The Department of Education, in conjunction with Catholic Education Western Australia and the Association of Independent Schools Western Australia, is conducting a review of pathways for senior secondary students. Read the SSTUWA's submission to the review and response to the review recommendations.

The public education advocacy group Save Our Schools has accused the Prime Minister of lying about the future funding of Western Australian public schools. “It is a blatant lie to claim that WA public schools will be fully funded under the new schools agreement”, said SOS National Convenor Trevor Cobbold.

SOS: The State of School Funding in Australia

At a time when the future funding of public schools is being determined by negotiations between the Commonwealth and state/territory governments, a groundbreaking new research paper shows that increasing funding for public schools has positive impacts on student achievement and attainment.

New figures reveal a scandalous squandering of $1.3-1.4 billion in Commonwealth Government over-funding private schools that enrol children of the richest families in Australia. The over- funding estimate is based on never before published data provided to Senate Estimates on the median income of families with children in private schools.

Unpublished data provided to Save Our Schools by the OECD shows that nearly 4 in 5 Australian students did not fully try in the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The figures show wide differences in student effort between countries, which call into question the validity of country rankings of PISA results.

The Productivity Commission has recommended that school building funds no longer be eligible for tax deductible donations. It should go further and end tax deductibility for all donations to private schools which are primarily benefiting the richest schools in the nation.

The OECD’s 2022 PISA results reveal Australia has one of the most unequal school systems in the OECD and that inequality is increasing. There are large achievement gaps in reading, mathematics and science of five or more years of learning at age 15 and the gaps have widened since 2006. As well, a large and growing proportion of disadvantaged students do not achieve international standards.

New analysis of the latest NAPLAN results reveals large achievement gaps in literacy and numeracy between rich and poor students at all Year levels tested. The gaps are up to five and more years of learning by Year 9. Very high proportions of disadvantaged students need of extra help at school to make expected progress through school. The vast inequities harm individual lives, restrict economic growth and foment an unequal and divided society.

The private school funding model introduced by the Morrison Government is becoming more and more incoherent and irrational. It purports to assess the financial need of private schools by the income of families with children in private schools. However, it ignores a growing source of income and assets of better-off families – the Bank of Mum and Dad. As a result, the Commonwealth Government is increasingly over-estimating the financial need of schools and, consequently, increasing their over-funding.

Save Our Schools (SOS) today called on the Expert Panel reviewing the National Schools Reform Agreement to address the shocking gaps in school outcomes between rich and poor. Trevor Cobbold, National Convenor of SOS, said that there are massive achievement gaps between highly advantaged and highly disadvantaged students that must be closed.

Save Our Schools (SOS) has called on the Expert Panel reviewing the National Schools Reform Agreement to recommend some key principles to guide the future funding of schools.

When I arrived in Australia four years ago from Finland, I was inspired by this question: How can we make Australian school education more equitable?

The Report seeks to examine the social justice implications of school autonomy. This is a critically important project. Achieving social justice in education is the most fundamental challenge facing Australia’s education system.

Ten years ago, the Gonski funding model promised much to reduce the vast inequity in school funding and outcomes. What we got was the reverse, courtesy of sabotage by successive Coalition governments, which have always favoured choice over equity, and because of the failure of state governments to deliver adequate funding for public schools.

The wealthiest, most exclusive private schools in Australia are raking in millions of dollars in donations and investment income. These millions are ignored in assessing the need for government funding. This is a major flaw in how private schools are funded. The flaw means the schools are massively over-funded by the taxpayer. Funding of private schools must be overhauled.

The wealthiest most exclusive private schools in Western Australia are raking in millions of dollars in donations and investment income. These millions are ignored in assessing the need for government funding. It exposes a major flaw in how private schools are funded. The flaw means the schools are massively over-funded by the taxpayer. Funding of private schools must be overhauled.

