School funding stopped being cricket long ago

We reprint today two articles from the Sydney Morning Herald on the scandalous over-funding of private schools, a situation that the new Federal Labor Government has pledged to maintain for at least another four years.


Author: Gerard Noonan
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald (11,Wed 09 Jan 2008)

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Australians like to consider themselves as belonging to one of the more egalitarian countries. Perhaps that's why this week's challenge to the sense of fairness on the cricket paddock has caused such ructions. What, Australians being boorish, pushy and sneaky? Come off the grass.

It's not only in the pampered professional cricketing circus arena where Australia simply doesn't get it. A far more fundamental, but important, example of how Australia has got it wrong - really wrong - has to do with the education of the nation's children and the way some get just about everything while many others get very little.

In October 2005, when he was a humble (of sorts) frontbencher in the Labor Opposition, Kevin Rudd gave a speech of unusual clarity, erudition and prescience to an eclectic audience at the University of NSW on the role of morals in the life of a politician. They had no reason then to believe they were listening to a bloke who would be leading the country in a little over two years. Certainly not one who has it in his sway to shape and remake a society, however conservative he might appear.

What Rudd said was interesting not simply because few leading Australian pollies dare stray into the potential graveyard of moral philosophy. He made a passionate case that the real role of religion (in his case a blend of liberal Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism) in secular politics was to challenge inequality wherever it emerged. This was especially so for the creation ofpublic policy that affected the less powerful in society.

As the Herald education editor, Anna Patty, has revealed today, Australia's educational funding model is under renewed scrutiny, and justifiably so. It is so flawed that even a hand-picked committee of federal government bureaucrats has produced a report that says that the system stinks. It recognises that the so-called Socio-Economic Status (SES) system of calculating a school's federal funding eligibility delivers up billions of dollars in a most unfair and discriminatory way.

The report, produced behind closed doors over the past 18 months, with only selected political hangers-on and lobbyists from the independent school sector getting a look-in, is not public. The Herald has been trying to obtain it, including through freedom of information laws for months, to no avail. Until now, that is. While Patty has only had a glimpse of this secret report's entire findings - access gained through the back door - its conclusions are stark.

At its simplest, the report recognises what every serious policy expert of good will and common sense in the education sector has known for nearly a decade. An education funding formula that rewards six out of every 10 private schools with far more than the formula says they should be paid is deeply flawed. These statistics include the vast Catholic network in which 20 per cent of all Australian children are educated. These are not just peanuts in overpayments. They are multimillion-dollar overpayments to schools, even by the lax standards of the SES formula, which the previous government had to adjust twice to accommodate the embarrassing largesse.

Rudd and his Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, must know this. The more honest senior players from the Catholic, Anglican and other private school groups acknowledge privately that it is unfair, even to grumpy curmudgeons like me. But to win the recent election Labor stamped out any possibility of a re-run of a feared "politics of envy" challenge by the Coalition, which had artfully used such a ploy in destroying the entirely reasonable, if culturally unacceptable, challenge to the status quo in 2004 by the former Labor leader Mark Latham.

Rudd and Gillard insisted they would keep the previous government's funding formula in place for the next four-year period, even though they had argued against it when it was imposed in 1999. That means that the system will, if Rudd's social conscience does not kick in, remain in place until at least 2012.

Few in this country seem to realise just how far out of whack Australia's school funding system is among the developed world.

The OECD places Australia in a category of its own in the way public funding is directed towards private school interests, which can then charge fees. Many industrialised countries provide funding through taxation to private and religious schools that meet national curriculum standards - some even provide 100 per cent of all costs - but the funding is cut off or severely curtailed if fees are charged by a school.

The policies are aimed at providing choice of educational type without distorting how much is directed from the public purse to well-endowed schools.

Here is one instance where those in power with a professed strong sense of social justice need to re-examine an election commitment - probably given in good faith - which has a big distorting impact on the development and legitimate aspirations of the nation's youth.