The existential dilemma facing Simon Birmingham

Budget time creates somewhat of an existential dilemma for federal education ministers, especially those of the Liberal variety. They must reconcile their philosophical preference for small government, federalism, and school autonomy with pressure to ‘fix’ the problems in the education system. If the federal government simply handed over money to systems and schools, funding might as well be administered directly through Treasury. The federal education department and indeed, the job of education minister, need not exist.

Beyond the initial challenge of justifying any intervention in school education at all, a federal minister has a second challenge – to work out what it within their power to actually achieve. As most people would know by now, the federal government does not operate any schools or employ any teachers. Its key pressure point is the distribution of dollars―$73.6 billion over the next four years.

True to his word, federal education minister Simon Birmingham has not funded the last two years of the six year ‘Gonski’ funding package. Nobody who has been paying attention could have been under any illusion about that. Likewise, despite what appeared in previous budget statements, there was never any doubt that the government would only offer funding increases in line with the Consumer Price Index. The Australian Education Act 2013 legislates a minimum increase in federal funding for schools of 3.6% per annum, and that is what the budget contains.

Criticism from the federal opposition and the teachers unions in the days immediately following the budget’s release was a reprisal of the line about a $30 billion funding cut. As noted by the Centre for Independent Studies and the ABC fact check unit, the funding figures on which this argument relies have never officially appeared in budgets – they were beyond the forward estimates when Labor was in government —and therefore cannot really be described as ‘cuts’.

While a $30 billion ‘cut’ is hyperbole, it is difficult to know the exact dollar differences between the Turnbull government’s budget, the ALP’s education platform and the full application of the so-called ‘Gonski’ model. The ALP policy ‘Your Child, Our Future’ promises an additional $4.5 billion for ‘years five and six’ of the Gonski model (2018-19 and 2019-20) but there is no detail in the document about what this amount is in addition to, or what the total schools budget would be in those years.

Drawing on figures from the National Commission of Audit, a report by Lindsay Connors and Jim McMorrow last year projected that the Gonski model would bring federal schools funding to $21.5 billion (approximately $22.2 billion in 2016 dollars) in 2019-20. This week’s budget forward estimates put school funding at $20.1 billion in 2019-20, suggesting the gap between the government and the ALP may not be as large as has been assumed.

The vast majority of the federal budget for schools is recurrent funding which goes to state and territory government and Catholic education systems, and individual independent schools, as bulk grants.

Giving untied recurrent funding is a good approach when viewed in terms of subsidiarity and competitive federalism. Authorities closer to the recipients of funding are better placed to know how best to spend and distribute it. Allowing states to determine their own funding priorities mitigates the risks of centralisation. However, this approach means that the federal government has very little control over what happens to the billions of dollars they distribute on behalf of taxpayers, even though they will be held responsible at the ballot box for the performance of Australian schools.

Minister Birmingham has set down a wide-ranging set of policies in the ‘Quality Schools, Quality Outcomes’ document that are ostensibly conditions of funding being delivered to systems and schools. It is not clear to what extent these conditions can be enforced given that the funding increases are the minimum legislated, and presumably some will be sacrificed in the pursuit of achieving the highest priorities.

The reforms proposed have a strong focus on improving literacy and numeracy, driven by the introduction of new assessments at the beginning and end of school, and the creation of incentive structures for quality teaching, such as shifting teacher pay away from seniority-based pay scales to salary structures based on quality standards. Again, it is not a world apart from the ALP policy platform. As well as offering more support for students with disabilities, both include plans to boost numbers and qualifications of science and maths teachers, and to mandate subjects students must study to Year 12 to be eligible for an ATAR. With a federal election only a few months away, it will be interesting to see which policies emerge as the bi-partisan priorities and which are the deal-breakers.

Dr Jennifer Buckingham is senior research fellow and director of the FIVE from FIVE project at The Centre for Independent Studies www.cis.org.au