May 2015
Many of those of us old enough to remember, pride ourselves that the sectarian bitterness of our youth is long gone. The debates over ‘state aid’ to Catholic and other non-government schools are now just a distant memory. Similarly, many of us like to believe that the class-based struggle of old is no longer part of modern political life.
But the continuing influence of both sources of conflict isn’t hard to find in federal and state arrangements for funding Australia’s schools. Although governments switched to their own systems of secular education in colonial times, Catholic systemic schools still receive considerable government funding on a separate basis to the public school systems, which are separate again from the greatly increased public funding going to ‘independent’ non-government schools.
If you’re tempted to think this no more than an artefact of ancient history, just try fiddling with it. Whereas religious schools have long been much more tightly absorbed into government school systems in most other developed countries, our Catholic systemic schools have retained a high degree of (heavily subsidised) independence. Few politicians have shown any desire to change these longstanding arrangements. Sectarian sympathies are too easily aroused.
And whereas in other advanced economies other non-government schools have retained their independence by swearing off public funding, in Australia they’ve been able to enjoy the best of both worlds. While you may think there is little media sympathy for what journalists almost invariably describe as ‘elite’ private schools, the authors of this review remind us that just twice in the past 40 years has one side of politics - Labor - dared to propose cuts in grants to prosperous private schools, before abandoning the policy and quietly vowing never to provoke such uproar again.
It’s commonly believed that politics has entered the post-ideological age, but schools funding is an exception. Whereas Labor governments have tended to emphasise equity and needs-based funding, Coalition governments have emphasised choice and competition. The result has been a degree of see-sawing over the decades as government has changed hands.
The authors trace the effects of these conflicting influences on schools funding by the federal government over the almost 40 years between the early days of the Whitlam government in 1973 and the later years of the Rudd-Gillard government in 2011. Using prices at December 2011, they find that federal grants for recurrent school funding grew in real terms from $900 million to $11.4 billion a year, a more than 12-fold increase.
Even remembering that the number of students grew by 24 per cent to 3.5 million over the period, this represents a significant real increase in schools funding. So, no evidence of unwillingness to increase spending by either side of politics. And international comparisons confirm that Australia’s total spending on schools is a little above the average for the OECD countries.
The authors’ figures reveal two outstanding trends over the period, however. First, whereas federal recurrent grants to government schools rose by a factor of about nine over the period, grants to non-government schools increased almost 16-fold. So whereas total federal grants were shared equally between government and non-government schools in 1973, by 2011 the non-government schools’ share had risen to 63 per cent. This represents the federal government supplanting the states as the main provider of funding to non-government schools.
Second, whereas total student numbers increased by 24 per cent over the period, the number of government-school students grew by just 3 per cent. This left the number of students in Catholic systemic schools growing by half and independent-school students growing by a factor of four. So government schools’ share of all students fell from 80 per cent to 65 per cent, with the Catholic schools’ share increasing by 5 percentage points to 19 per cent and independent schools’ share rising by 10 points to 16 per cent.
This raises an obvious question: has the balance of federal funding shifted in favour of non-government schools as parents have voted with their feet in leaving the government system, or has the shift in funding in favour of non-government schools encouraged parents to move?
No doubt there’s truth in both possibilities. With a growing proportion of two-income families, rising real incomes and smaller family sizes, it would be surprising if more parents weren’t attempting - wisely or otherwise - to advantage their children by sending them to fee-charging private schools. If it costs more, it must be better, right?
But equally, it would be surprising if the lower-than-otherwise fees or better-than-otherwise facilities at non-government schools permitted by greatly increased government funding hadn’t encouraged many families to send their children to non-government schools. And as often better-off, better-performing and better-behaved students have left or failed to join the public system, it has become that much harder for government schools to maintain their standards and attractiveness to parents able to afford other options.
What’s clear is the increased social stratification of Australian schools, with official estimates of socio-educational advantage in 2010 showing 36 per cent of government-school students in the bottom quarter of the distribution, compared with 21 per cent of students at Catholic schools and 13 per cent at independent schools. At the opposite end of the distribution, 47 per cent of students at independent schools were in the top quarter, compared with 29 per cent of Catholic systemic students and 22 per cent of government-school students.
So, we’ve spent a lot more money on schools, with much of the increase going to subsidise the growth of non-government schools, to the point where only about 5 per cent of all schools spend more on teachers’ salaries than they received in federal and state grants. What, then, have we achieved in terms of measured educational outcomes?
The authors quote research published in 2013 which found a small decline in reading and mathematics achievement among Australian students in the middle years of secondary school since 2000, stability in science and maths achievement among Year 8 students since 1994, a small improvement in maths achievement among students in Year 4 since 1994 and a small improvement in reading among students in Year 3 since 2008. So, as a general conclusion, little improvement.
Perhaps findings such as these account for those arguing that all the extra funds taxpayers have put into schools over recent decades have done little to improve educational outcomes. But it may not be that simple. It’s not just how much we spend, it’s also how we spend it. And, as we’ve seen, we’ve been directing more of our funds to non-government schools with higher proportions of socio-educationally advantaged students.
Results from the OECD’s PISA study in 2012 show that the lower a country’s overall level of schools’ educational resources, the greater the gap in resources between advantaged and disadvantaged schools. But we’ve managed to make ourselves an exception to that rule: despite our above-average level of school resources overall, we have the fifth largest resource gap between advantaged and disadvantaged schools. Why? Mainly, it seems, because successive federal governments have divided their recurrent grants to government and non-government schools in a way that favoured choice and competition over equity and needs-based funding.
It’s often argued in support of subsidised choice that, even so, parents who pay extra to send their children to a non-government school are doing other taxpayers a favour. Such arguments ignore the diseconomies of scale often involved when students move from public to private. According to rough figuring by the authors, federal and state recurrent spending on schools would have been somewhat less had the migration from government to non-government schools between 1973 and 2012 not occurred. As for the common contention that subsidised choice of schools would, by increasing the competition between government and non-government schools, serve to improve educational outcomes, little evidence has so far emerged to support it.
With its proposal for a ‘sector-blind’ reorientation of federal and state schools funding in favour of disadvantaged students regardless of their sector, The Gonski review panel offered the political parties and interest groups on all sides of the debate a rare opportunity to move to a fairer and more rational funding system in a spirit of compromise and co-operation rather than capitulation.
Regrettably, with the change of government in Canberra that opportunity has been forgone, partly because of the persistence of old partialities and partly because the compromise based on the Gillard government’s requirement that ‘no school would lose a dollar’ was judged too expensive by the Abbott government. Rather, after the first four years of Gonski funding the government proposes to subject its existing recurrent grants to government and non-government schools to a much less generous indexing regime.
This would save money while doing nothing to distribute federal funding in a way fairer to disadvantaged students. It would ignore the scope for savings by reducing grants to the most privileged schools. And it would pass up an opportunity to improve the labour force participation and productivity of young people near the bottom of distribution. As an Abbott minister might say, such an unsatisfactory outcome is surely ‘unsustainable’.