Some of the commentary on the Productivity Commission report on the National Schools Reform Agreement drew a simplistic and highly misleading link between increased school funding and results. It ignored the key facts that Catholic and Independent schools had the largest funding increases since 2009 and the largest declines in international test results. The figures suggest that private schools are much less efficient that public schools, especially given that public schools enrol the vast majority of disadvantaged students.

Prior to Christmas, the Federal Education Minister, Jason Clare, announced that the current National Schools Reform Agreement (NSRA) will be extended for another year to 2024. It has major funding implications public schools. It stops any funding increases for public schools which enrol the large majority of disadvantaged students and it continues an absurd arrangement that defrauds public schools of funding. Private schools will also get a small windfall funding gain.

Waiting for Gonski by Tom Greenwell and Chris Bonner is a well-researched and well-written account of the history of the Gonski funding inquiry, the flawed implementation of the new funding model by the Labor Government and its destruction by successive Coalition governments. It reveals new information about the implementation of the Gonski model and should be read by anyone concerned about the state of school funding in Australia and inequity in education outcomes.

Prime Minister Albanese says that increasing productivity is a priority for the Labor Government. A key component of increasing productivity is improving workforce knowledge and skills. However, major barriers to improving Australia’s workforce knowledge and skills include the large proportion of disadvantaged students who do not achieve an adequate level of education and the large achievement gaps between rich and poor.

Equity has become a central principle in educational policy and leadership around the world. However, there is a wide range of interpretations of equity and what it means in education. In this article Pasi Sahlberg and Trevor Cobbold explore different definitions of educational equity from policy and leadership perspectives.

Evidence that money works in education continues to accumulate. A new study published in the latest issue of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy shows that increased expenditure on schools improves student outcomes. It found substantial positive effects of increased spending on test scores, dropout rates, and post-secondary enrolment.

Today the ACTU has released “Morrison Missing – A Record of his Failure for Working Women” – a major report outlining how the Morrison Government has failed to support working women.

This speech was delivered to a school funding conference on the 10th anniversary of the Gonski report, held in Sydney last Friday. It shows that governments failed to fully implement the funding model recommended by the Gonski report.

Thirty-two WA private schools raked in $109 million in JobKeeper payments in 2020, contributing to profits of $121 million. Every school except one made a profit with JobKeeper and increased their profits over the previous year.

This SOS policy comment analyses new figures on school funding published last week in the Report on Government Services (ROGS). They show that government funding for private schools increased by nearly five times that for public schools over the last 10 years.

Shameless Greed of Wealthy Victorian Private Schools. New financial statements posted on the Charities Commission website before Christmas reveal the shameless greed of some of the wealthiest most exclusive private schools in Victoria.

Education Research Brief: The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has extraordinary status and influence. It is seen as the gold standard for assessing the performance of education systems, but it is a castle built on sand. New data published by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) call into question the accuracy and reliability of PISA and its league tables of country results.

In awarding the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2021, the Prize Committee said that there is strong empirical proof that money matters in education. This is an incredibly significant statement from a notoriously conservative institution. It represents a new consensus that has developed in recent years that more spending on education can increase school outcomes and future earnings, especially for disadvantaged students.

New figures show that 700 private schools, including many of Australia’s most exclusive private schools, raked in $750 million in Jobkeeper payments despite many simultaneously running surpluses of millions.

This report follows the Gonski Institute's submission to the Education Council of Australia - Government (COAG) review of the current approach to the presentation of NAPLAN. We start by outlining a new set of aims for Australia’s national educational assessment system, that is oriented to student, teacher, parent and system needs and utilises contemporary understanding of assessment. With clear new aims in mind, we conceptualise a new National Assessment System.

Test-based accountability has been a key education policy in most OECD countries, including Australia, for many years. It was believed that publication of school test results would put pressure on schools and teachers to increase student achievement. A new OECD study shows this policy is an abject failure. It found no evidence that test-based accountability has affected education outcomes in higher income countries.

