This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Measures to protect well-off schools from funding cuts under the Gonski model ultimately “undermined” efforts to improve results in disadvantaged areas, a report by the Queensland Audit Office has found.

The Queensland government established the “greater results guarantee” program as a vehicle to distribute federal Gonski funding in 2014. The audit found that after four years, there was no guarantee the program was delivering results. Schools could not demonstrate a clear link between improved student outcomes and the program, which has since been renamed.

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The auditors noted the purpose of federal funding, in line with the findings of the Gonski review, was to ensure resources were allocated on a needs-basis and reached disadvantaged schools.

But politically, the program was fraught. The Newman government refused to sign up to the original Gonski deal championed by the former prime minister Julia Gillard, claiming 160 Queensland schools would be left worse off.

A deal was eventually struck in late 2013 after the election of the federal Coalition, which allowed Queensland more autonomy to decide where the money would be spent.

In 2016 when the department updated its funding model, it began paying top-ups to schools that would otherwise have lost funding.



The audit found these top up payments “undermined the purpose and equity of the allocation model and meant that two schools with similar student populations and community contexts may have received different allocations”.

“The Department of Education effectively targeted the additional federal … funding for schooling to reduce the potential for disadvantage consistent with the Australian government’s policy intent,” the report found.

“It did this by designing a needs-based funding allocation model that addressed factors of disadvantage identified in the Gonski review.



“However the Queensland government’s commitment that no school will receive less funding using the revised … model detracts from the purpose and needs-based intention of the model. Top-up payments to enable schools to be ‘no worse off’ can erode the intended equity principles of a needs-based approach.”



The audit office was critical of the lack of consistency across the state, where principals and school communities have a degree of autonomy in how to spend the funding. It said this had led to a lack of oversight.

“Many audit stakeholders, including principals from schools we audited, peak representative bodies and [Department of Education] senior executives, expressed a view that there needs to be more accountability and scrutiny over how schools are spending [the] funding.”

The Queensland education minister, Grace Grace, said in a statement the government would “continue to do what’s best to meet the needs of all Queensland students”. But the real issue, she said, was the failure of the Turnbull government to secure an ongoing funding agreement with the states.

“While negotiations with the commonwealth continue we have committed to funding [the program] for 2018 and 2019 to ensure no school is disadvantaged and to provide schools with the funding certainty they need to support positive student outcomes.”

The president of the Queensland Teachers Union, Kevin Bates, said there was no question that additional federal funding over the past four years had had a positive impact on schools.

He also noted the audit found the department had used the money effectively and that schools had ultimately benefited.

“Our view is that if [the additional funding] was to disappear from our schools then the whole school system would grind to a halt,” Bates said.

He supported changes made to the program by the Palaszczuk government that he said made the funding allocation more transparent.

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The report also found that while schools generally directed the funding towards attempts to improve school and student performance, they could often not clearly demonstrate success.

“Most schools we audited reported improvement outcomes as the actions or programs implemented with [the] funding – in effect, they reported outputs rather than outcomes.

“There are many difficulties for schools in measuring long-term impact, in part due to the short time frame of the initiative, the unavailability of robust outcomes data, and the broad nature of the outcomes sought by the initiative.”