Ummmm, Liberal education under funding/ funding cuts & policies, since as far back as I can remember.
The history of the Torie policies & platform right back to & since the formation of the English parliament?
Those that do not know thier history are doomed to repeat it. It really seems through your ignorance trip, that you are repeating. it seems you blindly spruik & back right wing capitalism, without really understanding what makes it work, & why they want to retain the status quo.
Just how could it work, if everyone had a degree, & a white collar? How could they have had 11 yr olds mining coal for them for a pittance & dying of black lung while they sat on their fat white ■■■■■ raking it in, if education & labour laws had been in place back then?
I could go on & on. They have fought tooth & nail against education for the poor at every turn over centuries.
You really dont know, do you?
Let’s just begin with Howards funding of private schools, at the expense of the public system. How much unrequired funding did the Kings college in Sydney get, & what did they spend it on?
How about the latest assault? Pyne will likely end up being the worst of the bastards.
They are always cutting education quality & funding for the less fortunate, in favour of giving more to those that already have plenty. Even the most cursory of glancing over these articles will show the reverse “Robin Hood” strategy of the Lib’s… more Robbing Hoods, if you will,… taking from the poor, to give to the rich.
Lets start with a right wing paper…
Taypayer-funded windfall for Sydney’s 50 most exclusive schools
PETER BODKIN
The Daily Telegraph
January 30, 2014 11:05AM
Farce over private schools funding
200 public schools to see resources cut
But top 50 private schools to get up to $200,000 more
SYDNEY’S 50 most exclusive private schools are expected to be handed a taxpayer-funded windfall of more than $5.5 million this year.
While more than 200 NSW public schools, most of which are in the most disadvantaged areas, will see their 2014 resources reduced under the “needs-based” Gonski funding, a Daily Telegraph analysis reveals wealthy private schools can expect to get up to $200,000 extra from federal government coffers.
St Joseph’s College in Hunters Hill, which charges parents nearly $30,000 a year in fees, is forecast to be given an extra $151,169 this year, bringing its annual federal funding up to nearly $5.2 million.
The King’s School in Parramatta can anticipate another $176,824, for a total federal payout of $5.8 million.
This year’s funding increases:
-Newington College: $195,893 to $6,613,07
-The King’s School: $176,824 to $5,818,862
-Loreto Kirribill: $166,730 to $5,724,354
-St Aloysius’ College: $162,348 to $5,573,956
-Monte Sant’ Angelo Mercy College: $158,706 to $5,448,910
All of the state’s most privileged schools, when assessed using the government’s own socio-economic ratings, will get a funding boost of at least 3 per cent after the former Labor government promised no school would be worse off under its Gonski system.
The figures, from the federal Education Department, do not include the state government’s funding for private schools, typically about a third of the federal figure.
The analysis comes after The Daily Telegraph last month reported private schools were spending millions buying up properties and developing new buildings in a bid to compete with their wealthy rivals.
But NSW Independent Schools Association executive director Geoff Newcombe said a 3 per cent rise was the “bare minimum” any private school should get since education costs had gone up nearly twice that amount every year for the past two decades.
Last year Education Minister Adrian Piccoli announced 212 public schools would lose a total of $5.6 million in 2014 as part of its introduction of the Gonski system, which will pump an extra $118 million into state schools this year.
Federal opposition educa-tion spokeswoman Kate Ellis said the Abbott government had created the “absurd situation” in which state governments could cut funding to schools and deny them the needs-based funding it had promised during the election.
Federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne said total government funding to public schools was about 85 per cent higher per student than for private schools.
He said the money flowing to all schools over the next four years was “increasingly significantly”.
$3.3bn going to private schools produces no better results. It could fund Gonski
New research shows clearly that current school funding is creating and sustaining inequality. A redirection of funds could change all that
‘We found that most private schools were spending more per student, and often much more, to achieve close to the same results as public schools serving similar students.’
Chris Bonnor and Bernie Shepherd
Monday 9 February 2015 15.49
The annual running costs of Australia’s schools is over $44bn dollars, around $36bn of this provided by governments. The Gonski review suggested we spend more, especially on needy students. Opponents often asserted that spending more doesn’t get results.
But a closer look at where the money goes and what it delivers reveals many surprises. Schools are expensive places, some far more than others, depending on where they are located and who they enrol.
Some schools are also better than others. But whether they’re public or private, schools that enrol similar students (in terms of their socio-educational background) turn out much the same results. This similarity between schools prompts us to take a close look at exactly how much money schools are spending to get these same results.
By examining data available on the My School website, we found that if all schools spent the same as the lowest cost providers, up to $3.3bn each year could potentially be released and diverted to our most needy students. Gonski would be back in play and Australia’s worrying student achievement gaps would diminish.
How is the figure of $3.3bn reached? We considered the dollars spent per student on similar students to reach a common standard of achievement. The data behind the My School website makes it possible to identify the amount spent by the lowest cost sector and to compare this amount against the dollars spent by other sectors. The full version of this analysis shows calculations for groups of schools.
In general we found that most private schools were spending more per student, and often much more, to achieve close to the same results as public schools serving similar students. In public schools, the more advantaged students are cheaper to teach – the real cost of bringing them up to the common level of achievement becomes lower. The same is true, with significant exceptions, for students in Catholic schools.
