Fewer public schools will reach full funding within the next five years as a result of the latest bilateral deals, while almost all private schools will get their share or more, an analysis by the Australian Education Union has found.
After the new round of agreements between states and the Commonwealth late last year, just over 1per cent of public schools - those in the ACT - will be fully funded to the Schooling Resource Standard benchmark (SRS) by 2023.
That would be about 12 per cent fewer than predicted two years ago, the union's analysis found.
AEU federal president Correna Haythorpe said the states were left struggling to meet expensive targets because federal government refused to contribute any more than 20 per cent to the cost of running state schools.
“The impact of the Morrison government’s public school funding cuts is far worse than we thought when the school funding legislation was passed in 2017,” Ms Haythorpe said.
However, a spokesman for Education Minister Dan Tehan said the federal government was providing more than $300 billion for all schools.
When funding reform laws passed in 2017, about 13 per cent of public schools - those run by Western Australia and the ACT - were expected to reach 100 per cent of the SRS by the end of the five-year agreement.
But under the latest round of bilateral agreements signed at the end of last year, Western Australia would not meet its target as soon as originally predicted, the AEU said, meaning only the ACT is expected to reach its full share of the SRS by 2023.
The AEU will launch a new campaign on school funding on Monday, targeting marginal electorates around Australia before the federal election, expected in May.
Ms Haythorpe called on the federal government to use the April 2 budget to boost public school funding. “[Prime Minister Scott] Morrison has made it clear that public schools are not a priority for his government. Public schools deserve better treatment than this.”
No comments:
Post a Comment