Public schools have to do much more than private schools with far fewer resources. New figures show that public schools continue to bear the large burden of education disadvantage.

Yet another damning report by the Auditor-General shows that the Commonwealth Department of Education continues to fail to fully hold private school systems accountable for how they distribute taxpayer funding. It also criticises the Minister for Education and the Department for failing to meet their parliamentary reporting obligations.

Figures recently published by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) on its National Report on Schooling data portal show that income per student of Catholic and Independent schools is much higher than for public schools and that their income has increased six to eight times that of public schools since 2009. The increasing resource advantage of private schools is mainly due to much larger government funding increases than for public schools.

The Minister for Education, Alan Tudge, resorted to fudging figures to denigrate Australia’s school performance at the The Age education summit last week. He claimed the UK as the new benchmark for education performance but he misrepresented its results by ignoring serious flaws in them and other evidence showing no improvement.

A new analysis of major studies of the relationship between school expenditure and student outcomes provides conclusive evidence that increased expenditure leads to higher test scores, high school graduation and tertiary entrance. The impacts are much larger for low income than for high income students.

A new paper published by the Gonski Institute for Education recommends integration of private schools into the public system. It sees this as a key solution to the increasing inequity and social segregation which is described as a “structural failure” of education in Australia.

Commonwealth Government funding of schools is now a complete schemozzle. The Morrison Government has abandoned public schools and blatantly favoured private schools with billion-dollar special deals. These deals will accelerate the funding gap between public schools and private schools over the next decade.

Six months ago, the Morrison Government changed the method used to determine Commonwealth funding of private schools. It adopted a direct measure of the income of families called Adjusted Taxable Income (ATI) to assess their capacity to contribute to school income and thereby determine the level of Commonwealth funding for each private school. It will provide a net funding increase of $3.5 billion to private schools over the next 10 years compared to the previous method of funding.

Documents leaked to the ABC expose shocking rorting of taxpayer funding by the NSW Catholic school system with the approval of Catholic bishops. It is the latest in a long line of exposes about misuse of government funding by Catholic systems and which successive Coalition and Labor governments have meekly acquiesced to.

Australia has long been infected by what world renowned Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg, currently professor of education at the Gonski Institute of Education in Sydney, coined as GERM (Global Education Reform Movement). It is characterised by corporate management policies, test-based accountability of schools and fostering competition between schools to drive improvement in education outcomes. One manifestation of GERM is a bloated bureaucracy to police compliance with regulations, collect and record information and monitor performance.

The latest figures published by the Australian Curriculum, Reporting and Assessment Authority (ACARA) show that government funding increases continue to massively favour private schools over public schools. As a result, Catholic and Independent schools are far better resourced than public schools in every state even though public schools enrol over 80 per cent of all disadvantaged students and 95 per cent of all disadvantaged schools are public schools. This funding trend is set to continue under current funding arrangements and more special deals for private schools from the Morrison Government. It is a recipe for continuing educational, social and economic inequality.

There is extensive research evidence of the impact of family background on student results. Many studies from the United States, the United Kingdom, the OECD and Australia also show a school socio-economic composition (SEC) effect whereby students attending schools with a high concentration of students from poor families tend to have lower results than students from similar backgrounds attending schools with higher proportions of students from well-off backgrounds.

Save our Schools: Over half of all secondary school teachers in Australia report that they have too much administrative work which takes away time for preparing for classes and is a major source of stress. Nearly one quarter say they experience a lot of stress at school. These are amongst the highest proportions in the OECD. They are significant factors behind teachers leaving the profession.

New data from the OECD’s Programme for International Assessments (PISA) in 2018 show that Australia allocates more and better quality teacher and physical resources to high socio-economic status (SES) secondary schools than to low SES schools.

Total government funding per student in South Australian private schools adjusted for inflation (“real funding”) increased by nearly ten times that for public schools between 2009 and 2017. During the Gonski funding period of 2013-2017 the funding increase for private schools was about twenty times that for public schools.

