How not to waste Gonski school funding

A federal election is looming, a budget is imminent, and the Prime Minister has declared that, for Labor, “nothing is more important to building Australia’s future than education.”

In the interests of dulling the school funding headache, federal education minister Jason Clare offered more money than originally promised — in what is claimed to be the final piece of the Gonski funding puzzle — to get the new Better and Fairer Schools Agreement across the line.

Clare spent 2024 promising $16 billion of additional funding for schools, in return for improvement and implementation on key metrics and policies. But the year ended with Western Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and NT signing on, while bigger states held out.

That recalcitrance has been rewarded. Deals signed with Victoria and South Australia in January doubled the increase in the federal contribution to the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) from 22.5% to 25%. Holdouts Queensland and New South Wales will demand the same, Western Australia has already signed on for the extra, and you can expect the remaining jurisdictions to follow.

With Opposition Leader Peter Dutton committing in January to match the government dollar-for-dollar, this funding is as good as locked in for the next 10 years – so it’s worth examining what the return on investment might be. History is a guide, but it doesn’t lead us to be particularly optimistic.

The previous five-year National School Reform Agreement lifted federal funding to 20% of the SRS, but — as the Productivity Commission’s 2022 review noted — failed to meaningfully improve student outcomes.

Many of the problems facing Australian education have simply become more apparent since then.

Roughly a third of students across all subjects and year levels are failing to meet NAPLAN proficiency, and OECD testing shows today’s 15-year-olds have declined relative to those in 2000 — a year behind in science, a year and a half in reading, and almost two years in mathematics.

It’s also hard to improve student learning outcomes if they’re turning up less than they used to. The most recent data shows a decade ago, overall school attendance for Year 7-10 was over 90%. It has since fallen five percentage points. Student attendance levels – the proportion of children who attend school 90% of the time – have also fallen.

Year 12 retention is going backwards, and students who stay are increasingly taking up less demanding options. For instance, in 2022, 10% of Victorian students doing their VCE opted to go ‘unscored’, meaning they did not sit exams and did not receive an ATAR – more than double the proportion in 2018.

Further, high-level policy change can only work to improve student outcomes if it directly impacts classroom practice.

And – though this is controversial – it’s students’ engagement in learning, and whether they are safe and well at school, that should be the focus of education policy. Get students learning in disruption-free classrooms, and many of the other outcomes will follow.

The good news is that many Australian governments have become more focused on classroom practice. The bad news is the language in the Agreement is in many cases too vague to effectively hold education systems to account.

However, almost every state and territory has adopted their own policy around evidence-based reading instruction, and the Agreement requires a nationally-consistent Year 1 Phonics Check. Early intervention is on the agenda with similar numeracy checks, and support for students who fall behind through a “multi-tiered systems of support”.

Explicit instruction — used in some of our most successful schools — is also increasingly embraced as an evidence-based approach to teaching that aligns with the evidence on how students learn; and is also a powerful tool for improving educational equity.

Some Catholic dioceses – educating a sizeable minority of Australian students – are also embedding these practices in their schools.

Now, the less good news. Explicit instruction works best when paired with a curriculum that is knowledge-focused, coherent and consolidated across time in school. The Australian Curriculum in its current form does not support schools to deliver this for all students. A future federal government should do what it can to fix this.

Contrary to popular belief, the Agreement also does not mandate explicit instruction, just “evidence-based teaching”, and there is deep disagreement about what constitutes ‘evidence’.

As for the promise of early intervention, the devil is in the detail. For instance, WA’s bilateral agreement doesn’t necessarily mean  its public schools will do anything new in numeracy screening.

Additional federal money may unfortunately extend and expand inefficient and ineffective practices — such as small-group tutoring programs — rather than the more difficult task of lifting the quality of whole-class instruction across 9,000+ schools.

Most significantly, all the targets and initiatives in this agreement can only work if there’s a consequence for not following through. That would take a very brave Canberra.

More likely, we will be back here in 10 years … wondering why we have little to show for the investment.

Trisha Jha is an education research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.