A fresh battle over the underfunding of public schools is brewing, with Victoria and New South Wales vowing to push the new Albanese government to lift its contributions to close an investment shortfall.
The new federal education minister, Jason Clare, said boosting the results of Australian school students against international benchmarks and revisiting the needs-based Gonski reforms that aimed to end inequities in the distribution of public money will be among his top priorities.
Labor-led Victoria and Liberal-led NSW have joined forces to demand the new federal government close the 5% investment gap to tackle underfunding in education.
NSW education minister, Sarah Mitchell, said the Coalition would ensure it continued to oversee its commitment to public school funding.
“I will be seeking a commitment from the federal government that they will lift their funding contribution to NSW public schools by 5%,” she told Guardian Australia.
Last month, Victoria’s education minister, James Merlino, said he would engage with the new federal government to “pursue” the 5% gap.
On Monday he said it was an “unacceptable inequity” that government schools only received 95% of their student resource standard (SRS) – the needs-based funding benchmark created in the Gonski reforms.
“I’ve always said that I would prosecute this matter regardless of who is prime minister – and that’s exactly what I’ll do when the national school reform agreement negotiations commence this November,” he told Guardian Australia.
The current state-federal four-year schools funding agreement is due to expire at the end of next year. Under the agreement, public schools receive 20% of the SRS benchmark from the federal government and 75% from the states, creating a gap of 5%.
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Prior to the election, Labor’s former education spokesperson Tanya Plibersek said an Albanese government would increase funding for state schools by ensuring they were on a “pathway” to full funding, or 100% of the SRS. But the national teacher’s union criticised the pledge for lacking detail about the timeframe.
The Victorian teacher’s union urged both the state government and commonwealth to ensure public schools reached at least 100% of their SRS as soon as possible.
“At the moment our kids are missing out, and the longer they wait for the funding that they’re entitled to, the longer they miss out on the programs, the supports, that they need to get the highest quality education,” the union president, Meredith Peace, said.
Peace said the union would urge the Andrews government to continue advocating for the commonwealth to lift its contribution by 5% and would campaign on the issue in the lead-up to the November state election.
“Our view is that they should continue, regardless of who’s in government federally, to push for that,” she said.
In mid-2019, Victoria became the last state to sign up to the Morrison government’s Gonski 2.0 education reform deal, after a stoush with the federal government that saw it threaten to withhold its share of school funding.
Peace said the union also supported the abolishing of the 20% federal funding cap in the new schools agreement and the removal of a loophole that allowed state and territory governments to claim costs of up to 4% on measures like building depreciation and transport as part of their school funding contributions. These items were not originally deemed part of the Gonski SRS benchmark.
Trevor Cobbold, an economist and convener of public schools advocacy group Save Our Schools, agreed that states needed to “lift their game” and not continue to claim such expenditures as part of their contributions.
Cobbold said estimates by Save Our Schools showed closing the 5% gap would cost about $2.5bn a year.
A spokesperson for Clare did not respond to questions.