Three new US studies have found that increasing funding for disadvantaged students increases school results. They bring to 21 the number of studies in the last five years showing that funding increases targeted at disadvantaged students improves achievement. This is a remarkable degree of unanimity amongst education economists. Even notorious sceptics of the worth of increasing school spending such as Professor Eric Hanushek from Stanford University (USA) and The Economist magazine have been forced to concede that money matters for disadvantaged students.

A new OECD report, Balancing School Choice and Equity, shows that school choice policies have increased social and academic segregation between schools which, in turn, reduced equity in education. Australia is a prime example of the impact of choice on social segregation in schools. School choice has been at the centre of education policy for the last 20 or more years. Australia now has one of the most socially and academically segregated school systems in the OECD and has highly inequitable education outcomes.

The Gonski Institute for Education recently published a valuable paper on equity in education titled Improving Educational Equity in Australian Education. It discusses what is equity, why equity in education matters and makes recommendations for improving equity in education.

A simple moral choice: some children or all children?

Funding Increases for Private Schools Continue to Outstrip Increases for Public Schools

Public accountability for the use of taxpayer funding is a fundamental tenet of democratic government. Yet, this principle has long been ignored by Catholic education authorities who refuse to reveal how they distribute government funding amongst their schools despite it being a legislative requirement.

Funding Agreements Defraud Public Schools

A new comprehensive review of academic studies in the United States has found overwhelming evidence of a strong causal relationship between increased school spending and student outcomes.

Public schools will lose about $6.1 billion in funding over ten years from 2018 under the new Bilateral Agreement between the Commonwealth and Western Australian Governments published last week.

Public Schools Are Swindled by Billions Under New Education Agreements

The Brief summarises data contained in a just published UNICEF report which shows that Australia has nearly the most unequal education system in the developed world.

A research paper published today by Save Our Schools shows that Australia allocates more and better teacher resources to socio-economically advantaged schools than to disadvantaged schools.

Australia allocates more teacher resources to socio-economically advantaged schools than to disadvantaged schools. Disadvantaged schools in Australia have more students per teacher, more teacher shortages, more teacher absenteeism, more poorly qualified teachers. Read more.

Morrison puts more nails in the coffin of Gonski.The analysis shows that the deal further undermines the principle of needs-based funding in several ways

Labor and Coalition state governments are trying to evade commitments to increase their funding of public schools through a subterfuge.

SOS - The State of School Funding in Australia

Pushing past the fear of missing out technologically

ACT Private Schools Get the Mother of all Special Deals

New Figures Confirm More Private Schools Will be Over-Funded Under Gonski 2.0

​Several wealthy Melbourne private schools are set to get large windfall gains from the Turnbull Government’s Gonski 2.0 funding model after revisions to their assessed student need.

Teach for Australia (TFA) has abjectly failed to answer criticisms of the program. Save Our Schools has criticised TFA on several grounds.

An evaluation report on the fast-track teacher training program, Teach for Australia (TFA), raises serious questions about the effectiveness of the program.

One of the standout performers in the results from PISA 2015 was Vietnam. It achieved a ranking of 8th in science with a score of 525, which was significantly above Australia’s score of 510.

The Turnbull Government’s Gonski 2.0 funding plan is a fraud. It is a fraud because it delivers much less funding to public schools and much more for private schools than Gonski 1.0.

AEU submission to Gonski 2 Senate Committee

This is the first in a series of articles to be published by Save Our Schools on the Turnbull Government’s Gonski 2.0 school funding plan. The next article will examine private school funding.

A new report released by the OECD shows that social segregation in Australian schools is amongst the highest in the world. Australia has the 8th highest rate of social segregation out of 71 countries participating in the OECD’s Programme of International Students Assessments in 2015.

This brief draws on new data from PISA 2015 released by the OECD on student well-being. It shows that while East Asian countries are at the top of the league table of test scores, they are at the bottom in student well-being.