In Sydney’s west, Merrylands high school has become a poster school for the Gonski reforms. The $500,000 that flowed into the school after David Gonski’s landmark recommendations on school funding were adopted by the New South Wales government has made its mark.

School attendance is up by 5.1%, there has been a 14% increase in submission of classwork and assignments, and the number of students offered university places has doubled in the last three years. But the human stories paint the best picture.

A legally blind Indigenous boy who started at Merrylands broken, angry, having suffered unthinkable life trauma, who has been turned around by targeted teaching and individual attention, now thriving. Another student with no family support structure, who is finally able to come to school, able to engage with learning, able to locate some hope in his life.

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Or the refugee kids who were too scared to come to school now eager to learn. Or the teachers making time after school to teach literacy and numeracy to parents who don’t speak English. Or the immigrant parents walking into a university for the first time in their lives, to see where their children are going to go. All thanks to extra resources funded by Gonski money.

This is the heart of equity in education for the former president of the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council, Lila Mularczyk, who oversaw a wholesale cultural change at her low-SES high-LBOTE (language background other than English) school. Merrylands has introduced individual learning plans for each student, special engagement teams to work with children in need and increased professional learning for staff.

“We hear so much about education being a cost and, yes, it’s an expenditure but it’s all about investing in social capital, it’s about young people, the individuals that we all know by name,” Mularczyk says. “It’s about every single child that we have a sphere of influence over and it’s just really important.

“It is purely because of Gonski that we are able to provide a much broader scope of support, individual support for students than we ever have in the past, absolutely. It’s capacity building within the school too. It’s the professional learning that goes with those things, for all the staff, not just for the learning support staff or the enrichment staff.”

In this election campaign, the term “needs-based funding” is getting a workout. It was the idea at the very core of the Gonski review of funding for schooling, which proposed an overhaul of existing education funding arrangements to level an uneven playing field, to direct funds where they are needed most.

The proposals were, as Gonski said when he delivered his report in December 2011, “required to drive improved outcomes for all Australian students and to ensure that differences in educational outcomes are not the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possessions”. He estimated the extra cost at about $5bn a year.

When asked by Geraldine Doogue on Radio National in January this year if he had any regrets about how the report was delivered and if there may have been a better way to ensure lasting bipartisan support, he said: “I’m not sure I would have mentioned that we were advocating for $5bn of additional funding, which, by the way, was not an enormous percentage increase – 15% – but was obviously an enormous amount of money. When I look back, I was wanting to show that our fantastic review team and our fantastic secretariat was right on top of the numbers and we knew what we were advocating. On the other hand, if we hadn’t mentioned a number, it wouldn’t have been the headline and I think that was, when I look back, a mistake.”

The ALP has promised to deliver Gonski funding in full. And while the Coalition makes reassuring noises about needs-based funding, the absence of any detailed plan or modelling – like Gonski – makes educators nervous. The education minister, Simon Birmingham, says: “There’s no reason schools won’t be able to continue to support teachers and new or existing initiatives, such as specialist teachers or targeted intervention program.” But a Coalition withdrawal from a Gonski commitment means that these schools will lose what they have already been granted and will have to fight for their slice of the pie all over again.



Susie Boyd is state secretary of the New South Wales P&C and, like Mularczyk, she is witnessing need at a molecular level:



I’m in a lot of schools and the messages from parents I am getting is, ‘Oh my god, we might lose this’. One woman I spoke to whose child gets individual support was devastated. She said, ‘All I need is two more years [of support] for my child to finish school but I’m going to lose it’. She was crying, hugely upset. We’ve opened up so many doors for kids and we’re going to have to close them. The roll-on effect is going to affect all children, even the ones who don’t need extra support. Say you’re in a class and you can’t speak English. Targeted funding is going to help you speak English. A child who is doing well can say, ‘You’re not going to hold me back just because I can speak English and you can’t. I’m going to do well and because you’ve got support, you’re going to do well. If you lose your support, you’re going to get the teacher’s time. Then what happens to me?’

