For everyone From your president: A decade of inequity
Both the recent OECD Education at a Glance report and the AEU’s Decade of Inequity research clearly demonstrate that Australia is a global outlier when it comes to funding public education, and not in a good way. The OECD report found that Australia has the highest level of expenditure on private educational institutions in the entire OECD, at 0.7% of GDP. This is more than double the OECD-wide average of 0.3% of GDP spent on private schools.
The AEU research revealed that more than half of private schools in Victoria now receive more combined government funding (Commonwealth and state) per student than public schools of very similar size, location and with similar student needs. In 2013, there were 504 private schools in Victoria that received more combined government funding than comparable public schools. By 2022, this had increased to 521 private schools.
The AEU based its findings on ACARA data, using socio-educational advantage, school location and school size to determine comparable public and private schools. On average, every private school in Australia will receive $462 per student above their full Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) in combined state and Commonwealth funding in 2024, while every public school will be underfunded by $2,509 per student.
At the school level, this translates to a significant resourcing and staffing advantage. It has fuelled a private school capital works boom that is plain to see, while denying public schools the recurrent investment needed to attract and retain teachers and to address the high levels of student need in the classroom.
Under both Liberal and Labor governments, Australia has continued to spend less on public education and more on private schooling than other developed nations. As the OECD report also found, Australia spends 3.3% of GDP on public schools, just scraping above the OECD average of 3.2%. The twelve countries that invest more in public education than Australia are Belgium, Costa Rica, Finland, France, Iceland, Israel, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and the UK.
What’s clear is this inequity will only get worse if these funding gaps continue. As Professor Pasi Sahlberg from Melbourne University told The Age: “Australia is probably speaking more about equity and fairness, and the others are doing it.”
Australia – we have a problem, and it must be fixed!
What a sad indictment for a country as wealthy as ours – to continue to accept that it is OK for students in public schools to be denied the level of funding the Parliament has determined that all children should receive, while students in already advantaged private schools continue to be overfunded.
With national school funding negotiations at a standstill, the AEU’s report paints a clear picture for how federal and state governments should respond. The promised reforms from the original Gonski review are now more than a decade overdue.
We have seen the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments deliberately dismantle those reforms, obscure the debate with self-serving arguments about why funding “isn’t the answer”, and put public schools at a further disadvantage.
Now, the Albanese government is refusing to follow through on its pre-election promise to change all that. This leaves public school students at risk of falling even further behind their peers globally, and puts more pressure on schools to improve achievement levels without the necessary resources and support.
The story is similar in TAFE and early childhood, where greater levels of funding are required, particularly to support the workforce to meet increasing workloads. In the latest State of our TAFEs survey, 77% of respondents said that workload has had a major impact on the recruitment and retention of TAFE teachers from industry.
In early childhood, the need to address the workload pressures driving many EC teachers and educators out of the profession are a key part of the AEU’s log of claims for new benchmark agreements, the VECTEA and EEEA.
Our recently released AEU–Monash research paper shows school staff are working an unacceptable amount of extra unpaid hours. The OECD report backs this up, finding Australian early high school teachers are teaching 813 hours annually compared with the OECD average of 706 hours.
Australia – we have a problem, and it must be fixed! The feedback from members, supported by data, shows that workload is the critical issue deterring new entrants and driving existing staff out of the profession, followed closely by the need for increased salaries that reflect the value of their work.
Decent and fair funding for public education is not too much to ask. Government must deliver funding where it is needed, not continue to overfund the non-government sector. The AEU will keep driving governments to do better. There is no more important objective than the quality of our students’ education.
