Ms O’CONNOR question to MINISTER for EDUCATION, Ms PALMER
According to the state budget papers, Tasmania is now receiving the allocated federal funding as calculated according to the School Resourcing Standard. Are you able to outlay how the funding is being allocated to schools and to individual students to ensure equity relative to need, and where schools and students most needing support are suitably funded? This question in part is designed to respond to some concerns that have been raised by stakeholders about fairer funding being allocated towards departmental priorities rather than into schools.
ANSWER
Mr President, it was fantastic to be able to sign up with the Commonwealth government mid-last year to secure a better funding agreement, taking Tasmanian schools up to the full 100 per cent of funding, and with that came the federal government’s commitment to, at that stage, take it up to the 2.5 per cent, and now there has been that additional commitment from the Commonwealth Government to take it up to 5 per cent.
It is important to remember that that additional funding is attached to reforms, and they are reforms that we must report against. Those reforms are covering workforce; it covers equity and excellence and wellbeing. The way that we allocate that funding has to be tied to those reforms and we have to report against that. I believe it is six-monthly that we have to report to the Commonwealth about that funding. There has been some narrative surrounding that extra funding that has come in, how will that be distributed to schools.
It would have been a great scenario to be able to say, all right, this many schools, this many students, we can divvy that funding up and get it into schools. The issue would then be that it would be the responsibility, possibly of the principals and the schools, to have to report against those reforms. If there is one thing that I have heard very, very clearly from principals and teachers, but in particular our principals, is the workload that already sits on them, especially in that administration space.
I visited some schools where principals have said they would love to be out talking to teachers and working on professional development with their teachers, but instead they find themselves in their offices working in that admin space. We had to find a way that there was a really good balance, so the responsibility of reporting against those reforms would sit with the department, and ultimately with me, and how do we also get that funding into schools. A great example of this is the work that we are doing with the announcement that we have made of the $12 million for lifting literacy resources.
Again, the voice of teachers really came into this space, and it was very much, if we are going to provide wonderful opportunities for teachers to go and do professional learning, let us make sure that the schools are properly resourced to be able to pay for the relief teaching. That is part of that $12 million reform.
We will be paying for subscriptions to IT professional development, and where schools have in some cases already invested – say New Flight or Word Origin – we will reimburse them. It is decodable readers into schools. It is book sets going into classrooms. We have made sure that we are getting that money into schools, that it is tied to the areas of the reform, the three reform pillars that we have to report against. It is ensuring that that money is getting into schools, but then the onus will not be on schools to actually have that heavy administrative burden of having to report against those pillars.
