The federal education minister, Christopher Pyne, has warned that the government’s push to give state school principals more power over staffing and curriculum priorities would fail unless backed up by funding to develop local management skills.

Pyne visited Ringwood Secondary college in Victoria on Monday to launch the government’s $70m fund to promote the uptake of “independent public schools”, along the lines of policies adopted in Western Australia and Queensland.

The push to transfer powers from state education departments to principals and community-led school boards was a key plank of the Coalition’s education policy. It faces strong opposition from the Australian Education Union, which warned it would exacerbate inequity in the education system. The former Labor government voiced support for greater school autonomy as part of the Gonski reforms but argued the Coalition’s proposals went too far in the direction of “privatising” schools.

The Coalition's pre-election education policy flagged a $70m fund to provide grants directly to a school to assist it in gaining greater independence. It set a target of encouraging 25% of existing public schools – or about 1,500 – to become independent public schools by 2017.

In a statement on Monday, the government said it wanted to increase local and parental involvement in schools with “more streamlined budgeting and staffing arrangements and more local management of school facilities and infrastructure”. It said schools would remain part of the government system and would not charge tuition fees or introduce selective enrolment processes.

Pyne said under existing schemes in WA and Queensland, schools that applied for greater independence were assessed as to whether they had the capacity in their leadership teams and in their school communities.

He indicated the Abbott government’s $70m fund to increase school autonomy would largely be spent on “building the skills base of principals and their leadership teams”.

“I’m hoping that the Commonwealth’s money will be spent to reboot, if you like, those school communities and those leadership teams to give them the skills necessary to be able to become successful independent public schools, because we don’t want to have some headlong rush into independent public schooling which ends up failing,” Pyne said.

“Each school needs to be a success and the students’ outcomes need to be improved, otherwise this policy won’t have been a success.”

According to a government information sheet, funding could be directed towards activities such as professional development and training for principals, school leadership teams and school council members, or programs for parents to improve their understanding and involvement in school decision-making processes.

The opposition education spokeswoman, Kate Ellis, dismissed the government's proposal as a "half-hearted" attempt to shift the responsibility for resourcing public schools from government to school communities.

"If the government was serious about some of the benefits that can come from more principal autonomy and from having parents involved in education, they would back Labor’s Gonski reforms and fund them over six years," she said.

"That would see resources for real reforms in teacher training, school independence and community engagement in every single school across the country."





Pyne said state and territory education departments would still set parameters in which the schools would operate, but the government was looking for principals to have more capacity to choose their own staff.

“So in Western Australia, while principals can’t yet choose staff from outside the Western Australian Department of Education, rather than being sent a new teacher by the department regardless of what they need, they can advertise within the Western Australian pool and they get applications from 180 [or] 200 teachers in some cases, and then they can choose from that group,” Pyne said.

He said principals and parent bodies should be able to make decisions about matters such as extracurricular priorities, the ethos of the school, a focus on sciences or languages or major subjects, and spending money on music.

Pyne urged MPs from all political parties to become “ambassadors” for the independent public schools push, saying leaders from across the spectrum, including Julia Gillard, had previously voiced support for greater school autonomy.

But the AEU deputy president, Correna Haythorpe, said the policy was worse than a do-nothing approach to the growing inequity of the school system.

“Christopher Pyne is actively pulling apart our public education system all together,” she said. “The Productivity Commission has warned that in the absence of adequate resourcing, greater school autonomy can exacerbate inequalities.”

Haythorpe said if the objective was to lift student performance, the policy would fail.

The Victorian education minister, Martin Dixon, who joined with Pyne for the launch on Monday, said all Victorian schools had long enjoyed a high level of autonomy. He said the Victorian government was now looking to allow even greater autonomy, ensuring schools could better serve the local communities. Dixon said state and federal governments should take a hands-off approach.

“This is not about a label, it is about improving student learning,” Dixon said.

The New South Wales education minister, Adrian Piccoli, who has previously expressed his doubts about the federal government's independent public schools push, said the state had already increased local school authority and thought it had the balance right.



In a statement issued on Monday, Piccoli said the NSW government's reforms shifted decision making and responsibility to principals and their local school communities, with principals set to control up to 70% of the school education budget.



"While we strongly support devolving authority to local schools we have no plans to move further towards wholesale autonomy," the Coalition minister said.



"We look forward to ongoing discussions with the federal government to ensure that efforts to promote greater school-based decision-making are compatible with policies in NSW that meet the needs of schools and students within a system of public education."



Pyne said the government would work with each state and territory, each of which currently had different levels of autonomy for schools.

