Some of the neediest Catholic schools in Victoria are still being short-changed by administrators who are shuffling millions of taxpayers’ dollars to schools in wealthier areas, documents reveal.
While the federal government nominally allocates funding for each Catholic school, this is distributed to Catholic education authorities as a lump sum. They then use their own funding model to distribute the money as they see fit.
Previously secret records taking in 14 Victorian schools show that in 2016, several needy schools had up to 37 per cent of their allocated government funding diverted elsewhere.
St Thomas Aquinas School in Norlane, which has a low socio-economic status score of 73, received $600,000 less from head office than the $2.4 million allocated by the government.
That worked out to a loss of about $4000 per student.
The school was also deprived of 15 per cent of its funding in 2015, records from that year showed.
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Students at St Patrick’s School in St Arnaud were short-changed by about $8500 each in 2016, which worked out to 36.3 per cent of its total federal funding. St Stephen’s School in Reservoir had $320,000 or 30 per cent of its government allocation sent elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Catholic schools in higher-SES areas received hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the federal government had allocated, including Our Holy Redeemer in Surrey Hills, which had an SES score of 122. It received $161,000 more than its share allocated by the government.
The records, provided to Fairfax Media after a week of fighting between Victorian Catholic educators and the Turnbull government, only account for a handful of the state’s nearly 500 Catholic schools.
The Catholic Education Commission of Victoria refused to respond to questions about the funding discrepancies, instead releasing a press release attacking Fairfax Media.
Ray Collins, acting executive director of the National Catholic Education Commission, said it was a matter for Victoria.
“The NCEC does not determine the distribution formulas for respective states,” he said. “That’s a decision made by each individual [commission].”
Education Minister Simon Birmingham said the government “accepts the autonomy of school systems to work according to their own needs”, and conceded administrators had “a more granular knowledge of the students they enrol and the family circumstances they come from”.
But he also noted administrators were “ultimately accountable to their own families and school communities”.
“Our commitment is to ensure that across all areas of our school system, the amount allocated to school systems reflects the needs of the different schools in which they operate,” he said.
The Grattan Institute’s school education program director Peter Goss said any big discrepancies between what the government thought it was allocating schools, and the funding they actually received, need an explanation.
Dr Goss said Catholic education systems understood their schools better than the federal government and had the right to allocate money as they saw fit.
“The most important thing is the kids, but when any group receives government funding there is a requirement for transparency. And the explanation as to why funding is used in certain ways needs to stand up to public scrutiny,” he said.
Victorian Association of Catholic Primary School Principals president Michael Gray said schools were confident that the funding was being fairly distributed.
said the Catholic sector’s funding model took into account factors which the federal government’s model ignored, like the number of students from refugee backgrounds at schools. The sector had also topped up government funding allocated for students with a disability, he said.
“A just fair, equitable and systemic approach has ensured that local principals firstly understand their funding and that each school has support for their local specific needs,” he said.
Mr Gray, who is also the principal of St Joseph's Primary School in Warrnambool, said Catholic education authorities provided schools with system-wide support, including speech therapists, psychologist, councillors and curriculum consultants.
“Without this ... schools would not be able to access this support,” he said.
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