It’s clear, judging by both the outcome of the Gonski review and the government’s immediate dispatch of it to the purgatory of COAG, that Labor has lost any appetite for making good the damage inflicted by the Howard government’s SES school funding model, which continues to this day to allocate millions of dollars to Australia’s wealthiest schools.
That model was the Howard government at its most ideological, based on John Howard’s personal vision of a taxpayer-funded transformation of Australians into his ideal of Liberal voters — nuclear families, shareholders, privately schooled, using private health insurance. The conservative Catholic school system was a particular favourite of that government, serving as a low-income distraction from the direction of extraordinary levels of funding to Australia’s richest schools (and the rapid increase in that funding).
Eventually that vision morphed into a simpler mass vote-buying exercise, as Howard’s social engineering gave way to pork-barrelling on an extraordinary scale that left it with a structural budget deficit and a profound sense of entitlement.
The best that the government is likely to do is freeze the outrageous funding of the likes of Geelong Grammar ($4 million a year) and direct additional funding to low-performing, low-SES schools across both sectors. Funding for even élite private schools will continue to be based on the current SES framework until a new assessment tool is developed that will form the basis of how the non-private contribution component of each per-student amount is determined for each school.
And of course the government has repeatedly promised that no school will lose any funding, terrified as it is of handing the opposition the sort of weapon they deployed against Mark Latham in 2004.
Fear of the label “class war” thus becomes a tool for entrenching class-based privilege, as usual.
The Gonski model is actually a straightforward, common sense one — look at the best-performing schools and use them as the basis for a per-student funding model applied across all sectors, load funding to reflect the needs of different schools (particularly around disabilities), determine what’s fair for schools already receiving private contributions whether large or small, and the Commonwealth pays 30%. That’s a simplified version of the model, but it’s essentially sound.
The government’s real difficulties will lie in convincing the states to get on board what will in effect be a national funding model. The additional $5 billion might end up being the sort of carrot the government will need to carry the states with it — and where will it get that sort of money from?
Meantime, a timid government will grope its way forward by consulting furiously and, if no agreement with the different sectors is forthcoming, that the COAG swamp will trap the reforms until beyond the next election, regardless of the proposed 2014 start date.
The government has already been rolled by the miners and the clubs industry. And politically they’re nothing compared to private schools.
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OK Bernard you have redeemed yourself with this excellent piece.
Politicians should be obliged to send their children to public schools.
Bernard.
Whilst you identify the disgracefulness of the Liberal Party’s Education Policy that has given billions to well resourced private and well endowed church schools you fail to mention that it was Mr Abbott who administered this policy and put it into affect.
One really has to ask why such an error of omission should occur on your watch.
With Prime Minister Gillard smarming that ‘no school will lose a dollar’ and we’ve ‘moved beyond’ public versus private, former Prime Minister Howard can be richly satisfied with the prosecution of his 2001 hatchet job on public education.
We rarely discuss (and Gonski neatly sidestepped) one of Howard’s prime motives for starting the war in the first place.
Up to a point, he may have simply yearned for an idealised English world where the toffs’ schools were better equipped financially for their critical task of perpetuating inherited privilege.
But he also hated public education. Because it was godless, or in his code words deficient in ‘values’. It’s no accident that the 20% of independent schools and 60% of Catholic schools that are over-funded are nearly all god schools.
What Howard really achieved with Gillard’s complicity is a brilliantly successful and divisive attack on the historic Australian principle of a free and secular education, even though only a minority of Australians are committed Christians.
Just to rub it in, Rudd-Gillard Labor has enthusiastically endorsed Howard’s school ‘chaplains’ to infliltrate the godless public schools.
The horror of an education based on the English model of private versus public education I fortunately escaped. How an egalitarian society ever came to accept this silly system is incomprehensible.
A good education for everyone should not depend on the size of a wallet. Don’t even think about encouraging me on those Dickensian school uniforms and tuck shops. The horror, the horror!