By Correna Haythorpe, Federal President, Australian Education Union
It will take until 2034 to get there but along the way public schools will benefit from a decade of guaranteed funding increases.
Schools can use that investment in ways that best meet the needs of students.
A priority will be specialist teachers who can provide intensive support to students struggling with their reading, writing or maths.
Depending on the needs of students, schools may bring in additional school counsellors and speech pathologists or extra teachers’ aides in the classroom. Increasing teacher numbers will allow class sizes to be cut.
Reducing unsustainable teacher workloads is what we will be advocating very strongly for. Teachers want to spend more time on their students and less time doing administration and compliance work and data entry.
States and territory governments have their own priorities as well with some, like Western Australia, looking at investing in innovative schooling models where additional health and community services, such as nursing, are provided in schools.
Making sure these agreements continue
These funding agreements only came about because of the campaigning of principals, teachers, support staff, parents and community members.
It is up to us to ensure people across the country know the opportunity they have to vote for a better education for children in public schools.
Right now, only 1.3% of public schools are fully funded to the government Schooling Resource Standard (SRS). The SRS is the minimum amount of funding that governments agreed over a decade was necessary to meet the needs of students.
Principals, teachers and support staff are doing amazing work in schools, but they are being asked to do too much with too little. Increasing funding means increasing the opportunities children have to learn and the support they receive.
Where the parties stand
At a national level, Labor has delivered on the commitment it took to the 2022 election to put public schools on a path to full funding. The Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has taken the initiative and negotiated the agreements with state and territory governments.
The Greens also support full funding. They want the funding to be delivered faster than it is under the agreements and for schools to be given enough additional funding to be able to get rid of voluntary fees and charges.
We have significant concerns about the position of the Liberal/National Coalition.
Peter Dutton has never expressed his support for the full funding of public schools in the three years he has been leader. What he has done is attack and undermine teachers.
The Coalition has also made contradictory statements about the funding agreements. After the NSW agreement was announced, the shadow finance spokesperson Jane Hume said the Coalition had not even discussed what its position would be on school funding.
But at the same time, Mr Dutton said he supported that agreement and so did the Coalition’s education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson.
Senator Henderson says the Coalition will honour the agreements and match the funding “dollar for dollar”. But there is no detailed policy statement setting which agreements would be honoured or where the money would come from.
Many of us remember what happened in 2013 when only weeks before the election Tony Abbott did a major backflip and announced he would honour the Gonski agreements, negotiated by the Labor Government, and match the funding “dollar for dollar”.
After he was elected, Mr Abbott tried within months to rip up the agreements and announced a $30 billion cut to school funding in his first budget.
It took the Coalition until 2017 to actually get rid of the Gonski agreements, despite all the evidence that the additional investment was having a profound, positive impact on student learning.
That decision denied public schools billions in funding, and it denied children across the nation the support that could have changed their lives.
How you vote in this election is up to you, of course.
But the choice right now is clear: a government that will invest in our public schools and our students or a Coalition with a track record of cutting funding for public schools and denying students the support they need to succeed.
