Greens MP David Shoebridge, who obtained the school-by-school figures, said the backlog showed school control of budgets was not working, and the government's plans to address the problem - announced this week - did not go far enough. "The proposed changes are only tinkering with a very broken system that is seeing hundreds of millions of dollars misallocated or unspent," he said. "The government’s policy changes will do nothing to deal with the $1.3 billion sitting unspent in school accounts." In 2012, the Coalition gave principals power to make financial and educational choices that best suited students. They had control of their budgets, which included funding for staff and utilities, and some had extra money under the Gonski reforms to meet the needs of disadvantaged students. The government has now admitted the decision had "unintended consequences", such as making it harder to centrally track billions in Gonski money, and hindering its ability to intervene when schools struggled. On Thursday, it announced that from next year, schools failing to meet yet-to-be-determined targets would lose their autonomy, and the department would step in.

But Mr Shoebridge said the reforms did not address the underspending problem. "The Greens will continue to press for the scrapping of LSLD [Local Schools, Local Decisions] so that public education funds can be allocated based on educational need rather than local whim," he said. NSW Department of Education secretary Mark Scott told budget estimates on Tuesday that schools were getting better at managing money. "Schools really did a good job in spending the money that was allocated to them in 2019," he said. "It was the best expenditure percentage we have seen." The acting president of the Secondary Principals Council, Craig Petersen, said there were many reasons why schools did not spend their full allocation, such as a struggle to find teachers willing to work in some areas. Some schools were saving for building projects. The initial budget management tools supplied by the department were cumbersome and made the job harder, and had been recently replaced with better ones, he said. The government could help principals by taking back responsibility for pay, the bulk of schools' budgets. "The amount of money principals actually get to play with or use flexibly can vary enormously between schools, depending on the levels of disadvantage," said Mr Petersen.

"One way to reduce that burgeoning surplus [of money] in some schools is to put that into the central pool [government by the department], and that means we don't have to worry about that on a regular basis." Loading Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said the changes to Local Schools, Local Decisions would let the government help principals manage their school budgets. "We expect that this support will not only help them spend [Resource Allocation Model] money as intended but also allow them to refocus on what they are there to do - educate students and support teachers," she said. NSW Teachers Federation president Angelo Gavrielatos said fiscal and staffing responsibility had been unfairly foisted on schools. "It's the department's responsibility to ensure that the staffing needs of our schools are met," he said.