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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

The new government has inherited a problem that no one wants to talk about: the deep inequality of funding between public and private and independent schools.

That discrepancy is most evident when it comes to the way that students with disabilities are funded.

Today, Senior Reporter at The Saturday Paper Rick Morton, reveals the $600 million dollar funding shortfall for students with a disability in the public system.

It’s Tuesday August 9.

RUBY:

So, Rick, something that might have flown under the radar recently while the new government has been prosecuting its legislation, is the issue of school funding. So after a decade of the coalition being in power, what kind of position is it in?

RICK:

Yeah, I think a lot of people think that school funding is just kind of being fixed and solved and everyone just got on with things. But it's a bit of a mess, in a word. And the way it works is that state schools are majority funded by state and territory governments, whereas independent Catholic slash private schools are 80% funded by the Commonwealth Federal Government and 20% funded by the states and territories. Now obviously the fact that the Federal Government is involved in funding both sectors is kind of contentious for some people. But what is astonishing about this arrangement is that the federal government actually fulfils its funding promises to the independent schools and doesn't fulfil its promises to the state schools. In fact, it's underfunding them still at the moment by 2 to 3 percentage points. And that's just the federal government.

RUBY:

Okay. So could you just break that down for me Rick? Both private and public schools get federal funds - though obviously private schools also run on fees, and public schools are also funded by the states. But you’re saying that the federal government is actually underfunding public schools?

RICK:

Yeah. So it's promised to fund 80% of private schools and it will get to that level over the next nine years right. Now, as it currently stands in state schools, neither the state and territory governments nor the federal government are meeting their funding commitments for that sector. In fact, there is no plan, even out to 2029, for either of those two levels of government to fully fund state schools.

That means that there is currently no plan for either level of government to fully fund state schools. But there is a plan for the Commonwealth and the states to fully fund private schools up to 2029. So the way that breaks down essentially is that last year we've got some data in 2021 in every public school, in every state and territory except the ACT. They were funded to about 80 to 93% of what is actually required. So not a single public school in any of those jurisdictions have full funding. Meanwhile, both the Commonwealth and the states, as I mentioned, have fully funded many Catholic and independent schools, and the plan is to get to 100% or more over the rest of this decade. Now that is kind of setting the scene for some hinky business when it comes to the way kids get access to support in schools.

RUBY:

Okay. So how did this happen, Rick? How did we get to a situation where government schools are not being paid what they're owed by the government, when independent or private sector schools, which arguably aren’t the responsibility of the government, are getting paid that money.

RICK:

Well, it depends how far back you want to go…but let's go back to Julia Gillard and the Gonski schools reforms.

Archival tape -- ABC Newsreader:

Julia Gillard has unveiled Labor's long awaited school funding overhaul. The Prime Minister has backed the recommendations of the Gonski report into school education

RICK:

Now that was a huge programme of reform around 2011 looking at how we can equitably fund kids in schools

Archival tape -- Julia Gillard:

And today I've laid out a further programme for change, a national programme for school improvement, lifting teacher quality, empowering principals to get on with the job, more information for parents and communities as well as laying out a new funding system which puts individual children at the heart of the system and responds to their needs…

RICK:

But of course politically the Gillard government and no government since has been willing to say to private independent schools you will actually need to lose some money in order for this fair redistribution to happen. So in fact, there is no plan for that to happen.

Archival tape -- Leigh Sales:

And who will be putting that money forward?

Archival tape -- Julia Gillard:

Well, that money would be put forward collaboratively by federal and state governments and obviously in the private and Catholic systems. Parents also put in their fees.

Archival tape -- Leigh Sales:

And who puts in, who puts in what?

RICK:

And what has happened since is that the private school system lobbied the Coalition Government when they came to power for more protections.

Archival tape --Tony Abbott:

As far as I am concerned, as far as Christopher Pyne is concerned, as far as the Coalition is concerned. We want to end the uncertainty by guaranteeing that no school will be worse off over the forward estimates period…

RICK:

And there's been a kind of like other bolt-ons in this kind of Frankenstein policy arrangements where the coalition has done everything it can to protect the independent Catholic school sector while also shredding its share of funding. So they put a cap in 2017 on the Commonwealth funding for public schools, taking it from 25% down to 20%. And at the same time there was also no plan for any State Government to fund more than 75%, so 75 and 20 is 95% and that is what's baked into the agreements, whereas the Catholic and independent schools there is a plan to ramp up.

RUBY:

Okay. So it's successive governments then not wanting to cut funding or to say no to any of these independent private sector schools.

RICK:

That's the hardest word to say.

RUBY:

So, if we look at the funding then for each individual student – I mean, how does that play out?

RICK:

So here's the really weird and cruel quirk that's baked into this. There's a thing called the schooling resource standard and that essentially says that every student in primary school last year deserves about $12,000, as, you know, benchmark baseline funding. And in secondary school, it's about $15,000. That's the SRS. Now because of the way that is set and because you can get loadings on top of that. Right. So it's like layers of disadvantage will attract more money. So I'm going to focus on disability loadings today because this is a really quite striking example.

The way the loadings are set up is that they're paid as a proportion of the SRS that is eventually paid to students. Now, because the SRS in state schools is below 100%. Disabled kids in those systems are actually getting less money in disability loadings than they would otherwise be qualified for if those schools were funded properly. And I've got some data on that. And it's $600 million last year alone that disabled students in the public system were underfunded because of this original sin, if you like, of not fulfilling, you know, government obligations in the funding of students. Full stop.

RUBY:

We’ll be back after this

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RUBY:

Rick, you just said that students with a disability in the public system have been underfunded to the tune of about $600 million dollars in the past year. People have tried to fix the school funding system – for well over a decade now – how is it that we’re still in this kind of situation?

