Australia’s school funding debate has focused on headline spending figures while obscuring whether resources counted toward the Schooling Resource Standard are actually reaching classrooms, students and support staff.
For years Australians have been told that education funding is increasing. Federal and state ministers regularly announce record investments in schools. Budgets contain billions of dollars in new spending. Governments proudly report progress towards meeting the Schooling Resource Standard, the benchmark established following the Gonski Review to identify the resources schools require to educate their students effectively.
Yet after more than 40 years working in public education, I have become increasingly uneasy.
The unease does not come from how much governments claim they are spending. It comes from a much simpler question. Where does the money actually go?
If education funding has increased so dramatically, why do so many schools continue to struggle? Why are school counsellors stretched beyond capacity? Why are specialist support services difficult to access? Why are teachers expected to manage increasingly complex behavioural, emotional and social challenges with limited support?
The public hears about billions of dollars flowing into education and assumes schools must be benefiting. Teachers often look around their classrooms and wonder why the promised abundance remains so difficult to find.
Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question. For years the debate has focused on how much governments spend. The more important question may be what happens to that money after it enters the system.
Recent research by Trevor Cobbold from Save Our Schools provides an answer that should concern every Australian who cares about public education.
The Schooling Resource Standard was never intended to be an accounting exercise. It was designed to answer a practical question: what resources does a school require if children are to have a genuine opportunity to succeed?
The answer was not particularly mysterious. Schools need teachers. They need counsellors, learning support officers and specialist staff. They need teaching materials, libraries, intervention programs and additional support for students experiencing disability, disadvantage, trauma and poverty.
The experts who developed the model were careful about what they included and what they excluded. They specifically excluded system-level expenditures such as capital depreciation and regulatory costs because these were not resources used directly by schools in the education of children. The standard was intended to measure what schools need, not what education bureaucracies cost to operate.
Governments accepted that calculation. They also acknowledged that many public schools were operating below it.
Yet at the same time, governments began allowing expenditures that the original Gonski review had deliberately excluded to be counted towards meeting the standard. As a result, governments could report progress towards the target without necessarily directing equivalent resources into classrooms.
On paper, the numbers improve. Governments can point to rising percentages and report progress towards the Schooling Resource Standard. The public hears reassuring announcements about record investment. Yet for many schools the lived reality changes far more slowly. The shortages remain, the waiting lists remain, and the pressure on teachers and support services remains.
There is something deeply troubling about this arrangement, because public schools are not simply another government service competing for scarce resources.
Unlike many institutions, public schools do not get to choose whom they serve. They must accept the child living in poverty, the child carrying the burden of trauma, the child with a disability, the child whose behaviour makes learning difficult and the child who has already been rejected elsewhere. Public schools inherit the full complexity of Australian society and work with whatever arrives at the school gate.
That is both their greatest strength and their greatest responsibility. And it is why governments carry a special moral obligation towards them.
For much of my career I assumed the gap between government announcements and classroom reality reflected the inefficiencies that inevitably exist within large organisations. Money was allocated in good faith, absorbed by layers of administration and gradually diluted as it travelled from policy to practice.
I now suspect the problem is more fundamental. The measuring instrument itself has been altered.
That matters because most Australians cannot easily see it happening. They hear that funding has increased and naturally assume schools are receiving more resources. They are not being told that the standard being measured has quietly changed its meaning.
This is not a partisan argument. The evidence suggests both sides of politics have been willing participants. Nor is it primarily an argument about private schools. It is about something much simpler: whether the resources judged necessary for children to learn are actually reaching the schools that serve them.
At its heart, this is not really about funding formulas, bilateral agreements or accounting definitions. It is about whether governments are willing to be honest with the public about what is being provided and what is not.
If governments establish a standard that identifies the resources required to educate children properly, then the public is entitled to expect that the standard will retain its original meaning. Every dollar counted towards the Schooling Resource Standard but not directed to classrooms represents a resource that a child somewhere did not receive.
That is why this issue refuses to disappear.
Teachers continue to look around their classrooms and wonder why the resources they were promised remain so difficult to find. Parents continue to hear announcements of record investment while schools struggle with the same pressures they faced years ago. The language of success grows more confident, yet the lived experience often feels remarkably familiar.
Perhaps that is because people instinctively understand that this is not really an argument about accounting. It is an argument about whether a promise made to public schools has been honoured.
And so the question persists.
Not how much money governments spend.
But where it actually goes.
John Frew worked in public education, including as foundation principal at a secondary school for students with Conduct Disorder and Oppositional Disturbance. John has authored numerous books the latest being ‘Neuroscience and Teaching Very Difficult Kids’. Since retiring, he has continued to comment on social issues.