Time for smart school funding reform

New CIS research shows that sustained, record increases to school funding are not improving Australia’s education outcomes.

Dollars and Sense: Time for smart reform of Australian school funding outlines that for too long, education policy has been weighed down by political spats over the funding pie, placating the needs of vested interests, and bankrolling wasteful ventures.

The bipartisan conventional wisdom has seen pulling the funding lever as the cure-all of education policy — based on the flawed assumption that the more that’s tipped in, the better will be the outcomes.

High and increasing funding may well have been justified if students’ outcomes enjoyed a similarly meteoric surge. But we’ve experienced the opposite — with students suffering some of the fastest declines in achievement in the world. Over recent years — and with the benefit of Gonski funding injections — there’s no evidence that schools receiving more funding have benefitted with higher achievement.

The problem isn’t that we’re spending more per se. It’s that there hasn’t been serious quality-inducing reforms in education to match the added investment.

Smart reforms are needed to properly marry resourcing and the quality of education delivery — and doing that will require harnessing market-based and evidence-based approaches.

Policymakers should set their sights on shifting the funding approach so it’s more outcomes-based rather than fully input-based, ensuring the forces of choice and competition are enjoyed by all, and that schools have flexibility and autonomy to make key decisions.

Being more outcomes-based means that funding would better match with the quality of education delivered — not just varying according to who attends schools. The most direct way of doing this is attaching financial incentives to the highest-performing teachers.

To better unleash the forces of choice and competition, the unnecessarily complex and opaque funding approach needs to become more direct and transparent. The most obvious way to do this is with means-tested vouchers to households as financial support and choice-enabler.

And schools would gain from being unshackled from bureaucratic red tape and centralised decision-making. For a genuinely needs-based approach, schools can’t have their hands tied in actually meeting students’ specific needs. That requires flexibility and autonomy, not simply tweaking of a model from afar in Canberra.

With now irrefutable evidence of the misguided approach to school funding, bolder, smarter reforms can’t be eschewed.

Getting the investment right isn’t simply an exercise in penny-pitching — it’s about putting limited funds to the best possible uses.

We owe this to Australia’s long-suffering educators, taxpayers, and students.