Australian Education Union, Victorian Branch

feature
Ken Boston
Gonski panel member
and former directorgeneral
of NSW schools.
“The increasing performance gap
between the top and bottom 20%
of students in Australia (equivalent
to about five-and-a-half years of
schooling by Year 9) represents
an extraordinary waste of potential
human capital.
The consequences … are
immense. The loss accruing to
the individual in terms of lost
opportunity and lost earnings, the
loss to the community resulting
from the inability to capitalise on
unrealised skills, and the associated
costs to society arising from
the need to support a consequent
socio-economic underclass, are
extraordinarily high.
The growth of that performance
gap is not the result of serendipity,
but of deliberate funding policies in
the 1990s, which sharply increased
the disparity between rich and poor
schools. This situation can and
must be reversed.”
Christopher Pyne
Federal Coalition
education
spokesman.
“We remain firmly
committed to the current
funding arrangements so that
schools can plan with certainty into
the future.”
Barry O’Farrell
NSW Liberal Premier
Gonski’s “formula
benefits public education
and non-government
education and it’s a formula that we
would dismiss at our own peril.”
➠ continued from page 19
of students and the bottom 20%.
Education Minister Peter Garrett spoke to
the AEU delegation at an evening forum to
mark National Public Education Day.
Acknowledging the union’s frustration at the
Government’s inaction on Gonski, he sought
their continued support in the struggle for
well-resourced public schools. He desired to
introduce legislation to establish a funding
framework by the end of the year.
Work had started on technical aspects of
implementing the proposed funding formula. “It
is not work that grabs the headlines, but it is
being done,” he said. For example, “we don’t
yet have agreed measures beyond NAPLAN to
choose our reference schools and we don’t yet
have a definition of disability that would enable
a loading to be constructed.
“The review panel gave us a range in which
a low SES loading should be paid, but not
the precise increments or amounts in which
it should be paid, or what specific conditions
should be attached to its payment.”
Ken Boston, a Gonski review panel member
and former director-general of NSW schools,
said continuing the existing schools funding
system would have terrible economic and social
consequences. The existing funding model
expires at the end of next year and “we need
the new model in place by 2014”.
“We’re all pretty anxious about that.’’
Coalition education spokesman Christopher
Pyne told the AEU delegation that the Coalition
remained “firmly committed to the current
funding arrangements”. Unlike Mr Garrett, he
did not stay for the post-forum reception.
Delegations told MPs in marginal seats that
state schools desperately needed extra money
to help them bridge the huge gap between topperforming
and bottom-performing students.
State schools teach most children from lowincome
families, single-parent families, rural
and remote areas, those with disabilities and
those from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
backgrounds.
What would state schools do with the
extra money that Gonski believes they need?
Their lists are long and include more support
programs in literacy, numeracy, ESL and
student welfare, extension programs, more
professional development for teachers, new
and improved equipment and resources in art,
sport and music, and new buildings.
Delegations revealed the disadvantages
faced by many of their students (disengaged,
separated, absent or drug-addicted parents,
for example) and pointed to the success of
National Partnerships-funded programs as
evidence of the difference increased funding
can make.
Helen Trickey, a maths/science teacher from
Gisborne Secondary College, said the message
she carried from her principal to McEwen MP
Rob Mitchell was the need for consistent, not
piecemeal, funding.
Her teaching had improved greatly with
numeracy coaches paid for with National
Partnerships funding, but this ends soon.
Coaches helped her and others with task
creation and differentiation, questioning
techniques and the use of examples and
analogies to explain not just how but why
different maths activities were important
(extrapolating from patterns has real-life
applications in medical research, for example).
The coaching she has received has made a
“visible differenence to kids’ learning. You can
physically see them ‘get it’. There’s been a lot
more lightbulb moments,” she said.
Ringwood Secondary College principal
Michael Phillips told Mike Symons that drip-drip
state and federal funding made a mockery of
the autonomy that schools were supposedly
being given. A Gonski funding system would
“take the politics out of funding” and allow
schools to plan long term and consistently
deliver learning support programs, he said. ◆
20 aeu news | june 2012