You need all your fingers and all your toes to count the myriad funding and teaching reforms required to remedy the lagging educational performance of Australian children. But you need to look in just one place to find a foundation on which to build them.

Australia's poor results in maths and reading in the OECD Program for International Student Assessment global tests demand that Prime Minister Tony Abbott commit wholeheartedly to the Gonski vision for the long term.

"A significant number of Australian children do not enjoy that basic level of funding. The Gonski model remedies that and directs extra money where it is most needed." Credit:Michele Mossop

As other nations improve equity and results, we dither. Even this week the Abbott government could not decide whether the present system needed fixing, let alone whether the fairness and accountability criteria underpinning Gonski should be part of the solution.

Australians now face an uncertain mix of funding models, with doubts about how money will be allocated in some states for the next four years and across the nation beyond that.