New South Wales minister Adrian Piccoli says public schools would lose out if current agreements not honoured

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

NSW education minister Adrian Piccoli has warned any attempt by the federal government to cut school funding is a broken promise and would mark a return to the “dark old days” when public schools lost out.

“We signed an agreement,” Piccoli told Guardian Australia, speaking ahead of an education council meeting to discuss school funding.

“We still expect the commonwealth to honour the fifth and sixth years of school funding. Prior to 2013 election Tony Abbott said Labor and Coalition were a unity ticket so it is a broken promise if they don’t deliver.”

Coalition to argue Labor's school funding deals a 'corruption' of Gonski report Read more

Piccoli said he had not seen the analysis released by education minister Simon Birmingham that purports to show differences in funding to prove Gonski-style needs-based funding has not been achieved.

But Piccoli said if the commonwealth was proposing to take $100m from NSW, it would mean public schools would lose out.

“Why only take money out of one sector?” he asked.

“There is nothing needs-based about taking money out of public schools. I don’t know why they want to open [it] up again.

“Minister Birmingham is from South Australia. I am told South Australia is going to benefit. Western Australia has an election in March. Is this what is happening?”

Acting Victorian Labor education minister Jenny Mikakos likened comments by Birmingham to a burglar ringing ahead to ask someone to leave the door open.

She said the Victorian education figures quoted by the minister related to education spending under the previous Liberal government. By tearing up the current school funding agreement Mikakos said Victorian schools would lose $1bn, which amounts to between $450,000 and $550,000 per school, per year.

“It is like a prospective burglar calling ahead to ask people to leave the door open,” Mikakos said.

“It is an extraordinary way to to conduct commonwealth state relations.”

But the WA education minister Peter Collier defended the federal government’s plans as “sensible and equitable” which would provide a fairer distribution of funds for his state.

“The original funding formula was fatally flawed,” Collier said.

“Why should a student from an identical background in Western Australia be funded at a much lower rate than a student that happens to live on the east coast of Australia? This is no way to operate an effective federation.

“I look forward to seeing a true needs-based funding model, similar to the Student Centred Funding Model we have already introduced in WA, that is working so well.”

Birmingham says the commonwealth is spending $73.6bn over four years (which equates to $3.9bn less than Labor promised). Before the election Birmingham also offered $1.2bn of extra funding tied to teacher training and year one testing.

“States and territories will always be free under our constitution to fund schools in their state or territory as they see fit,” Birmingham said.

“But as a federal minister running a federal funding model, I want to make sure the bits that we’re responsible for treat a student who might have a disability or might be from a low socioeconomic background the same, wherever they live in Australia.”

Honorary associate professor at Sydney University and education expert Jim McMorrow said, in theory, the commonwealth could press ahead with a school funding deal without the agreement of the states and territories.

The current school funding agreements – contained in the Australian Education Act – finish by December 2017. Any new legislation needs to pass through both houses of parliament.

“It is up to the commonwealth to amend legislation and the commonwealth can determine to do what it wants,” McMorrow said. “But for most of the last two decades, the conditions included national agreement.

“The Hawke government started the national agreement idea and it was carried on by John Howard, but in principle the commonwealth can decide any conditions that it wants.”

Education ministers meet in Adelaide on Thursday evening and Friday morning to begin to thrash out the agreements for 2018-19. Those years represent the final two years of the six-year so-called Gonski funding agreements.

At issue is the funding formula and whether to extend formulas based on the Gonski recommendations of baseline funding for individual students, loaded for any disadvantage.

The Gonski funding plan was considered Julia Gillard’s signature policy but of the current agreements, half of the states were signed up by the Gillard government prior to the 2013 election and half by the incoming Abbott government.

Birmingham has argued that far from delivering a baseline national schooling resource standard (SRS) with loading for disadvantages, the current state and territory agreements provide different amounts for equivalent students in different states. He argues this is a corruption of the Gonski ideals.

While Birmingham has talked about the importance of funding based on students’ needs, the Coalition has consistently distanced itself from the Gonski model.

Queensland’s acting Labor premier and education minister, Curtis Pitt, said Birmingham was turning his back on education in Queensland and trying to lecture the states when “they don’t run a single school”.



“We educate more than 380,000 students in regional and rural areas with more than 1,000 schools outside the Brisbane metropolitan area,” Pitt said.

“We also educate around one third of the nation’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and some of these students live in the most remote areas of the country.

“Queensland is also a growth state and we need funding to keep pace with our growing population.”

Australian Education Union federal president Correna Haythorpe said the federal government’s refusal to honour years five and six of the Gonski agreements with the states would see schools lose $3.9bn in funding.

“No state has yet reached the minimum resourcing standards for schools that were outlined in the Gonski report,” Haythorpe said.

“That is because under the Gonski agreements, two-thirds of the extra funding to schools was to be delivered in 2018 and 2019. We don’t need to reinvent Gonski, we need to fund it in full.”

