Cash only part of schools fix

The Australian Financial Review

The Gonski review of education funding has taken an overdue step towards de-cluttering the way schools are publicly funded and focusing more on the needs of individual students than the schools themselves. But by placing a headline $5 billion price tag on the reform package, the review has tended to distract attention from whether existing resources can be better used, both among existing schools and through better practices in the classrooms.

A strong education system with public and private spending is critical to promoting widespread prosperity, and the review has identified clusters of disadvantage that deserve attention.

But the spending increase proposed by the Gonski review comes on top of new spending proposals in parental leave, disability insurance and a national dental scheme – raising the risk that we are locking in new entitlements on the assumption that commodity prices will remain close to their present record highs. It’s troubling that student learning outcomes are sliding at the same time.

So the Gillard government is right to be cautious about ­creating expectations of even more spending when the more urgent issue is about better spending.

Australia has experienced a significant increase in school spending in recent years, underlined by the wasteful school building stimulus program, but has been falling behind emerging Asian nations in student performance results. There is a threat to our longer-term outlook if this trend continues. But as Chris Ryan and Moshe Justman argue separately in these pages, there is no clear correlation between how much money is ploughed into schools and how well students learn.

The government should pursue a clearer funding model based on a guaranteed payment for students, topped up for disadvantage factors and with a better system of calculating the capacity of parents to pay for non-government tuition fees.

Australia has considerable school choice by international standards but the system should also make it possible for independent schools with disadvantaged students to be treated equally with government schools. The flow of students out of some parts of the government system despite the rising cost of fees underlines that there is something wrong with the system, particularly the suffocating role of teacher unions with ­persistent pressure for seniority-based pay.

However, when the government faces a tight budget position, with many demands at the top of the economic cycle, a debate over the detail of the Gonski report should be no excuse for failing to change the non-financial aspects of school education including teaching standards, school auto­nomy, teacher training and incentives, classroom discipline and concentration on core study areas.

These are the areas where some of the rising Asian school systems appear to be making better progress than Australia.

We need more evidence on the need for much shuffling of responsibility between the federal and state systems, with the sort of inevitable wrangling that occurred over health reform, because this will further delay action on pockets of disadvantage and basic school standards.

The Australian Financial Review