At Merrylands, Mularczyk has introduced three engagement teams, employing former students as paraprofessionals (and positive role models) and qualified teachers to give individual attention to kids who are disadvantaged, have learning differences, who struggle on a daily basis.

One student engagement teacher, Usha Rao, tells me about the satisfaction that she gets from working with students in dire need of extra support. To hear her talk about her job makes it seem like a kind of love, so far above and beyond the call of duty.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lila Mularczyk, the former principal of Merrylands high school, which has introduced individual learning plans for each student. Photograph: Jonny Weeks/The Guardian

“The majority of our children come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds,” she says. “They really need the support. They don’t get much from home, they get very little parental support in study and we are here to help them out with one-on-one coaching. We are in the library with them at lunchtime, we get universities involved in partnership programs.

“We have students who in their previous lives have actually had to move dead bodies at the age of 10. These students were actually too scared to come to school. They were scared to speak to people. We look after the wellbeing of those students, they feel protected. We are providing them with a safe learning environment. Many of them treat me like I am their mother.”

When I ask what will happen to her if the final two years of Gonski aren’t funded, she says: “The students will lose out on opportunity. The Gonski program is a beautiful program because kids are given this opportunity and it’s amazing. They will lose it and it will directly impact their HSC and their learning.”

But what about you?

“I will not have a job.”



Schools or subs

On day one of the federal election campaign Townsville school principal Louise Wilkinson delivered a home truth that cut through all the dreaded convolutions of education funding. The federal government had announced $50bn funding for defence to build 12 new submarines a few weeks after Malcolm Turnbull had a very unpopular moment with his short-lived idea that the commonwealth should wash its hands of public school funding altogether, handing it over to the states and territories.

It was in this atmosphere that Wilkinson brought the vexed issue of education funding right down to brass tacks – perhaps it was about time, she suggested, that defence did some chook raffles and sold some tea towels?

Anyone who has had a child in public school or who has sat in on a P&C meeting knew exactly what she was saying: that to keep coffers ticking over public schools have to plug budgetary holes with endless fundraisers – car boot sales, art auctions, chook raffles, craft fairs. And, in competing priorities for government funding, Wilkinson argued that education should take precedence over defence.

“My theory – and this is why I have stayed in education for over 30 years – I believe if we had better educated people and more active citizens then we might have less violence and less need for all the patch-ups that occur.”

Here she touched on a larger truth about education: there is no other area of public policy that has greater ability to shape the society we want, the economy we need and the world in which we would like to live.

An education referendum?

Bill Shorten nailed his colours to the mast early in this election campaign, marking education as a central arena where the two main combatants diverged considerably. And, on the back of Turnbull’s faux pas about withdrawing from funding public schools while still funnelling taxpayer dollars to private schools, it was an astute strategy. The Labor leader plumbed the distinction for all it was worth, proclaiming the 2 July poll to be a “referendum on education”.

“This can be the election where Australians choose great schools over tax breaks for multinationals,” he told the party faithful in Brisbane in May. “Labor will be the guardians of the case put to Australians where we can choose properly paid and properly supported teachers over a double tax cut for a very few wealthy people.



“The contrast is that sharp, the difference is that stark – a Labor party investing education and the Liberal party investing in the top end of town.

“I stand here and promise you that over the next 10 years – $37bn dollars to every school in every postcode – we will deliver Gonski. I will make it my mission to ensure every child in every school will get a world-class education.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bill Shorten, pictured at the NSW Teachers Federation library in Sydney, has said: ‘This can be the election where Australians choose great schools over tax breaks for multinationals.’ Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/AAP

In this election campaign, education is being posited by the ALP in this way – the only chance to fulfil the promise of funding the crucial last two years of the Gonski funding recommendation, which would see the culminated benefits flow to schools in need.

