Does Gonski Deliver for The Greens?

By Rob Delves, GI Co-editor

This is my 51^st year as a high school teacher, the last 30 of which have been in three high schools around Perth. So it’s not surprising that I get excited and wordy when   discussing education policy. In the first section, I focus on the education message we are taking to this federal election. I then go on to analyse The Greens’ response to the Gonski reforms (both the 2011 original and Turnbull’s 2018 Gonski 2.0). Finally I present some ideas about how The Greens relate to voters who strongly support private education. It’s a long journey, so feel free to terminate at any station along the way.

 1. What are our beliefs and policy commitments for schools?

Strong support for World Class Public Education, Health, and Social Services is one of our policy priorities for the 2019 Federal Election. Our core belief with regard to health and education is pretty much the same: universal access to a well-funded public system is the fairest and most efficient way to ensure the best outcomes for all. We reject the conservative mantra that private is always better – believing rather, that it increases inequality, wastes resources, increases costs and achieves worse outcomes overall.

What do we say is wrong in the world of Education? The Greens 2019 Education Platform begins by declaring that with public money, public schools have to come first. Liberal and Labor governments have sold us out by giving massive tax handouts and subsidies to their big corporate donors, instead of investing in the public services that we all need. Under the Coalition Government, billions have been cut from school funding. 87% of public schools are underfunded. If we don’t improve our investment in public education, just 13% of public schools will have the funding to meet their minimum needs by 2023, while 65% of non-government schools will be overfunded. That means two million young people will miss out on the education they need. 

What’s our solution? We’re making an unprecedented investment in public schools of over $20 billion in the next 10 years. Under our plan, by 2023, every public school in Australia will be fully funded to reach the nationally agreed standard and to meet the educational needs of all students. We will expand building and infrastructure funding so that the majority of funds go to public schools, remove the artificial cap on federal funding for public education and stop the special deals made by major parties with private schools.

As the Gonski Report continues to set the parameters of the debate about education funding, I’d like to examine how The Greens have engaged with Gonski, essentially asking: Does Gonski deliver for The Greens?

2. What was our response to the November 2011 Gonski report?

Many of the stars in the original Gonski Report aligned with The Greens Education policies. Bob Brown was the first out of the blocks, calling on all parties to fully implement the Gonski proposals.

The review placed student outcomes at the centre of its recommendations. It identified the need for a schooling resource standard, or SRS, as the basis for funding schools. The SRS is the level of funding which schools need to achieve a student outcomes benchmark consistent with national goals of achievement.

Gonski’s big call was that a huge increase in funding was needed to achieve this improved level of student outcomes. Funding would be sector blind: all schools would receive a base funding towards the SRS, but large extra sums would be directed to schools struggling to educate the most disadvantaged students. Gonski’s research showed that public schools were taking on a far higher percentage of disadvantaged students than commonly assumed, contrary to many claims by Catholic and other independent schools that they were doing their fair share of this heavy lifting.

The Libs made some supporting noises, but basically were opposed to its two key conclusions that Australia was under-investing in education and not delivering funding to where it was needed most.

Labor was much more positive, but the extent of its support was severely restricted in at least two ways.  Firstly, Labor had announced from the outset that no school would be worse off: the panel had its hands tied by Gillard’s “no school shall lose a dollar” pledge. The government’s cautious response – another round of consultation and a review of the review – was met with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief. “Honestly,” wrote the Sydney Morning Herald’s Andrew Stevenson, “what is there left to be said?” The spectre of Mark Latham’s “private school hit list” obviously continued to haunt Labor, regardless of any serious analysis of what, if any, part this played in the 2004 election loss.

Secondly, implementation of Gonski challenged a couple of decades of rusted-on Labor commitment to marketplace and choice. Gillard pitched Gonski as an arm of her school reform – but it really pointed to the inadequacy of much of her own education revolution, especially in the often-counterproductive adoption of the Liberal language of school accountability, competition and choice.

3. What was our response to the 2018 Gonski 2.0?

The Greens faced a difficult challenge in 2018 when the Turnbull government produced an important initiative called Gonski 2.0. We’d endured the Abbott years dominated by slogans about Gonski reforms being “unaffordable due to Labor’s Debt and Deficit Disaster”, so Gonski 2.0 was a welcome return to needs-based funding. However, the amount allocated to public schools fell so far short of Gonski’s original Schooling Resource Standard that Labor and union leaders berated The Greens for even agreeing to negotiate with the government.

As a Greenie and a committed member of teacher unions for 50 years, I was attacked by Labor-leaning teachers and was severely conflicted on this matter. However, I’m more than happy to defend the stance that our MPs took. We recognised the imperative of locking in needs-based funding increases as quickly as possible. Before entering negotiations with the government, Sarah Hanson-Young stressed that getting more money, sooner, to disadvantaged students was a priority.

