The media chorus says it all: the school funding wars are over, public schools will finally get justice, all the major combatants are onside and there will be peace throughout the land. And when all schools implement a suite of mandatory reforms, our levels of student achievement will make us the envy of the world.
Alas, it all falls short of being the full story.
First the good bits. Yes, the funding is good news – and well done, Jason Clare. The federal government will chip in more and the states will no longer be able to wriggle out of their obligations. And the money does matter, especially if it goes to where it matters most.
It seems that the federal government and opposition have both committed to the deal. Good news, but haven’t we been here before? School funding peace broke out after Gonski reported a dozen years ago. The private school lobbies did mutter that the devil might be in the details, but Tony Abbott declared a unity ticket with Labor on school funding. That didn’t last long, and his education minister Christopher Pyne conjured up other details which quickly undermined Gonski’s intentions. Hence we are here, yet again.
In the light of that, shadow minister Sarah Henderson’s current concern about missing details in the funding plan doesn’t inspire confidence. And will the private school peak groups really accept the funding haircut that is integral to equity funding? It is a cliché, but it’s easy to see history repeating itself.
The really bad news might be the biggest shock of all. A decade ago, I worked with a colleague to predict what might happen to schools in 10 years’ time, that is, in around 2025. We weren’t soothsayers or even above-average smart. We just followed the data, scanned the policy horizon, and took a punt.
Check it out: we predicted nine likely developments and most have eventuated, things like increasing inequity, enrolments shifting to advantaged schools, concentrating disadvantage, deepening school hierarchies, diverging student achievement and more. Of course, we weren’t the only ones to flag warnings; a growing body of academic research is creating concern among those following the trends.
Now here’s the thing, only one of our predictions was about funding. Problems around funding ranked alongside all those other things. By itself more money won’t slow or reverse regressive trends. Governments and systems know this, and the recent funding commitments come with a swag of required school reforms. There is nothing new about that. It didn’t work in Julia Gillard’s time, but it’s still needed to reassure the neoliberals amongst us. But neither the money nor the reforms will make a difference if we persist with our hybrid public/private system structured the way it is.
So what can we expect in 10 years’ time, if and when both the funding and reforms are fully implemented? It really depends on which schools and where, so let’s consider three groups, in the lower, upper and middle socio-educational ranges, based on the SES of their enrolments.
The most disadvantaged (mainly public) schools will certainly get more funding. They cost the most in per-student terms now, and they will certainly cost much more in the future. The strugglers are increasingly concentrated in these schools, something which immediately creates greater challenges around learning culture, teacher expectations and much more. And achievement levels… well, at least the achievement we narrowly measure – but that’s another story.
Let’s get real: why do families with the resources avoid such schools in favour of the one-third of Australia’s schools, which by location or discrimination can avoid the strugglers? How will extra funding solve this problem if the winning schools in this competition — especially those in the upper one-third — have little or no obligation to serve a wider range of students?
Let’s think about this upper one-third. In gross funding terms they are highly-resourced and they are sought after. They tick all the measures of success we know and love. Without actually doing enough, they sit at the top of every conceivable league table we care to create.
The focus of most school reform is on emulating this success, yet the irony about these schools is that they are the most inequitable of all. High equity systems are those in which it is teachers and schools that have the most impact on student achievement. In these schools, it is family background and school SES that has an increasing impact.
What about the schools in the middle? There will be more private schools in this group by 2035, and they will also come at a greater public cost. The public schools will lose out because the competition between the two has forever been on grossly unequal terms. The numbers of higher SES kids in our “middle” public schools have shrunk over the last dozen years. They have gone elsewhere, up the school ladder, regardless of sector.
Long story short: the very structure of Australia’s school framework is hell-bent on creating winners and losers, an arrangement which will always limit the impact of additional funding and within-school reform. It’s quite amazing that we have avoided the essential macro reforms needed if our funding and reform efforts are to work well. Our avoidance goes back decades. The last few days are evidence enough that not much will change in the future.
Chris Bonnor is co-author, with Tom Greenwell, of Choice and Fairness: A Common Framework for all Australian schools Australian Learning Lecture, 2023.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.
Chris Bonnor is a former teacher and secondary school principal, a previous head of the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council, co-author with Jane Caro of The Stupid Country and What Makes a Good School, and co-author of Waiting for Gonski. He has jointly authored papers on Australia’s schools in association with the Centre for Policy Development and the Gonski Institute for Education.