Meanwhile Birmingham is singing from the needs-based funding song sheet but without the Gonski chorus. He too says he wants to see every child given access to a quality education. “I want a school funding system that is genuinely needs-based and is targeting the money where it’s most required,” he has said.

The funding will be tied to evidence-based initiatives and conditions “that will lift student performance and results”.

This includes standardised testing of students’ reading, phonics and numeracy skills in year one, annual reports to parents that identify literacy and numeracy attainment against national standards, and a minimum standard of literacy and numeracy skills for year 12 school leavers.



The government also wants to link teacher salary progression to demonstrated competency and achievement against the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers, as opposed to length of service.

“While funding matters, what you do with it matters even more,” Birmingham told Guardian Australia. “The Coalition is the only party with a fully funded and affordable plan that ensures money is directed where it’s most needed and focuses on proven measures that will improve outcomes in literacy, numeracy, Stem subjects and prepare students for the jobs of the future.”

Birmingham announced $1.2bn in extra funding for education over three years from 2018 tied to these conditions but it barely claws back the $30bn cut (over 10 years) in Tony Abbott’s 2014 budget.

Both parties want better teacher training, more rigorous entry standards for teaching courses, and more emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Disadvantage in Australian schools is being concentrated, not only by the drift to the non-government sector but by parents seeking out higher-performing public schools for their kids. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

The ALP has promised $4.5bn over school years 2018 and 2019, with a package estimated to cost a total of $37.3bn over a decade. It has identified more subject choices, more resources for disabled students and “targeted teaching” as policy goals.

Peter Goss of the Grattan Institute says targeted teaching is building rigour into every classroom through supporting teachers to understand what their students know now and to teach them what they need to learn next.

This is what we call targeted teaching. It would improve outcomes and improve the productivity of the education system by maximising the time that each student is working on tasks they are they really learning well in. It’s the old Goldilocks story, neither too easy nor too hard but about right. Given the huge spread in levels in any given classroom, teachers do need to understand where children are and they are generally very good at knowing who is relatively ahead and relatively behind. Understanding what students know and don’t know is actually very hard but it’s not about more and more testing, it’s about schools having a common understanding of the process of learning and talking about the evidence around what each student knows and feeding that back in to the daily classroom experience. This idea is an old one, and all schools are trying to differentiate what they teach according to what students need, however few schools are able to do it rigorously unless they get support. What they need – what teachers need – is time, tools, training, to be doing their teaching in an environment of teamwork and trust. This this is why I’m not a fan of trying to improve the system by accountability because accountability from the top down encourages people to tick boxes.

The public education advocate Jane Caro said on ABC’s The Drum: “Teachers are human beings. We need to give them more professional development, we need to give them more time to hone their teaching, their skills and to enjoy their time in the classroom.

“We need to stop ramping up accountability, Simon Birmingham, with your new set of performance standards. That’ll drive more good teachers out because they will have to fill in forms instead of coming up with creative lessons.”

As for funding promises, Goss says: “Both parties are proposing to spend more on education, yet there is no guarantee that either will lift outcomes substantially. It depends on whether hard trade-offs are actually made within these funding envelopes. At present, neither party have put serious funding trade-offs on the table.”

By “trade-offs” Goss means upsetting existing arrangements, reversing the Gillard pledge that no school would lose a dollar as a result of the Gonski review and making the tough political decision of removing funds from advantaged schools and directing them to less advantaged schools.

Forget about the price tag



Australia’s education funding set-up is a complicated brew of agreements between the federal government and state and territory governments, between private schools and governments, Catholic schools and governments, and public schools and governments. Private schools get some public funding from the federal government and the rest from its clientele; the states run state schools, with some funding from the federal government.

For one set of figures supporting a trend in one sector, another can be produced to support the exact opposite trend. Plenty of research says funding to the private sector outstrips funding to the public, while the minister for education can produce numbers saying it just isn’t so. One minister says there are no strings attached to the money delivered to the states from federal coffers; then the next says there are strings attached. And around we go.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The fact the name of the Sydney Grammar-educated eastern suburbs multimillionaire businessman David Gonski has become synonymous with equity in education is a triumph of grassroots marketing. Photograph: Alan Porritt/AAP

As the Gonski report stated: “Australia lacks a logical, consistent and publicly transparent approach to funding schooling.” In great detail, over 319 pages, it outlined exactly how Australia could and should untangle it all.

