Exclusive: all 24 schools expected to lose money get increase to help with Gonski 2.0 transition

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Rich private schools earmarked for cuts through the landmark Gonski 2.0 funding deal have instead seen their proportion of taxpayer money increase this year, thanks to millions of dollars in bonus “transitional” funds set up by the federal government.

Last year, as the Turnbull government fought to pass its Gonski 2.0 funding deal through the Senate, it announced that 24 independent and Catholic schools would lose funding under the new agreement because they were receiving more than their fair share of taxpayer money.

The list included private schools such as Loreto Kirribilli – a Catholic girls school on Sydney’s north shore that charges more than $20,000 in annual tuition for senior high-school students. Loreto Kirribilli received 191.9% of its Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) in 2018. The SRS is the Gonski review’s needs-based formula for measuring how much government funding each school is entitled to.

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But the Guardian can reveal that all 24 of the schools who were supposed to lose money received a funding increase in 2018 because of bonus funding set up to help private schools cope with the transition to the Gonski 2.0 funding model.

Among the bonus funding was a $7.1m transition fund set up by the federal education minister, Simon Birmingham, to help secure the passage of his landmark education reforms. It was advertised as “additional financial assistance” for schools with less than 3% per-student funding growth in 2018.

The fund has since been used to distribute extra money to 102 of the most overfunded non-government schools in Australia. The government has previously released the names of the 102 schools but not the amount of money that they received from the fund.

Figures obtained under Freedom of Information reveal that the transition bonus meant schools on the so-called funding “hitlist” actually increased their overall funding.

In 2018 Loreto Kirribilli was due to see a cut of about 2.5% of its per student government funding, which would have seen its total recurrent funding drop from $6.7 to $6.5m. But thanks to the $381,274 in transition funding that it received from the government, the school actually increased its year-on-year funding by more than $200,000.

Oakhill College, another overfunded school in Sydney, had been slated to lose 0.57% of its per student government funding in 2018. It would have seen its overall funding drop from $12.4 to $12.3m. Instead, the school was given an extra $453,688, the single largest handout from the transition fund.

Despite being on the list of schools due to lose money, government figures show that a handful of the 24 schools actually saw a small increase in their 2018 recurrent funding. For example the William Clarke College in Sydney saw its recurrent funding increase from $11 to $11.1 million in 2018. The school still received $252,000 in transition funding from the government.

Birmingham points out that the $7.1m transition fund is only available in 2018 and the schools will still lose funding over the next decade. Loreto Kirribilli, for example, is expected to lose an average of 5.22% in per student funding each year until 2027, according to figures seen by the Guardian.

“We accepted requests for a one-year buffer to allow for budget planning before they began receiving their lower growth rates as part of the transition to one consistent funding model,” the minister told the Guardian.

But the Australian Education Union believes there is “no end in sight” to what it calls “secretive special deals” for rich non-government schools because from next year the schools will also be able to claim extra money from the government under a separate transition fund.

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Announced last year, the $40m National Adjustment Assistance Fund was described by the minister as money for “disadvantaged or vulnerable schools” with, for example, “a high proportion of students with disability or a school in a disadvantaged community”.

But schools on the list will be eligible for the $40 million fund because they receive a lower rate of funding in the new agreement. Criteria for the transition assistance released by the government states that the measure of “disadvantage” will be considered relative to other overfunded schools.

“Now it seems that under the revised guidelines the $40 million school adjustment package, originally intended for ‘vulnerable and disadvantaged schools’, can also be accessed by private schools from 2019,” the AEU federal president, Correna Haythorpe, said.

And there have been other side funding deals.

In 2018, four out of the five ACT schools on the government’s list actually increased their total funding by more than $1 million because of a $46.1 million fund the government allocated to private schools in the territory to be spent across the next decade.

The fund will see three schools – Daramalan College in Canberra, Radford College and Marist College – receive $2.2m, $2.4m and $2.2m respectively over the next decade.

In 2018 Daramalan received $1.2m from the fund, or an extra $894 per student. Radford received $1.3 million, or an extra $852 per student.

The government sold the funding cuts as a part of unwinding so-called “special deals” that had undermined attempts to make Australian education funding more equitable.

It argued that it was fair to cut funding to a small group of schools because the vast majority – about 9,000 in total – would be better off.

Haythorpe said the funds are an example of exactly the kind of “special deal” that Birmingham said he would unravel.

“Minister Birmingham has proven once again that he is the minister for special deals,” she said.

“He has repeatedly said he would not do special deals. Yet here he is using this $7.1 million as a secret slush fund to top up private schools. These elite institutions are already getting two to three times what they should from the taxpayer.”

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“It is hypocritical of the minister, who said he would end special deals for schools funding, to simultaneously be negotiating secret funding deals for Australia’s richest private schools.”

The minister’s office didn’t answer questions about why it established a specific adjustment fund for non-government schools in the ACT, or the eligibility for the $40m fund.

But Birmingham lashed out at the AEU for supporting the previous funding deal.

“We won’t take lectures from the AEU that backed the 27 special deals Labor stitched up in government that would have seen even higher growth rates for many of these schools and meant a student in one state received up to $2,100 less commonwealth funding than if that same student went to the same school but across the border,” he said.

“Ultimately, under our arrangements we’re transitioning every school and every student to a system that will ensure they get support based on their needs.”