The Gonski Review isn't just a new way of 'doing' school funding. It opens up new ways of linking school funding with improved life chances, a key factor in school reform. With more parents sending their children to non-government schools, the government must address the implications of this for all Australia's school-children.
It would have been easy simply to deregulate funding and invest it to reflect trends in school enrolment. However, the school results picture isn't simple.
While some government schools don't achieve good results, others do. Similarly, when equivalent school results from the public and private sectors, broken down by socio-economic status, are compared, some state and Catholic schools do exceedingly well.
Finally, the socio-economic profile of non-government school students is generally higher than that for state school students, so poverty and disadvantage are inescapable factors in Gonski's attempt to reconfigure school funding for the next 50 years.
What the figures additionally show is a long 'tail' of poor achieving students at one end, while Australia's top performers do not do as well as top performers in other countries. The reasons for this are complex: Australia has the largest non-government school sector in the world, whereas Finland, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore have almost no private schools, while Canada's Catholic schools do exceedingly well, but unlike Australia, and similar to New Zealand's, are public schools.
Indeed, every single Catholic school in New Zealand, such as Baradene — a sister school to Sydney's Kincoppal-Rose Bay, which charges $23,514 p.a. — is part of the fully-integrated, fee-free public education system. There are no private Catholic schools in New Zealand and a handful of unfunded independent Catholic schools in other countries. Australia's Catholic school model is a distortion from the norm, insofar as fee-requirements are conditional on enrolling in them.
Also, Asian countries at the top of the table have selective secondary schools, whereas Australian differences are defined by wealth exclusion and class (i.e. socio-economic) differentiation. Even among predominantly Western countries there are vast cultural differences: Finland has a culture in which teachers are regarded as being on a par with doctors, whereas Australian teachers feature lower down the scale in salary terms, being about the equivalent of social workers in socio-economic status.
The political ramifications of any funding policy linked with an anti-poverty program are therefore far-reaching and deeply controversial if they are to be effective. It has ramifications for enrolment patterns, accountability, student entitlement and teaching methods. It is in these four areas that Catholic schools will be called to make the greatest changes and have the most effective impact.
While Gonski has said no school will lose funding, elite schools, most of them independent and some of them state-based and selective, will get a smaller proportion of total funding, while schools that are lagging behind will get more. In addition, the Commonwealth has flagged its preference to amalgamate the dual system, whereby it is responsible for funding mainly private schools and the states responsible for state schools, to a uniform funding model across the entire range of schools.
Gonski's framework is based on acknowledging student and school needs in all schools, regardless of sector, and funds an aspirational outcome, rather than just costs. Such a principle is totally consistent with Catholic school provision, which is need-based. To this end, Gonski recommends that funding come in two parts. The first would be a standard amount per student. The second would consist of added loadings, intended to address disadvantage of various kinds.
Smaller and remote schools would attract extra funding, as would Indigenous students, those from lower socio-economic backgrounds and students with limited proficiency in English, or a disability. While big-city elite schools would get less in relative terms, because they have fewer poor, black and disabled students, most state and Catholic schools would benefit according to this model. Wealthier state and independent schools could not hide behind the false binary of public versus private schools.
Gonski also recommends that government schools, special schools and disability loadings should be fully funded, while other non-government sector payments should be based on the anticipated level of a school's private contribution. This would create the opportunity for fully-funding non-government schools that are prepared to educate student demographics similar to that of state schools. Catholic schools should welcome this opportunity to proclaim their mission to serve the poor before all others.
What is striking in the research Gonski cites is the correlation between the performance of a child and the average socio-economic status (SES) of all the students that attend such schools. In other countries, including 'high equity' countries like Canada and Finland, where the social mix is less pronounced than in Australia, such an effect would not be evident. In Australia it is quite pronounced.
The figures show that the movement of a bright child from a low SES school to a higher SES school in Australia undermines the quality of the remaining student body in the low SES school. The gain to the child who moves is offset by a loss to his or her fellow students who stay behind, reinforcing the process of social stratification. And, for all Australia's claims to nurturing an equitable society, home address is a key marker of school enrolment and a predictor of results and student life chances.
In other words, the Australian system encourages a ghettoisation of schools; the more privileged parents withdraw their students from the public system, leaving behind a concentration of kids whose need for school support services is high.
This reflects not only on elite private schools and on Catholic schools, but also on state selective schools in some states like NSW. Australian schooling is marked for its social differentiation. No other developed country tolerates this. It counters the rationale for equitable school provision.
Compared with other nations — particularly those whose performance is at the top of the table — Australia has a higher concentration of disadvantaged kids in disadvantaged schools, and a lower proportion than in other countries of kids who attend schools where there is a mixture of social and economic backgrounds.
For instance, 60 per cent of the most disadvantaged Australian students are in schools whose SES ranking is below the national average. This is higher than in all similar OECD countries, and the OECD average. Moreover, Australia's performance in mathematics and reading has declined since 2000. Australia was one of only four OECD countries to have experienced such a decline.
Worse, scores usually improve as countries become wealthier, yet Australia's decline comes against a backdrop of rapid economic growth. Clearly the private-versus-public divide along social-class lines hides a much more complex reality.
The report charts the drift: more children of well-off, well-educated family backgrounds attend independent schools; more 'average' kids go to Catholic schools to replace the bright ones who've moved to the independent sector; and disadvantage gets concentrated in the public sector.
However, the highest SES Catholics now attend state and independent schools and the proportion of non-Catholics in Catholic schools has increased inexorably, thereby contradicting the impression that Catholic schools educate Catholic children.
Statistical projections suggest high-aspirant students from well-off backgrounds would do as well at state schools. Indeed when Gonski's survey controlled for students' background, there was no significant difference between the educational value-added effects of state and private schools.
Given that Catholic and independent schools tend to produce better results than government schools, one would expect to be able to demonstrate that the non-government sector adds more value to a student's education.
In other words, taking a student from a government school with a mediocre record of performance and putting them into an independent school, you would expect to see better results after controlling for the effect of the student belonging to a higher socio-economic cohort. Bourdieu's research, on the cultural capital private and state-selective schools are thought to invest, argues that this makes a difference to the student's education outcomes. However, the evidence does not bear this out.
At the other end of the SES spectrum, where the education ethic is not as strong, and where more resources might make a greater difference, such resources are lacking.
What happens when there is greater equity in a school system? The report produces some arresting evidence. It poses the question: is it possible to have school systems that are both highly equitable and high performing? The answer is that the best performing school systems in the world, as well as the fastest-improving, also are marked by higher levels of equity.
The Coalition accuses the Commonwealth of waging class warfare between the public and private sectors. This kind of absurd rhetoric would return Australia to the Catholic Bishops' Joint Pastoral of 1879, which condemned modern education as founded on 'immorality, infidelity and lawlessness' and precipitated the fierce sectarian conflicts that helped abolish state aid, instead of seeking to accommodate it, as Whitlam did a century later.
Now is the time to build on the achievements of the past.
Dr Michael Furtado is honorary research advisor at the University of Queensland. He was education officer — social justice, Brisbane Catholic Education, and did his doctorate on the funding of Catholic schools. He has taught in the Catholic, independent and state school sectors in Australia and the United Kingdom.