With so much energy in the education conversation sucked up by funding arrangements and who’s paying for what and how much, we often forget to talk about ideals in education. A similar prism now has Gonski trapped too – the discussion in education has been focused on the all-important funding of the last two years of a six-year plan to the point where there is a perception now that this was what Gonski was all about.

“One of he most disappointing aspects of what has happened since the release of the [Gonski] review is that some essential elements have gone by the wayside while we argue about and just talk about the price tag,” says the veteran educator and researcher Bernie Shepherd.

In particular he is talking about the establishment of a national schools resourcing body, an independent entity set up to oversee the maintenance of the Schooling Resource Standard (the amount schools receive plus loadings for disadvantage) – equitable distribution of sector-blind funding to schools based on ongoing research and data collection.

The Gonski review recommendation was: “The national schools resourcing body should be independent of governments. This would ensure that the work it undertakes and the advice it provides is impartial and does not favour one school sector over another.”

In a country where one side of federal politics talks of an “emotional commitment” to private schools – as the then education minister, Christopher Pyne, did in 2014 – and keeps revisiting the possibility of withdrawing funds from the public sector altogether, and the other side states a firm commitment to public schools but won’t make difficult decisions about fairly redistributing funds between sectors, this would have been a revolutionary reform to embrace, potentially changing the education landscape forever by systematically providing for and supporting the ideal of equity in education.

Made up of experts with no ties to government, the body would advise governments in perpetuity about how to best maintain the schooling resource standard – the amount schools receive – plus loadings for disadvantage. It would also monitor and recalibrate data analysis with a view to continuous improvement in the system.



“The [Gonski] panel recognised that this would require a significant amount of initial and ongoing research to keep those funding levels in touch with what was needed on the ground in schools,” Shepherd said. This was an essential part of the gameplan that Gonski had plotted, one designed to take the political football of education funding out of the hands of politicians and out of the stranglehold of short-term election cycles.

It would have been, Shepherd said, “a very significant move in terms of depoliticising education”.

“The really revolutionary element of the review was completely sidelined – all the issues of where you go to school and all of the sector acrimony and arguments about public, private all that sort of thing – it just would have wiped them away.

“We’ve completely lost that element. We’re just talking about amounts of money now, divorced from a range of needs and priorities, and we’re back to doing deals behind closed doors with different provider groups.

“Which is exactly where we were before Gonski.”

Did we really give a Gonski?

The fact that the name of the Sydney Grammar-educated eastern suburbs multimillionaire businessman has become synonymous with equity in education is a triumph of grassroots marketing. All over the country there are bright green Gonski signs hanging from the fences of public schools, there are T-shirts, button pins and in this week, Gonski Week, you can be assured of plenty of green banners and waving flags with the famous four-word slogan I Give a Gonski.

As the former head of the Australian Education Union Angelo Gavrielatos once told Anne Summers: “It wouldn’t have worked if his name was Smith.”

When Abbott reneged on the promised “unity ticket” for the non-partisan findings of the Gonski review three months after coming to power in 2013, he was delivering Gonski directly into Labor’s hands. Although Gonski took on a partisan flavour when Julia Gillard claimed it as part of her re-election campaign in 2013 – and although Labor itself did not fully commit to funding the final two years of Gonski until January this year – the perception that the I Give A Gonksi campaign, run by the Australian Education Union, dovetailed with traditional ALP support for public schools was further cemented.

