding rationale or the
actual funds provided to individual schools.
This is because most states have never been
asked or required to do so. They provide
broad information across all schools (eg,
teacher salaries, redundancies, capital) but
not the funds made available to individual
schools or student groups.
However, the problems are not insurmountable. The introduction of similar funding methodologies at both state and Commonwealth levels and across school sectors would improve transparency and accountability as well as create a more sound footing for future funding debates. The fact that Gillard is moving in this direction is a very positive sign. But the problems are significant and she will need all the help she can get.
Dr Andrew Dowling’s paper Australia’s School
Funding System (December 2007)
can be found at
www.acer.edu.au/documents/PolicyBriefs_Dowling07.pdf.
