As the Herald and Age reported this week, government funding boosts to private schools outstripped increases to public schools in the decade to 2017, despite Gonski. There are many reasons - power games, political expediency, and a level of policy complexity that stymies community engagement - but the bottom line is that "we have failed to live up to what we have promised ourselves," says Peter Goss, school education program director at the Grattan Institute. "This whole time we've been talking about moving towards needs-based funding, we have been heading in the opposite direction." Loading Federal governments of both persuasions have, at various times, taken principled stances on funding. Both parties have also buckled to political interests at crucial moments, leading to what one senior bureaucrat described as a "two steps forward, one step back" approach. The buckling tends to come before elections, amid fears that anger from the independent and Catholic sectors will lead to punishment at the ballot box. Former Labor prime minister Julia Gillard, for example, commissioned the Gonski review and convinced the states to agree to its reforms, but buckled by promising that all schools would have their taxpayer funding increase, including those that already had too much of it. Malcolm Turnbull's government revived the attempt to take money off wealthy non-government schools. "There shouldn't be special deals," his treasurer, Scott Morrison, said in 2017. "There should be one deal and it should be based on the needs of every single student." The government held its ground against a forceful backlash from the Catholic sector in the lead-up to several byelections. The Coalition fared badly in the July 2018 vote, the school-funding backlash was one of the reasons why Turnbull was replaced as prime minister weeks later, and his successor, Morrison, promptly gave private schools the $4.6 billion they wanted.

The result is, seven years after the Gonski report was handed down, school-funding policy remains a "grotesque policy disaster", says Adam Rorris, an education economist who managed the school resourcing taskforce between 2002 and 2008. Instead of getting closer to its goal of more funding for disadvantaged schools, Australia has moved further away. According to analysis by the Grattan Institute, real resources available to schools were increased by more than $2 billion in a decade but, when wage growth was taken into account, private schools got more than 80 per cent of it. Part of the problem is that the public thinks funding has been dealt with. When Labor put forward an agenda and the Coalition eventually agreed to it, "everyone just assumed it would be implemented", Rorris says. But the reforms keep being quietly delayed and diluted; last year, the deadline for over-funded schools to lose that money was extended by two years, to 2029. In the same agreement, an accounting loophole was introduced that lets state governments include depreciation in their school operation budgets. Then prime minister Julia Gillard and David Gonski at the release of the Gonski review into education in 2012. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Another issue is that school-funding policy is diabolically complicated, making it difficult for most non-educators to follow. Simply put, the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) sets a base amount for each student, with loadings for different types of disadvantage, such as disability or Indigenous heritage. When the child attends a private school, the base amount is reduced according to their parents' capacity to pay. When a school is described as over-funded, it is receiving more than 100 per cent of its SRS as determined by that formula. The state and federal governments pay different proportions of the resulting bill; for private schools, the Commonwealth pays 80 per cent, and the state pays 20 per cent. That is reversed for public schools.

Partly because non-government schools are not as expensive as public ones - there are not as many, for a start (in NSW, they make up about a third of schools) - and partly because it raises its own revenue, the Commonwealth has been better at meeting its financial obligations. The states are supposed to foot 80 per cent of their public-school bill, but they will all struggle to get to 75 per cent. At the moment, the ambition is to bring under-funded private schools to 100 per cent of SRS by 2023, and public schools to 95 per cent by 2027. Loading This year, the NSW public system was below 90 per cent of SRS, despite teaching needier children; in the 10 years to 2017, the number of students from the most disadvantaged quartile in Australian government schools grew from 81 per cent to 89 per cent. But the biggest problem facing funding reform, according to many within the sector, is lobbying power. The independent and Catholic sectors have always been vocal in defending their interests (and in ensuring the other doesn't get a better deal). But the Catholic system, in particular, has stepped up its efforts in recent years. Now, neither of the heads of the national or NSW Catholic Education Commissions have backgrounds in education (although educators remain in charge of each diocese). NSW's is headed by a former National Australia Bank lobbyist and member of the Liberal Party state executive, while the national office is headed by a former Labor senator. Until recently, the Victorian commission was headed by a former state Liberal MP.

When it comes to lobbying for its fair share of resources, Rorris says the public system is fighting with one hand behind its back. The Catholic and independent systems can send letters to principals and parents, arguing their case. Priests can extol the virtues and needs of Catholic education from the pulpit. But the public system is required to be apolitical. Its champion is the education minister, who is responsible for the other sectors, too. "Private school authorities make full-blooded, unrestrained bids for public money for their schools, while state ministers of education are constrained and limited in their support for public schools because they are fighting their own treasurers," he says. "There is a governance issue with public schools that leaves those schools without an effective champion, which could forcefully make the case to defend and attain their resourcing requirements." Loading Adrian Piccoli, the former National Party MP, NSW education minister and now director of the Gonski Institute for Education, agrees. "The [Catholic] bishop can ring the premier or the prime minister - they are usually on a first-name basis. The bishop can say, 'We're going to put out a letter to our parents saying what a terrible government you are.' The secretary of the NSW Department of Education can't do that." They have a more subtle power, too, Piccoli argues. Their parent bodies include some of the community's wealthiest, most powerful people. "If you heat-mapped Australia based on social capital, power and influence of parents, it's weighted towards non-government schools," Piccoli says. "They're smaller in terms of numbers but ... they are newspaper editors, politicians, judges, lawyers. This is where they have a disproportionate amount of influence."

A spokesman for the National Catholic Education Commission said public schools could lobby for their interests through the P&C Federation, while teacher unions spent millions on campaigning against funding for private schools. Catholic Education was bound by rules governing charities. "We represent and advocate on behalf of our schools and families," he said. "Our parents expect Catholic education to inform them about policy changes that will affect them." The head of the NSW Association of Independent Schools, Geoff Newcombe (who points out that many independent schools are both disadvantaged and under-funded), disputes the suggestion that public schools don't have a champion. "I think the NSW Teachers Federation sees itself as the main lobby group for government schools, and they are outdone only on occasion by the Australian Education Union," he says. Yet the influence of the union, which represents public school teachers and principals, stops at the school gate, and doesn't extend to parents and students, Rorris says. "[Catholic and independent] sectors have a machinery in place that directly engages parents and communities they serve," he says. "They can tap that, mobilise that, and apply pressure to the government far more easily than the union. That translates to a greater lobbying effectiveness on their behalf." Loading In today's federal election, the major parties are offering starkly different choices when it comes to education. The Coalition is pushing forward with its existing policy. It says it will pressure the states to increase their contribution to schools, but hasn't said how.