But the per student cost in Independent schools progressively rises, with few exceptions, as student advantage increases – to the point where over twice as much is spent in comparison with public school students. It is important to note that these are averages: due to the lingering complexities of the Howard government’s arrangements, some schools receive far more funding than others with similar students.
When the numbers of enrolled students in each sector are taken into account the total “excess” amounts allocated to students who achieve the same results as the “cheaper” public school students are:
$520m for students in Catholic schools
$2,771m for students in Independent schools.
This adds up to almost $3.3bn per annum for students in all private schools. The total public contribution to private school recurrent costs is around $9.6bn, hence around one-third of this amount is arguably in excess of what is needed to bring student achievement to the average level for similar students across the sectors.
If the purpose of investing money in schools is to improve student results then this represents a poor investment: it has little or no additional impact on measurable student achievement.
We need to know more – and My School can only partially tell us – about how the money is spent in these schools. This might help explain why it has such little impact. What we do know is that this amount, if redistributed, could more than double our investment in disadvantaged schools - in all sectors.
The most common rationale for higher spending in some schools is that the additional money comes from parents – especially for advantaged students in higher fee schools. Parents make a choice, so the argument goes, to spend their money in these ways and hence the value which may or may not be gained is a matter for them alone.
But the reality is that, regardless of the source, the funds spent on students in these schools come from both parents and governments. The current funding regime, quite unique to Australia, makes governments active and willing partners in arrangements which create, sustain and actually worsen a well-researched and documented inequity. In view of the demonstrated needs of students in disadvantaged schools, how and where should governments direct public funding?
The $3.3bn apparently not used for, or not succeeding in, improving student outcomes in advantaged schools would be far better invested in schools with lower ICSEA (Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage) scores, in all sectors, where the upside potential for improving outcomes is considerable.
If the required investment identified by Gonski for these students can’t come from additional funding then existing public funding needs to be redirected to where it can make the greatest difference. It is a policy choice: we either make the investment needed to lift the strugglers or continue to top up the advantaged. We can’t do both.
Opinion: Nothing equitable in public funding of private education
David Gillespie
The Courier-Mail
May 28, 2014 12:00AM
AUSTRALIA is sleepwalking into a privatised education system that will deliver massive inequity, steadily declining results and cost vastly more. And on Budget night Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey gave us a giant shove further down that road.
In deciding to remove $5 billion from state education budgets, he is telling the states (who run the government schools) to make do with less. The inevitable result of this will be to accelerate the shift to private education and, ultimately, the destruction of our once-great school education system.
According to the Productivity Commission, in 2012, Australian taxpayers spent $8546 per student per annum on educating children in non-government schools. And according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, taxpayers spent $11,980 per child in government schools. Neither number includes capital expenditure, which was about the same per child in both systems. In other words, the average non-government school student costs the taxpayer 71 per cent of the average public school student.
Government schools are overwhelmingly the ones providing education to Australia’s most-remote students.
And therein lies the core argument for boosters of private education in this country (including our education minister). You see, the argument goes, children at non-government schools are saving the taxpayer money. They are transferring the cost of their education from the community to their parents (and church congregations presumably). They are choosing to participate in a user-pays community. And even if it does only amount to a 29 per cent saving, they should be immediately given a medal of some sort.
But those average numbers hide some pretty big gotcha’s for the public system. Government schools are overwhelmingly the ones providing education to Australia’s most-remote students. They teach seven times as many students classified by the ABS as living “very remotely” and four times as many students classed as being “remote”.
When it comes to children with special needs, once again it is government schools doing the heavy lifting, educating 3.3 times as many children with a disability as their non-government brethren. Unlike public schools, non-government schools are exempt from the provisions of Australia’s discrimination laws.
Educating hard and expensive-to-teach students is undeniably a task that is increasingly falling to government schools but, strangely, it is in the non-government sector that the costs (to government) are exploding. Over the decade prior to 2012, per student government recurrent spending on government schools increased by only 19 per cent. At the same time government funding for non-government students increased by 28 per cent (both numbers after inflation).
That means that if current funding trends continue, it will not be too long before the taxpayer contribution to non-government schools overtakes the contribution to government schools – notwithstanding they are the ones educating the vast majority of the children with special needs, in remote locations or with behavioural difficulties.
The small and decreasing taxpayer “saving” is the reward we have reaped for the decision to destroy the equity (and the achievements) of our education system. In the half century since Australian taxpayers started funding private education choices, our school education has been progressively failing.
Even though we now pay five times as much (after inflation) to educate a student, by the time that student reaches Year 9 they are three months behind where the same student was in 1964. And if that’s not bad enough, when we compare that same student to the world’s highest-performing educators, we find they are more than two years behind.
Some people might be able to justify that destruction if the privatised part of the system was setting the world on fire. Unfortunately, not even that is true. All Australian schools performed terribly in the latest round of international comparative tests. But our best private schools did even worse than everybody else. And while (after adjusting for socio-economic disadvantage) all Australian schools performed equally badly overall, there were significantly less really high performing students in the nation’s private schools. There were no changes in the numbers at those levels in government schools.
The privatisation of education, just like the privatisation of health care, results in islands of underperforming privilege among a sea of despair and it drags the whole system down. We have systematically created a school education system that performs worse for everyone (even the better-off) than the system it replaces. That’s quite an achievement.
But it is not irreversible. We can return to a high-equity, high-performance system. Unfortunately, it appears the current government is hellbent on doing exactly
the opposite.