RICK:

So basically what happened with Gonski was when when the report came out, they said that there needs to be extra funding for disabled students. Nobody disagrees with that, but they didn't know how many disabled kids there were. And so eventually they did this, what they called this nationally consistent collection of data through all the schools to find out exactly what the number was. And it was about 100,000 more students that they anticipated and Christopher Pyne was the Education Minister at the time and onwards. And they kind of kept delaying putting in this system to give extra money for those kids and also to find out, you know, what that money should be. Now as a way around that, according to the Australian Education Union, they think that what happened with this system was that they suddenly created a new, you know, four categories of support that supplementary, which is like a little about half as much as the SRS gets added on top of it for, you know, someone who needs a bit of extra help in the classroom.

There is substantial, which kind of does what it says on the tin. And then there's extensive, for kids who clearly need, like pretty much constant support in the classroom, if not, you know, special school. There's also an unfunded category that has no money and that's called quality, differentiated teaching practise. Now, that, in layman's terms, means you're on your own teachers. These kids have a disability. They need a bit of extra support, but we're not going to fund you any money for it. And that's an artefact of the coalition.
Now, the way these categories work is that the schools actually have to prove that these kids need the support. So they, in order to verify someone to be in any of these categories, even the ones that don't attract any extra funding, they have to show that they've changed teaching practises for ten weeks, that to fill in paperwork every day about these students, to try and get them accredited basically as a disabled kid in order to get the money in return.

RUBY:

Okay. I mean, that sounds like a lot of work, Rick. Is it just the case, then, that private schools or independent schools have the ability to take that on, to do that in a way that public schools can't?

RICK:

Yeah, I mean, I certainly would argue that they're better equipped to do that. In fact, they often, and I reported on some of this, advertising for dedicated roles to support teachers, to fill in that paperwork, to do the admin, to get their head across the individual learning plans that are required for the disabled kids in these classrooms to do that for ten weeks to get the loading in return. Whereas the state school system is just, they just do not have the same level of resources to do that.

You know, I spoke to one teacher at a private school in Brisbane. They were saying that, you know, yeah, it's like any bureaucracy, the people who actually can afford to compete with the bureaucracy are the ones that get to the other side of it. And, you know, they've witnessed that in their own school. And of course, the point here is not that they shouldn't do that, because I don't think there's I've got no proof that there's any kid in an independent or Catholic school that's getting more than they deserve. They are just getting the support that would be provided to kids in the public system if they were resourced to do it. And if there wasn't an underfunding baked into the very DNA of the agreements and not just baked in, but no plan to get rid of it as it currently stands. So I went to Jason Clare's office, the Education Minister, for a response, and they didn't come back to me at all, which I thought was kind of surprising. The Independent said that, of course, you know, they do what every other school does, as with the Catholics, and that they don't do anything more or less than any other school to try and get support that kids with disabilities need.

RUBY:

And so Rick, what does this actually mean then, for these kids with disabilities who might be within the public school sector and the school that they're at isn't able to get this funding?

RICK:

Yeah. I mean, this is where it really becomes damaging and long term because teaching staff are already overworked in all the sectors, but particularly in the state system, teaching support staff are even more overworked. In fact, my mum was a teacher's aide. She just retired at the start of this year and like the demand between in different classrooms and multiple kids within those different classrooms for a single aide is off the charts. Now, the extra support that is provided to schools in the funding goes on, you know, staff bodies on the ground. Who can actually do the reading recovery or do the intensive kind of explicit instruction. There’s also equipment for the kids so that they can learn in a mainstream setting with their peers and not be segregated. Now, what the AU has found in discussions with its principals committee is that school principals typically in the state system have been transferring $100,000 on average from elsewhere in the schools budget just to try and plug some of the gap with their disabled kids. But it's not enough in an already overstretched school. In fact, what that ends up happening doing there is essentially meaning maybe larger class sizes, cutting corners somewhere else in the school just to try and give their students with disabilities a bit of a fair go. And that's what this means. This isn't a theoretical argument about school funding or it's not about a spreadsheet. It's about kids in classrooms and what they're actually learning.

RUBY:

And the key issue of inequality being baked into these agreements is that something that is on the New Labor government's radar? Because it sounds like a lot of these problems, they were partially caused by Gonski, but at least Gonski was a top line attempt by the previous Labor government to fix school funding. We haven't really heard much about it this time around though.

RICK:

Yeah. I mean, Gonski had all the greatest aims in the world, but it's kind of like if you embark on a house renovation with deciding to add a top floor, but then halfway through you get a new owner who's like, no stuff that we're going to do a basement. And so you get this kind of hodgepodge, right, of weird protections. So Jason Clare is the new Education Minister in the new Federal Labor Government. He knows that these agreements are out there. In fact they have to be renegotiated by the end of next year because from 2024 be basically extend them out into the future. Now this is an opportunity to fix some of this. Either way, there will be new agreements in 2024. The only question now is whether they're actually going to fix a problem that is hurting kids who need the most support in our state system.

RUBY:

Rick, thank you so much for your time.

RICK:

Thanks Ruby.

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Also in the news today,

Former NSW politician John Barilaro has told a parliamentary inquiry that he regrets applying for the role as a trade commissioner in New York and denied he had sought any special treatment – describing the situation as a ‘shitshow’.

The former deputy premier withdrew from the role several weeks ago, after it emerged another candidate had been previously selected for the role before Barilaro’s appointment.

And a ceasefire between Israel and the militant group Islamic Jihad has taken effect in the Gaza Strip after three days of fighting.

Palestinian officials in Gaza said a total of 44 Palestinians were killed, almost half, officials said, were civilians and included 15 children.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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