The Gonski Report is ambitious. It focuses on addressing educational disadvantage in Australian schools through an additional $5 billion dollar increase in funding. This recommendation is popular with advocates of state schools because the vast majority (75 per cent) will be directed to the state system, which educates the majority of disadvantaged students.
The non-government sector is also happy because it has argued that the focus should be on increasing the size of the cake, rather than on the state versus private debate.
Hopefully all agree that there are pockets of disadvantage — Indigenous children, children in remote and country Australia, children with physical and mental disabilities, and children from poor backgrounds — where an injection of resources is needed.
Moreover, the report appears to encourage the non-government sector to assist more in this area. This was a theme of many submissions made to Gonski and the panel from private schools.
There is, however, an important caveat to this. It presumes that a $5 billion injection is possible.
The detail that is passed over is that only 30 per cent would come from the Federal Government, with the rest coming from the states. This seems to vindicate those who have argued that state schools are primarily responsible for funding state schools, whereas from the 1960s the Federal Government has taken responsibility for providing some state aid to the non-government sector.
The AEU and others talk of non-government schools receiving more government funding than state schools. They conveniently ignore the fact that state schools receive most of their funding (88 per cent) from state governments. If you combine federal and state funding, only 20 per cent of all funding goes to non-government schools, which educate 32 per cent of Australian students.
Gonski appears to suggest that the bulk of underfunding of state schools is the responsibility of the states. State governments have allowed the state school systems to be increasingly under-resourced, especially in the area of maintenance, while the bureaucracies ever expand. It could be argued that the AEU itself has been an obstacle to reform in this area.
Australia spends a lower proportion of its GDP on education than many countries. It also has the biggest non-government sector in the developed world.
My concern about the Gonski Report, in this respect, is that for the authors to have as a central feature a spending target that is undeliverable raises unrealistic expectations.
Moreover, the timing of the report and