2016-03-08
Ms PENNICUIK (Southern Metropolitan) — I rise to make a statement on the Auditor-General's report, tabled this morning, entitled Grants to Non-Government Schools. The report tells us that the state government provided $624 million in recurrent grants to non-government schools in the audited year 2014. The majority of the funding — almost $431 million — went to the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria (CECV) and the balance went to smaller school systems and 171 non-systemic, non-government schools. The auditor found, in looking at how this money was actually spent, that:
… there is limited assurance that grants are used for their intended purpose or are achieving intended outcomes.
This is primarily due to weaknesses in funding agreements and ineffective oversight monitoring or management of funds by the department and the fact that there is no requirement for non-government schools to demonstrate how taxpayers funds have been spent. This practice has persisted for years under both Labor and Liberal governments, which have done nothing to require more transparency and accountability from non-government schools about how public funds are spent.
The auditor also found:
There is significant variation in the management practices of the selection of non-government schools tested as part of this audit — overall, they lacked policies and procedures to demonstrate the effective use of state government grants. With some exceptions, they cannot adequately track and demonstrate how grant funds have been spent.
…
Most schools that received targeted funding for students with disabilities … or grants under the support services program could not demonstrate that funds were used for their intended purpose.
There is a need to strengthen guidelines and funding agreements, and the associated accountability for the use of all grants to non-government schools. Both school-level accountability and controls, and DET's oversight and monitoring need strengthening.
…
The purpose and goals of the state recurrent grants are set out in the funding agreements … however, there are no performance measures or monitoring and reporting requirements associated with these goals. Therefore DET is unable to determine if the grants are contributing to the achievement of its goals.
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In some cases, DET relies on system authorities to administer and oversee grants made to schools. In effect, this means that the system authorities oversee themselves, because they receive the grant funding from DET, manage the allocation of grants to schools, and provide acquittals to DET on expenditure. DET has only assessed these acquittals from system authorities to ensure that expenditure matched the payments provided. DET does not oversee or monitor system authorities to assure itself that grants are used for their intended purpose or achieving the intended outcomes.
Most concerning, I think, is that CECV allocates the funding according to its own methodology, and the overall effect of the CECV distribution is that some Catholic schools receive substantially more than they would receive under the debts allocation and some substantially less. The overall effect of the CECV methodology is to reduce the importance of that element, which is the student family background, in providing funds to individual schools. If you look at the outcome of this on page 30 of the report, you see under the heading 'Figure 3D' a chart which shows how the reallocation is made by CECV, according to its non-transparent methodology. The report says:
CECV reallocates SRG funding away from the lower socio-economic status schools — —
in the Catholic system — —
to schools with a higher socio-economic status. Overall, the highest socio-economic status schools —
in the Catholic sector — —
with an SFO index below 0.1, gained an additional 75.14 per cent in student funding while the lowest socio-economic status schools, with an SFO index of greater than 0.4, lost between 11.35 per cent and 63.33 per cent of their funding.
One of the most concerning parts of this report is the effect of the redistribution of the funding: $431 million of taxpayers money by the Catholic education commission, and the effect that it has an the distribution of funding amongst the Catholic schools.