Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Honourable Speaker. I rise tonight to talk about school funding and the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement. During Estimates, on 25 September, an agreement was announced on school funding arrangements between the Tasmanian and Australian governments. Thousands of Tasmanian public-school teachers, students and parents heard the headlines professing that Tasmanian schools would be fully funded to the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) by 2030. It has been spun as a win for Tasmania by this government, but the truth is that teachers and their representatives are frustrated, and many outraged.
While the agreement and its claim to fully fund schools by 2030 was touted by the minister, Jo Palmer, as ‘a massive day for public education in Tasmania’, the devil, as always, is in the detail. The agreement will see the federal government’s contribution to the Schooling Resource Standard increased by 2.5 per cent. This is contrary to the minister’s own words just two days earlier, before the Legislative Council Estimates Committee, on Monday 23 September. Ms Palmer remains steadfast on demanding 5 per cent funding from the Federal Government. She stated:
We firmly believe that we must see 100 per cent funding in our government schools and that the federal government should be providing that full 5 per cent, not 2.5 per cent, so we are standing with the other states and territories.
Two days later, Tasmania blinked and agreed to split the shortfall. That will cost Tasmania, but it is not the main concern.
The most significant concern is that this agreement has, essentially, locked in a major funding loophole that will see $260 million of the said funding over the next years funnelled away from Tasmanian schools over the next five years. The agreement locks in a loophole and, therefore, underfunding. A 4 per cent additional allowance is:
A component of the funding that each year can be directed into non-school based costs including capital depreciation and the maintenance of regulatory bodies.
During the budget Estimates session on the same day as the announcement, I pushed the minister on this loophole, which essentially robs students of desperately needed funds. To this, Ms Palmer stated that she had ‘concerns around that, and is looking into it’. Concerns alone will not stop $260 million being funnelled away from schools and students. This amounts to $900 of funding per student redirected to non-teaching elements of the departmental budget. Students will need concern to turn into action.
The Australian Education Union (AEU) could not be clearer in its demands: close the loophole and make good on a commitment to funding each student at 100 per cent of the SRS. AEU Tasmania president David Genford said :
Unless 100 per cent of the SRS is spent on schools, the state and federal governments cannot truthfully say they have funded Tasmanian schools according to the Gonski principles. This is not the deal Tasmanian students deserve and will further exacerbate existing inequalities for public school students. It fails to show a genuine pathway to 100 per cent funding of the Schooling Resource Standard. It embeds, as opposed to removes, the 4 per cent funding loophole.
All of us in this place know that Tasmanian public schools are in desperate need of funding and attention, something that they are sadly lacking in comparison to their private counterparts. We have heard time and again that teachers are doing it tough, doing more with less, doing admin instead of teaching, and enduring violence and insult.
Tasmania’s education results are some of the worst in the nation by many a measure. Whether it is year 12 retention or NAPLAN results, or the over 3000 students waiting to access specialist support, our results underwhelm. While we are all anticipating the Vicki Baylis education review, we know it comes on the back of many others that were commissioned to address an issue and then largely left on the shelf to gather dust.
Your standard of education should not be dependent on the size of your wallet. Everyone deserves a good one, and that is the key to others’ and this state’s success. It was the great American civil rights leader Malcolm X who in 1964 stated, ‘Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today’.
We have a duty to our students, and our public schools cannot afford to have a single cent siphoned off when we are dealing with such an important matter. The 4 per cent loophole must be closed, and 100 per cent of the schooling resource standard truly directed to teaching students and making them ready for the world we hand on to them, because with intergenerational debt, disadvantage and climate breakdown, it will be a challenging world for them to manage.