There was a “brief, wonderful moment”, as Shepherd describes it, in 2012 when all sectors and parties worked together towards a common goal but it was soon lost.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Malcolm Turnbull with the education minister, Simon Birmingham. Birmingham says Coalition policies have given more parents choice over which school is right for their children. Photograph: Ben Macmahon/AAP

David Gonski is famously old friends with that other Sydney Grammar-educated eastern suburbs multimillionaire businessman, the prime minister, and many mistakenly believed that Turnbull’s ascendance meant that the universally acclaimed model would be re-adopted as a bipartisan policy that would serve future generations of Australians well. They were sorely disappointed.

Now, while the Coalition makes reassuring noises about need-based funding, the historical perception that the LNP has a bad track record with public education is hard to shake.

During the Howard era, new funding models increased the flow of public money to private schools, leading to an expansion in the sector and a drift of students from public to private. Over the years 1995-2000 (Howard became prime minister in 1996) the number of students enrolled in independent schools increased by 46%.

This was, according to the policy-makers of the time, in service of the free market gods called choice and competition but, as the choice between well-resourced private schools and impoverished public schools became more stark, inequality in the system became further entrenched.

Subsequent Labor governments have not made the tough choices we talked about earlier and money still flows to advantaged schools, putting money where it doesn’t make a lot of difference. Just saying the words “needs-based funding” doesn’t miraculously make it happen.

“Are we allocating money to the schools that need it most?” asks Goss. “As of today, no.”

Class warfare

When the New South Wales education minister, Adrian Piccoli – a Nationals member and the state education minister most committed in both his support for Gonski and in his criticism of his own party for reneging on it – said Turnbull’s idea of withdrawing federal funding from government schools would be “the biggest mistake in education policy - probably forever” that would entrench a two-tier system, Birmingham accused him of class warfare.

This is a trusty old trope. Whenever anyone points out inequality, widening gaps, two-tiered systems, or the haves and have nots, you can be assured that somebody – usually somebody on the more attractive side of the widening gap – calls it class warfare. Whatever you want to call it, it’s happening.

Going to school is not the same as going shopping. Parents should not be burdened with locating a school for their child Diane Ravitch

Disparity in Australian schools is increasingly associated with socioeconomic background. While in the past we have had above average overall equity, the differences in outcomes according to family background are growing and education, the once-great leveller, is struggling to close the gaps.

Consequently disadvantage in Australian schools is being concentrated, not only by the drift to the non-government sector - where 34% of Australian students are educated – but also by parents seeking out higher-performing public schools for their kids.

This ability to choose is lauded by the Coalition – in his maiden speech to parliament, Birmingham said: “I believe that choice is also a major piece in the puzzle of providing the best education to young Australians. Families who can afford to choose between an overly bureaucratised government school and a responsive private school have voted with their feet in recent years, shifting en masse from the public to the private sector. And, thanks to the policies of this government, more parents have been able to afford that choice.”

As a counterpoint, the US educational historian Diane Ravitch says: “Going to school is not the same as going shopping. Parents should not be burdened with locating a suitable school for their child. They should be able to take their child to the neighbourhood public school as a matter of course and expect that it has well-educated teachers and a sound educational program.”

Federal aid for private schools to outstrip funding to similar state schools Read more

“Australia has a system,” says Goss, “where many parents have educational choices for their kids. However, the idea that choice and competition will by themselves improve educational standards has very little evidence behind it. Internationally there is not a lot of evidence that choice drives improvement.”

Indeed the highest performing systems, according to the OECD’s coordinator of the Pisa (Program for International Student Assessment) tests, Andreas Schleicher, are those that are the most equitable and provide excellence for all. As a 2010 OECD report put it: “The evidence is conclusive; equity in education pays off. The highest performing systems across the OECD countries are those that combine high quality and equity.”

Says Goss: “There is a range of evidence that, when education outcomes improve, the benefits flow not just to individuals but also to the broader economy.”

From kids in the classroom to the economy, and from the economy to our society. From an equitable base, the benefits trickle up.

Lucy Clark’s book Beautiful Failures: How the Quest for Success is Harming Our Kids is published by Ebury Press on 27 June