The Gonski dream: how can governments restore funding – and trust – to public education?

When Greater Shepparton Secondary College was first announced, it was described by Victoria’s then-education minister as “the most important education project” in the region’s history.

The goal was to restore trust in the public system and improve student outcomes by merging the regional city’s four underfunded public high schools into one $140m “super school”, complete with rooftop gardens, a gymnasium and a Stem hub.

But 18 months after the school opened, that goal is still a work in progress.

“[Parents] need to be confident in what we can offer their students,” says the college’s principal, Barbara O’Brien. “And that will happen as we prove we can provide the same outcomes, results and opportunities, even better in some respects because of [the] breadth of subjects we can offer.”

Experts say funding is a crucial part of the puzzle to achieving education equality, but not the silver bullet. They urge governments to also take steps to restore parents’ trust in the public system, and stem the growing concentration of disadvantage.

“Our kids can’t wait any longer,” says the Greens senator Penny Allman-Payne. “We can’t continue to pretend that fairness is central to our national identity when our public school system is on the brink of collapse and elite private schools are swimming in cash.”

The federal government is working on a review of the education system before setting a new national schools reform agreement next year, and has committed to get every school to 100% of its Schooling Resource Standard (SRS), the fair funding level proposed under the Gonski reforms.

The education minister, Jason Clare, says there’s a crucial gap that needs to be filled.

“By the end of this decade all nongovernment schools will come down to 100% of the Schooling Resource Standard. But apart from in the ACT, no government school will be.”

The former New South Wales state education minister Adrian Piccoli says the onus is on the federal government to increase its contribution to public schools from the current 20% because it has greater taxation powers than the states.

“That’s why you get this disproportional increase because the commonwealth are increasing their funding, but they fund nongovernment schools more than they fund government schools, so of course the nongovernment funding goes up more than the government schools funding goes up.”

He says the federal government should fund public schools at the same proportion it funds private schools.

“[It] could be 50/50 or that the commonwealth funds 80% of all students,” he says.

Australian Education Union has also called for the federal government to lift its cap from next year, but to a more conservative 25%. It also urged the government to fully fund schools according to their SRS by 2028.

But Allman-Payne says lifting the comonwealth contribution to 25% is not enough: “Another 5% won’t close the gap in the Northern Territory, where public schools are underfunded by more than 20%. Or in Queensland, where they’re being shortchanged by over 10%.”

The former prime minister Malcom Turnbull says the reason his government set the federal contribution at 20% – which was an increase from 17% – was to hold the states to contributing at least 75%.

“Otherwise you get a zero sum game where the commonwealth puts in more and the state just takes money out the back-end,” he says.

Boosting confidence

As the example of Shepparton shows, restoring parents’ confidence in public education requires more than just a funding increase.

O’Brien says the facilities in the amalgamated school are a big improvement on what was available to students previously.

“Students love going into these spaces,” she says. “It’s shown them that it’s possible for them to get the best, regardless of their background, demographics.”

Greater Shepparton Secondary College was built to hold about 3,000 students. But last year only 2,083 were enrolled, a drop from 2,269 students in 2020, and 562 fewer than the combined figure for the final year when the four pre-existing public schools were open in 2018.

More affluent parents have continued to turn to or remain in the independent and Catholic schools in Shepparton. MySchools data shows their students perform above Greater Shepparton Secondary College on Naplan.

Michael Sciffer, president of the Armidale Teachers Association, says restoring trust in public education needs to start with a narrative shift from the top.

“In my view the conservative side of politics are part of the problem in creating this negative view of public schools,” he says. “Governments need to talk about the fact that public schools provide equal opportunities for kids to reach their potential in life.”

Enrolling in diversity

Part of the problem is simply one of perception about standards in public schools. The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) studies show the results of both Australia’s government and nongovernment schools fell between 2009 and 2018, but public schools had the smaller drop. It was also the only sector to not have a significant drop in reading and literacy, according to Pisa.

Sciffer says attracting more students from affluent backgrounds back to the public system is a win-win.

The Pisa data underlines that on average, students from a low socioeconomic background perform better in schools that also have students from a high socioeconomic background. And students from a high socioeconomic background tend to perform just as well at a public school as they do at a private school.

Sciffer says governments could consider adjusting Atar ranks according to a school’s socio-education disadvantage.

Similar moves in Texas and California have helped draw middle-class families back to neighbourhood public schools, he says.

Dr Tracy Woodroffe, a Warumungu Luritja woman and an education expert at Charles Darwin University, says in relation to Indigenous students, governments need to consult more with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents, and also calls for a concerted effort to train more Indigenous teachers – currently only 2% of the workforce.

“We get the annual Naplan report that shows that Indigenous students performing below their non-Indigenous peers, and that’s even more the case for remote Indigenous students,” she says.

“I believe people don’t know enough about the diversity of Indigenous peoples across Australia, and programs that are implemented are often one size fits all.

She says meeting the specific needs of a community would benefit the broader community.

“If a school has a good reputation, they’re going to get more students and more enrolments and better educational results. So really, that cross-cultural communication and learning benefits all our kids.”

Tom Greenwell, the author of Waiting for Gonski: How Australia Failed its Schools, says ultimately all schools should be free to reduce the concentration of disadvantage in certain schools and boost education outcomes.

He argues that in return for full government funding, each school should have an obligation to enrol a student population that reflects the socio-educational advantage of their community, as is the case in the Canadian province of Ontario.

“Catholic schools in Ontario are as Catholic as Australian Catholic schools in their ethos, in their curriculum, in their governance,” he says. “But they’re as public as Australian public schools in that they’re free, there’s no fees required, and they enrol on an inclusive basis.”

He admits such structural transformation would take time, and says in the immediate term, the national school reform agreement should clearly articulate the purpose of public funding to private schools.

“There’s all sorts of rationales that float around – like, we want to increase choice or reduce fees – but … public funding increases and fees keep going up. So actually, we’re not improving choice or saving taxpayer money, so these rationales fall away,” he says.

“We need to explicitly say what we are hoping to achieve by doing things this way. Only then can we maximise the potential benefits of this approach and minimise the potential harm.”