Further we recognized that significant funding increases must involve major commitments from the states. What the Commonwealth does is important, but not nearly as important as what state and territory governments do. To deliver needs-based funding, governments must work in concert. So we submitted Gonski 2.0 to a Senate committee for review, to pursue significant amendments (especially more money for disadvantaged state schools), greater guarantees of getting the requisite buy-in from the states, and an independent body that drives understanding of the resourcing that students need to succeed.

And we achieved some improvements, of course still well short of what was necessary. I’m happy to defend these gains, despite Labor’s repeated goading that The Greens had sold out on public schools. Shorten did an Abbott three worder ‒ the only response to Gonski 2.0 was “Just. Say. No.”

I also believe that the ambition of Gonski 2.0, flaws and all, matters. The conservative embrace of needs-based funding shifts the ground on which debate about schools funding takes place decidedly to the left. It offers the opportunity to elevate needs-based funding to the level of Medicare, as the national consensus which will be politically costly for any future conservative leader who wants to return to the grossly unequal ways of the Howard years. Then again, we now have Morrison.

4. What’s with The Greens and private schools?

Finally, does our embrace of public education make it impossible to find any common ground with parents and other supporters of private schools?  Obviously not, as I’m sure that most of us know Greens voters whose children attend a non-government school. It’s a difficult choice for people who support the Greens goal that all children must have access to a well resourced local state school, yet have to deal with the reality that our current gross inequities in education provision mean that their child may be disadvantaged by attending the poorly resourced local secondary school.

So we are not anti-private schools. However, it can be very difficult to persuade private school parents of the importance of two of our key policies:

1. We will direct funding away from private schools (especially the wealthy schools) towards state schools. Why? Because we recognise that the absolute priority of government is to ensure that all children have access to a well resourced local state school and that many of these state schools require much more funding to reach the Resource Standard. 

2. Private schools that receive public funding should accept obligations to promote  the common good – especially they must give up the privilege of being able to select the students they want, tell any undesirables they should move to the ‘local state school down the road’ and generally avoid the difficult task of educating the tougher end of town.

Both of these are fundamental social justice principles, but will challenge those who are strong believers in private education and who are doing well from the system that advantages that system.

On private-school-friendly doorsteps, I try to pursue a conversation around the following ideas. I acknowledge that education is certainly about providing the best for the individual child, but seek equal acknowledgement that education is also about creating a better Australia overall: building social harmony (especially vital in a migrant country), an educated democracy and the contribution of skilled responsible workers to economic progress. I point out how far down the OECD tables we are in terms of total education spending, but how near the top we are in public funding of private schools, thus producing lower standards overall and massive inequality. I ask whether we really want to become the Stupid Country.

On the odd chance that I sense the other person wants to continue our chat, there are a couple of other ideas I feel are worthy of mention. When Whitlam introduced state aid for private schools, there was agreement that this was totally needs-based, with the dollars strictly allocated only to the most deprived schools, mostly struggling Catholic primary schools. However, under Howard we had millions of taxpayer dollars poured into schools that were already absurdly wealthy, while poor state schools were neglected. As well as being manifestly unfair, this was also a classic case of inefficient money management.

How did the 2011 Gonski reforms deal with private schools? In relation to private schools, there were two major Gonski proposals that I felt were compatible with Greens thinking. Firstly, Gonski proposed that private schools that take on high-needs students and don’t charge fees should be fully funded for those students. This was an interesting prospect, in effect creating an integrated public-private approach to meeting the needs of such students. Secondly, the assessment of a non-government school’s need for public funding would be based on the anticipated capacity of parents to contribute financially towards the school’s resource requirements. This brought a sound social justice principle to the vexed and divisive role of private funding. Applied fairly, it would have meant “private school hit list” changes similar to those that Labor was ruthlessly attacked for in the 2004 election. However, as mentioned before, Labor was very constrained in its ability to apply this capacity to pay principle because of Gillard’s pre-emptive strike about no school losing a single dollar.

What do we say in public about private education? You rarely hear Greens MPs and other spokespersons being strongly supportive of private schools. A good example was the Labor and Greens responses in September 2018 when the Morrison Government bypassed parliament, using regulations to boost non-government schools funding by $4.4 billion. Labor offered only gentle criticism, in the process making their support for private schools very clear. Tanya Plibersek: “Labor has always supported the right of parents to choose to send their child to a Catholic or an independent school, and to make sure that the fees of those low-fee Catholic and independent schools are affordable for Australian families. But there is no genuine choice in education unless you properly fund public schools as well.”

By contrast, The Greens went hard and angry in their opposition, making it crystal clear that this money was going to the wrong sector of education. Mehreen Faruqi: “When this comes to parliament, we will use any and all options available to redirect funding from the $4bn special deals with the overfunded Catholic and independent school sector to public schools crying out for funding. Labor can’t sit on the fence while billions go to non-government schools. They need to join the Greens in committing to put 100% of this money into the public system”

At least no-one was going to die wondering which side of the fence we were on.

Header photo credit: Gonski worldsofeducation.org

[Opinions expressed are those of the author and not official policy of Greens WA]